CA, is not fair deceiving people with such low minimum requirements.

[=Vastator=]

TotalWar is a really CPU intensive series. Especially the warscape engine, in which even some graphical settings such as "unit details" and "shadows" are heavy CPU intensive. We already experimented it on Shogun 2, especially when the melee fight starts, where the CPU bottlenecks the entire system, resulting in low FPS.

Rome II is even way more CPU intensive: and this is totally normal, because there's way more stuff involved now. Totally new mechanics and features, and more of the old ones.

Considering this, and considering that there is no magic optimizations that one would have expected hearing your false propaganda "extremely scalable experience! -advertisement on STEAM/official site", "not matter what specs you have, Rome II will run on it! -J.Russel", i think that is really, really unfair that you declared such low minimum reqs, especially about the CPU part.

I feel really really sorry and embarrassed reading all the people (there are a lot!) posting for help on official forums or on TWC with low end CPUs such as core 2, old AMD or laptop ones (all above min reqs) , saying that in the first prologue battle with everything on low the game is unplayable and brings only 2-5-10 fps when zoomed in on soldiers.

All people that have been fooled by the false propaganda/advertised low reqs, and have spent 55€/60$ for the game. And many of this people are the ones of the "old generation", ones that come from the old Rome engine and that have never played a warscape engine TW and not experimented how resource intensive they are. And they even couldn't try the game through a Demo that you have not released (now i understand why)!

Me too, with an old (but kicking in all other games) Phenom II X4 @3.3 GHz and a 7790 2 GB (something that can enjoy Shogun 2 on high/ultra) is having serious problems with the performance on the game (melee are unplayable, even on lowest).

Surely some optimization patches will be out that may bring some help, but there is no way, no way, that a "2 GHz Intel Dual Core processor / 2.6 GHz Intel Single Core processor" will be able to achieve a reasonable performance on the hottest moments of battle. No way, unless patches will bring 500% more performance.

It's really unfair and unethical fooling people in such a way.

I expect that you'll say something about this subject, considering all those poor people seeking for help that they can't never have perhaps.

[nubcaker]

Indeed. I feel kinda betrayed. My hopes were so high for ROME II, and my pc isn't good, but it was well above the min. specs, yet, it runs extremely bad on medium-high settings. Even on low when I zoom in. And I'm not even mentioning the fact that I had to find a way to fix the black/broken shadows glitch. This game isn't optimized AT ALL, and like mentioned before, it feels like we're playtesting a Beta here. It's a real downer when I can't enjoy the game if I can't even properly play it. Here's to hoping a bunch of patches will fix most of the errors very soon, otherwise... Well, it was a good run on these forums before the game was released. Cheers.

[Keithzor.]

Anyone who is naive enough to believe this game doesn't need a quality PC..

I have a GTx Asus 640 graphics card and a I5 core processor and run it high. It works really well for him but you still get lag sometimes on the campaign map. Perhaps more patches needed or optimization issues?

[Chopy]

I have Phenom II x4 @3.6ghz. I found Rome 2 , to be less cpu intensive than shogun 2 , it is more gpu intensive. I can run big melee's without shadows , just fine.

[dom385]

I dont have that great a pc, it cost about £600 (self built) and is about 2 years old and I've been playing on high/very high and it looks great. I had a bit of trouble with it getting stuck on low textures but thats sorted now. This is a very confusing lauch, people either seem to be practically unable to play or have no trouble at all.

[Khassaki]

Yep, I have a very basic 3 year old PC running XP, Nividia 250ish card and 4 GB of ram, and it is flawless on medium. I haven't tried a higher setting yet.

[warbless]

Guys not everyone is a computer especialist or has a high end pc.. or it's rich... I built my pc for rome 2, i didn't expect max settings but i follow the recommended requirements, it was really hard for me to get the money but i manage to do it. And now, i can't run the game on high, in low/medium settings i get 10-15 fps in melee fights and im not even going to talk about sieges... I cannot trust CA anymore, that was the end of the line for me, all this years playing Total War games and i never felt so betrayed/scammed!

[DarthShizNit]

From what I'm hearing it's just most people not checking the "unlimited memory" or whatever box. That seems to the root of most problems.

[evenflowjimbo]

With just a few tweaks from the Rome 2 forums. Re-installing directX, putting false when the game forces directx 11 on you when you don't even have it in preferences. Although, I have grass, sky, and shadows on low. The rest is medium to high. The basics of my computer is an AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8 GHz( I can unlock the forth core but won't ), 4GB of ram and a 9800 GT Green Edition. I can use large units and zoom in without lag, or at least so much that it's noticeable. I could probably turn the grass up and still get the same affect. I'm gonna buy a new card, but that might just make it a little better, or worthless if the optimization of this game is as bad as it is now. Either way, I know people that have nice rigs and still can't play on my settings for some reason.

[=Vastator=]

I have Phenom II x4 @3.6ghz. I found Rome 2 , to be less cpu intensive than shogun 2 , it is more gpu intensive. I can run big melee's without shadows , just fine.

Less than Shogun 2? Unfortunately not for me (just played a big battle on it and the difference with Rome 2 is quite noticeable). I hope something will change in the near future.
Though there's no way that in 2013 i have to play without shadows.

[Keithzor.]

15fps is fine though. I got that on benchmark on Rome 2. Although I think that was on very high settings, so I put it to high.

[Skyfighter]

Yeah, after this I'm having trouble of thinking of CA as anything but a bunch of rat bastards, despite all the awesome crap they've done. "If your computer can run Shogun 2 it can run this, no problem!" they said. I can run that with some things set on high, others on medium, with no issue, 30 fps at the minimum. I can't get above 10 fps with everything set to the lowest possible setting on this thing. Now, I'm not an idiot. I know my computer is dated, and I couldn't hope to run most big fancy games. I have an Nvidia 9500GT, which has served me well, and an AMD 2.4ghz dual core, not very impressive I know. I do want to upgrade, but at the moment I'm an unemployed college student (though I am working on the unemployed part) and while I do have savings I'm trying to be a little fiscally responsible and not spend hundreds of dollars on new parts. Yeah, I preordered this game, but it's Rome 2 man! They said that pretty much ANY graphics card and ANY processor would be able to play this game, so I figured I could put that off until I had bleeding employment. I know there's going to be people saying it's my own fault for, I don't know, existing (I see one already) but do you even notice how flawed that logic is? It's like I don't know, outrageous metaphor, it being the Native Americans' fault for trusting the settlers to follow the treaties they wrote and signed. CA explicitly said, so many times, if you can run Shogun 2 you can run this. They confirmed and reaffirmed it. Why wouldn't I believe them? To my knowledge, they've never lied about that before. I wasn't expecting it to run at 60 fps or anything, but I was expecting it to run. I guess technically they're correct, but I sure as hell wouldn't call what it's doing on my computer running. Shogun 2 looks pretty good far as I'm concerned and I can play that. At the lowest possible settings this game looks like ass and it can't even frickin' handle it. If the minimum requirements were set higher and CA hadn't said those things, then you could call me a naive ijjit. You might still be kind of a dick, but whatever. My only crime is believing what the developers said could run the game they were working on and knew inside and out. I was really looking forward to finally being involved in a game I care about from the very beginning and contributing to the community and multiplayer, but unless they release crazy optimization patches in a week or so it looks like that'll have to wait for Dark Souls 2. Thanks CA.

[Post Hoc]

Playing on ultra unit size, by reducing unit detail from very high to medium i went from 60fps average to over 100.

[♘Top Hat Zebra]

I was actually surprised at how well Rome 2 ran. Considering how much better it looks than Shogun 2, it runs only slightly more slowly on my computer. And that is with everything but shadows on the highest setting.

[Amos]

I completely agree with the OP. As someone playing with the minimum required it is completely false to say this is the minimum when it is not good enough. ON Shogun 2 the minimum settings could still give you a decent game - disappointed with this.

[Emperor Domitianus]

From what I'm hearing it's just most people not checking the "unlimited memory" or whatever box. That seems to the root of most problems.

Not only that. People should also look at drivers of their VGA. Nvidia is the best in this. Also there is a clear difference if you have and SSD or a 5400rpm disk. There are factors that can't be controlled by CA. So it's not their fault.

With just a few tweaks from the Rome 2 forums. Re-installing directX, putting false when the game forces directx 11 on you when you don't even have it in preferences. Although, I have grass, sky, and shadows on low. The rest is medium to high. The basics of my computer is an AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8 GHz( I can unlock the forth core but won't ), 4GB of ram and a 9800 GT Green Edition. I can use large units and zoom in without lag, or at least so much that it's noticeable. I could probably turn the grass up and still get the same affect. I'm gonna buy a new card, but that might just make it a little better, or worthless if the optimization of this game is as bad as it is now. Either way, I know people that have nice rigs and still can't play on my settings for some reason.

Well 4 GB is really too few, the CPU is not the best and the game runs better on Intel as it's clearly shown on the box and the intro video. 9800GT? It's a 5/6 years old GPU. What do you pretend for that prehistoric GPU?

[evenflowjimbo]

Not only that. People should also look at drivers of their VGA. Nvidia is the best in this. Also there is a clear difference if you have and SSD or a 5400rpm disk. There are factors that can't be controlled by CA. So it's not their fault. Well 4 GB is really too few, the CPU is not the best and the game runs better on Intel as it's clearly shown on the box and the intro video. 9800GT? It's a 5/6 years old GPU. What do you pretend for that prehistoric GPU?

It's also Green Edition, so less power. Haha. I just rely on modders to create textures that look the same(somewhat), but take less power to perform.

[Grimbold]

It's weird that i have 4 gigs of ram but the game is only using 978 mb

[Emperor Domitianus]

Playing on ultra unit size, by reducing unit detail from very high to medium i went from 60fps average to over 100.

In most cases it's enough to tone down a bit.

[KingIzzystero]

Ladies and gentlemen, Let's focus on the FACTS here.

1. What did CA list as the minimum requirements? Officially (link http://eu.download-store.sega.com/es...me-2-3418.html), OS : Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8CPU: 2 GHz Intel Dual Core / 2.6 GHz Intel Single CoreMemory: 1 GB (XP), 2 GB (Vista / Windows7 / Windows8)Video Memory: 512 MB VRAM, Shader model 3HDD: 30 GBDirectX: 9.0c

2. What did they say about people's required hardware concerns? (Do not have links for this as it requires going through all the forums. Feel free to add links to my post and to correct any mistakes)They said that they worked with Intel to ensure this game was running even on onboard graphics.They said this game was scalable so you could play it no matter what hardware you have.They said they want to make this game accessible to as many people as they could. So that everyone has a chance to play this game.

3. Was there a DEMO? No. I wonder why? No seriously, not being sarcastic. But why was there no DEMO?

4. Have they fulfilled their promises?No. The game works for some and not for others. Most people on these forums have the required hardware.

5. MOST IMPORTANTLY, are the consumers to blame?A BIG FAT NO. My friends, accusing people of being naive is pointless. These "naive" people are the victims here. They didn't buy a new PC, like so many of you think they should have, simply because CA SAID! that they didn't have to. Most people here have a life, and ROME 2 is just a game for them. Something to play to pass time and enjoy themselves a bit. They have more important problems to deal with other than saving for a new PC. It's called ECONOMICS. And economics deals with priorities, of making a profit. For most people, buying a new PC would mean making a loss and falling into debts. So please NO MORE of this "buy a new PC" nonsense. That is all for now. Enjoy the game, and if it doesn't work tell CA that. Making games is THEIR lively hood, not yours. You can do without buying games, they can't without you buying them. Don't be GRATEFUL they made the game, they should be GRATEFUL TO YOU for parting with your hard earned money.

Till next time,The King