Tony's Romatherapy

[Tony83]

Test Rome Campaign

Revision 986

Difficulty - Medium/Medium

Introduction

Hi guys, when Tone invited me to beta-test an RS2 campaign I jumped at the opportunity to test drive my favourite faction, Rome! I don't know what it is but the vision of the legions tramping up and down the Via Appia really stirs the blood.

Not being the sharpest tool in the box, I scratched my head a little but eventually managed to find and fire up the Roman Test campaign. I liked the introductory screens, warm and inviting, colourful; a good showcase for the units.

So, having got things up and running I settled down to Turn 1.

Turn 1

Looking around the Italian landscape for the first time, the overall effect was very pleasing. A very good clear map and a comfortably hued, inviting, complimentary interface with lots of very nice touches. I particularly liked the little ships and their unit card images, the sails are particularly good. The sea movement kept catching my eye and pulling my attention, it's very well done, but I'm not sure yet whether or not it would be too distracting in the long term, but no doubt I'll have plenty of opportunity to assess that, so I will report back on it.

The first thing I tend to do with any new campaign is go around all my settlements and set the tax levels as high as I can without actually starting riots. Having done that, and noting the 5,000 starting pot, I was a little surprised to discover that I could anticipate 120,000 for the next turn. It's far too early yet to assess whether that is too much or too little but I was glad to discover that I wasn't going to have to plunge deeply into debt, from the off, and have to claw my way back into the black, only after twenty to thirty turns - I hate that sort of campaign.

The AUC date threw me a little, but when I spied Hannibal's army I was able to get my date bearings - lol. Checking out the armies, I noted that the hastati/principes setup had been replaced with the Polybian Cohort. Is that historical? I hadn't realised that they had been done away with prior to the Marian Reforms. I also came across the 0 turn recruitment. With past RS campaigns I've always gone for the optional, and traditional, one unit per turn option, but I didn't see that available this time, but as this is a test campaign no doubt that will come later.

The final step of the first turn setup was to decide whether or not to lat Hannibal's army pass, or attack it head on. Playing with my arrogant "Roman" head, I decided that they would have gone in head first, like bulls in a china shop, assured and confident of victory, and it was a victory that I got. For a loss of 25% I managed to kill Hannibal and rout his army, killing over 80% of his army. But it was epic! The battlefield looked superb - all those beautiful units marching into battle - it was wonderful to behold. The grass and trees looked great and the distant terrain, hills looked very atmospheric.

Having killed Hannibal, and routed his army, I don't know yet if that is it for his invasion, or whether there are additional strands coming up. If Hannibal is the main and only thrust in the invasion, you might like to beef up them up with additional experience/armour chevrons because, personally, I think it would be much more of a challenging campaign if the Romans were slaughtered in this battle, or at least won a Pyrrhic victory. But please bear is mind that I'm saying this from the end of Turn 1, and you may well have other surprises up your sleeves.

Going back to the battle for a moment, I loved the music, there was one march that was particularly stirring, and one last point, I think I would have liked to have seen more of a contrast between the selected and unselected unit cards. In the heat of battle I did find it a bit difficult to tell between the two.

Performance-wise I found that I was getting between 7 and 10 fps, but I was using Huge unit size and all the other settings maxed out. Actually, it's about the same that I experience with FOE, in similarly sized battles.

To close my first report, I'll leave you with some random images taken from the battle (below) and I'd like to thank you for the chance to participate here.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[apple]

Great to see you here again mate.

Don't set the units on the highest setting use the high as the very high setting turns of all the spirits. You should gain some fps by doing this.

[Tony83]

Cheers mate. I was playing on Medium/Medium, as I do with all my campaigns. I've never liked the silly bonuses that CA gives the AI in lieu of a better intelligence. And don't worry about the FPS, I know I can better speed if I turn the settings down, but I'm used to it, and it gives better quality sceen images.

[apple]

Yeah I saw that just a moment after I posted it. The very high is more or less only for very high end owners and more or less shouldn't be used if you don't have monster machine. However that's all up to you.

[swhunter]

Welcome Tony!

[Tony83]

Thanks swhunter.

@ apple

My rig is pretty capable (i7-965; 4 GB RAM; 2 x GTX 295 in quad SLI mode) so I know it's not that, because I can run Med II maxed out and get 50+ fps, and similar with ETW. I think it's actually the RTW engine itself bottlenecking, it just wasn't designed the handle the increased data stream that the vegetation and larger texture files that we use these days. It's one of the reasons that Im so keen that RTR moves across to the Med II engine.

[Ballacraine]

It's one of the reasons that Im so keen that RTR moves across to the Med II engine.

Now that is a very appealing thought!

Balla.

[Tony83]

What is that music that plays when you use the RS2 Launcher (I think I've heard it in the battles too)? It's damned excellent! I find myself just starting the launcher and just sit there listening to it!

[tone]

Yes he did

What is that music that plays when you use the RS2 Launcher (I think I've heard it in the battles too)? It's damned excellent! I find myself just starting the launcher and just sit there listening to it!

Same here

[apple]

My setup:

OS: Windows 7 64 bit & Mac OS 10.6.1 (Snow Leopard)
Memory: 4x2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
1 TB Serial ATA Drive
Graphic card: ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics
Processor: 2.80 GHz Intel Core i7

I get 30-40 frames with it with all maxed in RS 2 (except the unit's).
25-35 for ETW.

[Pat89]

Tony, do you use the RTW anti-aliasing or the NVIDIA controlled one (ie RTW AA off)?

[Tony83]

I don't let NVIDIA control the anti-aliasing because it screws things up when I'm working on sprites, so I usually leave AA set to low on RTW itself. With ETW and Med II I let NVIDIA do the math. It probably doesn't help that I'm using a 1920 x 1200 resolution on a 28" screen.

@ tone

The launcher says "Test Campaign" and Rome was the only option, so I think I'm using the right one, Tone. I'm not too bothered with the fps, I can always redial some settings if needs be, and it's only an issue with full stack battles. I'll have to remember to switch the banners off too, I think that makes for better screen shots.

[tone]

Tony presumably this is the "Test Campaign" in the launcher rather than the "Rome" campaign - I hope so, as the test campaign has a number of enhancements, and will become the Rome campaign.

What I have done though is create a hi-res DMB file with sprite distances set to 95m instead of 50m which works really well and has lower overhead than units set on highest. You can swap that in the main data folder (descr_model_battle_hires.txt) for the main one or in the Play Test folder for the Roman test camapign, but you'll need to remember to overwrite the default one again if anything gets updated.

I've just uploaded one for the Play Test folder.

[dvk901]

Tony, the 'Polybian Cohorts' are, in reality, a mixture of the Principe and Hastati. The information and rationale for doing this comes from Polybius (I believe) in his description of the Battle of Cannae, where the Romans grouped the Principe and Hastati in blocks of maniples they called 'cohorts'...presumably to present to the enemy a stronger looking front. Evidently, by this time, their was little to no difference in the two as far as how they looked (the Hastati were just the younger less experienced men), and from this point on the 'cohort' consisting of so many maniples (I forget how many) was used. There is evidence Scipio used it in Spain as well.

Given or crunch from unit space and models, and what we thought was good evidence, we decided to do it that way.

I too, am often perplexed by the lack of contrast between the Roman cards.

[Tony83]

OK, thanks for that DVK. I was only wondering, because we don't really differentiate between the "Camillan" and "Polbyian" in RTR, although I believe they do in EB, and usually expect to see the "triumvriate" in action before the dreaded "Marians" occur. I think that I must be one of the few who wails inconsolably when they do, and my beloved hastati, principes and triarii are consigned to the dustbin of history. All that experience gone for nought!

[Ballacraine]

Nice to see you here, Tony.

A bit of cross-pollenation is no bad thing.

Yes, it is a shame when you lose those valued experienced units.
I know it isn't the same, but could they not just be swapped for experienced Post Marians, rather than starting from scratch?


Balla.

[Tony83]

Thanks for the welcome Ballacraine. I wish there was some way of marching an Hastati in one end of a barracks, re-equip them, and have them come out the other end, retaining their experience as legionaires. However, that's not possible with the RTW engine as is. Maybe it would be possible to jig something with a batch file that made certain changes to critical files, when the reforms occur, but I've never seen it done.

[Philip_II]

I feel exactly what you feel, gentlemen. I had three or four hastati with two gold chevrons (they'd obviously been fighting and retraining for about thirty turns in Greece) and the same with a similar amount of Triarii. Even had a few Eqvites Extraordinarii up to single gold. Alas, such is life. The old vets had to retire sometime, right?

Hey could we make the rebellion easier to trigger by having it simply coincide with the Marian Reforms? Or is that too non-linear? Or make it the same percentage increase every turn that it may happen post-MRs (the same way we made the rebellion of Capua). Start at around 5% and increase by five every turn till it's a guarantee twenty turns post Marian. That's only ten years though....hmmmm. Well, I'm just trying to think of same way where it's a set time that the player will get hit by the reforms that we can guage and make a little easier that if a player will lose, it will be 40-80 hours into the game and not 100+. That would suck.

[apple]

That's Glory. I'm happy to hear that you like it.

[Tony83]

It's absolutely superb mate, I love it, did you write it?