Total War: Atilla (Rome 2 Stand Alone Expansion)

This thing is a slap in the face for everyone who bought Rome II at release. So fuck 'em, I'm not going to buy that.

Looks good so far except it still the Warscape engine. So no unit collision mosh pit clusterfuck combat and kills are scripted animations is still the norm.

Pretty excited for this, I've played Rome 2 for a couple hundred hours at this point and still enjoy it (have an IA Egypt campaign wrapping up). I played it around launch for ~50 hours, and while I liked it better than launch Shogun 2, due to the bugs it couldn't match FotS era Shogun 2. I played a bunch more around patch 12-14, maybe another 50 hours. The massive rebalance they did for the EE however was a huge improvement, it catapults the game from simply good to absolutely fantastic. Perhaps city building is alittletoo easy now, but overall the restructure is a massive improvement and I'll take it.

The UI changes for Attila are mostly good as well, including the meta information within the game just makes sense. You can get by in Rome 2 having a steam browser open to the building/skill trees, but that really shouldn't be necessary. Without that easily accessed information the huge faction variety ends up working against the game. Conceptually I prefer the card system for adding traits as it allows more varied customization, but a tree is easier to understand and plan with. I don't mind either in the end, they are basically the same, the car system could have benefitted greatly from a more comprehensive UI.

I much, much, prefer the Rome 2 unit cards. I feel like the greco-roman frieze art style does much more to pull me into the atmosphere than renders of the posed 3D models Attila has. They also provide a nice clear pictographical representation of the unit functions. But whatever, I apparently don't care nearly as much as other people seem to, and much of that comes down to personal taste, of which mine happens to be a very spartan aesthetic (which living in Scandinavia seems to have only reinforced).

I feel like Rome 2 doesn't get nearly enough credit for its Province/Army system. This is as large a step over its predecessors as free map movement was for R:TW. It solves so many problems with the empire management of previous games, adding depth and more decision making to the building choices while simultaneously cutting down on the tedium of individually managing each... and... every... little... town, most f which were just copies of each other anyway. It also drastically alleviates the "every battle is a siege" problem that especially Shogun 2 had. AI bugs and crashes can be fixed iteratively, but solving the deeper problems that underlay the older TW games (some of which plague 4x game in general) is much more challenging and can't be done in patches.

Looks like a big step forward (and backward, as a good thing).

So is Rome II finally worth playing? I'm one of the suckers who bought it day 1 and then uninstalled that heap of shit within an hour. I love the TW series but will probably never buy one of their products at release again.

It's still a healthy distance from a great strategy game in my mind. I think the Attila changes are a step in the right direction. But it is significantly better than it was at release.

Agraza_sl said:

It's still a healthy distance from a great strategy game in my mind. I think the Attila changes are a step in the right direction. But it is significantly better than it was at release.

Click to expand...

I am going to politely disagree with Agraza Other games do parts of what Rome 2 does better. Paradox games do diplomacy better for example, other games probably do RTT better, but there is no game that puts everything together into a single unified experience (I can't stress enough how difficult it is to do things like this) like Total War games do, and Rome 2 is now the best Total War game to date.

And honestly, no one else is really even trying. So if you want to play an Empire building game that focuses on tactics, combat, and battles, I don't know of anything else that really comes close. To me that makes it overall a great strategy game.

As an avid player of both Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings 2, will this game disappoint me in comparison?

Most likely. It shifts the focus away from the campaign map over to the actual combat. The diplomacy options in the TW games are a joke in comparrison to the stunts you can pull in CK2 for example.

Zajeer_sl said:

As an avid player of both Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings 2, will this game disappoint me in comparison?

Click to expand...

Maybe?

They are different enough that I can't say for certain either way. The Total War games give up some of the complex management and diplomacy aspects of being a "King" in exchange for the immediate and visceral core fantasy of being a "Battlefield Commander."

I'd say Total War is at its heart a Real-Time Tactics game while the Paradox ones are Grand Strategy. That isn't to say TW doesn't have grand strategy, but I think it is there more to support RTT aspects of the game by giving your battlefield actions much more meaning and consequence than they would otherwise have.

Some people actually do play and enjoy the game like a simplified militaristic Civ using auto-resolve, and that is ok too, but they are missing out on its uniqueness in my opinion.

All that being said, Rome 2, especially after the EE, has the most complex empire management in the series.

nate_sl said:

So is Rome II finally worth playing? I'm one of the suckers who bought it day 1 and then uninstalled that heap of shit within an hour. I love the TW series but will probably never buy one of their products at release again.

Click to expand...

Yeah actually just got the latest pack (Augustus/Emperor Edition) and it seems a lot better. Runs faster on the same hardware, anyway (single gtx670).

The game itself was actually pretty fun for me even at release. I had finished a Junian grand campaign and was pretty far into a Carthaginian grand campaign before I moved on back then.

I picked it back up after seeing that gamescom vid and the diplomacy is waaay improved, but it can still be a crapshoot if you're not mindful of trespassing/agent actions etc. Some of the personalities are slightly off... the spartans being loyal expansionists got them spreading aggressively in both my new Parthian and Macedonian campaigns and Syracuse could prolly use some kinda tuning pass for similar reasons. Trade is way more profitable now and Syracuse always ends up doing better than Carthage on harder diffs for me.

Anyways, playing as Bactrians now and the whole unit legacy metagame actually adds a lot of character to the each culture. Each civ have different upgrade tracks for their armies in addition to similarities amongst civs in the same culture. IE: Bactrians get hellenic phalangite infantry but with some competent steppe horse archers and their generals have the option of starting as armored war elephants instead of heavy cavalry or heavy phalanx.