Actually in the Greek factions you have a main family and "other families", my short stint as Epirus it was the Molossians with Pyrrhus and some other guy and I think it was the admiral who was part of "other families", presuming they are going to function the same as Epirus.
Well, that certainly makes more sense. As an update, with the Iceni you get you ("Elder Chiefs") and "Other Chiefs" as your factions - I presume this will be the case with the other barbarians.
This of course makes their politics very simple: we start with 73% support for Elder Chiefs.
It may be that the game is - perhaps bizarrely - very poorly optimised for play as the Romans; the Iceni seem to have a more game-relevant tech tree (and there seem to be many fewer public order buildings, so actively managing public order might even become relevant), and because sword units aren't their basic unit type they don't stamp all over the spearmen everyone else spams (although their general's cavalry is stronger than Roman general's cavalry and can go toe-to-toe with a couple of medium spear units and still win, as I found out myself on the receiving end).
I start with one settlement only, with fewer buildings than the Roman ones, and I'm finding the factions I play against a closer match, and have even lost land battles (because of that Heroic Cavalry) - unless you attack with both starting armies you'll be at a disadvantage in your first siege battle (which didn't stop me winning it). I've actually had war declared against me and enemy armies actively move to attack (including when massively disfavoured, but it's the thought that counts).
It feels more like playing a 'real' Total War game, but the AI problems are still there and the battle pace makes it very hard to usefully employ tactics or do much more than click your special ability buttons at opportune moments.
I also like the "Join Confederation" idea. As far as I can tell this basically works like annexing in Civ V (except that the option is only available with certain factions), as now I've annexed a faction it's ceased to exist so presumably can't break the deal. I haven't checked to see whether its characters turn up as a separate political faction, though they may do.
like:
-region system
-armies only with generals
I like the principle of the region system, particularly the fact that you can have 'hung' control of a province, but it's poorly-implemented. There's one major settlement and up to three minor ones, so whoever has the main settlement is at an advantage, and the basic structure is unchanged from Empire (different, occupiable buildings for resource 'villages') rather than any significant change to gameplay mechanics - you just get more building slots for the minor settlements. With global food, you aren't going to be starving out the main town by capturing all the surrounding minor settlements (only minor settlements get farms), not least because cities can have docks.
I strongly dislike "armies only with generals". It's an arbitrary restriction, with an arbitrary army cap which is in any case set high enough to be irrelevant, it means that if you want a small raiding army (common in earlier games) you have to have a general leading it. It also makes recruitment in the field very awkward - you either go home and build the units you need, or you spawn a new general, recruit units with him, then take him to join the army in the field and bring him back home (since you can have only one general per army); you can't just build units and send them to reinforce the armies in the field. I also find it crushingly characterless - in old TW games a general was a rare and important commodity, to be treasured for his skills and ability to improve army leadership (and, pre-Empire, to govern provinces). Now a general's just a commodity you buy when you have a spare 375 talents. He's powerful as a fighter due to his retinue unit, but fundamentally expendable and doesn't feel like a general or an individual character any more.
-combined naval and land attacks
Again I like the principle, but I see it doing very little in practice other than promoting some very poor AI invasion behaviour, and introducing yet another area the player can exploit to the AI's detriment. When units do disembark, they don't coordinate with the land armies, and there's no risk to having a naval invasion force - in reality disembarking troops would have been attacked with siege weapons or archers, but now they're invulnerable to land attack until they finish unloading, when they suffer no penalties at all.
For some reason, I find the Shogun 2 campaign map prettier, but there's certainly nothing wrong with R2's.
i dislike:
-horrible split up research tree. shogun was miles better. you can get legionaries within 15 rounds or so
Once again, nice in principle (it's based on Empire's system, but with much shorter trees), but yes ridiculously fast teching speeds and the ability to unlock high-end units within very few turns is a big problem. The campaign is designed to be longer than Shogun's, but even with the split trees there aren't many more techs and teching is faster. Shogun 2 got the balance about right, it's a shame to mess it up now.
I've started seeing open-field battles where the AI is more or less the same as Shogun 2's (i.e. it will rush you and send cavalry after archers and spears after cavalry, but that's about its limit), but it's the worst yet at sieges (and Medieval II takes some beating), and the campaign AI mostly avoids pitched battles even more than those of past games.
-internal power struggles are terribly implemented, they just have one function: kill your best generals and there is nothing you can do
I have yet to even see this happen. TW games have generally had bad political systems, and mostly outside the player's control. In Rome 1 you had two political 'flavours': plebian support, which was basically just a measure of campaign success - the idea being that the plebs like a military hero - and did exactly nothing except notify you when you were strong enough to attack Rome; and senate support, which you gained only by completing randomly-assigned missions and the result of which was that certain generals got random traits reflecting a system-allocated senate office. You could build some buildings to influence the latter, but essentially it was outside your control. In Empire most government systems allowed you to appoint your own ministers, but the system decided which ministers were available and what their traits were, and the whole system seemed to have very little actual impact on gameplay. In Medieval II you had a bit more control over the Pope's opinion of you, and of all the TW political systems this is the only one that appeared to integrate well with broader gameplay, but it could still fluctuate seemingly at random, and as with Rome's senate was partly at the mercy of which random missions the game decided to assign you.
-some agent powers are horrible op, for example mass poisoning with a spy can reduce an armies strength by 50% (actual troop losses) for ~400 gold. basically level a spy up and specialize in poisons and you will never loose battle
The powers are okay, but agents have an issue they did in the older (pre-S2 games): they gain traits way too easily, and in R2 those traits have very powerful effects (+10% casualties from poison etc.). In general the combined levelling + random-traits-that-nearly-always-favour-your-character's-best-stats system makes characters too powerful in R2. Actual agent powers were intrinsically far more unbalancing to gameplay in Shogun 2 - you can't now sabotage an army so you can wipe out the one that was relying on it for reinforcements, or demoralise an army so that you win the battle and run down survivors almost as soon as you make contact.
Get rid of the levelling system and make traits a bit more unpredictable and less likely to give you "+6 cunning, +10% critical success on all actions" type bonuses, and R2 has the best approach to agents in Total War - I like the split stat system (which works less well for generals).
-victory flags in open field battles ==> forget strategic positioning and rush the flag
You shouldn't usually get these in open-field battles - I've only seen them as either attacker or defender in a siege, when they work much as they did in Shogun 2 (but in keeping with the ridiculously fast game speed in battle, you don't need to hold the flag for very long).
Against a human opponent or a capable AI, this system would be fine because the defenders would array themselves around the flag in a way that would force better tactics than "rush the flag". But the AI neglects to either properly defend or properly attack a flag, and is hard to goad into doing anything more sophisticated than rushing the enemy (while this was the AI's default approach in S2 as well, the AI showed a much better ability to adapt if the player did something unexpected, such as not standing in place to be rushed).
-early armies rout in about 10 seconds. the first battles are basically 2 minutes to meet the other army => 30 seconds max the actual battle ==> 1 minute to pursue fleeing units
Even siege battles, and larger-scale invasions, aren't usually more than 5 minutes. I'd initially thought S2 battles were too fast for tactical play, but as I got used to them I found them pretty much spot on and the older games a little lethargic, giving me too much time to plan and execute my actions. An average R2 battle is maybe a quarter of the time of an average S2 battle of the same scale (a decent S2 battle could quite easily be a 20-minute affair) - that really is too short to employ tactics, not just a perception.
And on the subject of fleeing troops, why on Earth - of all the bewilderingly bad decisions made with the interface, including the removal of unit numbers and morale indicators from the unit cards and the removal of the "close/loose formation" button, did they remove fleeing units from the radar map? You no longer have any quick way of telling where fleeing troops who can be run down remain on the field.
I think basic morale is similar to S2, but there's no longer a Command stat and generals' authority or level doesn't automatically boost morale (he gets an influence radius boost that's intended to do the same thing) - the retainers and skills he can get to do so will probably have less effect than a good Shogun 2 general would.
-terrible unit collision. your units can bunch up. for example i had enemy units pushing through my pikemen on many occasions. especially in urban combats expect huge clusters of units where there are up to 3 soldiers on top of each other
It's even worse with naval battles.
-unit don't automatically pursue routing units or engage very close units, e.g. if there are archers 3 meters away from your legionnaires, the legionnaires will just stand there and get shot to pieces
Yes, I've kept running into this, finding that for some reason my spearmen are standing still and being shot.
the combat, the real strong point of the series, is utter trash at the moment. how hard can it be to use shogun 2 (or better yet the darthmod for it) as a base line. units are so fast that even horse archers in skirmish mode are easily engaged by melee units who pursue them. in earlier total wars i would have expected to kill a whole army of speamen with mounted archers in rome2 my stack of parthian horse archers gets routed by the cheapest spearmen because skirmish mode does not work.
I tend to avoid skirmish mode because I lost too many battles to it in Shogun - it's too easy for half your army to be kept on the run by one or two enemy units while the rest mop up your melee troops, and the system wasn't able to distinguish between the speed of attacking units very well - in S2 a unit could consistently run fast enough to get away from spear ashigaru, but the skirmish move would trigger at exactly the same time if the attackers were light cavalry or rapid-advancing Yari Samurai, which of course is much too late for the unit to get away from those kinds of attacker.
I forgot to disable it in this game, and I've ended up in the same situation - one unit of Heroic Riders can lose me an already-won battle. Unfortunately, R2 battles are too fast to easily control archer units manually to pull them back from the fight. Skirmish, when on, triggers automatically, so it wouldn't make any difference if a human or an AI was controlling it - hence your result. Skirmish mode basically is an AI.
verdict: stay the away from that game until it is patched and modded, e.g. wait half a year.
In fairness to the developers, they recognise the problem. Immediately post-release they took what, as far as I know, is the unprecedented step of promising weekly patches for the forseeable future, and there's a sticky on the TW forum from the developers titled "Sorry from CA". Many games are released in a fairly poor state, but this is a sign that CA knows that Rome 2 is a particularly bad example. It has a Metacritic score based on professional reviews of 8.1, and falling (it was 8.5 at release), very low both for a highly-promoted major game release generally and for a Total War release specifically (Empire and Shogun 2 both scored 9.0. Napoleon is also 8.1, but that's its final score - Rome's may have further to fall).
Given their experience with Empire, it's surprising they allowed this to happen again, but Empire almost destroyed CA and Rome 2 is a much higher profile release so they are at least well aware of their need to fix Rome 2 ASAP. Unfortunately, in my view too many of its issues are with core decisions regarding the interface, the combat system, and new elements of the campaign (basically, nearly everything added that wasn't in S2 is a bad idea, badly-implemented or both. The sole exception is the line of sight system, but the AI has problems with that since, if it can't see any units, it seems to stand around and mill uncertainly).
) and that one nasty bug where if any faction, including the Ottomans, held surrounding territories around the landbridge of Constantinople, would later take forever to make their move and just promptly freeze up the game during AI turn... It was like devs never bothered to try finishing a game in that game before releasing it.
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