So I bought it even though I wanted to wait. Got the 20% discount from GMG. First thing I noticed when I turned on the games was.. FUCKING DLC! Ugh, I mean pre-order dlc like this makes my piss boil.
This is kinda made further annoying due to not having that many factions to play as. You have your horde factions, Rome, middle eastern (1 I believe) Saxon/Franks. That mostly it. Having 3 more factions (or 1 faction with 3 sub factions) locked away is kinda BS. Mostly because I'm Danish and the DLC includes Danish vikings, oh well...
Anyway game do indeed appear to run more smooth both on the campaign map (which looks gorgeous btw) and in battles with two 20 unit armies clashing it out. My first fight was against the saxons (playing as Franks) and it was a very foggy field. I really liked it, quite atmospheric.
So two things about the battle: it was for whatever reason quite chaotic and units appear to die quite fast. Units dying fast means that you have to be all over the place because otherwise it'll go bad quickly I think.
I'll have to try out more combats to see if it truly is fast, but that was my initial impression from one big fight. I think it lasted overall 10 minutes and the armies didn't have to march long before close combat.
It was great though! Maybe a bit fast, but great.
Anyway family tree is back, yay! Such a pleasure to have that again and not only that, but you can manage two different kind of things within your family. Candidates which was similar to the promotion thingy from Rome 2, however now it works kinda differently and then there's the Governor position for each province. When it's all kept together by the family tree the overall experience of running your family dynasty like this is much much better than Rome 2.
Having only one province to begin with I didn't have to manage so much, but then I realized the insane amount of different buildings. Atleas I feel like there are quite a lot to choose from and this makes me happy. Unfortunately though the game manual/wiki is horrible imo. No search button makes it really annoying to find things and when every construction option is new including the tech tree it easily becomes super annoying. For instance I want to have a veteran so I can gain more experience for my troops. In Rome 2 you needed to take the war path and only research two items. This time, for me, it's under civil and it's at the 3rd or 4th item and you need a specific building to rectify them. Needless to say I had to go through all kinds of things to figure this out and all of that would've been fine if I at the very least could've had the chance to use a proper search.
Now people might disagree with me on this, but I dislike the new skill tree on both the armies and generals. Not only does the army one make no sense (gaining skills to increase stuff to a city..?!, but I also don't like the way they're set up. It's more akin to Shogun 2, but tbh I like it more in Rome 2 where your agents and generals specialized in authority, cunning and zeal. Now it's just.. Kinda weird tbh. I'll have to try it out some more and get a better feeling for it. Maybe I'll grow to like it.
The research tech tree have been more streamlined it appear. Not sure what to think. Again it has kinda moving away from specializing, at least specializing in the way you did in Rome . I'm not too bothered by this though, although I still think I prefer how Rome 2 handled it.
Overall I like the game, only bug so far have been my cavalry unit acting weird. Giving orders to 3 cavalry units resulted in then doing something I did not intent for them. Just picking two units and they did as I said. Very weird and kinda made me micromanage them more than necessary. On the battlefield of course.
I'll dig some more into it later, but for now I'm happy. Some new changes and not all of them are my favorites, but I think I'll manage. Obviously I cannot say whether or not the game is good-good, but my impressions so far are positive.
Feel free to ask questions
