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[Deleted member 17706]

So little hype for this one.. Rome 2 really burned people.

I think Rome 2 is just plain bad. I avoided it at launch due to the negative impressions and reports of bugs/poor performance, but I picked up the super complete Emperor edition or whatever during an end-of-the-year sale, and the game still feels like a goddamn mess.

It is by far the UGLIEST Total War game I've ever played. No matter what I do, the LOD and texture pop-in are just horrendous. Really breaks the immersion. Not only that, but there are all kinds of weird graphical glitches. Is this a different engine from Shogun 2? That game looked great and ran really well to boot. Rome 2 is a huge leap backwards. Looks like shit and doesn't even run well with decent hardware.

The interface is a confusing mess of style over functionality, too. When it comes to the actual gameplay, so much of it seems poorly thought out. I admittedly haven't forced myself to play too much of it, but early impressions were so poor that I just deleted and tried to forget about the game.

It's a damn shame, because the original Rome: Total War was awesome. Since Attila looks more or less like an expansion pack of Rome II, I have no faith that it will be any good.

 

[Chance Hale]

Rome II looks great most of the time in my opinion but certain stages/landscapes have unbelievably terrible color filters over them that create banding and just look horrid. No clue what they were thinking. If nothing else the character models are absurd given the scale.

Snow is always nice.

Example of one of the filters

 

[sheepishlord]

Oh, the end turn problem isn't a crash, it just freezes whilst it takes an age to load lol.

Still, at least i can play it i s'pose

 

[Kinthalis]

What did they do Isolation on? UE4? Wouldn't mind them switching over to that tbh.

Yeah, I think they have to roll their own engine. the face issues most third party engines just aren't optimized to handle.

Like the ai, pathfinding and coordinated animations of thousands of units.

 

[Chance Hale]

The performance is so bad on my my 780Ti/i53570K, one day these games will run at 60 FPS and it will be glorious ;-;

To be fair I have a 1440P monitor and have the higher AA setting on, will have to start chopping things down.

 

[blado]

The performance is so bad on my my 780Ti/i53570K, one day these games will run at 60 FPS and it will be glorious ;-;

To be fair I have a 1440P monitor and have the higher AA setting on, will have to start chopping things down.

Generally it's best to reduce unit quality and shadow quality for the biggest performance improvements. Reducing unit quality by one tick to the quality setting doesn't actually make the units worse, but reduces the draw distance on them. Shadows are similar as well if it's just like Rome 2.

 

[Forerunner]

By my surprise my copy actually came today, Amazon said the 18th, not going to complain. It was also the Special Edition which was nice. It came with a map and also a really informative biography (60 pages) about Attila and of course the dlc. Still need to install, but I'll give my impressions later.

 

[Gibbo]

So this game is completely broken for me. Cant even start the game at all. When i tried verifying the cache, steam says that it has 12 files missing. Even after redownloading, shit still does not work at all.

Loads of other people are having the same problem. Seems more prevalent among amd users

 

[frontovik]

It's disappointing to see that the game still retains the atrocious building system from Rome II.

 

[demolitio]

Loving this one so much more than Rome 2. A.I. is a lot tougher and some of these factions are a real challenge to play as early on, especially the Norsemen factions.

 

[Forerunner]

This game is quite difficult compared to earlier installments, maybe playing Eastern Roman Empire for my first play through is a bad idea, I'm just getting annihilated...

Aside from me being terrible, the game is great. Haven't ran into any bugs or issues, and the game's performance is fantastic at max settings.

 

[KorrZ]

This game is quite difficult compared to earlier installments, maybe playing Eastern Roman Empire for my first play through is a bad idea, I'm just getting annihilated...

Aside from me being terrible, the game is great. Haven't ran into any bugs or issues, and the game's performance is fantastic at max settings.

Yeah, I thought I was doing well as the WRE on Hard but within the span of about 10 turns last night I ended up with 2 Civil Wars breaking out, lost all of Spain, the Picts, Caledonians, Saxons, Angles and British have overrun all of Britain and are currently rampaging through the north of Gaul, raiding and razing as they please.

I've pretty much left those territories to suffer as I focus all of my military on protecting Italy, Southern France and Africa and am investing all of my cash into those areas. I'm running out of food though, disease has broken out all over and most of my provinces except Italy are on the verge of revolt. I feel like things are spiraling out of control really quickly.

 

[Kinthalis]

How in depth is the fmaily tree?

Can you ransom family members? Kill off rivals? Marry for political clout?

 

[4Tran]

This game is quite difficult compared to earlier installments, maybe playing Eastern Roman Empire for my first play through is a bad idea, I'm just getting annihilated...

Aside from me being terrible, the game is great. Haven't ran into any bugs or issues, and the game's performance is fantastic at max settings.

Yeah, I thought I was doing well as the WRE on Hard but within the span of about 10 turns last night I ended up with 2 Civil Wars breaking out, lost all of Spain, the Picts, Caledonians, Saxons, Angles and British have overrun all of Britain and are currently rampaging through the north of Gaul, raiding and razing as they please.

I've pretty much left those territories to suffer as I focus all of my military on protecting Italy, Southern France and Africa and am investing all of my cash into those areas. I'm running out of food though, disease has broken out all over and most of my provinces except Italy are on the verge of revolt. I feel like things are spiraling out of control really quickly.

I wouldn't be surprised if the two hardest factions to play are the two Roman Empires. You start up with huge territories, instead of helping you, they end up being huge burdens that you can't even defend properly.

I'm surprised about the relative lack of bugs. I've come to expect Total War games to be all but unplayable until the first few patches hit.

 

[KorrZ]

How in depth is the fmaily tree?

Can you ransom family members? Kill off rivals? Marry for political clout?

Yes, yes and yes. You can also do other things like try and force family members to get a divorce, adopt other generals into your family, and assign people to governorships or various political offices to give them bonuses and also improve their loyalty to you. There are a few other things you can do as well.

I think the loyalty system is pretty cool. Basically characters have a loyalty rating of 0-10 to your king/emperor. They all have a base loyalty level based on their characteristics or w/e but it's influenced up and down by various other things, like if you're losing a lot of battles, if there is a civil war going on, which offices you promote or don't promote them to. If a general is leading troops and drops to 0 loyalty then they take their whole army and rebel against you.

It's pretty neat.

 

[Sober]

I'm kinda tempted but do political/faction dilemmas pop up more often? And are they only from actions or can they trigger from character traits, etc.? It kinda sucked that Rome 2 had none in the late game and it just became a game of building buildings and fielding more stacks and all the AI did was maybe promote a general once or twice with no consequence.

 

[bonesmccoy]

Turns out my resolve wasn't so strong and I grabbed this on Wednesday rather than at release. I'd recently been getting back into Rome 2, which didn't help matters.

Right off the bat, everything feels so much better, so much more 'Total War' than (even patched up) Rome 2.

The family stuff is handled like it was in Shogun 2, which I think everyone prefers over Rome 2's awkward faction/senate mini-game.

It's really, really nice to be able brought to the General or agent you need to level up after you click on 'End Turn' than having to click through all your guys individually.

Battles seem to play out much faster too.

Mind you, this is all based upon the prologue. Hopefully the GC is more of the same.

 

[cripterion]

Goddamn, fresh install and the game won't even launch it crashes at startup, I thought it was supposed to be more polished than Rome 2, not a good start lol.

 

[ferrasvansen]

Mine crashed at intro video, but after updating my graphics card drivers i have had no issues and even with my 760gtx it looks stunning and plays bug free.

 

[Gibbo]

Goddamn, fresh install and the game won't even launch it crashes at startup, I thought it was supposed to be more polished than Rome 2, not a good start lol.

I have the same issue. Game crashes at the splash screen after clicking on the launcher. Problem Seems pretty widespread as well

 

[cripterion]

I have the same issue. Game crashes at the splash screen after clicking on the launcher. Problem Seems pretty widespread as well

I don't even get to a splash screen, I click attila in the CA launcher and it won't load. That or if I reboot my pc, Steam tells me the game is already running. I swear these guys take the cake. At least I could launch Rome 2 at release. *sighs*

 

[KorrZ]

This game is exhausting lol. I never feel like I've turned back the tide and am now ready to push out of my borders and expand. I'm just constantly sending my beleaguered armies back and forth all over my frontier responding to different internal and external threats.

It's really cool because I don't think any other strategy game has really captured that feeling so well. It is also as I said, exhausting though and I can only play a few turns at a time since there is no breathing room.

 

[cripterion]

Steam keeps DLing 12 files worth of 37mo. Fine let's get it on.
Oh wait! Now the launcher tells me my game's not installed or being updated! Hmmmm time for a refund?

 

[Gibbo]

What is Steam's policy regarding refunds? After Unity and Far Cry 4, I'm not in a mood to deal with anymore broken games (at least the above 2 games were somewhat playable in their initial release)

I should mention that Shogun 2 and Rome 2 works fine for me.

 

[cripterion]

I uninstalled the game and reinstalled and it somehow worked. Dunno why my first install was corrupted, I didn't even install it on another drive, did the same steps but this time the game loads.

Everything on max settings @1080P except for screen space reflections (the Ultra quality is greyed out) and game runs fairly well and looks gorgeous.

EDIT : I guess the game conflicts with Rome 2? As the launcher is now telling me Rome 2 is not installed or currently updating