• Aktualisierte Forenregeln

    Eine kleine Änderung hat es im Bereich Forenregeln unter Abschnitt 2 gegeben, wo wir nun explizit darauf verweisen, dass Forenkommentare in unserer Heftrubrik Leserbriefe landen können.

    Forenregeln


    Vielen Dank

Rome II: Total War Sammelthread

Rage against the machine: Total War Rome 2′s brutal AI

Stace Harman explores the lengths that the AI of Total War: Rome 2 will go to in order to crush you and speaks to The Creative Assembly’s James Russell and Pawel Wojs.

Total-War-Rome-2-banner.jpg

The visual spectacle of hundreds of soldiers clashing on the battlefields of Total War: Rome 2 is certainly a sight to behold.

Surveying the ebb and flow of tiny troops from a distance offers a sense of the huge scale of the battles, while focusing the camera on an individual soldier offers a wince-inducing close-up view of the action.

On a previous visit to The Creative Assembly’s motion capture studio, I gained some insight into what it takes to create the animations that bring those battlefields to life, as well as discovering that Roman Legionnaires are partial to a bit of YMCA.

However, looking the part is only half the battle and so, this time around, I decide to leave the spandex suit at home.

After several hours with Rome 2’s prologue missions, I sat down with lead game designer James Russell and lead battlefield artist Pawel Wojs to discuss siege mentality, difficulty levels and how the AI adapts from fighting on the open expanse of rolling fields to the close quarters of a burning city.

“For cities it’s a real big challenge, so much so that we’ve designed a new AI for sieges,” explains Wojs. “All the streets and squares and points are highlighted to the AI and they use them to flank, block and establish defence points.

“We’ve given ourselves a crazy problem to solve because most games script everything, even other RTS games are based on set missions, whereas we’re pretty much sandbox so our AI has to look intelligent and behave in every single situation it’s placed in.”

Extern eingebundener Inhalt
An dieser Stelle findest du externe Inhalte von Youtube. Zum Schutz deiner persönlichen Daten werden externe Einbindungen erst angezeigt, wenn du dies durch Klick auf "Alle externen Inhalte laden" bestätigst: Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit werden personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen übermittelt.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Datenschutzseite.
Check out these new interviews from the game’s recent press tour and some campaign prologue gameplay.

For the most part, the AI responds appropriately to the challenges I present to it. There are tangible advantages to be gained from utilising the terrain during a skirmish and to manoeuvring to attack an enemy unit from the side or rear. The AI understands these factors and so occasionally tries to disengage from a head-on conflict to regroup on higher ground.

Likewise, I pay dearly when a rush of blood to the head sees me order my Roman cavalry to cut deep into the exposed flank of a company of Samnite soldiers and then chase down the stragglers as they break. It’s a gleeful moment until my cavalry becomes isolated from the main body of my army and the enemy AI quickly moves its spearmen to block the riders’ return path.

It feels like the AI is constantly evaluating the battlefield and reacting to my strategy (or lack thereof), which ensures that conflicts are much more than just two sides hammering chunks out of one another until the strongest wins. However, Creative Assembly acknowledges that there’s still room for polishing.

This was particularly evident during the prologue where some AI actions occasionally failed to trigger and my commander unit felt particularly vulnerable, which rendered his area-of-effect ability largely redundant as I had to keep him away from the frontline.

Total-War-Rome-2-4-600x337.jpg

Reacting to the player’s actions is just one element of the AI’s decision-making process. Balancing its perceived intelligence at higher difficulty levels is an essential factor in presenting an AI challenge that feels both difficult to overcome but remains fair.

Traditionally, strategy titles have relied on conferring buffs upon the AI to increase the challenge they pose and while Russell admits that a degree of this is “inevitable”, the Rome 2 lead designer also highlights a range of other factors that contribute to the AI’s behaviour.

“There’s actually an element of penalising the AI at normal difficulty and removing some of those penalties at higher difficulty levels,” said Russell. “We also make sure that, with something like the visibility system, the AI has to navigate the battlefield in the same way the player does and so send out scouts to find its way.”

Russell went on to explain that it’s once a computer-controlled opponent has the lay of the land and has assessed the strengths and weaknesses of a player’s army that the AI’s behaviour will vary depending on difficulty level.

“There’s a difference between flat-out difficulty and AI aggression but they’re correlated, right? Fundamentally, you want the AI player not to let-up on higher difficulty levels but sometimes you get weird counter-intuitive things going on.

Total-War-Rome-2-9-600x337.jpg

“For example, if you attack an army it makes a judgement about whether you’re going to win that battle. If you’re more powerful than it then we actually have this situation where the higher the level of the AI the more likely it is to retreat, if it can.

“That’s much like a human player would, but at the same time if you’re playing on Easy then you don’t want the AI constantly running away while you’re trying to beat it so on easier levels it’s less likely to retreat.”

I’ve now spent around eight hours with Rome 2’s prologue and am encouraged by the fact that, aside from the very first one, none of the missions feel like a hand-holding exercise. The game is quick to hand over the reins and, once it’s introduced you to some of the primary features of the campaign map, it leaves you to your own devices.

This means experienced players won’t feel mollycoddled and new players have the chance to properly understand the consequences of their actions and formulate customised strategies, rather than just following a succession of banal instructions.

There’s also the opportunity to tackle optional senate missions and capture cities before constructing improvements and researching technologies to bolster the efficiency of your empire and armies.

Just don’t expect to have it all your own way and know that for every political coup, daring raid or savvy tactical manoeuvre that you execute, Rome 2’s AI is actively plotting to counter your successes and limit your conquests, both on and off the battlefield.


Quelle: Rage against the machine: Total War Rome 2′s brutal AI | VG247
 
Rome II: Total War’s upgrades, tweaks and familiar rhythms

Edge Staff at 02:00pm August 1 2013

Rome-II-Total-War-610x343.jpg

Part of the fun of Total War is the freedom of heading back to a well-realised period in history and rewriting the hell out of it: having the Gauls control the entirety of Italy, for instance, or turning Britain into the northern tip of the far-reaching Carthaginian Empire. It’s a slight shame, then, that we have to stick to the historical script while playing Rome II’s prologue campaign. This involved tutorial chronicles the rise of a domestic power in Italy: Rome has to quash the rival city state of Samnium before starting its campaigns throughout the rest of the globe. While the narrative shackles slightly chafe – especially when we’re introduced to the sprawling, but boundary-encircled campaign map – the prologue campaign tries to atone for this with the injection of more character drama than you can find in the game, courtesy of a Mark Strong-voiced protagonist. It also functions as a fine (though, we expect, probably not entirely reliable) history lesson while efficiently introducing some of Rome II’s more significant upgrades.

Chief among these is a much more naturalistic treatment of sightlines. You’ve always had a godlike view of the battlefield, of course – this a realtime strategy game, after all – but now you’ll find yourself less omniscient, only able to see enemy units if one of your own clusters of soldiers has a direct view of them. Anything can break a sightline – a hill, a forest, a city street – and this means that scouting and environmental awareness have become a much more crucial part of the game. In one battle, we have to move a unit to the top of a hill before we can see the gigantic Samnite army coming. In another, we use a forested ridge to hide our soldiers in a village before descending upon an undefended piece of Samnite siege equipment. This subtle, but potentially far-reaching tweak can be felt most keenly when attacking cities – battles throughout the streets are more claustrophobic and more tactical now, as you can be ambushed by the city’s defenders while also using their own buildings and walls to sneak auxilliary forces past them.

Elsewhere, however, the game plays according to the familiar rhythms of Total War. The prologue campaign ignores the delicate political intricacies of statecraft. There’s no diplomacy nor any of the internal power battles that will define the Roman factions in the main game, focusing instead on the practicalities of waging war. We learn how to train new units, for instance, a streamlined process in comparison to previous games. The unit types available for recruitment within a region hinge on the buildings and structures you’ve established in that region’s city. Once you’ve built the requisite building (stables, say, for cavalry) you can generate the new unit within the legion itself, rather than recruiting it and then marching it over to the bulk of your forces. This is part of a focus on legions as singular powerhouses, rather than smaller groups of soldiers, that will see you adding traits to armies as they gain experience, potentially allowing specfic legions to specialise in certain forms of warfare.

Rome-II-total-war-3-610x343.jpg

It’s hard to get a firm grasp of the nuances of combat during the prologue missions, stuck as we are following the tutorial’s relatively strict instruction, but the overall impression is of, well, Total War. Since the first Rome, Creative Assembly has been iterating upon such a solid foundation in its combat mechanics that tweaks and new additions (which in Rome II’s case include improved simulation of weight and impact as well as combined naval and land battles) can’t help but feel iterative. And since we’re engaging in semi-scripted warfare – placing cavalry where we’re told, achieving specific objectives – it’s also impossible to judge the extent to which Creative Assembly has improved its traditional limiting factor: underperforming AI.

Beyond the teasing boundaries of the prologue campaign lies a world map rich in variety – the perfect contrast to Shogun 2′s relative cultural uniformity. There’s something ideal about this period of history for Total War – the cultures of the time were distinct enough in tactics and technology the period feels prebuilt (with a few balancing tweaks) for a strategy game. Rome II’s factions can be subdivided into three groups: the Greco-Roman factions, the Eastern ones, and the Barbarians. As well as very different unit types, the three types will play a very different campaign game. Barbarians can form confederacies with other tribes – joining forces to become a kind of giant meta-faction – whereas Greco-Roman and Eastern forces will be limited to the more traditional ally-or-subjugate options when dealing with other states.

Presentationally, Rome II provides precisely the kind of minute detail you want to find when zooming in on a campaign or battlefield map. Total War’s campaign map, which has evolved from its rudimentary origins to richly complex 4X game of its own, looks more dynamic this time around. Much of this is entirely cosmetic – birds flying over Vesuvius make only for pretty screenshot material – but some changes have more strategic impact. You can literally see cities expand, their walls encroaching upon the surrounding countryside, as you invest in them, a subtle tweak that should make it more immediately readable which cities are a faction’s most valuable holdings.

As the prologue campaign draws to a close it finally opens out, letting us formulate our own plan for wiping out the remaining Samnite cities before eventually destroying Samnium. It’s a small taste of the tactical freedom that the main game looks set to offer, though when the full game’s released we’ll probably skip a second playthrough and head straight to Total War.


Quelle: Rome II: Total War's upgrades, tweaks and familiar rhythms | Features | Edge Online
 
Fear and loyalty play a 'massive role' in Total War: Rome 2

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Aug 01, 2013 at 9:00a @Megan_Nicolett

28184twrii_battle_battleline.0_cinema_960.0.jpg
lazy-load-image-gray.vc5f04cd.gif
lazy-load-image-gray.vc5f04cd.gif
In the heat of battle, the fear you inflict on enemies and the loyalty you inspire in allies will play a "massive role" in The Creative Assembly's upcoming strategy game Total War: Rome 2.

Speaking with Polygon during an event in San Francisco, studio communications manager Al Bickham explained how the game's system would work. Many a great battle has been won or lost on the basis of morale, and players will need to tap into that notion to be successful. A group of soldiers will not mechanically fight to the death, but flee to see another day. During our time with the demo, we came to know the sour taste of defeat as a result of that fear.

"Generally speaking, if a unit of 200 men lost 10 or 15 percent of its number, those guys are going to get scared and run away," Bickham said. "It's quite a good tactic on the battlefield to aim for morale breakage, rather than simply killing everybody. Individual fights are over quicker, and then you can reform your forces and be more effective because you've got greater local superiority. You've got more forces against the next unit that you fight. Morale is absolutely key to battles."

Morale can be manipulated in many different ways. Cavalry units, for example, have a special move that acts as a temporary morale modifier. Their hits hurt because they're "tearing through screaming, bellowing and blowing the horns," Bickham said.

"A war elephant ... is much more terrifying than a man in a loin cloth with a stick."

"If you want your army to hold fast, you keep it in formation," Bickham said. "If a unit has its flanks exposed, it doesn't like that. It's naturally going to be more worried. If you, like the Romans did, line your troops up in nice big blocks like that, their morale is going to be much more solid."

Even the kind of unit matters — and in some cases, it's more obvious than others.

"A war elephant charging toward you is much more terrifying than a man in a loin cloth with a stick," Bickham said.

If players want to lend their troops emotional strength, it's a good idea to take a general into battle. Generals come with a natural radius of morale boosting, and their presence can help steady a shaky troop's hand.

"If he's just behind the troops, going ‘Onwards boys!' [he's boosting morale] and they're all within his radius," Bickham said. "They'll all gain a morale boost of some kind — a greater or lower level depending on the general's stats."

Like any RPG character, generals will level up; players can then shape them as they like. Some stats will improve their fighting skills or defense, while others increase their ability to encourage their soldiers. Finding the right balance for your playstyle will be a key part of battle, Bickham said.

28193TWRII_Naval_Macedon_epic.jpg

Boosting morale isn't the only thing players need be aware of. Their relationships with allies will be clearer than ever before thanks to the game's diplomacy system, Bickham said. It's a key part of tracking an ally's loyalty and their overall opinion of you. Using the game's diplomacy interface, players will be able to quickly check the relations panel to view their past actions. This accounts for all battles fought, factions spoken to and much more — all things the AI will judge your relationship based on. If a player has attacked a faction the AI is rallied against, it will like you. If you've traded with the AI's friends, it will like you. Those situations all work in the reverse as well.
"[The AI] is doing something for a reason," Bickham said. "And we haven't always shown the player those reasons. Now you can see why. It's like, ‘you're getting too big, I'm worried about you.' There's a reason why it's broken its trade agreement and attacked you. It gives you a good level of transparency about how the AI feels about you."

For more on Total War: Rome 2, check out our interviews on the game's political system and the challenges political conflict posed.

Quelle: Fear and loyalty play a 'massive role' in Total War: Rome 2 | Polygon
 
Total War: Rome II fans will revel in detailed maps, smarter A.I., and elephants climbing the alps (interview)

August 1, 2013 6:00 AM, Dean Takahashi

al-bickham.jpg

Strategy game fans will be delighted to get the biggest Total War game yet on Sept. 3. After years of waiting, fans can expect a big game in Sega‘s Total War: Rome II, which combines a turned-based strategy campaign akin to Civilization with real-time brawls between the armies of the ancient Roman empire and its foes.

total-war-fight.jpg

We got another preview of the game last week and talked with Al Bickham, the communications manager for Sega’s The Creative Assembly studio. He told us what to expect about the combined strategy and tactical focus and just how smart you can expect the enemies to be. We played a few battles, and it was a small slice of what is in the full game. This game feels epic in its scope and visceral in the way that it depicts the vicious hand-to-hand combat of swords, spears, and horses.

The scale of the The Creative Assembly’s ambition is huge. It has more than 700 units, compared to just 50 in Total War: Shogun 2 from 2011. The campaign map is about four times larger than the previous game, depicting every territory from Scotland to the Horn of Africa. The A.I. makes better educated guesses about how to counter your expansion strategy, he said. And when your armies meet on the realistic map, the conflict zooms in on the forces as they engage in a real-time tactical battle.

“It’s been a titanic effort,” Bickham said. “We crossed our own personal Rubicon.”

Total War: Rome II captures historical periods like Hannibal’s wars against Rome, but once you take control of it, you start making your own history.


Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Bickham.

GamesBeat: Tell me some of those stats about how big the world is.

Bickham: The campaign map is about four times the size of Shogun II’s. It stretches from Portugal, the coast of the Iberian peninsula, over to Afghanistan, and then north to south it’s from the northernmost tip of Scotland to the Horn of Africa. It’s pretty big. In terms of factions, you have nine playable factions across three cultural types: barbarian, Greco-Roman and Mediterranean, and then eastern kingdoms as well, which have a very different look and feel, very different units to field.

We have around 700 battlefield units to recruit, including mercenaries. Wherever you are in the world, even if you’re not back in your home territory, you can always recruit mercenaries, which will be relevant to the local area. If you’re playing as one of the Germanic barbarian tribes and you’ve conquered your way down to Africa, you could hire some war elephants or camel riders. By comparison, we had only around 50 units when Shogun II initially released, and they were all very similar, because of course it’s a single culture, with just a few minor variances. It’s big.

The important thing is, it does sound a bit daunting. “How am I going to deal with all that?” But you can play a game of Rome II just in one little corner of the world. Just because you’re playing campaign doesn’t mean you have to conquer the whole campaign map. We have a number of different victory conditions to reflect that. You can still have military victories where you conquer a certain number of territories. But we also have two new victory types as well. You can play for a cultural victory. You can try to flip other cultures to follow your own and conquer through cultural expansion. You can also play for an economic victory, a series of economic milestones you have to get through. That introduces a different method of play for Total War, which has always been about conquest.


GamesBeat: Does it feel like laying a Civilization game over that military element?

Bickham: It’s about bringing a sense of variety, giving people more interesting choices to make. Any strategy game — any game, really – is about presenting the player with a series of interesting choices and challenges. We wanted to broaden that with Rome II.

It is still a Total War game. You might want to play for cultural victory, but you’ll still fight battles. You still have diplomacy to deal with. Enemy factions will still say, “I don’t like the way you’re expanding like this. I’m scared of you. I’m going to knock you down before you get too big.”

total-war-map-2.jpg

GamesBeat: How granular is the strategic map? If two armies meet, will you go to battle in a tactical map that is an accurate reflection of where they are on the strategic map?

Bickham: More so than we’ve done in any game before. We have a new terrain map hidden underneath the campaign map as you see it in the turn-based part of the game. The terrain generation system looks at any point on the map. When we have a battle on the map, you’ll see that landscape reflected. It’s essentially a giant battle map under the campaign map. When you dive in there, you’ll fight over that bit.

The next turn, you might fight another battle that’s only a couple of miles away from the battle you just had. You’ll see the same terrain features in the distance. If you’re fighting next to the Pyramids, you’ll see them on the outfield of the battle. If you fight a bit further down the Nile, you’ll see them in the distance. It’s incredibly detailed, incredibly granular, the way we generate battlefields based on where you are in the world.

We’re bringing that into multiplayer as well. It’s one of the exciting things about multiplayer matches. You have a representation of the campaign map in multiplayer, even if you’re just playing one-on-one with a friend or someone online. The host can click on that map and it will generate a battlefield from that part of the campaign map. If you find a really cool battlefield there, you can mark it as a favorite and save it for later. We’ll provide a set series of battlefields in multiplayer, but you can also go and find your own.


GamesBeat: Is there a trick to that? Instead of creating an entire battle map underneath there, are you generating sections of it and reusing some things?

Bickham: Certain parts of it are auto-generated. Things like shrubbery, foliage, that sort of thing. The key is the height map, the terrain map underneath that tells you where mountains and lakes and things like that are.

The whole thing has been an enormous amount of work. This is the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done. We’ve changed or improved so many of the core systems. Veteran players are going to be pleasantly surprised, I think, by how much more there is.


GamesBeat: How smart is the enemy now? What sort of behaviors do you see when you’re facing off against the A.I.?

Bickham: There are two strands to the A.I.: faction A.I., or campaign A.I., and battle A.I. On the campaign front, we’ve made some changes to the subtlety with which the AI reasons about the allies and opponents around it. It looks at relationships further away from itself. It looks at its opponent’s allies and its allies’ opponents. It draws a clearer picture of what’s going on in the world and makes more reasoned judgments – who it’s going to conduct war with, who it wants to make alliances and trade agreements with.

On the battle side, the big challenge has been—cities are very different. We have streets and alleys and big squares in the middle of cities and walls that you have to knock down. Since the original Rome, the AI has undergone a number of major revisions over time to improve the way it fights. Right now, if you play Shogun II, you’ll see that it’s in a good place. The AI does smart stuff in battle. It knows how to flank you. It looks to counter units with the right units.


GamesBeat: That was one of the flaws in past games, I thought. You could almost always defeat an A.I. unit by using two of your own to flank it. I rarely saw them do that to me.

Bickham: Right. That’s a core tactic of this kind of ancient warfare stuff — if you send the right unit up front that can stick around and hold the enemy long enough to hit it in the flank. Now, the AI looks to protect its flanks much better. If it has a bunch of infantry in front, and you’re obviously sending your cavalry around the flank, it’ll look to bring its spearmen out and protect the flank, because of course horsemen are very ill-advised to run at men with long sticks that have pointy ends. [laughs]

The way the player can exploit the landscape around him has changed, because we have a line of sight system. If you’re very cagey about the way you move your troops through terrain, you can hide them in woods now. If the AI doesn’t know it’s there and you set that up early, you have a flanking force. You draw the AI in with your main army and then send your flanking forces in. That’s going to be a good challenge for the AI.

We’ve thrown in a designed element of gutsiness as well. If the AI did exactly the right thing every single time, you wouldn’t be able to win. We introduce a level of variance. Some battle AI are more gutsy, more aggressive. Some are more defensive. It looks to make the best use of its forces, all the time.

total-war-map.jpg

GamesBeat: Are you able to fight inside cities now? I remember mostly battling in the fields before.

Bickham: Oh, very much. Siege battles are a big feature in Rome II. Shogun II was very castle-based — it was all about sieges – but we had a limited number of castles. We have a tremendous variety of sizes and shapes of cities here, in different cultural and architectural styles. The variety of city battles is great – everything from tiny settlements up to capital city headshot battles like Carthage or Alexandria, colossal cities with kilometers of high walls and fixed-emplacement onagers and catapults and things like that.

Here’s where we’ve had to do a lot of work with the AI, because we have to teach it how to deal with streets and capture points and line of sight. Going back to the original Rome, we had city battles in that. But what the AI would do is, if it couldn’t defend the walls, it would just pull back to the main square in the center of the city and it would turn into a big mosh pit.

Now the gameplay is more cat-and-mouse, because we have a variable number of capture points in each city. A smaller city might have one. A big city might have three. If you have to capture the majority of points and hold them for a certain period of time, that makes the game different. You have to think about the balance of where you put your forces around the city. You might send some fast-moving units to nip off one capture point, and then send the bulk of your forces to really solidly fight for and hold another point while denying it to the enemy.


GamesBeat: You can go into the soldier’s-eye view now. Is that more fun? Will you notice different things?

Bickham: One of the things we’re trying to do is push at both ends of the scale spectrum. We have this enormous world with so much choice and variety and cultural variance, but right in close, when you use the unit camera, you’ll see the extra detail, a much greater variety of combat animations.

During Rome II, we built our own motion capture studio. Before, we used to rent places out. We had a tiny little space at the office where we could do some limited motion capture. Having our own facility with 56 motion capture cameras trained on up to five guys fighting in the same volume has meant we can just massively increase the amount of animation we put into the game.

We’ve got 700 different unit types, so we need to have relevant matchups going on. A swordsman facing a pikeman – from a phalanx unit, say – they’re going to fight in a very specific way. We need to think about that. When they all run into the phalanx, some of them are just going to run right on to the spears, and you’ll see that in the game when you’re up close. We’re supporting the fact that we’re letting people get up close and have that incredibly cinematic experience.

total-war-mpa-4.jpg

GamesBeat: One of the things I always have a problem with in Civilization is that there’s too much building. It seems like there isn’t as much of that here.

Bickham: It’s balanced, really. Building is an important part of the game because it’s how you win. You increase the ability of your cities to output more advanced troop types or produce coin to increase your trading power. But it’s not quite the same thing as Civ.

You have those elements, culture-increasing elements. With cities, it’s pretty obvious what all the buildings do. You build a training ground or a barracks, you know it’ll produce troops. For each of those buildings, there’s an upgrade tree. On top of that, most factions each have a unique building type or building chain. If you play as the Spartans, they get to build the Monument to Leonidas. When you see those building options, you want to dig into them, because they bring interesting benefits to your faction. That particular building gives tremendous bonuses to the experience gain of your hoplites, the Spartan warriors.


GamesBeat: Do the various campaigns hold very closely to history? Or are some of these more fictionalized?

Bickham: I would say this of any Total War game. We put the player at a historically accurate starting point. The game starts in 217 B.C., around the time of the Punic Wars – Scipio and Hannibal and all those great battles. It’s an amazing period for drama.

Once the player starts the game, everything becomes counterfactual very quickly. You’re carving out your own empire. You might say, “No, I’ll just trade with Carthage. I’ll take Rome east and conquer the Greeks and hit the Parthians and Persians.” The flow of history changes as soon as the player gets his hand on the tiller.

We always say, if there is too much tension in some part of the game between history and gameplay, then gameplay wins. We’re making a game and a game should be fun to play. So we don’t slavishly follow history, but we remain as authentic as we can. We do an awful lot of research. The unit types and the armor they’re wearing, the fighting styles, those matchups between a spearman and a swordsman or an elephant and a chariot, we look for historical authenticity when we balance the abilities of these things against each other.

Just like any Total War game, you choose a faction to start. You might choose the Gauls or Rome itself or whoever, and you have a geographically authentic starting point. But things quickly change. We aim for authenticity in everything we do, but it’s up to the player to change history as they see fit.


Quelle: Total War: Rome II fans will revel in detailed maps, smarter A.I., and elephants climbing the alps (interview) | GamesBeat
 
The Art of War: Hands-on with Total War: Rome 2

Although Rome 2 introduces new levels of politics and treachery, there's nothing quite like a spear to the face to prove a point.

By Stace Harman on August 1, 2013 at 10:30 pm

totalwar-1.jpg

In a recent introduction to the more civilised side of Total War: Rome 2 we looked at how diplomacy and manipulation can win you allies without a single drop of blood being spilt. We also explored the benefits of effective territory control and learned how to discern a willing trade partner from an arrogant ambassador.

All useful stuff, but honeyed words and devious machinations will only take you so far and while the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword, nothing proves a point quite like a gladius through the gullet.

Playing through the opening hours that form the prologue of Total War: Rome 2, it’s apparent that there are many reasons to mount your enemy’s head on a spike and an even greater number of opportunities to do so. City defence, border expansion, senate missions and civil insurgence must all be effectively managed as the prologue teaches you to tend to military affairs both at home and abroad.

totalwar-2.jpg

The opening level puts you in charge of a well ordered but inexperienced company of soldiers. They are led by Tribune Gaius Fulvius Silanus, a commander of a grain store who is more accustomed to defending his rural outpost during minor skirmishes than charging headlong into battle. Nonetheless, it is up to Silanus to march his men to the aid of his compatriots who are under siege by a vast number of Samnite soldiers.

As you might expect, this first mission is a hand-holding exercise designed to teach you the basics of battlefield management and troop control. However, there are a number of fundamental concepts introduced here that form the basis of more complex strategies later on. The advantages of moving troops quietly through a forest in order to ambush an enemy or of maintaining the higher ground during a skirmish are key lessons that you’ll draw on time and time again.

As the prologue progresses, these early lessons become an ingrained part of your battle strategy. Manoeuvring individual legions to outflank an enemy is often more effective than spamming them head-on with your entire force. Conversely, leaving your own flanks undefended can easily result in you snatching humiliating defeat from the jaws of certain victory.

totalwar-3.jpg

Unsurprisingly, the fewer casualties you take during a conflict the better, but not just for your own sense of pride. Replenishing an army can be an expensive business and so a poorly managed skin-of-your-teeth victory can prove almost as costly as outright defeat. In this way, Rome 2’s economics extend into battlefield management as a smarter victory means more money to spend on improving your armies rather than simply propping them up.

A host of technologies, edicts, and city improvements can further enhance your army’s combat prowess. These cost money and time to come to fruition and so it can be beneficial to accept one of the many optional missions set by the senate to help boost the coffers. From the very beginning, Rome 2 advises patience and warns that recklessly rampaging through the campaign map can leave you overstretched and exposed to counterattack.

Likewise, out on the battlefield it can be tempting to thunder over a hillside to sweep aside enemy skirmishers with your cavalry but you must be mindful of the spearmen that might be lying in wait just out of sight over the crest of the hill. Even very early battles have the potential to ebb and flow as you gain ground before ordering a tactical retreat to regroup. It’s immensely satisfying to enact a battle plan and emerge with minimal casualties due to cunning rather than because of sheer force of numbers.

totalwar-4.jpg

As armies and their commanders survive multiple battles they gain bonuses and traits based on their actions. Experience points can be spent to boost a commander’s authority, cunning or zeal, which brings with it a suite of unique abilities. Similarly, attributing a Tradition to a legion allows it to specialise in training accomplished skirmishes, artillery experts or formidable fighters. This further individualises your army, informs your battle tactics and strengthens your connection to your troops.

Politicking plays a major role in Total War: Rome 2 but Creative Assembly is also ensuring that a keen mind will serve you as well on the battlefield as it does in the senate. Ultimately, brute force will win you a battle or two but it’s cunning and guile that will better serve you in the long run as you seek to further the glory of mighty Rome.

Quelle: The Art of War: Hands-on with Total War: Rome 2 | games.on.net
 
Al Bickham of Creative Assembly joins Maxwell McGee to show off the Prologue of Total War: Rome II.

Extern eingebundener Inhalt
An dieser Stelle findest du externe Inhalte von Youtube. Zum Schutz deiner persönlichen Daten werden externe Einbindungen erst angezeigt, wenn du dies durch Klick auf "Alle externen Inhalte laden" bestätigst: Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit werden personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen übermittelt.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Datenschutzseite.
 
Sehr gutes Interview mit Spielszenen, sehr empfehlenswert (englisch):

Extern eingebundener Inhalt
An dieser Stelle findest du externe Inhalte von Youtube. Zum Schutz deiner persönlichen Daten werden externe Einbindungen erst angezeigt, wenn du dies durch Klick auf "Alle externen Inhalte laden" bestätigst: Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit werden personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen übermittelt.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Datenschutzseite.
 
Das sieht alles so großartig aus. Ich freu mich riesig. Und wenn ich Glück habe, bekomme ich sogar in der Release-Woche Urlaub. :)
 
heute bei amazon vorbestellt =)

Ich freue mich auch riesig, kann mir vorstellen, dass es für mich seit age of empires 2 das fesselndste strategiespiel wird.
 
heute bei amazon vorbestellt =)

Ich freue mich auch riesig, kann mir vorstellen, dass es für mich seit age of empires 2 das fesselndste strategiespiel wird.
Hast du denn die anderen TW-Teile nicht gespielt? Also für mich war immer stets das aktuelle TW auch das fesselndste Strategiespiel. Aber ich bin auch ein TW-Junkie. :-D
 
Hast du denn die anderen TW-Teile nicht gespielt? Also für mich war immer stets das aktuelle TW auch das fesselndste Strategiespiel. Aber ich bin auch ein TW-Junkie. :-D

Nein leider nicht. War/bin 10 Jahre abstinent was games angeht. werde mir nun, wenn die kompnenten bald geliefert werden, endlich meinen langersehnten pc zusammenbasteln und dann einiges nachholen:-D
 
Schiffskampf:

Extern eingebundener Inhalt
An dieser Stelle findest du externe Inhalte von Youtube. Zum Schutz deiner persönlichen Daten werden externe Einbindungen erst angezeigt, wenn du dies durch Klick auf "Alle externen Inhalte laden" bestätigst: Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit werden personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen übermittelt.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Datenschutzseite.
 
Daran dachte ich noch nicht mal (oh schreck, War of the Roses hat bereits ca 7 Stunden gedauert) .

Ne ich kann leider da nicht zocken
 
Zurück