Sense of scale and GRAND STRATEGY
I haven't played all that much Rome 2 yet so my view on things may be wrong/incomplete/etc but given the flurry of criticism about various bugs and glitches as well as corner case design decisions that are questionable I wanted to comment on what I feel is wrong with Rome 2 in a broader sense.
Clearly CA has put a lot of effort into their engine, in particular the campaign and the various decisions there, I think it's a great move and I was really quite excited about it, and to a degree I still am even if it's dimmed by the implementation. They put a lot of effort into reducing the 'number of moving parts' and making player decisions more interesting, this leads to there being fewer armies on the map and fewer important settlements that are easier to manage. Unfortunately that's about all they've done. While the province capital and minor settlement setup provides the potential to flesh out the map with more settlements then you found in Rome 1 without turning the campaign into Seige: Total War this was ignored in favor of giving us even less total settlements then before.
On top of this a provincial capital in Rome 2 is less capable then a settlement in Rome 1 as far as total potential is concerned, this is a result of porting the build setup from Shogun 2, which itself isn't too bad but when compounded with the fact that now farms ( and other resource development? ), ports and blacksmiths are sharing the max of 5 city building slots this is actually an even more constrained system then Shogun 2 before you even touch on the number of branching options there are for development where Shogun 2 had a bit more unified buildings. If anything the opposite should be true since the cities of Shogun 2 spend much of their existence as part of a large unified state who's individual roles in the economy of Japan could afford to be more specialized where in Rome, many of the cities were City-States with centuries of history as independent actors.
It's now literally impossible to make an Athens with the same options and capabilities as it would have had in centuries past, forcing a choice between a trading port that's the only way to get any trade but produces no food and basically no ships and ports that will either produce ships or food is just insane. What naval power in history would have built up a powerful navy without being able to take advantage of the trade or fishing their navy secured? I've barely gotten into the game and already the 6 slots for a provincial capital and 4 for smaller settlements feels overly cramped forcing punishing decisions upon the player instead of difficult ones.
I know I can't count on CA to alter their game to my liking but I will make this promise. Not going to pay for even one DLC until I'm certain that it's possible at least to mod the game into a more GRAND STRATEGY state ( map editing is probably the big one here ). If CA is only going to launch bite-sized Total War campaigns then they'd better allow the community to take the game further.
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Originally Posted by Stoicblitzer
