Rome 2 Total War

[Jack1n]

I just stopped playing this game altogether until it gets some major patching done to it.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Slaves are a vital part of the economy. I will only take about 20 or so slaves if the enemy result is that low, kill otherwise. That way I keep up that part of the economy without getting too many.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

Patch 2 did quite a bit of good for the game.

and on TWC modders are already starting to rebalance the game and fix issues as well. Day by day things keep getting better. Hopefully in the next 3-4 weeks the majority of the major problems and balance issues will be resolved.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Patch 2 did quite a bit of good for the game.

and on TWC modders are already starting to rebalance the game and fix issues as well. Day by day things keep getting better. Hopefully in the next 3-4 weeks the majority of the major problems and balance issues will be resolved.

Completely agree with you! I've already got mods that I feel improve my game experience, and I do like this patch. It's one of the smoothest patch updates I've ever seen out of CA!!

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

Patch 3 is pretty awesome as well but need a new game to notice all the fixes.

But yea I have my game modded for 2 turns per year this has resulted in the internal politics system actually being a somewhat interesting experience it also made spys / champions / dignitaries useful as they dont die immediately.

Newest patch has made the AI better in battles. altho it still seems over 50% of my fights are city / siege but there is a new options the AI sieges you have the ability to Sally Forth and attack them instead if they besiege. This is ridiculously useful and why it wasnt there in the begining is beyond me as it could be done in Medieval 2 6+ years ago lol

Sadly this may very well be the last decent RTS release from CA

Currently is appears the Audio files for the game are natively encoded for Xbox and SEGA is already considering porting Rome 2 to Xbone and PS4. This means going forward Total War will look worse play worse have less features and in general become an inferior product. All we have to do is look at CA's other console releases where the only decent one was on PS2 called Spartan Total Warrior everything else has been pretty much garbage. So for any Total War fans here I suggest you pay close attention as the Death of this franchise of games could be pretty close since SEGA tends to drop the ball fairly often when it comes to important decision for their gaming franchises. Currently its all still under "Consideration" but well when it comes to milking a franchise what publisher can resist?

 

[rtwjunkie]

LOL, I went the 4 turn per year route, and while it slows down the game considerable, and adds alot to the political angle, it causes techs to be ahistorically ready too early. I may start over and go the 2 turn per year route instead.

 

[freeboy]

I'm playing two turns.. Agreed the research is too fast, I had a bug introduced by ACTH two, disappearing unt, the glad was there, the men too, just they where investable to me, and the are my men... No combat bonus either! Lol

 

[entropy13]

Anybody else using STIM?

 

[freeboy]

Thanks for tha question, After I read it
I was intregued and now am dl it! what do you think?

 

[rtwjunkie]

Just noticed the mod last night which extends research times to match the 4 turn per year gameplay. That said, I may stick with the 4 turn gameplay....it really adds alot of depth to the politics, and seems to match movement rates on the campaign map much better....even so Marching an Army from Rome to Massilia takes 1 and a half turns, which is 4 and a half months of time(a turn and a half). And that's with 4 turns per year!

 

[freeboy]

can you link me to the research extending mod?
You may see march times decrease through attributes and as the highways are improved over time... I had one army with a veteren who had increased campaign march almost double the distance other armies could go

 

[rtwjunkie]

can you link me to the research extending mod?

Unfortunately no, I can't. I am at work, and cannot access TWCenter.net. I'm sure someone (maybe even Crazyeyes...) will notice and put the link up to the posting. I'm sorry. I haven't even tried it yet, I just downloaded it last night after a 6 hour session in the game.

 

[ShiBDiB]

twcenter has gone to shit..

 

[rtwjunkie]

Yeah, they've got server problems, but it's still the go-to place over the .Org for mods as far as I am concerned. They've held that title for the last 9 years in my book. The server problem was alot better yesterday.

 

[freeboy]

well my system and steam stopped cooperating, so after deleting and reinstalling r2, I am now re installing steam, what a pain

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

Server issues at TWC are due to one server being down and hte other being rather old. At this point they are in the process of gathering funds for an entirely new server system to resolve the issues as with each Total War game the community has grown by a large degree and as you can guess more users = more bandwidth and more strain on the server. Regardless while it is a slow wonky mess as said above they are the go to place for mods.

 

[entropy13]

Work internet speeds are substantially much more faster than at home, but no downloads (more than 300KB) allowed so...LOL

Being able to access TWCenter won't really matter.

 

[rtwjunkie]

My only true complaint about the game (that hasn't been fixed by mod or patch), is that Roman Legionairies (and associated heavy early troops like Princepes), don't throw their Pila on the defence, only if attacking. Did CA completely forget that they got it right in RTW? The primary reason Roman Legions were so powerful was because they primarily let the enemy come to them on the battlefield, standing in formation, and throwing their Pila at about 30 to 40 feet in order to disrupt the enemy charge and lower morale. This seriously needs addressing.

 

[ShiBDiB]

Server issues at TWC are due to one server being down and hte other being rather old. At this point they are in the process of gathering funds for an entirely new server system to resolve the issues as with each Total War game the community has grown by a large degree and as you can guess more users = more bandwidth and more strain on the server. Regardless while it is a slow wonky mess as said above they are the go to place for mods.

that makes no sense because a few months ago they took everyones money for "upgrades".

I called them out on it on the forum and my post got deleted... Something fishy going on there

 

[entropy13]

that makes no sense because a few months ago they took everyones money for "upgrades".

I called them out on it on the forum and my post got deleted... Something fishy going on there

Isn't that for the then impending arrival of Rome 2?

Right now it's a case of "we've underestimated things after the new game was released", not really "yeah let's get moar moneyz bwahahaha".

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

Pretty much the amount of whiners has increased 30 fold in just the last couple weeks. I am surprised the server is still running at all.

 

[entropy13]

To be fair though I never encountered 'slowdowns' at all in their site in the past month...

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

I dont get slow downs just the 500 error its definitely slower than it use to be but I don't frequent the site as much as I use to.

 

[Enterprise24]

Rome II is very CPU intensive game.
It's well multithread game except it put heavy stress on one core.
I think that is cause of bottleneck and result in stutter on acceptable framerate (30-40+).

Still don't understand why it must put stress to thread#0 , why not shared some work to other thread.
And why very well multithread game like Crysis3 or BF3 CPU usage on all thread is even.

Here is my 3770K 5Ghz with HT on CPU load 55% GPU load 76%



with HT off CPU load 82% GPU load 57%

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

There is a reason for it

essentially data given to thread 0 is locked to thread 0 it cannot be shared with thread 1 because thread 0 is already using that information to get an end result

The reason for this high load is due to the games animation subsystem being pushed onto 1 core

More soldiers on screen moving or fighting = more load on thread 0. This has been a long standing issue and wont be solved anytime soon. The only way to resolve the issue is to have every single unit in a battle have its own thread for animation and physics sadly it then introduces a new issue of interaction between units for said animations. There is far more to the problem then most people realize and granted I would have expected them to come up with a better solution at this point but its likely they can't or don't know how to solve the problem.

This issue has existed since Rome Total War was more noticeable in Medieval II.
Empire brought a new game engine where animations were kept to a minimum thus the issue was as noticeable with missle / gun troops however in large melee (shogun 2) the problem became even more apparent. This applies to Rome 2 as well because with each and every total war game more and more individual animations are added for each soldier meanwhile the single thread that handles that data has not really changed.

It is also a well known fact that Total War games perform slightly better with HT off especially when using multiple GPUs. Regardless you cannot compare and FPS with an RTS.

for Crysis 3 you have crappy generic AI routines and physics
BF3 you just have physics and of course everything that comes along with that for both titles included collision detection etc

Total War has to handle: Battle AI routines and how to react to the player /animation sub system along with matching animations between units in combat in large blob melee that can be a single units attacking 3-4 units it has to handle collision detection for every soldier along with mass / momentum / animations for 1 on 1 fights as well calculating armor / attack / shield / hp etc into the equation for which soldier lives and dies / General Physics and much much more.

Essentially put in terms of CPU calculations Total War is much heavier than BF3 or Crysis 3 etc.

but easiest way to explain it

you have threads A B C D
Thread A handles data1
Thread B handles data2
Thread C handles data3
Thread D is idle
Thread B finishes Data 2 tries to access Data 1
Thread A is not done with Data 1 so Thread B is denied access
Thread A finishes Data 1
Thread B starts Data 1
Thread C finishes Data 3
Thread A starts Data 2

essentially with everything being calculated the game needs all these pieces of data to be crunched in a certain order. splitting these threads onto other cores means completely different variables emerge example Thread A and Thread B if they both worked on Data 1 if Data 1 is animations then conflicts arise as each can give a different result. This is why animation sub system and other aspects of the engine are lumped into a single thread. Its simplifies the process.

Crysis 3 and BF3 are also on console they will sell 20-30 million copies in their lifetime. Rome 2 Total War might sell 2.5-3 Million take the return on investment into account and becomes obvious why these limitations remain to this day. It all boils down to money and keeping the code simple enough to run on the lowest common denominator systems.

multi core programming is the way of the future but there are many aspects of coding in todays games that just cannot be easily multi-threaded. I have probably screwed up this example multiple times but i don't care I am to tired to care.