Your top three issues with RTW 2 (constructive criticism)

[lampuiho]

The problem I have with the campaign is that it is still turn based. This system is so old that it should be abandoned.

What I propose is that there is a strategic planning phase where you plan on where the army would go to, what buildings you'd what to build, what units to recruit etc. Then after you click turn ends, the executing phase follows and your orders are carried out in real time. There should be enough turns in a year to allow you to reaccess your strategy and keep the balance of amount of battles happening.

What problems this solve? For starter, the unrealistic movement speed of army. Units no longer and teleport from one place to another to attack another army if given realistic movement for 1 year of time.

Then you could have generals with low courage or loyality refusing to carry out orders.

You no longer have to move and wait for a turn before you setup ambush and wait again to ambush another army.

There are just endless possibilities generated by making it half real time and half turn based.

[Doomsday]

First off, overall I'm satisfied with the game. but if pushed, and ignoring the battle complaints (lighting, ctf points, speed etc), which I feel are obvious, my three complaints are: 1) lack of buildings. in some towns you can only build three buildings. one of those being the town itself seriously? 2) recruitment for the iceni is awful. to get the full recruitment roster requires about 10 different buildings. that in itself wouldn't be a problem, except all their recruitment buildings decrease happiness. as opposed to say, sparta, where you only need a mercenary camp and barracks. 3) squalor. I can accept heavy industry increasing it, but fields? barracks? you need so many temples to combat the unrest there's no room for multiple recruitment buildings, let alone weapon upgrade buildings. and yes, I know these complaints focus on the iceni in particular, other factions aren't so bad :cough: sparta.

[whitewizardg]

1-Fog of War, I much rather have the option to play with it off.

2-Only 4 Historical Battles

3- ...

Guess I only have 2

[tungri_centurio]

1. To short battles and to Easy battles,i wanna play battles that last atleast 30 min when fighting 2 full stack armys
2. Not enough building slots in settlements(double shoud be a big improvement)
3. Beter diplomacy,as the romans i can get almost no trade agreement with other factions.
Dunno how IT is with other factions to get trade or other.

For the rest i starting to like the game.

[tungri_centurio]

1. To short battles and to Easy battles,i wanna play battles that last atleast 30 min when fighting 2 full stack armys
2. Not enough building slots in settlements(double shoud be a big improvement)
3. Beter diplomacy,as the romans i can get almost no trade agreement with other factions.
Dunno how IT is with other factions to get trade or other.

For the rest i starting to like the game.

[Agorix]

1. No gaurd/stance button.
2. No hold formation button.
3. No ability to have infantry throw their pilum while not attacking. (We are forced to attack to get them to throw: stupid)
4. Putting units into phalanx, shieldwall or hoplite phalanx and clicking on an enemy unit to attack it takes the unit out of phalanx etc...
5. City management is dumbed down for the CoD idiots. Instead of micromanaging each city, you can now only manage each region. Essentially each region is only 1 city, while graphically show as more obviously(provinces).
6. Inability to change taxes per city. Instead we have only 1 tax rate, and that is for EVERY SINGLE city you control. Stupid.
7. AI armies are always small. I rarely see a large stack army.
8. AI has no brain. Improve the AI.
9. Remove capture points from non-city battles. ( I like them in city battles actually.)
10. Inability to change capital city.
11. Diplomacy is pointless. AI rarely wants to work with you, will rarely trade or accept any deals. AI will also rarely make peace with you, forcing you to capture every single province of theirs. Even still they wont make peace.
12. Region culture system needs to be overhauled. Just because a nation with a different culture controls half of a region, that shouldn't change my culture. See #5 also.
13. No family tree. (Not really necessary but still bugs me.)
14. Inability to have my family's leader get married. He always dies being unmarried. See #13 also.
15. Civil wars are bland and feel pointless. Sure its a challenge but just seems real gamey spawning multiple full stack armies all in one city.
16. Graphics: I'm fine with how the graphics look, but I cannot stand the lag. Make the graphics more efficient. EX: I move the mouse and can visually see the ground changing to a higher quality texture, this happens with everything.
17. Stuttering/lag.
18. Sometimes units doing amphibious assault on cities won't get off the ships and are stuck in their ship on the shore.
19. 5 minute battles. Either slow down battles or give us a setting to control battle speeds. EX: Option Slow - Medium - Fast.
20. Units route to fast.
21. Conquest penalty. If I am playing as carthage and I 'conquer' it. Why should I get a penalty? If anything I am a 'liberator' and should get a positive bonus to public order.

Please CA fix/improve on the issues...

[Keithzor.]

The biggest problem is the campaign map lag. I want to play the game but until this is sorted, I have installed shogun 2 and playing it instead. Once a patch sorts the campaign map, I will be back to Rome 2. The lag/stuttering is unacceptable.

[GussieFinkNottle]

1. No numbers on unit cards. 2. Gollum face bugs, I know they need to be rendered at lower poly in the distance but this is ridiculous3. Only beneficial option when conquering towns is ‘occupy’, the others have barely any benefits

[Choki]

1)Bad textures
2)The bad AI battles and campaign modes(in campaign they use to many see transports, and if I make siege on one AI city they take away they generlas)
3)Unoptimized completely

[Hadro]

1. BAI going for single gate during sieges or defensive stance battles
2. Attacking army attrition for sieging an enemy settlement and waiting a turn to attack (to build towers/ladders)
3. Unable to maintain formations (eg// spear wall) when attacking

[yukishiro1]

1) Bad campaign AI. Most of the other long list of failings you can put up with but bad campaign AI makes the whole experience horrible. This is the dumbest campaign AI I've EVER seen in a total war game. Just horrible. Among its many other failings, whoever programmed the peace treaty AI needs to go back to school. The AI will NEVER accept peace, even when you're beating the crap out of them. Whatever calculations being made need to be thrown out and redone completely. When I've taken two settlements from carthage and they are at war with 4 other powers and have no armies to speak of at all they should jump at the chance of a peace treaty, not reject it out of hand.

2) Turn length. Again, it's hard to believe they ever tested this product if they thought this was acceptable. It's just too long. It starts out fine, it becomes unbearable after about 20-40 turns.

[Doge Domenico]

1. Burning gates

2. Burning metal gates

3. Burning metal gates.

seriously, why the can I melt ing iron gate?

[Efix]

Why does my units cards take half my screen and why does one row of cards use the same space as 2 row.
I can even see those 30 sec battles

[Stygian Knight]

1. Performance / graphical / not optimized
2. i wish i could zoom out campaign map a bit more
3. units in battle are not 100% responsive to my actions

[Dago Red]

1. Battles: Benny Hill on crack.
Battles are a joke, units run at ludicrous speed, and since battles are over in 5 minutes (another joke) they never get to the point of tiring, thus running units all over is not a disadvantage. Kill rate is insane along with this movement speed, it's as if you're playing on fast forward --I literally had to check to make sure I wasn't on 2x speed the first battle I played, and I was shocked to find it was normal.

Almost all engagements turn into formless, ugly wrecks with no tactical cohesion on either side and since everything is moving at ludicrous speed you can't even zoom down and enjoy the pretty units killing each other for 2 seconds. Someone shot someone else in the foot in this development team, and then they both just went limping about the office wrecking everyone else's work. It's truly the worst (un-modded*) battle experience in TW.


2. Incoherent UI. Smoked Glass touchscreen panels everywhere! Good interior decorating on a spaceship, not good for Classical Antiquity. Someone tried to make a modernized UI for an intergalactic Sci-fi MMORPG and they added it to Rome II. It's nonsensical at every turn. Not only do the windows and panels not match anything else about the game or even the other parts of the UI (borders and buttons) but the way they are laid out is not a good way to relate information.

The provinces are totally devoid of substantive info that the past games had, where a player who wanted to immerse in the city building, could, and be fulfilled. It's been turned into a click app on a mobile phone for a pre-schooler. Yet oddly, the info that is there is hard to understand, especially when much of it is gained by mouse over smoky glass panel pop up -- great what do those icons mean? If the pop up would stay put so I could then mouse over THOSE icons, that would help, but you cannot mouse over a panel that is a pop up, because you have to keep your mouse over the icon which made that panel pop up in the first place AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. If that wasn't bad enough, it's just not fun and engaging. It doesn't pull me in.

I don't think -- gosh, I'd love to manage my cities a little bit right now and build some cool things.
I think -- what the hell is this icon again, it looks just like that one? And why can't I see more information on what's going on here?

It works against itself constantly. Too many things are working against each other in the UI and this release in general. PRETTY UNITS - Oh no time to watch them, sorry! Huge number of formations -- They all melt into a round-ish ball after 3 min anyway!

3. I was a goat herder, now I'm a fleet captain: Army/Navy in one is awful. Armies being able to dive into the water practically anywhere they want to and instantly have a huge fleet of heavy transport ships is the worst idea CA has ever had. It totally ruins the realistic aspects about this periods warfare -- or any period for that matter, because at no time in history was any army so mobile and self sufficient. I watched as a random, 1 city faction, LAND LOCKED, deep in North Africa declared war on Athens and the next turn 2 huge fleets of skirmishers and horsemen were in the water -- EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD NO NAVY, NO PORT, THEY WEREN'T EVEN ON A COAST.

It turns the campaign game, like the battles, into a silly cartoon, sapping so much of the great atmosphere, brilliant map and what little intrigue the game does have. Cities, whole factions, constantly falling and rising again, then falling again to some random enemy that would never have attacked them in history, ever.

*Check the mods section for Radious battle mod and another called close combat (i'm sure there are others too that improve battles).

[Bilbo ballbags]

Agree with Prometheus on 1 & 2

3) cities are too large for the campaign map

[Twido]

As requested I have compiled the data to the best of my ability and I will try and forward it to the CA community rep. I have edited the OP but for your information I will duplicate it here....

This thread has had long enough to accumulate most peoples opinions so I have made an attempt to compile it into statistics. This was not easy for a variety of reasons so I have sometimes combined similar criticisms together or divided them when several issues were listed under one heading. I will list the criticism with the numbers of people mentioning it and any noteworthy comments.

1. Battle speed is too fast - 80 people.
2. Optimisation - 39 people.
3. Battlefield AI - 30 people.
4. UI - 29 people.
5. Poor historical representation of units - 29 people. (Note that this is particularly ambiguous because the complaints here were very wide ranging and often very specific for example javelins go too far, units can easily burn down gates or unit X is too powerful)
6. Units unable to maintain formation - 29 people.
7. Campaign AI - 21 people.
8. Too many unrealistic ability buttons - 19 people.
9. Poor city information and management - 19 people.
10. Character development and family tree - 19 people.
11. Time between turns is too long - 12 people.
12. AI army composition - 12 people.
13. Limited number of armies on the campaign map - 9 people.
14. No guard mode for units - 9 people. (This could have been combined with number 5 but enough people mentioned it specifically)
15. Only one turn per year - 7 people.
16. Faction politics - 5 people.
17. Battle maps - 3 people. (This was mostly the siege maps)
18. Lack of cinematics - 2 people.
19. Too many factions - 1 person. (There could be some overlap here with AI turn length)
20. Bugs - 1 person.

One should take care when interpreting this data since people were asked to list only their top three complains. Therefore, just because an issue didn't get many mentions does not mean it does not have a consensus opinion and the opposite could also be true. People should feel free to continue posting in this thread although I will not keep updating these statistics for the sake of my sanity.

Finally I want to thank the people that contributed to this thread, the tone has remained respectful and mature at a time when certain people are criticising these forums for the manor in which opinions have been expressed. Cheers!

[CaileanMac]

Overall the game is good but:1. There are too many settlement battles! 99% of battles take place on settlements and just becomes an entire army defending a street. What happened to old fashioned, wide open battles? 2. Politics system is not very engaging. I just pick one random general/statesman to replace another. No family tree, no connection, no immersion. 3. The battles are too fast, and just become random blobs with no tactics required. Special abilities are completely out of place too.Most of the other stuff I can live with, and there are a lot of good new features that have been included.

[Praetorian_BGX]

1. Blob Battles. - Formations used in ancient warfare that don't work. Easily noticeable on Phalanx, Testudo, Pilum. Unit cohesion don't work.2. AI. - Playing this game is like a playing chess with 2 year old child. AI Charging into legionaries with archers and slingers is not fun. I guess that every product finds its client, so there are many people that can enjoy this. 3. Micromanagement. Game is terrible dumbed down. No Walls? Ancient Warfare... Really? No buildable Roads? Beside those 3 points: Boring graphics (not like the trailers); All unit types play exactly the same; OP free transport ships; Agents are bad, useless, short living; UI is eye-raping; Total lack of depth of the previous games; Units runs on cocaine/lsd; 1TPY; Unit magic powers and buffs, 3 mins for battles, Flawed and limited tech and build trees, Lack of family tree, Horrible optimization, 55 euros for Beta testing, Willy the ginger as fisherman, CA False Advertising.

[Van Diemen]

I think that the three most annoying gameplay issues that Rome II currently faces are:1) Bad campaign and battlefield AI2) Battles progresses way too fast. The average battle lasts for only about 6-8 minutes3) Game not optimized.Concerning the AI the following issues are a huge problem:- The campaign AI keeps too many small armies/fleets instead of a few larger ones- The campaign AI does not seem to adapt well to new situations. For example when territory is lost and food shortages occur, I feel that the AI does not do anything to increase the food supply- The battle AI does not keep formation properly and seems to run nearly all the time to move across the map- The battle AI blindly charges towards the victory points- The battle AI does not always try to wait and combine forces when reinforcements are moving onto the battlefield.