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Gaming Rome II Review

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Meanmotion, 2 Sep 2013.

  1. Meanmotion

    Meanmotion bleh Moderator

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  2. Ergath

    Ergath Giant Zombie Pigeon Photographer

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    Quelling a Roman? Sounds like an ace tutorial.

    Nipicking/constructive criticism aside, this looks amazing - I'm very excited for this game.
     
  3. will_123

    will_123 Small childs brain in a big body

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    How much more demanding is in comparison to Shogun 2?
     
  4. jimmyjj

    jimmyjj Minimodder

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    Great written review.

    However the screenshots look like they were taken at the lowest graphics settings before being reduced in resolution and horribly compressed.

    I am sure you used to be able to click on screen shots to open a high res version?

    If you can not afford the bandwidth how about hosting them on a third party site or making high res screenshots available only to those with forum accounts?
     
  5. Meanmotion

    Meanmotion bleh Moderator

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    Yup, just didn't have time to add them earlier. Added now.
     
  6. vampalan

    vampalan What's a Dremel?

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    3 pages, and 96 percent. That's quite something for bit-tech.
     
  7. jimmyjj

    jimmyjj Minimodder

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    Nice one, high res images look brilliant.
     
  8. Greentrident

    Greentrident Minimodder

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    Convinced me - pre-loading now!
     
  9. m0ngy

    m0ngy What's a Dremel?

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    Would like to have known how it runs. Needless to say, it's a hungry beast, but some description of the specs required for various settings would be really handy. Also, is it significantly multi-threaded, should I upgrade to hex core?
     
  10. Eiffie

    Eiffie What's a Dremel?

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    I have a question, in the review it's stated that ships can land troops as long as a city has a port but in one of the screenshots it looks almost like the ships are just landing on the beach, does a beach count as a port? Are there different ways to land troops by sea?
     
  11. m0ngy

    m0ngy What's a Dremel?

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    The article specifically said you could land on a beach. You always could in TW, Rome II is no different.
     
  12. Lockinvar

    Lockinvar What's a Dremel?

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    Preloaded and ready to go .. just a few more hours! I feel this review could have been twice as long.
     
  13. m0ngy

    m0ngy What's a Dremel?

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    OK, so I bought it on Steam, it's important to contribute to studios like Creative Assembly for all the fine work they do.

    My specs are;
    i7 920 @ 2.66 (USB issue with the H80i, won't allow me to overclock, really need to warranty it)
    8Gb 1333Mhz
    6990
    256Gb SSD
    2560x1600 display

    I'm playing the prologue on High preset (middle settings) and getting an average of about 35-40 FPS, which doesn't sound like a lot but it feels smooth, and looks pretty good at 1600p (always does). I can't see that the individual animations or movement of the troops is vastly better than Shogun II. Maybe I'm missing out by not having it at max detail, not sure. They're a bit better, but nothing really noticeably awesome, as this review would suggest. It's early days yet, I'll have to play some more and see if I can pick anything that blows my mind.

    In the very first engagement I noticed the enemy storming forward and then being repelled by missile troops and retreating, only to move forward and retreat again a moment later, a very unrealistic behavior which was repeated several times until I attacked with melee troops. You can probably tune out this sort of thing by upping the difficulty settings, not sure what it says about the AI...

    Suddenly getting horrific texture problems!! The ground tiles are on the blink, downloading 13.8 beta drivers now...
     
    Last edited: 3 Sep 2013
  14. impar

    impar Minimodder

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  15. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    not a game where you need 30 fps though. Most people can make do with 15-20 on map screen as long as the engagements are in the 30s you would be ok.
     
  16. m0ngy

    m0ngy What's a Dremel?

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    Still, nothing's worse than a choppy battle. The strategic map is still really choppy while the AI is 'thinking'. Not sure how many cores this engine utilizes, probably just one, as I've read that's all Direct X can handle. Don't quote me on that though, lol.

    The 13.8 beta drivers seem to have fixed the (very bad) texture problems. I got the serious artifacts after alt+tabbing in and out of TWR2, so maybe it's still a bit glitchy.

    The prologue is pretty much for noobs, experienced TW players need not apply. As the article said, some of the mechanics are slightly different (not much), but the gameplay is the same as ever, and that's pretty damn good.
     
  17. Panos

    Panos Minimodder

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    If you plan to play X:Rebirth in two months, then hex core should be mandatory :)
    Or else a 2-3 core one will do the job.

    Either way, plays well on my XPS laptop (lunch break 4TW), see how it goes tonight when I go to my home PC (AMD 1090T, Nvidia GTX580)
     
  18. RickLane

    RickLane Staff Lover of bit-tech

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    A couple of notes RE: comments above.

    The game ran pretty well for me, on an intel core i5 and nvidia 660ti. The only time I got any severe slowdown was during a battle with lots of weather effects (fog and heavy rain) and a large amount of foliage (forests etc).
    It also loads pretty quickly for a TW game, both initially and for battles. The AI takes forever to take its turn however.

    With regard to the boats thing. When I was talkign about boats only being able to land on beaches, I was referring specifically to the campaign map. Battles are a little more flexible, although you can't land a mass of units on a cliff-face, obviously.

    Cheers!
     
  19. Hovis

    Hovis What's a Dremel?

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    Getting absolutely horrible performance with it here. Even in low settings for everything getting 18FPS on the built in benchmark using a i5 CPU @3.8GHz and a 760GTX graphics card. Something rotten here. :(
     
  20. Digi

    Digi The not-so-funny Cockney

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    Last edited: 3 Sep 2013
    Teelzebub and G0UDG like this.
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