Rome : Total War

[Ralence]

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.

[Trippy]

How is the new 3D battle engine?

[jwinston2]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Sky]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Train Wreck]

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

[Sky]

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

[Daeven]

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.

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

[Train Wreck]

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

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.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Damnit, my store still doesn't have it.

[Der Helm]

Carthago delenda est

Quidquid latine dictum sit, audit viditur.

[Sky]

Hey, me no speekee latin!

Couldn't stand all the kids running around and screaming like they were at the local park

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.

[Gong]

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

Carthago delenda est.

[Alkiera]

Carthago delenda est

Quidquid latine dictum sit, audit viditur.

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

[Lum]

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."

[MrHat]

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.

[Comstar]

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.

[Sky]

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

[Lum]

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.

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.

[Ironwood]

   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.

[Daeven]

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."

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.

[Krakrok]

You can download The Art of War here.

[Tige]

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.

Ha, goes to show how much you know.

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

-Tige

[Sky]

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

[Trippy]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Ralence]

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.

[Sky]

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.

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

[Rasix]

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...

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

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.

[Rasix]

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".

[slog]

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.

[Ralence]

Movement Rate Mod
Killing Speed Mod
Removing time limits from campaign battles

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.

[Ezdaar]

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.

[Lum]

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.