Gaming Rome II Review

Yeah, that's too low, something's wrong, especially if it's only at 1080p. I got worse frames in the prologue (~35) than the actual game (~50) for some reason, and that's at 1600p (twice the res). Using 'high' preset with i7-920@2.66GHz/6990/1600p.

I'm liking it, it's another TW game, more or less like the others. Man, it's pretty epic, with so many factions, takes the AI a while to get through them all. I've always found the economy a bit frustrating with TW, it's more mysterious to me than the only other strategy game you can really compare it too, Civ. I totally understand the Civ5 economy, I know if I build this it's gonna effect that, and by how much. To me, TW isn't an exact science like Civ, it's much harder to work out in advance exactly what effects which buildings are gonna have, you just sort of build things as they're needed, it's very reactionary. In Civ5 you can plan well in advance, which I like, whereas in TW it seems like you're forever putting out spot fires, so to speak.

 

Sorry, I think I was just a bit confused with what it said on the first and last page about that. Re-reading it makes a bit more sense, thanks for clarification. I mistook "as long as a city has a port" for "you need a port to land." Thanks

 

I don’t agree with this review at all. Personally I’m disappointed at Rome 2, I have come across a lot of unpolished ********, just playing a few hours of Rome 2 here is my experience.

- Troops and individual units are missing ambient sound after loading into combat.

- Random crashes in the middle of combat.

- Guarantied crash 9 out of 10 times when trying to exchange unites on campaign map.

- IA transport unable to disembark onto shore, stuck because of poor path finding.

- Popup textures even on extreme settings, missing quality that defines a polished game, no matter what the excuse is.
- Poorly designed ui icons, over simplistic and hard to read function or building type.

- Ugly ui, no coherency to the overall theme of the period, it looks like something out of steam “greenlight game”
- Units that have disembarked onto beach get frozen, unable to attack or move or be attacked.

- Rome 2 is a step backwards when it comes to competitive multiplayer, where is the ability to customize your general or army like in shogun 2. Where is the competitive ability to battle for supremacy over regions, like in Shogun 2… where you are able to pick clans and capture areas on the campaign map?

 

Dude, I totally agree with you 100%, another POS article from the in-crowd at Bit-tech. Why do they even bother?

I've been playing Rome II for a day and a night, and it's shite. It's been dumbed down **A LOT**, and is missing much of what made the previous games great. Instead of adding upon previous iterations of TW, they've tried to re-invent the wheel, and it's bit them in the ass, badly.

 

check this review out its more balanced http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdpIENG0Y2k

 

Some problems?

Or unbelievably unstable? http://kotaku.com/total-war-rome-ii-the-kotaku-review-1248518849

 

This game is awesome but I was getting black screens, buzzing, and then a system shut down after very little play time.

After a while, I got my gpu-monitoring utility up and running and saw the cards spike up to 109*C at stock settings!!!!!!!!!!!! My water loop (3x120mm radiator, good airflow) was showing 55*C at this point, and the CPU was doing fine.

I under-clocked and under-voltaged them and set the game graphics to Low, and they still hit 90*C on water. It's bizarre! Shogun 2 ran fine on Very High graphics settings for hours on end without getting over 80*C. I can now play the game for hours without a crash though.

Specs:
i7-920 @ 3.9GHz, watercooled
2x GTX 480's, watercooled, now clocked down and under-voltaged
12Gb 1600MHz, CAS 7-8-7
3x 60Gb OCZ Vertex in RAID-0

 

I'd like to know how, possibly, Bit-tech.net gave this steaming pile of turds 96%. Please, give us an explanation. In the meantime, read these threads from the official CA forums;
i. http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/79419-Rome-2-A-casualty-of-the-casual
ii. http://forums.totalwar.com/showthre...-downgrade-on-the-near-perfection-of-Shogun-2
There are literally hundreds of threads on various forums complaining about what a complete POS Rome II is, yet you gave it 96%.

 

Wait what, did you jokers even review this game?

It has basicaly been brought out well before it was ready, riddled with major bugs and game braking issues, zero optimization, people are getting 2fps with titan cards lol.

 

I never understand why people are so quick to jump on a game on the first day then moan about bugs? It's software. It's going to have problems, people pay thousands for enterprise/business software that is riddled with them as well. That's what happens imo when your an early adopter. Wait a couple of months till it's patched up.

Roskoken that's just excessive and horrible language, no need for it.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 4

 

It's not the bugs, if it was simply buggy, that would be a blessing. Empire TW had plenty of bugs, but the core gameplay remained relatively unchanged.

The marketing hype was spastic Rome 2, apparently Sega/CA now spend ten times on marketing than on actual development. Everyone was expecting an improved version of Rome I, the next iteration of everything that had been perfectly distilled in Shogun II, with improved graphics and AI.

What we got is a messy, ugly, dumbed-down POS, 'arcade mode' TW for kids and imbeciles. CA have systematically casualized Rome 2 in every conceivable way, it's a mere shell of a TW game, lacking any sort of depth or interest what so ever. Not only is it God-aweful to play, but the GUI is f&^king disgraceful, really bad, incredibly frustrating and un-intuitive; http://forums.totalwar.com/showthre...-downgrade-on-the-near-perfection-of-Shogun-2

Obviously, it'll be ported for consoles very soon, to cater for the phone game crowd. We should've seen it coming, but it's sad when there are (sorry, were) only a couple of 'serious' strategy games left.

Here is a real and accurate review of Rome 2; http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/09/total-war-rome-ii-review-a-total-mess/

Note this well written and accurate piece deviates from the marketing script strictly adhered to by so many other 'review' sites. This Bit-tech article is total and utter ********, nothing more than a sales pitch written by yet another hack, for a product that's not only buggy, but is a HUGE backward step for the TW franchise in every way. If they are to be taken seriously, Bit-tech owe their readers honest and subjective reviews, so they know where to spend their hard earned dollars.

Articles like this do real damage, I'll never take their word for it again.

Spruiking this POS game isn't any different from recommending dodgy hardware, something we all know the Bit-tech crew take very seriously and show much pride in. Why then, do they seek to F&*K OVER their readership with this ********? Any sort of supposed expert would know this stuff, it's primary game journalism, so sack this f&*kwit and get someone who has a f%&king clue next time. I'm $90 down on this POS and Steam refuses to refund me through Paypal, thanks Bit-tech.

Edit: Found this great review by user 'Ozil' on Metacritic, hilarious;

"Genuinely awful game. I only gave it 1 because I suppose they've done some work on graphics but clearly nothing else. The website/magazine reviews have been bought and paid for again so ignore completely. Any user giving this 5 or higher is an idiot/child/idiot child and should be ignored completely.

This game has absolutely zero depth. The AI is rubbish of the highest order, yet you will still spend most of your time waiting for the game to take the AI turns, even on decent rigs. The UI is horrendous and displays info in a painful fashion. Each turn is a pointless exercise in building things that create food and reduce order, then building things that raise order and reduce food. The "tactical" aspect is laughable and battles rarely last more than 5-8 minutes and consist of a series of insta-routs. Defensive battles now have a capture point rendering all tactical thinking irrelevant.

Total War games (and I've played them all) have never been what you would call strategy masterpieces, but CA have somehow managed to remove every single aspect of decision making and choice from this. If you enjoy strategy can I suggest you play chess or Europa Universalis IV because Rome II is crap of the highest order.

If I can help stop even 100 people from buying this then I'll be happy. TBH, this game wouldn't even be worth pirating."

 

Guys, our review of this game went up on the day of release so we weren't privy to the widespread stability and performance issues - we can only judge what is put before us. As to not liking the changes to the game, a large proportion of that will come down to personal preference. If we feel that, on reflection, the review needs to be adjusted we'll happily do so.

 

I have played pretty much every TW game and every single game has released in the same state with regards to optimisation and AI.

I remember in Empire Total War the AI could not use boats for about three months after release.

Shogun 2 released with no direct x 11 and huge multi threading problems.

Both of these games received 90% scores from several major reviewers. Then as now, killer problems were swept under the rug.

My god, the original Rome needed months of patching to get on top of the bugs.

I do not know why we forget every time and still buy the game on release.

All I can say is that while CA have an appalling record for releasing broken games they have an equally great record for supporting them post release.

The game will be fixed and in about 3 months will be everything is should have been on release.

 

Dude, it's got nothing to do with the bugs, forget the bugs, they're a very minor problem.

The real problem is that the core TW gameplay which we all know and love has been absolutely BUTCHERED beyond all recognition. CA has deliberately sought to DUMB THE GAME DOWN for f$%ktards, in order to PORT TO THE NEW CONSOLES and make a bucket load of $$$. Rome II isn't going to get better, you cannot simply patch over the horrendous design and functionality problems this POS has, it'd be impossible. The only way you could fix Rome II is to start again, from scratch, honestly, it's that bad.

Save your money, DO NOT BUY THIS POS, it will NOT improve over time, you have been warned!!

This is what I'm talking about, a quote from the official forums, under the thread 'Rome 2 will more than likley still be great'; http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/83385-Rome-2-will-more-than-likley-still-be-great

Originally Posted by mijofl (OP);

"I realize that the game truly is an unfinished beta excuse for a finished game, and I understand why most are upset with CA for this. However I don't understand why people are swearing off the game already. I think after a couple months (mabye 3-4) this will be a great game and perhaps the best total war yet. Once these issues are dealt with by patches from CA and mods, which are both already present with more to come, This game will meet all the expectations we had for it and more. What does everyone else think?"

Response by Shux;

"You are part of the problem. I loved CA, even bought the Collectors Edition of Rome 2 at 9am and had to wait till 5pm that day just to install based on the stupid world release which now looks like they did that to stop the bad press leaking out early. Besides the balance and tec issues, there are huge core problems with this game. So I paid double the price of a normal game that I will now need to wait 6 months for before the game is "finished". At that point the game will probably have a half price steam sale.

Usually I would have faith in the Modding community to fix most of the stupid problems that CA made themselves, but this time I don't think mods can fix the issues related to how poor the actual core gameplay is.

CA has somehow managed to make the biggest sequel in their history worse than anything they have made before. Rome 1 plays much better in every area besides updated graphics. They could have paid some of the modders of Rome 1 and just released it again with updated gameplay and it would have been a lot better than this current joke of a game."

 

Greetings!

I like we now manage provinces, not cities but the thread linked above is spot on. It takes more effort now to get to the same info. Just look at the Tech Tree... Or the Diplomacy, we can now just see four factions at a time...
I am not having freezes or crashes but I find playing R2TW to be a chore, we have to battle the UI and wait forever for the AI turn to finish.

We end a new research, why not have a direct link to the Research tab? We forget to assign a new research, get a popup at the end of the turn, again with no direct link to Reasearch.

In RTW we gained random ancilliaries to your generals, now we have the chore of going to the generals and choose a "upgrade" without knowing what path that "upgrade" leads to.

And have you managed to merge units?

 

Merge units works in the same way but you cant have more than one general / bodyguard in the same army.

Im enjoying the game so far, I didnt like the UI at first but im quite used to it now. Ive not suffered from any bugs, glitches or performance issues at all so must be lucky on that front.

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk 4

 

Previously, you just dragged and dropped, easy. This is much harder to do with a controller, so they've gone to this new setup, which sucks balls. Another clear indication it's going to be ported.

You can't have individual units, like garrison them in unhappy cities. Dafuq? Why? To simplify it, to broaden the potential sales market, this is TW for noobtards. The fact the author of this article either can't see that, or refuses to acknowledge it, means he's just pushing the company line. Honesty and integrity mean nothing at Bit-tech, it's just about pushing ******** products to unwary consumers. What a shame...

God, you're full of it man. Your article is absolute garbage, you're not a game reviewers butt-hole mate. We get it, you get paid to write garbage and Bit-tech get paid by the publishers to push new games, and you think we're too stupid to work it out. Don't try and justify anything, you're just trying to make mugs out of your readers.

Worth watching, funny ****.

 

There really is no need to be rude, and as far as I'm aware Meanmotion didn't write the review, so it makes even less sense.

I personally haven't played it but I've got several friends who have and seem to enjoy it, the main issues being the odd (for them) bugs and the turn times.

 

I also have played nearly every TW game on release and while broadly what you're saying is correct, in Rome 2s case, it really is broken above and beyond all previous TW games by a massive degree.

Terrible Performance issues -
*Poor optimisation
*No nvidia or ATI drivers planed for release
*An in-game benchmark that is not representative of the in-game performance in the battle maps.
*Turns that take even longer than a late stage big game of civ 5!
*Campaign map performance so bad that it only compounds the battle map performance issues.

Now you might be able to forgive all that and chances are, CA will fix/improve it with patches.

But what is really poor is the actual game play changes they have made (which I don't think CA will change), most of which are a big detriment to the game:

*Complete lack of detail and control over the settlements. Trying to find out the cause of unhappiness? good luck!
*Fiddly province build controls that look suspiciously like they would work well on a console controllers D pad...
*The campaign map might be big but it is full of single line choke points that render any real fear of invasion muted.
*The ability to embark across the oceans with the sudden magical appearance of ships, rendering the upkeep cost of a navy nearly pointless. a Full 20 stack of units creates a nice big navy, good for ramming with 80-160 strong cohorts and capturing all enemy ships with little effort.
*A balance of power counter that is pointless and seemingly bugged, especially for auto resolve.
*AI that is beyond dumb, you take a settlement from an AI, then they send wave after wave of 2-3 stack strong "armies" against the city, where even the smallest of garrisons immediately defeats it.
*Complete lack of 'Stances' controls for individual units. You can no longer tell legionaries to stand ground and try to hold formation. Anyone who has played previous TW games can probably appreciate the issue that causes, no tactics, everything just ends up a complete blob warfare.
*complete lack of cohesion controls Being peppered with arrows/javlins? Spread your men out. Once it slows down, bring them back to close formation.
* battles are over in 5 minutes, blob 1 meets blob 2, 1 breaks in no time, game over.
* Pointless objective makers, which is stood in for a minute or so (regardless of if you were winning or loosing) can win the game, even of random encounters in the wild.
*Lots of magic ability buttons.
* other unit abilities that don't work - legionaries take more damage in Testudo formation than not...!
*1 turn = 1 year - so guess what, no seasons!!! Every battle is fought in summer... and most generals, spies, champions and diplomats and dead of "old age" in no time.
* no family tree and hugely dumbed down character management. Why do the senate punish me with a lack of support from 1 general over he other...?
*a tech tree rammed to the brim with repeat technology research that increases things like agriculture income by 2% and can be researched 5 times. Why not just make it 1 longer research and give a 10% bonus?
*Major factions (Carthage, Egypt etc.) destroyed by other lesser AI players in less than 30 turns in both the campaigns I tested.
*an in-game encyclopaedia that is either bugged or dependent on a working net connection and back-end servers.
* a hard cap on the number of armies you can have. Previously you were limited somewhat by upkeep costs but there was no arbitrary hard-cap.

I could go on.

And this is why, pre-ordering is not good for the quality of games. If pre-ordering was not possible, people would probably wait for reviews (not that bit-tech are helping with their gushing review!) and then only be likely to buy if it was any good. It might actually encourage games companies to properly QA their games. Ohhhh but if you don't pre-order, you won't get the Greek culture nations pack!!!! you know, only one of the major nations in the Hellenistic times, I mean it's not like they should be giving you that as part of the main game eh?

Bit-tech have dropped a bollock (along with several other mainstream reviews). Personally I'd not give TW:R2 more than a 5-6 out of 10 in its current state.

 

m0ngy's potty mouth doesn't help to put their point across, but DeckerdBR has analysed this game in its current state pretty well. We all know that CA's releases are buggy on launch, and like all the others, this will get fixed. However the list of game play changes are totally accurate, and serve to drag Rome II down in to the sewers.

It's not terrible, but it's not 90+%. I'd give it a solid 6/10. For a Total War game it is a complete and utter step backwards, and not deserving of the name. For a generic RTS it's okay - and it's pretty obvious that they've picked up generic RTS 'features' as well (eg: cap points).