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« on: September 17, 2013, 03:17:02 AM »
First two times i tried playing it i got so pissed off with how hard it was to work out what the buttons did that i switched it off. You really have to play the prologue campaign to understand how it works, because the icons don't look enough like the thing they're meant to be the way they mostly did in the original Rome Total War.
Unit cards are annoyingly slow to load the first time you go to look at one, but slightly less slow after that.
I played as Carthaginians twice and there are some improvements compared to the original Rome. If one of your cities is attacked it automatically raises a militia and levy garrison which has a size and composition based on what military buildings you have in it.
You can move armies by sea without building ships to represent commandeering merchant vessels as transport ships (the problem being that if it's a big army it can beat warships, which it shouldn't be able to - should get sunk by warships automatically as in Rome I with transports).
The biggest problem is that each city gets only one or two building slots for each size level it has - so you end up having to choose to build certain buildings, you can never build the whole range in ever city. This seems unnecessarily limited. And if it's possible to build city walls i never got the technology or buildings needed.
The technology tree is not bad - there are different tech advances available for each of the four types of faction (Roman, Hellenistic, Eastern and Barbarian) and a lot of buildings require both other buildings built first and technology - and the buildings available are different for the four types too.
I found the limited numbers of buildings per size level of the settlement made it almost impossible as Carthage. Build military buildings to get good garrisons and armies? You run out of food and your armies and people starve and lose people and soldiers. Build food production buildings? You're well fed but your small armies get massacred and enemy armies take your settlements.
Characters get only 3 or 4 retinue members each (courtesans, mercenary captains etc) which seems a very small number.
I think there may be a multi-player campaign though i've never checked properly. I'm wondering if the limited numbers of buildings and retinue sizes are to do with that?
There are far too many factions and many of them were nowhere historically.
Playing as Carthage it very annoyingly only gives you 4 settlements at the start and gives all the rest to 'Libya' and 'Nova Carthago' - AI factions which are Carthage's client states. In practice all this gives you is an alliance and trade rights with them. You can demand money from them but they'll tell you to sod off, though they will declare war on anyone who declares war on you.
Maybe if they gave Carthage control of more starting cities and took out the stupid AI client state allies in a mod it would be possible to win as Carthage.
The graphic, which were supposedly going to be amazing look considerably worse on my laptop which is less than a year old and high spec with a high end graphics card. In graphics options Rome II won't let me set graphics quality higher than Medium. Everything is also very very dark in battles - don't know if this is some copy Europa Barbarorum thing - liked EB but never understood why turning the brightness way down in it was supposedly "more realistic". It's often pretty sunny in the Mediterranean and it was in 272BC too.
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