Rome II is the most ambitious Total War entry to date, but CA has failed to deliver on its promises.
-Huge campaign map comprising a diverse set of factions
-Siege battles are better than ever
-Great sound effects and musical score
THE BAD:
-The campaign is crippled by micromanagement and an unhelpful UI
-Unintelligent AI in both campaign and battle
-Fast-paced battles have limited need for tactics
-Long load times
Let me begin with a vital disclaimer: I was in fifth grade when Rome: Total War released. I was a devoted AoE and Civ fan, and this was my first taste of Creative Assembly's unique formula of turn-based empire building and real-time battles, all contained in a well defined geographic and historic frame. No game bedazzled me the same way as the original Rome. So if my review of its sequel comes off as excessively critical, it's because I expected this game to be the second coming of my video game messiah.
To get a better perspective, let's consider Shogun 2. Critics and fans, myself included, regard this entry as the gold standard for the Total War series. It delivered a well paced campaign, polished multiplayer, and a vastly improved naval combat system. The one downside was its scale. The campaign had a mere 65 settlements, and fighting for control of this tiny map were poorly differentiated daimyo. Each clan's campaign consisted of the same basic path to Kyoto, packed along the way with thousands of identical peasants in paddy hats stabbing each other with tridents.
CA learned their lesson this time around, and for it they deserve great credit. The campaign map is about 170 settlements split into about 60 provinces, the biggest TW campaign to date. Victory conditions require that the player hold 100-odd settlements, and completely control the provinces holding the great cities of the Mediterranean: Rome, Carthage, Athens, and Alexandria. The result is an epic clash of civilizations. The Latin, Punic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Eastern, Nomadic, and Desert Nomadic cultures, each with their own bonuses and unit rosters and fragmented into 100 or so factions, fight for supremacy of the classical world. After Shogun 2's countless battles between yari samurai distinguished only by the color of their armor, it was a sight for sore eyes when the first horde of screaming Celtic swordsmen, clad more in woad than armor, crashed against my Epirote phalanx.
The map of Rome II may be enormous, but it's not as open as past entries. Impassable mountains and various attrition zones serve to give you a preset path from one settlement to another. And that's a good thing. It puts emphasis on the stance of your army and the skills of its accompanying generals. In past TW games, players who fortified one position on the campaign map, or had their army lie in wait to ambush the enemy would usually see the invaders bypass their position. That frustration is over. If the German Confederation chooses to challenge my holdings in Italy, I know that I can leave a single army guarding a mountain pass to the west of the Swiss Alps. With my northern frontier secure, I devote the rest of my military to conquering Egypt and the Levant.
Smart management of your armies is important, because the game restricts how many you can recruit. In past games, recruitment was managed at the settlement level and a captain was assigned at random to lead if you didn't embed a dedicated general. Now a general must be assigned to every army you recruit. Like in Shogun 2, generals level up after enough victories, allowing you to boost their attributes and assign them a household retinue. Expanding on this system are "army traditions". Armies are permanent fixtures, complete with their own names. As an army accrues more victories, you can give it more traditions with the intent of giving each force its own distinct flavor.
It's a neat idea, but there are three problems. First, army traditions are of the "+5% morale" or "+3% firing speed for missile units" variety. There are some interesting traditions, like those that give it a bonus in ambushes or night battles. To make use of the latter though, you need a general capable of battling at night.
Therein lies our second problem: it shouldn't be difficult to assign your general bonuses complementary to his army's composition and traditions. But it is. Because generals die all the time. Upon a general's death, you'll be asked to pick his replacement from a pool of poorly differentiated candidates from your own house and rival families (more on this later), and you'll need to level him up from scratch. Only for him to die of natural causes or assassination by a rival house 5-10 turns later. What should be an engrossing and rewarding system that makes the player take pride in his generals instead becomes a chore.
And finally, just as generals are virtually interchangeable, so are armies. Should your veteran army that you've been cultivating from turn one suffer a critical defeat, you can simply recruit new units without losing any of the bonuses accrued by your stream of past victories. In fact, if the army is wiped out entirely, you can simply draft a new general and "revive" the traditions of your lost legion. The only penalty you pay is the time waiting for new recruits to pour in.
That penalty is in fact a steep one, but not for the right reasons. See, as more of the campaign map is explored and the game's numerous AI factions are discovered, more and more time is spent waiting between turns. This wait is all the more frustrating when you only want to build up an army or are waiting for it to reach its destination.
If the wait were the only impediment to engrossing empire building, I wouldn't complain. But there are other issues here. I mentioned earlier the "your house" versus "other houses" system. When you pick a faction, you are also controlling a house within that faction, which must hold onto a certain level of influence among the nobility or run the risk of civil war. It's not a bad idea, but it's terribly executed. The best way to gain influence is by having a general belonging to your house win a great victory, while allowing generals and statesmen from rival houses to accrue enough "gravitas" (which generates influence) erodes your legitimacy. This presents dilemmas: do you allow your general to be adopted by another family and start generating influence for them, or do you pay some amount denarii to stop the adoption? These dilemmas aren't interesting because you never run much risk of civil war. If a rival general becomes too influential, you can simply assassinate him and assign a new faceless drone to command his army. (There are other options like adopting him or marrying him to one of your daughters, but they have never cropped up in my 50 hours of gameplay). Politics, as CA dubbed it, is a neat idea, but it manifests as a nuisance rather than an exciting new system.
The other main issue to the campaign is city planning. As I said, each of the game's 65-odd provinces is split into 2-4 settlements: one capital city and 1-3 villages, which can't hold the same number of buildings. Shogun 2 struck the right balance here: any fort could be upgraded into a full-fledged castle, but at the cost of food which your clan would need for economic growth and a happy populace. Aside from managing recruitment from the settlement level, Shogun 2 had the best empire management system to date.
Rome II takes a few steps back from the gold standard. The game reintroduces the "squalor" mechanic, and it's your biggest threat to public order. Unlike in Rome 1, where squalor accumulated to encourage you to expand your cities, squalor here is generated by doing just that. Upgrading almost any building, or expanding your settlement, will either cost you food or squalor. What's the problem? The first is that public order is basically impossible to control. In past games, you could garrison armies in a settlement to keep order. This is no longer a viable option because you are restricted by how many armies you can control. Converting the province to your culture helps, but only goes so far. Finally there are other buildings that improve public order, usually at the cost of food.
This constant balancing act isn't the problem here. We had to do the same in Shogun 2, devoting our core settlements to wealth generation while having a handful of others focus on producing specific units with damage or morale bonuses. The problem here is that the wealth-generating buildings are fragmented into different types and subtypes. The types are color-coded so it's easy enough to remember what they do: yellow is your town center, cyan is sanitation, brown is industrial. But within each color-code is further specialization. These buildings are differentiated by nearly identical clip art, making it hard to remember what each one does. To top it off, it's unclear how the bonuses from one building, or a technology you've researched, affects others in the same settlement or province. One branch of food-generating buildings will produce more food, but at the same time contribute more to squalor.
You'll often have to respecialize settlements or entire provinces as your frontiers expand and you devote new lands to recruitment, requiring you to wait out the turns as you demolish your barracks and camps and replace them with temples and fields. After the lengthy transition is over, it's nigh-impossible to tell if a province is generating more money than it was before. One province may threaten to rebel, so you exempt that province from taxation, because this is the best way to deal with negative public order. But because this province was one of your empire's bread baskets, suspending taxes has resulted in an empire-wide food shortage. Remind me, CA, why we aren't allowed to adjust the tax slider at the provincial level?
The inscrutable user interface isn't just a step back from the elegance of Shogun 2. It reduces empire management to guesswork. Fortunately I haven't had as many headaches over empire management as I would have if the AI could put two synapses together. Enemies generally passive during wars, allowing for you to invade them easily without worrying about defending your recently won territory. They rarely swallow each other up into empires that present a credible challenge to your dreams of world conquest.
The AI performs about as poorly in battle as it does in the campaign. It's not often that the AI will have his units run in circles or stand by passively, but they almost never try to flank or otherwise outmaneuver you. Send out one unit of missile cavalry and you can sometimes distract the entire army, allowing the main body of your force to charge the enemy while they're facing the other way. Siege battles are the exception, at least when you're the attacker. The enemy will challenge you at chokepoints and try to retake capture points. These may be the reason why siege battles work: the AI has some target on which to focus his resources. It's a poor substitute for AI, but at least these battles aren't the same tactical cakewalks as the open-field slugfests.
CA made a big deal about the "personal face" of war in their previews for Rome II. It's true that watching individual soldiers fight to the death looks better than ever, but units in melee lose all coordination and become amorphous mobs. It may have something to do with the removal of guard mode, which in Shogun 2 was exploited for unfair victories in multiplayer. Be that as it may, guard mode was important to any player who wanted their units to stay in formation, and particularly important for my faction of choice, Epirus: hoplites make up 60% of my armies. Breaking formation on impact completely defeats the point of playing as a Greek faction. This has been a problem with all games on the Warscape engine (Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2) but at least with guard mode my yari ashigaru kept formation more or less. Knowing that this was an issue CA would likely never fix, I abandoned my Epirus campaign and started over as Iceni.
It's not just land battles that have taken an unforgivable step backwards. Empire first gave us real-time naval combat, and it was a disaster. The frustrating controls and pathfinding made it hard enough to form a "battle line" of ships without the variable of wind direction. Throw three different types of ammunition and sail speeds into the mix and it was tempting to click the auto-resolve each time. Shogun 2 fixed this issue with clearly defined ship types and simpler controls. It's a shame then that Rome II is a step back on the naval front. It's not that battles are too complex: the controls are straightforward enough, and combat consists of having ships of a few different specialties that shoot at, ram, or board the enemy's vessels.
The problem is the confusing blur between army and fleet. Send your army overseas, and the units are automatically given transport craft that are more than able to defend themselves against a dedicated enemy fleet. And admirals, might I add, cannot morph their fleets into armies and come ashore (though they can besiege coastal settlements all by themselves).
The reason for this one-way interchangeability appears to be the new battle system: land, sea, and siege are no longer treated as separate engagements, but are all part of a single fluid system. It can be a lot of fun to trap your enemies between your army and navy, or to bum rush an enemy settlement before his naval reinforcements can land. But in both scenarios, the ships typically end up depositing their personnel on the shore, where the actual fighting is done.
Navies feel unnecessary for one other reason: sea-based resource nodes have disappeared. All luxury items are instead generated by controlling a settlement that produces them. For some players this will come as a relief; guarding your stack of trade ships against pirates was one of the more aggravating tasks of Shogun 2. Don't get me wrong; the combined land-and-sea battle is a neat system overall, but it's a shame that navies feel mostly unnecessary after the well defined role they played in Shogun 2.
Lastly, a few words on multiplayer. I haven't tried much of it, but what's apparent to me is that it's a small step back as well. I can name one big positive: the system now only tracks victories, which will hopefully encourage more players to dip their toes into MP. On the downside, I will never play an MP campaign. The campaign is playable alone because you can save your game once you have your fill of the AI's glacial pace and pick up where you left off later. In MP, the sheer waiting makes the experience unplayable. Lag that may be permissible in single-player battles also becomes a game-breaking issue when fighting an opponent online. And the avatar system, which was justly criticized for giving heavy bonuses, has been scrapped altogether rather than fixed, just like guard mode. At least the 1v1 battles are as exhilarating as ever if you can stand the load times and the Warscape engine's disappointing collision mechanics.
Rome II maintains the tried and true real-time/turn-based hybrid formula well enough. The graphics are breathtaking, even as they choke the most powerful of rigs. The period ambience is reinforced more by the sound effects and music than it is weakened by the ridiculous British voiceovers. And the massive yet carefully planned campaign map is a great canvas to color Roman red or Parthian purple. I just wish that the conquest of this expansive virtual world were a more challenging and rewarding endeavor. Instead, Rome II strikes a far more perverse balance: this game is simultaneously easy and frustrating. I've played each Total War game since Rome 1 at launch, and every time the fun factor has more than compensated for the game's numerous flaws. I can't say the same about Rome II.