Maybe..less is more?

[zbeck008]

After getting giddy as a schoolboy and playing Rome 2 for ten hours...I went back to Rome 1 and Medieval 2...why??? Because I had an epiphany..."Less really is more"!

Game after game they have gotten worse and worse by adding Super Mega Awesome graphics or AI or a new engine or whatever...but the stickmen in Rome 1 are smooth, and fun as heck to play year after year!

What's with the crummy graphics? The crashes? The AWFUL AI? I have spent my last year litterally chomping at the bit for any scrap of infornation about this game....all of it to a resounding..... (insert cricket noises here)

All my irritation aside from all of the bugs I counted during my epic stint on Rome 2... I've got to think that someone else out there thinks the same as me...Has CA been adding MORE, and simply made it LESS?

[tech99]

Remind me of the Madden football series promising new features and gimmicks every year, but they forget to actually work on the bugs and gameplay. Madden has been the same game for 10 years with updated graphics and new gimmicks. In the case of the Total War series, the gameplay appears to actually be getting worse ....

[Dan113112]

After getting giddy as a schoolboy and playing Rome 2 for ten hours...I went back to Rome 1 and Medieval 2...why??? Because I had an epiphany..."Less really is more"!

Game after game they have gotten worse and worse by adding Super Mega Awesome graphics or AI or a new engine or whatever...but the stickmen in Rome 1 are smooth, and fun as heck to play year after year!

What's with the crummy graphics? The crashes? The AWFUL AI? I have spent my last year litterally chomping at the bit for any scrap of infornation about this game....all of it to a resounding..... (insert cricket noises here)

All my irritation aside from all of the bugs I counted during my epic stint on Rome 2... I've got to think that someone else out there thinks the same as me...Has CA been adding MORE, and simply made it LESS?

I've actually found the TWR2's Very Hard AI to be better than any of vanilla RTW's AI choices. Same with M2TW. Are you playing RTW and M2TW unmodded or modded? The Warscape engine is not actually that bad but this game lacks many good features ETW, NTW, and even TWS2 had. Even though I like many Warscape features I have to agree that if the RTW/M2TW engine had better diplomacy AI and better vanilla battle AI I would have been happy. Warscape does offer modders the chance, however, to make the AI better than any modded AI for the previous games. At least that's what I've noticed.

[AlexisonfireNZ]

I've actually found the TWR2's Very Hard AI to be better than any of vanilla RTW's AI choices. Same with M2TW. Are you playing RTW and M2TW unmodded or modded? The Warscape engine is not actually that bad but this game lacks many good features ETW, NTW, and even TWS2 had. Even though I like many Warscape features I have to agree that if the RTW/M2TW engine had better diplomacy AI and better vanilla battle AI I would have been happy. Warscape does offer modders the chance, however, to make the AI better than any modded AI for the previous games. At least that's what I've noticed.

Totally agree with you on the AI for VH. Hopefully some mods will improve it much more.

[JackDionne]

I agree less is more. It's starting to look like a game designed for children. I am posting this everywhere I can.

If something is not broke don't fix it.


Having put in over 1800 hrs and 4000 battles in the Avatar Campaign and now having played Rome II, I find the format for multiplayer battles is better in Shogun II. To be more specific what I mean about format are things like unit stats appearing when you mouse over them.


-I like the fact that other players can't see your win lose record and leave before the battle even starts, that's great, thanks.
-I like the animations very historical, great job.
-I like how you can change the size of the unit banners in game, very nice and other stuff like the missile trails.
-I like the way you can minimize different windows on the battle screen and bring them up again.


The following is a list I compiled of things I don't like in no particular order.


No ladder for ship battles.


No guard mode.


No rewind button on replays.


Romans too strong. Animation for Romans throwing pila nfg, you had it down pat in the original Rome. It's almost like they don't even stop to throw it. I certainly hope when the Romans from the Justinian era come out the animations for throwing the Plumbata are correct. (UNDERHAND). Please don't disappoint on that issue.


Sparta sitting on the fence for now.


Unit cards I find hard to interpret in the heat of battle, the General is hard to find. As mentioned in other threads on this same subject make them so we know what we are looking at. Give two options with a check mark one for the ones you want us to use and one for the more traditional.


Too many bells and whistles i.e every time you activate a special ability, fire works go off(all that glitter above the unit. No need for it! Reminds me of some childrens games, it has to go or at the very least toggle the damn thing off. It's effect totally takes away from the historical accuracy of the unit animations.


Too many special abilities. The only unit that should have more then two is the General unit.


Missile units need adjusting, not enough damage for the slingers (elite slingers).


The 20 minute timer is a step back. I find people camping on the hills whit Sparta and artillery. Makes the game very boring waiting for the 20 min timer to finish just to get a draw. Bring back the dojo's!


Finally no pdf doc that we can download and read while sitting on the thrown. I have mentioned this before. I can't find the information I am looking for in the game encyclopedia in reference to special abilities. I am sure it's there I just don't have that kind of time to track it down. There is a lot of information that could be put in there that would answer a lot of questions. Example, health in game terms? You should of at least beta tested the multiplayer and we would not be getting half the issues we are getting now.

[Consortium11]

Total War games tend to have a revolution followed by evolution style development.

Rome was a massive revolution over Medieval Total War. And Medieval 2 was an evolution on that concept. Empire was a massive revolution over the previous games... and Napoleon was an evolution on that concept. Now we have Rome 2, which again is a revolution compared to everything that came before.

The issue here is simple; frankly CA (under SEGA's control at least) have struggled with the revolutionary games ever since Rome 1. Rome 1 was amazing for its time (and holds up relatively well these days despite some obvious flaws) but it limited its revolution to changing from the strict Risk style movement system to the more flexible one we're now used to. Despite how fundamental that change is, CA kept most of the other systems and mechanics from Medieval in place.

The best comparison to Rome 2 is Empire (and not just in terms of bugs and shoddy AI). Empire was a massive revolution of the game. The engine was changed, city development was changed, the basis of combat (from melee to ranged) was changed, technological development was changed, tactical combat was changed, the scale was vastly increased. And as I think we can all accept, even the fully patched (and often modded) version of Empire is still a deeply flawed game. The combination of the number of "improvements" made, the scale of the game and the increased graphical capability meant that the development team were clearly stretched very thin and as a result despite there being a host of good ideas, almost all of them were badly implemented.

Rome 2 seems to me to be in exactly that situation.

It's a revolution of the series. How armies work has been fundamentally changed with the requirement for them to be led by generals. City development has again been reworked. The addition of capture points fundamentally changes how field battles work. Combined arms attacks and transport capacity. And all this on a vast scale with (supposedly) much improved graphics.

But much like Empire, while most of these ideas are good in theory, they struggle in practice. The way armies work got round the problem of the AI spamming small stacks... but with garrison troops being somewhat lacking and the need to put down revolutions means a player often finds himself forced to turtle. Capture points should have avoided the problem of players being able to "camp" on a hill and exploit the poor BAI... but instead leads to illogical situations where a defender has to run 3/4 of the way across a battlefield to defend a meaningless patch of ground (which occasionally ends up being right next to the opposition army, giving you little to no chance of victory. The fact that armies can freely move on water got round the micromanagement of fleets and the somewhat illogical position where, however risky, you could transport a full stack on a single, small vessel. But the power of transport fleets compared to a regular navy and the fact there is no delay or cost to moving onto water makes a conventional navy an expensive perk, not a necessity.

And all that combined with issues with the graphics and battle set-up (notably the speed).

I think most players were fairly happy with what Shogun 2 turned out to be. There were still issues with the pace of units and the slightly overpowered nature of missile troops (somewhat of a fact of life with Warscape) but on the whole most people were content with the game. Shogun 2 was not a revolution; while it did bring in changes (notably the RPG elements to character development) on the whole it was an evolution of the concepts introduced in Empire and Napoleon and on the whole it was better for it. In truth if Rome 2 had simply been a reskin of Shogun 2 I think most people would have been happy. A reskin with a few additions, implemented well? People would have been ecstatic.

But instead Rome 2 is an attempt to reinvent the wheel. And for the moment at least, they made it square.

Clearly there's a really good game underneath the dross in Rome 2. Graphical issues will be sorted and a combination of patches and modding will remove many of the annoyances from other aspects of the game. But my suspicion is that many of the things that annoy players are essentially hardcoded or, at the very least, will be difficult to mod. And considering the development time of games these days and CA's need to make a profit, by the time the community is really getting to grips with making Rome 2 the game is could... and likely should... be, the next Total War will be near to release and attention will turn to that. Empire should have been the definitive Total War game played out on an epic scale and yet to this day, despite the patches, despite the mods, despite everything, it isn't.

When CA want a revolutionary game (as Empire was and Rome 2 is) they tend to add a lot of bells and whistles that look great in previews but struggle during the game itself. When they quietly evolve the concept, reducing it down to its core and improving on the basics, it generally holds up; both Napoleon and Shogun 2 were very solid games (although still flawed).

[JaM]

Consortium11: calling this game a Revolution, is same as calling Dragon Age 2 a Revolution... This is a revolution of dumbing down great game series, so it can be played by 5years old.. I wouldnt be surprised, if they release it for next gen consoles immediately as they are being available, because whole UI ismade like consoles are their main concern...

[Consortium11]

Consortium11: calling this game a Revolution, is same as calling Dragon Age 2 a Revolution... This is a revolution of dumbing down great game series, so it can be played by 5years old.. I wouldnt be surprised, if they release it for next gen consoles immediately as they are being available, because whole UI ismade like consoles are their main concern...

Oh, I'm not saying that it being revolutionary is a good thing. Dragon Age 2 was a revolution of the Dragon Age Origins concept (which itself benefited from being an evolution of the Infinity Engine games)... but it was an awful one (although Origins wasn't that great to being with). If anything what CA have shown us over the last few years is that their evolutionary games (Napoleon, Shogun 2) are superior to their revolutionary ones (Empire, Rome 2).