f13.net

Picked this up today at lunch, played through the tutorial, and started a campaign, but only got to play for an hour or two.

  Seems a lot more involved than M:TW was, as far as the TBS goes.  I've never really been into the RTS segment of it, and more often than not just auto-calculate all the battles.  The TBS portion has picked up a lot of elements from the Civ series it seems, with limits on construction based on population and size of cities.

  Instead of being broken up into provinces, it's broken up into cities that you conquer/control, the difficult part being, if someone parks an army in your territory, they can be destroying improvements without actually attacking you, and you don't get much of a visual range, as opposed to being able to see where all of the armies were in the adjacent provinces in M:TW.

  I *think* I'm a pretty good M:TW player, even when I was using WesMod, or actually fighting every battle myself.  My first try through in the campaign in R:TW, I had serious problems with money, and went broke fairly quickly while being overrrun.

   I started a second game on Easy, just to try to get a handle on the TBS portion, and have done really well so far, with 4 or 5 cities conquered.

  The Senate gives you missions, things like take this city, or block this port, which aren't as straightforward as I had first thought.  A lot of times they're throwing you into wars you really can't afford, or don't want/need to be in, so there's definitely some picking and choosing you need to do with the missions that are given.

  The other big change is that if you don't have a "family member" located in a city, you have no control over what it builds at all.  It puts the city into "auto-govern" until you move someone from your family tree and park them there.  Gone are the days of handpicking the best captains to govern each area and then using them as normal troops, you really have to shuffle around the best administrators from your limited pool of available governors/heirs.  It definitely caught me by surprise, and I ended up expanding faster than my family tree was growing, leaving me with a couple cities I couldn't really control.  The good part of the family tree is that you can designate your heir from the available family tree, something that was seriously lacking in the first, no more dud kings who get the entire empire to revolt against you.

  Overall I think it's lived up to my own expectations, by expanding on the  TBS portion a great deal, while keeping the great RTS battles that everyone else seemed to enjoy.

  As I said, my time to play was really limited, so you can take this as a "first glance" type of review, but considering M:TW was probably the game I've played the most in the past 2 or 3 years, I expect to get a lot of gameplay from this one as well.

  If you enjoyed M:TW, I definitely can recommend this as a game you don't want to miss, as the TBS genre is already starting to flounder, and with CA moving more towards it with this title, it gives us some hope for the future.

How is the new 3D battle engine?

The new 3d  engine is pretty shiny and nice, like that new toy you got straight out of the box. The controls are a little funny but thats how I have felt for all the Total War games. You can really tell this game was polished pretty well, very few bugs so far. Not to contradict myself though but I just ran into one where the game crashed when a spy was trying to sneak into a city. Ohhh well luckily I just saved it, guess the old philosophy of save often still holds true.

The screenshots for the game really do not do the engine justice I guess your best gauge would be the show on the history channel. My only gripe with the engine would be that all the units look the same. What I mean here is that if you zoom in a peasant unit, all 70+ peasants are clones. Ignoring the clone issue I really haven't seen such a detailed series of animations yet for a Strategy game, I have heard the new Warhammer RTS is pretty good too though. Anyway yah ignoring my rant the engine is good, very good.

While I haven't played the full game yet, based on the demo and the in-game footage on the R:TW website I have to say it's one of the most well animated RTSs yet. Charge an Elephant regiment into the enemy and you see soldiers go flying, Cavalry will vault into the enemy when you charge them and you can almost just sit there and watch your troops fighting in close up (for a while at least). The engine's well done, nicely polished and my only gripe was a bug in the demo that caused flame arrows to unleash the light of the fucking sun whenever they landed if you were using an ATI card.

I'm hoping and guessing that's been fixed for the full version.

My stock questions about any RTS:

1. Can you pause and give orders?
2. Can you slow down the game time?

I hate the chaotic pace of RTS games. Fast pace is great if I'm controlling one avatar.

If it's like the other Total War games (and it is), you can pause and give orders, and you can speed up the game time (though I don't think you can slow it down). The resource management portion is all turn-based though. The only real-time bits are the actual battles, and in those, all you are dealing with is that battle. Nothing else is going on at the time.

The Total War series are my favorite series of strategy/war games.

I don't have R:TW yet, but I am a big fan of the other two games.  The battles are awesome and highly realistic, as much of the engine's mechanics such as calculating morale and whatnot used Sun Tzu's Art of War as a model of good strategy (hold the high ground, allow the enemy to march over long distances to reach you, etc).

BTW, if anybody is interested in the book, it's usually at Waldenbooks for around $5.  Actually, since it's an ancient work, it is not copywrited and is probably translated online somewhere.  The copy I have includes commentary from T'sao T'sao, a name that should be recognizable by anybody that's played one of Koei's RoTK games

You can also visit your local library, which has shelves full of military books from all ages :)

I would just point out that the Total War serires aren't really RTS in the classical model. So to describe them as 'Real Time Strategy' really grants them a bunch of non-applicable baggage more than anything.

Oh, and Rome is out? So much for my productivity.
Carthago delenda est

I stopped going to those years ago.  Couldn't stand all the kids running around and screaming like they were at the local park.  But yeah, good point.

Damnit, my store still doesn't have it.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, audit viditur.

Hey, me no speekee latin!

I wonder how much of this is generational or cultural. When I was a kid, we always knew to stay quiet in the library, now people have no qualms about whipping out the cell phone (after a blaring custom ring tone aka klaxon) and having a loud, one-sided conversation in the 'Quiet Study Room', which is littered with signs like "No unnecessary conversation, please." or "Please turn off your cell phone's ringer" and "Please take cell phone conversations into the lobby".

Bah.

I think every single latin textbook in existence uses that to teach the Gerundive of Obligation.

Carthago delenda est.

Sky, the second one, roughly translates to 'Anything said in Latin sounds profound.'; basically pointing out that people these days only use Latin in order to sound erudite.

ancienthistory.about.com, via Google, says the first one is 'Carthage must be destroyed.'  Apparently Roman senators were fond of the saying back during those Punic wars.

--
Alkiera

Gah, doesn't anyone take history any more?

"Carthago delenda est" was Cato's tag line. He was a Roman senator who really, really, really didn't like Carthage. So after literally every Senate speech he gave (and he gave quite a few), he would add "Carthago delenda est" to the end. Just in case, you know, anyone forgot. So a typical speech would end "Yes, I agree, we must allocate at least 50 denarii for road maintenance in Apulia. Carthage must be destroyed. Thank you."

God Damn that sounds familiar.

Anyone read Tacticas? I saw in in the "classic" section of the book store (they didn't have Sun Tzu, I need to read him one day)  but was unsure how heavy the reading is. The one page I read seemed quite modern in it's writing, but mabye that's the translation.

It took the Romans a LONG time to bring down Cathage I think, severel long wars and it wasn't over until the place was in our terms a radioactive desert.

There's a moral in there. Nice to know humans havn't changed in the last 2000 years.

I was just saying not to get me into it due to a misquote. I don't do dead languages imo.

Yep, the Punic wars were pretty much the first real large scale wars in history. Hannibal couldn't invade Italy through the Med so he marched his forces through Spain and the Alps. Finally, he met the Romans at Cannae and, although outnumbered and out of war elephants (Carthage's weapons of mass destruction), defeated them anyway through superior tactics. The defeat stunned Rome (which to that point relied on human wave attacks to do anything) and forced them to actually learn tactics and strategy. They sent forces to knock out Hannibal's supply lines in Spain, and finally, 10 years later, invaded Carthage and knocked them out of the war.

http://www.fact-index.com/s/se/second_punic_war.html has a good description of the penultimate Second Punic War. Fascinating stuff, full of the kind of stuff you'd think only happened in movies. For example Hannibal found out his supply lines were screwed when the Romans tossed the head of his brother Hasdrubal into his camp.

(!)


That would be the trademark Roman 'subtle' hint.

Thanks Lum and Alkiera for explaining things. God forbid I sound to 'profound' when commenting on a game about the ROMAN FUCKING LEGIONS.

Goddamn kids.

You can download The Art of War here (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/132).

Ha, goes to show how much you know.

Cato was Inspector Closeau's butler.  I got the DVD set to prove it.

-Tige

Did he attack Carthage occasionally to keep it on its toes?

The turn based campaign game definitely has that addictive Civ-like "just one more turn" feel to it. Too bad the battles have screwed up camera controls that you don't seem to be able to change (the control mapping is in some sort of binary format that I have no idea how to change). And the way you turn your units is a pain in the ass. They should've borrowed the Rise of Nations style unit facing controls. Plus the general UI has a confusing mix of left clicks, right clicks, double-left clicks and double-right clicks that's confusing. It's been a struggle wrestling with those controls.


The campaign map is still divided into regions (you can see them better on the world map) -- it's just that there's always one settlement in each region and you have to conquer it to control the region.


There's a setting you can select before you start a campaign that allows you to manually control a settlement even if you don't have a governor there. It's easy to miss since there's no tool tips on those screens and the manual is crap. And there a whole ton of other settings in the game that are only accessible through editing the preferences.txt file. *Sigh* If you want to turn on no governor settlement management I believe it's the MICROMANAGE_ALL_SETTLEMENTS setting in that file.

As a follow up, I've actually gotten quite good at the TBS portion of the game, the first 20 or so years completely decide if you're going to end up face down in the dirt or not, just being able to withstand the attacks from the AI long enough to build up an economy to put you in the black.  This is on Hard/Hard, a huge difference from the Normal games I had been playing.

  There's still some bugs in the game, I managed to get a fleet of ships stuck in a river mouth, and it wouldn't let me move them, or delete them since they weren't in my territory.  And I randomly crash to desktop, I'm thinking it's a memory leak of some kind, but every time I try to play Inspector Clouseau and switch to task manager to check, it's never using a lot of resources, and doesn't crash until I'm not paying attention.  Luckily it only happens after a couple hours, and it seems to be auto-saving every turn, so I'm not too pissed about it.

  The entire Diplomacy bribe thing is fairly out of wack, I find it easier to just keep a diplomat in each city and bribe every army that even attempts to come near me, and also to grab every other factions family members as they leave cities.  Definitely need to fix that so bribing another faction is an act of aggression, I can usually steal most of the Julii family members while they're trying to fight the Gauls, and being able to buy a 3 or 4 star general for 10-12k is a little off, while weakening the other Roman factions at the same time no less.

  For a while I had a real problem with most of my heirs being complete garbage, with no management or influence skills at all, and  I found that it helps a ton if you manage the retinues as the family members age, loading up a 16 year old with +5 command out of the gates is a huge help.  It's extremely tedious, and I don't much like the family tree display the way it's set up, but it does make a big difference, so you can set up your capital with all the library/scriptorium buildings, then as family members mature, dump all the good retinues onto them and move them out, 2-3 turns later, that original governor ends up with them all back anyways from being parked there.

  So far I'm really enjoying the game, there's a few tweaks I grabbed from one of the .org or .com forums, one that slows down kill speed, and the other slows down movement rates of troops.  It was way too arcade like for me, and slowing down those two things has made it much better, IMO of course.

  And as for the controlling each province thing, you can also just uncheck the box that says "Construction" and "Recruitment", you can't uncheck the  auto-govern box, but the other 2 let you control everything you need to, you just have to play with the build style thing to guess at what the tax rate is.

Linkzor plz. That and the micromanagement tweak make this game sound better imo.

Well, I can say without a doubt, this is one of the most addictive games I've ever played.  It takes that whole "one more turn" mentality that games like Civ 3 elicit and takes it just that much further.  

Playing as the Julii on normal/normal (hey, this is my first time ever playing this franchise), I'm just steamrolling the world. The Gauls gave me some little problems at first when they decided to seige a town with a garrison of 250 odd soldiers with over 700 screaming primitives.  Worst part is 160 of my soldiers were town watch (one step above peasents). With some somewhat clever strategy (basically I let my general outside the gates and charged their missile units until they ran then hit the troups pouring through the gates from behind, retreat, rinse, repeat) I was able to pull off a demoralizing, crushing blow to their aspirations.

What's great about the game is that tactics really matter.  Holding the high ground really matters. Using tactics that cause fear and panic really matter (hello war dogs and flaming arrows).  Defeating 2000 barbarians with 600 Romans isn't an impossibility (or even that difficult) if you play it right.

The problems I've run into are primarily financial.  My army tends to grow well beyond my resources. Early on unless I start mowing through Gaul I can run into massive cash flow problems.  Also when you start taking out the other barbarians (Dacians) you're fighting a war on two fronts which means more troops and more garrisons.  You basically keep having to take towns or you're going to not generate enough income to keep developing your empire.

Another problem is squalor.  Even in my capitol, the population boom has made my citizens uneasy and in a large Gaul town they've gotten down right mutinous unless I've kept the place filled with troops. I've tried just about everything to keep up the public health (baths, aqueducts, an arena) and keep the people happy (lower taxes, temples) and still they require a near full garrison.

The only way I've been able to keep squalor and populations at a content level is to put conquerer towns to the sword.  Of course, this gives you the problem that you now have a town that cannot support recruitment so you run into logistical problems with your army.  Despite this adding a nice strategic/management level to the game, the squalor stuff is a bit much.

I haven't tooled around much with the diplomatic angle of the game.  I've pretty much been playing to crush.  Why bribe or why why be peaceful when it's so much more fun to destroy your enemies with your legions? I've mostly just used my diplomats to carry out senate missions and the occasional "I'm sorry Greeks, my bad, was that your port?"

As far as heirs go, I haven't had too much of a problem with mine. If I want to get them some command ranks, I just give them an army and go have them ass kick some primitives.  I haven't tried managing their retinues, hell, I didn't even know that was an option.  Yet another aspect I haven't touched upon...



You can change this in the game options setting I believe.  Or it might have been in in the faction tab.  Just uncheck the automanage ungoverned provinces or whatever and then you can just uncheck automanage at each individual provice.  Too bad I didn't figure this out ealier.  My rapid expansion into Gaul (along with some bad deaths: one AI blunder, one dumb mop up cav charge, and some old age) left me with a bunch of ungoverned provinces.  

One question, and I know this is going to sound like a "read the fucking manual, ohh wait you can't you dumb warez moneky", but... how the hell do you line up your troups while moving them?  I've done it a bit by accident, but troup movement has to be one of my bigger challenges.

The one major gripe I have with the game is sometimes the AI is just plain retarded.  I tend to avoid getting into battles when an allied general assists me, because they often tend to get themselves killed by being dumber than your average learning impaired 4th grader.   They start far away sometimes, with their large army coming to your assistance.  So what do they do?  Quite naturally they charge with their fastest unit, which happens to be THE GODDAMN GENERAL, straight into heavy infantry. A nice, heroic, braindead death. I assume this is going to be a problem once I actually need some large numbers for dealing with the Greeks and eventually Rome itself.

I'd honestly recommend buying this game (to the point where I'll likely pick it up in stores over my warez guilt). This game is like a wonderful onion of many flavors. Many layers, each adding a distinct flavor.  I've got the Sims 2, Fable (which I still enjoy, OMG I'm broken), and other games collecting dust because of it.

This sounds fairly historical. What the Romans found out as they expanded so far was that it was damned hard to maintain all those possessions with purely Italian troops. So they began offering the conquered peoples a chance to serve the Roman army. As the army lost its Roman-ness, it was weakened by divided loyalties. They really began to screw themselves when they allowed the barbarians who had served in their legions actual Roman citizenship, to the point where some of the barbarian generals actually overthrew Roman leadership and became Emperor. By the mid-6th century, I think, being Roman was a whole lot different than it was in Caesar's time.

Of course, I probably shouldn't call it a Gaul town anymore.  Because I wiped those dirty barbarians off the face of the planet.  

Muahahha.

And yes, I find it highly fitting that as my empire grows, it begins to crumble from the inside.  But the squalor issue is just horrid.  Every somewhat large city turns into a giant midden.  

I figure eventually I'll find a way to eventually counter it.  Until then I'll just go with the old standby of "dead people can't revolt". Perhaps that's why Decius's title has wavered between "the mean" and "the wrathful".

You can Bribe other factions familly members to join your faction too.  It's pretty handy when you don't want to deal with a 1500 person hoard.

Also, assananation of diplomats is fun.

Movement Rate Mod (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9703&st=0)
Killing Speed Mod (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=45&t=9877)
Removing time limits from campaign battles (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9993)

The last one may be needed depending on how slow you make things go.

  As for the squalor issue, I had a problem with it when I was playing on Easy and Normal difficulties, because I was expanding extremely fast, once I moved into the higher difficulties, my expansion rate slowed, and it almost completely stopped being a problem, usually the culture negatives are assimilated by the time I move on.

  You can also use a trick that I read somewhere, when you capture a settlement, and enslave the people, their population is distributed only to cities that have a family member in them.  So if you have say 3 troop producing cities, you can move governors out of the rest of your cities, take the enemy town, enslave the people, which will only get moved to those 3 cities, then just move your governors back in.  That way you can keep inflating the population of your best cities, which most likely won't have any issues with distance from capital, culture, or garrison size.

  Something else that might help, when you conquer an enemy city that has one of their temples in it that you can't build yourself, you can't upgrade it past whatever stage it's in originally.  You can destroy it however, then build up your own temples as far as the city size allows.

I found in the endgame that sacking and bribing work great. Playing as the Julii I sacked Rome which gave a huge amount of money, which I then used to bribe off the Brutii armies, then sacked their cities, repeat.

It might be a bit broken I suppose, I think the squalor thing might be an error as well.

Squalor is bugged, the improvements that are supposed to remove squalor don't. Also bribery is way way way overpowered (as in, one diplomat can destroy an entire army for far less than it would cost to maintain a defense). I suspect both of these will be patched soon.

I've got say this game is just fucking beautiful. Playing as Scipii I've had some fun moments in battles, normal/normal is easy enough to not be tense while still giving interesting battles. Not challenging but its entertaining, biggest problem I've run into so far was when Carthage built a 15 ship super fleet with a triremes and began a naval campaign against me. Carhago delenda est indeed.

I actually found the camera was fairly easy to get used to, left-click to select units and right click to make them do stuff is the general rule. Getting your units to face a different direction or choosing the depth of formation is a simple matter of right clicking, hold and drag to get the desired formation.

I know you can swap retinues but I haven't figured out how yet, I've picked them up but there seems to be nowhere to drop them once I've done that. I've also run into the "expand to avoid being broke" problem, fortunately I've been getting Senate missions that actually help with this, apart from the odd go and piss off the Greeks because we hate you missions. The replayability with the Roman factions alone seems pretty high, factor in all the other ones and this game looks like it's got some enduring appeal.

Hopefully they'll fix the bugs and balance it out a bit more, having to put all my cities to the flame every few years isn't particularly appealing. Friend of mine is still complaining about the lack of any campaign multiplayer, he really enjoys TBS ones and he's now holding out hope for a fan made mod. Not too likely though I'd say.

  You need to have both people at the same location to move the retinues, either in the same army, or the same city, then just pick them up and drop them on the other persons portrait.  I've been swapping them whenever governors start to near 50ish, or whenever I get a decent family member that comes of age.

Tell your buddy not to hold his breath. The multiplayer campaign game was one of the promised features of Shogun: Total War, and they scrapped it when they couldn't figure out how to make it work. Seems most people had problems waiting out their turn when other players had to have actual battles, which can sometimes take up to 30 minutes or more. Considering I've had campaign games of both Medieval and Shogun that lasted 10-20 hours and still not finished, I can see how that would be a problem.

Still, it'd be one helluva multiplayer game.

Anyone see the history channel show, Decisive Battles? It uses the R:TW engine to reinact great battles from that era. Pretty damn cool, and the host is Cpt. Spears from Band of Brothers! Woot!

I watch that show. My buddy and me usually play miniature wargames on Friday nights, and we make sure to catch the show when we can remember it. Nothing like a fine wine, a game of DBM and Decisive Battles.

I finally picked this up over the weekend. I fucking hate RTS games, but I am really enjoying this. I still get stabby when real time battles get hectic and things are happening offscreen, but for the most part it is fun as hell. Does anyone know if there is a patch out yet?

I think there is a 1.1 patch, that doesn't change a lot.

Total War Download Page (http://www.totalwar.com/community/download.htm).

Yes, there's one. It reduces the effectiveness of elephants and patches in multiplayer.  

Ohh btw, never try Spain on hard/hard.  You just get fucking mauled.  Gaul and Rome attack you at the same time.  It's just brutal.  I just can't see any way around it because you're losing money right off the bat.  Ohh and Carthage is sitting right below you.  Uck.

I think it might just be the difficulty settings. For some reason, I completely destroy any game's AI if it's at the normal setting.  Once I bump up the settings I immediately start getting shitkicked.  I think there needs to be a setting inbetween normal and hard called "Not as stupid but not cheating.  We swear."  One would think I'd get better and start trouncing that difficulty as well, but no go.  Heh, I think never having enough time to devote yourself like you did as a kid to a game means you're always going to be exceeding above average just not any good.  /Ramble

Yeah Civ III needed that difficulty mode badly. Everytime I played on a hard I'm like, why do they have three times as many cities as me in the first 20 turns?

Good luck cause that would require the devs to actually, you know, code a smarter AI. Civ IIIs difficulty levels are distinguished simply by how much of a head start the AI civs get...I've never noticed the computer actually playing smarter on the hardest levels it just gets more shit so it takes me longer to catch up and win.


edit: I do remember one game though, War of the Lance, where I would actually turn the AI to its lowest level for a better challenge. I found that if the AI got the right alliances it would attack my main powerbase early on before I got established..at the highest AI it would dick around attacking periphals letting me get well prepared for its forthcoming attacks. Go figure.

I'm still on my first campaign to 50 provinces playing as the red Roman faction with campaign on hard and battles on very hard. I have 44 provinces so far and I've won 214 battles and lost 14 battles. I usually play the battles (instead of autobattle).

The key for me seems to be "use lots of cavalry". As for managing cities I usually exterminate the populous when I take it over but now that I am nearing the endgame some of the cities have grown enough where they are starting to rebel. I just keep large garrisons of troops in all of them and destroy any new rebel armies that show up with 3-4 cavalry units. Any new faction generals that show up I ferry out to cities that don't have one yet.

The only units that seem to be able to give cavalry grief is chariots. So far my strategies for taking them out seems to be: have 4-5 times the number of cavalry or use missle troops (preferably missle cavalry) on them.

The Egyptians give me some serious grief though (especially in sieges) because they max out their walls and have missle chariots running around inside rendering my 80% cavalry armies useless. It won't be long now though.

I don't think I've used any diplomats or assassins the whole game so far.

I love the improvements to the battle engine, the way units turn (or fail to turn) seems much more 'realistic', and units like the elephants, the wardogs, incendiary pigs etc seem to add more vareity than the usual cavalry < spears < missles < cavalry game of previous versions, also the battles seem to revolve less around the need to find a really big hill and fit everyone on it, which I always felt dominated the earlier TW games a little too much.

The campaign map is an obvious gain, the squalor and family member governor rules seem espeicially impressive.


And finally, Onagers with flaming rocks fucking rule.

That is all.

I got this recently and I'm playing through my first Imperial campaign thus far. Here are my impressions.

The battle engine is awesome. Tactics play a huge part in success of every battle, but this is moreso the case on the sieges (attack/defend) rather than the open field conflicts. The highest level archers with flaming attack seem to be the best counter to cavalry that I've found so far, provided you can stick a few spearman in front of them to take the early assault. It demoralizes the cavalry units quickly. On offense, a steady does of cavalry can remove infantry attacks of 3x or more depending on your commanders.

If you haven't messed around with spies or assassins you are missing out on a big portion of the game. Spies are very very key in assaulting large cities since they can give you a breakdown of the army you are up against, and they can give you a good chance of taking the enemy gates without a fight. Assassins are awesome because they can eliminate pesky diplomats wandering around, and they keep your enemies in certain cities leaderless in a fight. I've been slicing up enemy diplomats like a hibachi chef, and nobody can get any alliances done against me. Plus, your assassins level up and take on retinues like any other character, so they improve their killing percentages with each successful kill.

The downside of the game by far is managing finances. This is probably the clumsiest part of the game that I've seen thus far. Money is a huge issue through the game, even if you hold numerous continents. I blame this mostly on the fact that army upkeep is ludicrously high, and in some cases as much as 66% of unit cost per turn. If I'm running 26 provinces I don't think I should be trying to scrape together enough money to keep my empire from going broke. That's just stupid. Also, despite best efforts, some provinces won't break-even ever. They are just sucking chest wounds on the empire. I've actually let cities be conquered because they were such a pain in the ass. Again, that's stupid. The game needs to find a better way to divide up the upkeep of the army if taxes on the population in the city won't cover it even on "very high".

All in all, the biggest obstacle to the game is trying to manage your family so your empire doesn't go broke, which I find to be a rather unworthy pursuit over trying to manage armies to fight for you. Other than that, the game is pure gravy when you get the chance to attack something.

Also, a few things are way too overpowered.
1) Cavalry, as stated above they will run over anything with impunity
2) Chariots, they are way too fast
3) Sapping points, there is no other reason to bother with siege equipment, these are an unstoppable way into the city, i've never used a ram on any stone wall.

Perhaps future patches will even that out, but I doubt it.

Again, this is very historical. The Roman Empire was definitely a victim of its own success. The costs of running such a large empire eventually outweighed the benefits. They gave up the British Isles because it was too expensive to maintain, leaving it to be conquered by the "barbarians." It's the reason most armies have real issues keeping what they conquer. Napoleon, Genghis Khan's successors, Alexander's successors, the British empire et. al. all found it difficult to hold onto these massive conquests for long.

So wait, I'm supposed to be happy about dicking around with my finances the whole game because its "realistic" to the period?

Thanks, but I'd rather have fun trying to play war instead of accountant. I do that at work.

Just saying that's the reason for what you're saying. I'm not saying it's an insurmountable issue, only that attrition through over-expansion is historical. And they've built the Total War series to be all about the history.

'Dicking around with finances' in Rome, like in most games of it's ilk, really just consists of doing a quick scan of your existing armies and disbanding all the obselete spear thowers, or never used training facilities once every 20 turns or so.

Personally I feel they need to crank up the upkeep costs even higher.

In general wargames that work on the basis of upkeep rather than construction cost being the limiting factor work better (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/prod/diplomacy). For a start they punish people who just sit and build a gazillion tanks before attacking anyone, and tend to lead to more balanced tactical battles.

It also prevents everything after your first 20 provinces being an enormous waste of time with an all too inevitable outcome. Like, for instance, in M:TW.



Onagers are just as effective, and you end up with spare ammo to fire at the bad guys.

Walls in general need an upgrade, whichever siege method you use, you'll generally get through the wall with few losses.

Just another example of trying to keep the black man down imo.

I suppose in reality its not the finances part that bothers me as much as the clunky interface of trying to get things to happen. The reality of my town's income is buried deep in menus that took me a while to even find, and they aren't even that clear when you do get to them. The financials page is nice, but there is no real information there that you can change on the fly. A quick menu of all the towns listed where you could change the tax rates without scrolling all over creation would go a long way. There is no way to allocate your troop costs except the way that the game does, which is by population. I would much rather be able to set higher percentages of overhead to higher income towns rather than stare at one town that's losing $2K every turn due to troops. There is no upgrade function to obsolete units even though there is a retrain option available to restaff depleted forces. That was a key feature of Civ when your tech increases made spearmen useless, yet in this game you must disband and start over from scratch.

If there is an army total menu, I haven't found it yet, but that could be because the manual is a total POS. I'm finding most of the key stuff on my own. I'd like to see what my breakdown of total troops is in comparison to cavalry, missle, and infantry so i can better equip my units. I also agree that walls need an upgrade because unless you have epic walls with flaming archers manning them, they are useless.

If it's anything like the other TW games, there is an army list, but it's a bit useless for anything other than informational purposes. Controlling the economy can be a bit tedious, having to click on every single province to control individual tax rates. Whether by design or accident, I have no idea.

I'm intrigued as to why you care how such costs are allocated, but I do agree that there should be a summed total of all your towns' operating profit/loss projections in the bottom right corner of the screen.

Most of the financial summary tools are utterly useless because they fail to separate out capital expenses and windfall payments below the operating profit/loss line.

Telling me I made a 1359 loss last turn when that included construction & recruitment costs as well as diplomatic and looting one-off windfalls is not helpful.

The whole issue is somewhat moot, however, because I have yet to see anyone play Rome and not end up with at least 25% of their army and 40% of their buildings standing idle and eligible for disbandment at any time.

How many of those conquered territories of yours still have tier 1 barracks sitting around going nothing except draining the exchequer?

Well, I can see what you are saying. Keeping a staffed army in every province isn't practical, and that makes sense. I'm in a very Civ mindset of play where upgrading all cities to the gills was extremely helpful, but I need to retool my thinking to play this game. This game seems to put more of the focus on intensifying your military production to a few key areas and letting the rest of the world go on its merry way. Just a different style than I'm used to I suppose.

Still, my main problem is that when I'm on auto govern, cities without governors keep cranking out crappy units and military buildings even when they are on orders to culturally or growth build. Again, this makes the tedium of placing family members everywhere an issue, but I suppose that is an intended barrier of conquest for the game. That's something that took me by surprise a little.

My newest issue is with fleets. They are a little on the uninspired side. Very very cheap to build and they play no real part except as shuttles. You can blockade ports, but I haven't seen how that has a big effect yet. Also, why am did they always make fleet battles an auto option only? I would have enjoyed conquest on the high seas as well, but not its just a side game I hardly bother with unless I need to get to one of the islands.

My friend the eqholic just gave me his copy of the game, not sure why he bought it as he doesn't like strategy games, I'm betting he thought it'd be like the one strat game he's liked: Myth. That's the usual reasoning.

Anyway, after reading this thread I might have a fighting chance ;) Now I just need TIME to play, heh. Played through the tutorial, nice enough looking game. Wish you could slow down gametime a bit, though. Missing lots of cool little bits, like the little celebrations when a unit is victorious and whatnot.

Like Paelos, I'd probably have approached it like Civ, which isn't the best way to approach a lot of games. Hey, how about a Colonization sequel? Been playing the emu of that excellent game a bit...

Do buildings have upkeep on them? Heh, I never actually bothered looking.  A good strategy for empire building, especially on the frontiers is to maybe build up one or two cities on the far reaches, but leave the rest of them bare minimum development with a minimal garrison.  This allows you to use on or two spots to keep your borders replete with fresh/upgraded troups and it also allows you to keep unrest due to squallor down to a minimum.  Of course I burn down their temples and slaughter their populations when I take over, but I just want to keep the savages in line.



You can turn automanage off in the settings.  If you do this midgame, you have to uncheck automanage on the settlements that currently are being automanaged.  It still helps to have family members at your more significant areas for their management and combat skills.



Blockading ports has a big affect on trade.  Unless you haven't noticed yet, naval trade is possibly the biggest earner in the game.  This is why I make it a prereq to conquer as many coastal towns as I can and upgrade their shipyards as far as I can.   I think their reasoning for the uninspired naval portion of the game, is that they wanted the focus to be on the ground battles, which they pulled off spectacularly (imbalances aside).

A couple other random points based on your posts:

Don't worry about individual town income.  The game portions out the costs of maintaining your empired based on population.  Your big population centers will always have 4 digit losses, this is a given.  Ports will do a bit better than some, but not by much.

Walls, especially stone become a must in the late game.  I've never lost an assault, no matter badly outclassed if I have stone walls.  The computer rarely brings onagers to the field.  Also, seiges become much more difficult later on as it becomes a necessity to field seige engines as storming walls and using rams is for suckers.  Onangers do a spectacular job of softening the defenders while avoiding those icky losses from arrow towers, archers, boiling oil and heavy infantry poised on the walls.

It's a fun game, but some of the imbalances are just ridiculous.  You'll find this to be evident if you end up battling a Gaul army that's stocked with 6 family members. Yes, that's 6 groups of heavy horse that you're going to have to contend with.  I barely beat an army of just over 1200 with 2000 when they pulled that crap (well, I had to field a lot of mercenaries).  Cav, elephants, chariot archers, and some other units tend to make the battles a little fucked up a times where army balance just gets thrown right out the window.

All of the sudden an old SNL skit with Chase and Pryor comes to mind...

Yes you could fill a warehouse with what I haven't noticed yet about this game. Mostly because it does involve a lot of unscripted exploration. Like I just figured out how to build forts and watchtowers in the field. Forts are pretty stupid unless you are a straggling general waiting for reinforcements, but watchtowers are so key in big provinces where FOW lets rebels run rampant. The downside is that only generals can build them, not just regular units.

As for the blockades, I can see how that would disrupt trade, i should delve a little more into my displeasure with boats. The main fact is that even when I'm winning battles, it's too easy for me not to do heavy casualties to the enemy and they row away. You almost need a ridiculously overwhelming margin to destroy their fleet, or just a low number on their side. Either way, I find myself playing tag on the high seas instead of being able to control the kill count. When i auto battle in the field, that's normal, but I can take control and reduce the army to a number than could fit in a Volvo if I want to. Such is not the case with naval battles, and it irks me.

I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking the game, but I really do enjoy it. These items are meerly things I've noticed that cause me minor grief but aren't at all gamebreaking. Overall, the game is a triumph on many levels, trumping many of the gameplay successes that Civ has released in III. It's not perfect, but close enough that I'm playing an RTS for the first time since WCIII and not hating life.

Forts do have purposes, though limited ones.

You can use them around settlements to delay a siege starting, or when a city is building up to more than 20 units and you want to be able to build more without having to leave small numbers of units outside the walls and vulnerable to attack, as well as for controlling choke points.

Remember a general is required to build a fort, but a captain can maintain a fort just fine.

Word is that forts will also reduce the frequency of those brigands who sometimes pop up in your provinces.