New Campaign pack for R2! :)

[Daruwind]

I´m really happy with Ancestral Update so far. I hope there will be like fix/patch later after month to catch some bugs. :-) But most of the stuff is working quite well!

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

I´m really happy with Ancestral Update so far. I hope there will be like fix/patch later after month to catch some bugs. :-) But most of the stuff is working quite well!

Could you give me a quick report of your performance after using ingame new Anti Aliasing buddy ?

[Daruwind]

Could you give me a quick report of your performance after using ingame new Anti Aliasing buddy ?

I tried MSAA 8x and looks great, especially with new lightning,water reflections and stuff. Game runs +/- the same with MLAA as MSAA 8x for me...no major performace impact. But I have quite good PC and run extreme details everywhere (1080Ti). Yeah when Im fastly moving across regions with snowing, it gets some FPS hits ;-)

I noticed battle maps are no longer having water waves at some below sea level parts but instead some weird texture under some angles.

[Fest]

I had a go at the campaign and it has been pretty fun, I tried Taras and they've been pretty interesting so far, apparently the philosopher-diplomat king has Tourette syndrome:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I tried it on Legendary to see if I could keep the Loyalty issues under control and so far I think I'm passed the worst of it:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

and with the destruction of Carthage (I guess some random AI faction):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I'm left wondering what the end game is, a 100 ships off the coast?

Anyway, the graphics look pretty good imo and the game runs very smoothly performance-wise for me.

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

I tried MSAA 8x and looks great, especially with new lightning,water reflections and stuff. Game runs +/- the same with MLAA as MSAA 8x for me...no major performace impact. But I have quite good PC and run extreme details everywhere (1080Ti). Yeah when Im fastly moving across regions with snowing, it gets some FPS hits ;-)

Good to know. What's your CPU btw ?

When I'm back from vacations, I'll need to compile new graphic setting suggestions and performance tests, cause people are trying to use both GEM and ingame Anti Aliasing with disastrous results. I haven't played the game with the latest patch so I'm a bit worried about performance not on my end (I have a 1080ti-8700K both clocked) but many people having issues with their FPS lately.

I noticed battle maps are no longer having water waves at some below sea level parts but instead some weird texture under some angles.

Interesting. I'll need to check this as soon as I have access to my gaming rig.

[Daruwind]

i7-6700K at 4.4GHz and gtx1080Ti :-) Im running without GEM.

[Welsh Dragon]

I had a go at the campaign and it has been pretty fun, I tried Taras and they've been pretty interesting so far, apparently the philosopher-diplomat king has Tourette syndrome:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Taras does sound fun. I get the impression they're one of those factions where early game you may be at a disadvantage, but if you can weather the storm you can come out as one of the most powerful factions in the game.

Also, as someone who has lived with a person with Tourette Syndrome for much of his life, can I just point out that Coprolalia (involuntary swearing) is a symptom that affects only a small percentage of Tourettes sufferers. And that the use of Tourettes in this fashion is not only inaccurate, but also serves to further the negative stereotype that helps make the illness so socially isolating for many people with it. They have it hard enough dealing with the illness, without then being made a joke or a slang term for something.

(To be clear, I don't think you meant any harm by using the phrase. I'm just trying to highlight that Tourettes Syndrome is an illness with many different symptoms. But most of all that it affects people, and those people have to deal with a lot both with the illness itself, and because of the way society treats them at times because of it. It's no joke.)

I tried it on Legendary to see if I could keep the Loyalty issues under control and so far I think I'm passed the worst of it:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Well you're braver than me. I never go above Very Hard, and mostly play Hard. I know my limitations.

and with the destruction of Carthage (I guess some random AI faction):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I'm left wondering what the end game is, a 100 ships off the coast?

Anyway, the graphics look pretty good imo and the game runs very smoothly performance-wise for me.

In my Syracuse campaign Carthage are proving quite the threat. I just lost one of my starting coastal regions to a Carthaginian raiding fleet, and so now I'm needing to develop a navy to counter their threat, because most of my settlements are ports!

I play on fairly low graphic settings for most things, but even I've noticed improvements, surprisingly without impacting performance that much. And the tickbox for Lightning (which also effects flickering torches in night battles) is a godsend for my eye problems.

All the Best,

Welsh Dragon.

[Daruwind]

Actually I´m missing old agents somehow, they are powerful, more campaign oriented instead of armies/cities.. I can assassinate enough but I have no spies to effectively stop enemy armies. It is constant running around and trying to catch enemies. Plus even worse is navy. Transport ships should finally have like half movement range and armies on the sea should be able to move much longer than land armies And Navies has pretty low variety of ships.

Overall I´m pretty happy. All these things i can solve for myself with a few mods.

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

i7-6700K at 4.4GHz and gtx1080Ti :-) Im running without GEM.

Any other lighting mods or Celticus' HD projects ?

[Daruwind]

Any other lighting mods or Celticus' HD projects ?

I just disabled all mods for first Rome campaign, probably later when mods are updated. I was usually trying to play with Water HD and some Attila HD assets, pre Imperator colour schemes and such, but right now I´m comparing just Vanilla.

[Abdülmecid I]

Where did you see that? It's funny because the reaction here at TWC has been pretty positive so far, though elsewhere I do see a lot of the usual griping. That's unfortunate because it seems like CA are finally listening to the fans. Yes, there's still issues this long after the game's release (I too got annoyed with all the ship disembarking bugs), but with the Ancestral update for example it now feels that CA has been humbled and is trying to win players back. But people are used to being angry at CA, and I guess it's a hard habit to break. I saw the steam score was surprisingly low, then I saw it was weighed down by Mac users angry that it's only a windows release. I was like "Guys, I'm a Mac user too, but you guys are being jerks." It sucks that I have to play it on my ancient windows desktop, which is so old and cheap that it literally freezes after every battle. But that's life. Deal with it. Do I go around giving one star reviews to droid games because I have an iPhone? Grow up, people. (This isn't directed at anyone here by the way, just the steam reviews.)

I understand their frustration, as the game was advertised as Mac-friendly until a couple of hours before the release. It's a classic case of misleading and aggressive marketing, but I at least hope that it will teach them not to sabotage their own interests by pre-ordering. Anyway, the majority of the reviews clearly point towards a grossly over-priced DLC, which will gradually be abandoned after some weeks. There's also a general consensus about the broken state of family politics. Generic family members, including kings, desert you for absolutely no reason, leading to comically absurd situations. The comparison with the interactive and immersive trait and loyalty systems of Medieval II is not very flattering for RotR.

[Welsh Dragon]

I understand their frustration, as the game was advertised as Mac-friendly until a couple of hours before the release. It's a classic case of misleading and aggressive marketing, but I at least hope that it will teach them not to sabotage their own interests by pre-ordering. Anyway, the majority of the reviews clearly point towards a grossly over-priced DLC, which will gradually be abandoned after some weeks. There's also a general consensus about the broken state of family politics. Generic family members, including kings, desert you for absolutely no reason, leading to comically absurd situations. The comparison with the interactive and immersive trait and loyalty systems of Medieval II is not very flattering for RotR.

From what I've seen it's a classic case of "someone didn't realise Steam was taking the system requirements from the base game for the DLC," rather than an intent to mislead or "aggressive marketing." There would be no logical reason to advertise something as being on Mac when it isn't, because of exactly the consequences we're now seeing.

I do agree that something has gone wrong with the release version of this patch in some areas, compared to the opt-in Ancestral Update Beta we played, like the weird faction desertions.

As for Family Tree, I think given that the game was never designed to have one in the first place they've done rather well with it. I actually quite enjoy it, and I certainly didn't expect that. I'd still rather they invested the resources into something else for Rome 2, but given that people have been complaining about the game not having a family tree for years, I understand why they did it.

(As an aside, I fired up Medieval 2 earlier to check the family tree. Was surprised by just how little is actually there, compared to Rome 2's family tree. Also much to my amusement, I noted King William and one of his sons were the same face and picture, just with a moustache stuck on to the King. And people say the Rome 2 ones all look alike. )

All the Best,

Welsh Dragon.

[Daruwind]

There's also a general consensus about the broken state of family politics. Generic family members, including kings, desert you for absolutely no reason, leading to comically absurd situations. The comparison with the interactive and immersive trait and loyalty systems of Medieval II is not very flattering for RotR.

It needs some tweaks but in first gameplay I got no desertion of family member. Other houses try to adopt some of your members from time to time but I was always able to pay it off. I played for achievement so my family got 100+ members by the end of campaign. There is so many political options for varions ranks and members, elections... Honestly it needs just some tweaks of numbers to keep more options viable and interesting,probably bigger drawbacks of some...

[lolIsuck]

Now that they've introduced a family tree they do need to give us better portraits though, these 3D ones are not pleasant to look at. Characters also still go from little boy to seasoned construction worker once they come of age.

[Skotos of Sinope]

From what I've seen it's a classic case of "someone didn't realise Steam was taking the system requirements from the base game for the DLC," rather than an intent to mislead or "aggressive marketing." There would be no logical reason to advertise something as being on Mac when it isn't, because of exactly the consequences we're now seeing.

Indeed. And this same thing happened with Empire Divided. When I purchased ED on steam, they had the apple and windows icon next to the title, but CA had stated on their blog weeks ahead of time what the real system requirements were and also stated in the FAQ that there were no plans for a Mac version. Not to pass the buck, but this was steam's mess in mislabeling a product, not CA's.

[Noif de Bodemloze]

I have played this ROR some hours and I have spotted some things in my game:
- BAI is still bad and some BAI action still feels horrible like from Rome 2 release.
- BAI lost in naval invasion when they come to your port. 2/3 enemy army landing your port but 1/3 camping nearby beach doing nothing.
- CAI is very hard, no matter what difficulty you use. Even I must turn to easy difficulty but still feel AI is badass.
- Rome is Hard because of hard neighbors
- Samnites, feel fine but CAI is spamming their armies to me and enemy AI doesn't care about trespassing neutral factions? wtf?
- Taras (hard?) feel quite easy and have access to riches earlier than other factions.
- Hoplites too OP unit?!
- Sword > Spear = should be easy rock-paper-scissor style,seemingly seem impossible.

[Fest]

@'Welsh Dragon', thanks for your thoughtful response.

[Ludicus]

As for Family Tree, I think given that the game was never designed to have one in the first place they've done rather well with it. I actually quite enjoy it, and I certainly didn't expect that. .

Rise of Republic: what's your opinion on the civil wars and secessions? are they bugged?

[Skotos of Sinope]

I'm starting to wonder if this DLC would be more aptly named "Rise of the Rebellions". I saw the thread on reddit about the huge increase in civil wars and secessions that many are experiencing and the near financial infeasibility of managing the party loyalty system. Supposedly it has to do with one change. In grand campaign, you start out with +25 party loyalty and it goes down from there. In RotR, it starts at zero and goes down from there. (There's also no government reform to empire here, so you have to do without that option to buff party loyalty.) Some people are reporting civil wars every couple of years, which is nuts. Mostly this is for those playing on legendary difficulty though.

It's not that bad for me yet, but it's starting to get brutal. After that crazy civil war where every single party joined in civil war against me, taking every single army save my faction leader's, I started paying attention to politics and thought I had a handle on it. After my protection expired, immediately loyalty started dropping. Right now I've got my edicts focused on the loyalty buffs, I'm pouring 2/3 of my income into promoting other party members and giving them gifts. "Secure Loyalty" barely will get it out of negative territory, and I've seen it drop ten points in the next turn even after using it. I'm thinking if I don't want to go broke, my only option is to intentionally provoke a secession every few turns and then wipe out the party. This is unsustainable.

[Daruwind]

Use even Dignitaries for loyalty buffing. They have one skill which is adding +5/10/15 loyalty to the party owning that province. Two house traits are default,one is according to house leader. Try to get rid of faction with bad traits, and remove leaders with bad traits as well...or at least line them all up so you can focus some aspects..like having a lot wars On contrary, I tried to promote just my house, with almost 100 members I was able to generate high number of gravitas and getting so a lot support in senate...that´s important. The less support for other houses, lesser number of controlled provincies for potential civil war.

Women can send gifts which were like free loyalty for a few turns and such. I was able to generate big family so I could easily put my own guys into leading all armies, navies and prevents others from getting high gravitas... :-)Only one civil war in whole game play at legendary.