EU: Rome

[Egan]

The demo is out at last. First impressions are good: I already got my ass kicked by Carthage!

Demo starts at the beginning of the second Punic war and has either Carthage or Rome as playables. Lasts about 30 years - I think.

Second Impressions: Map looks really nice - probably the best that Paradox have done IMO. The decision to make the game character driven instead of Event driven looks like being a winner. Captures the feel of Ancient politics and warfare much better I think. Undeniably a thrill in assigning a general called Gaius Julius Caesar to a military command and knowing that if he becomes too powerful he might try to overthrow the government!

I've already pre-ordered the collectors edition. Two weeks to go!

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=378

[Slang]

huh, says the server is too busy and I should try again later. Seems you aren't the only one excited about it. :D

[Egan]

WooHoo! Release day! Got home to an e-mail telling me to check out my 'free gift' on Gamersgate which is a downloadable copy of Rome! That should tide me over until my hard copy of the collectors edition arrives.

I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend!

[Egan]

Hmm. Well, After getting a couple of days with the game the jury is out. i'm afraid to say. This pains me no end because of two things: I'm a massive Roman history nerd and I love Paradox games.

For the half dozen people on the forum who might have ever thought about buying it, go ahead. It's fun enough in places but, well, I don't really no where to start. Actually, I do: here goes my review.

Firstly, I suspect they should probably change the title from Europa Universalis: Rome to Europa Universalis: Generic ancient nation #1. This is a problem I thought they may well have had. The problem with doing a game about Rome and doing it justice is that you have to tailor the system to Rome rather than the host of Hellenistic and successor kingdoms kicking around the Med.

What made Rome great, particularly in the days of the Republic, are the fact that they were noticeably different in terms of government, in warfare and the raising of armies, in citizen ship and society. Paradox has decided to almost completely ignore anything that could be described as uniquely Roman in favour of a fairly weak system that actually leaves RTW looking like a master class in grand strategy. Cases in point? here goes:

Consuls: In reality two were elected to rule for a year. In the game one is elected to rule for two years. Coupled to the fact that, in the game, Consuls seem to win re-election every year until they either die or get caught up in some sort of scandal which destroys their popularity and you have something which is indistinguishable from a monarch - exactly and categorically the opposite of what the Roman republican system was created to provide.

Campaign season. Now this one is just bizarre considering that in almost every game I have ever played the time of year and the weather has a major effect in combat. In the ancient world military campaigns were fought predominantly from march through to October or so. In Eu:Rome none of this matters, you can fight as long as you want, start a campaign in the middle of winter and neither weather nor terrain will have the slightest impact on how things will play out.

Women: My various governorships and magistrates posts are mostly being held by woman now because, you know, Cleopatra in HBO's Rome was quite ballsy and strong so, you know, that must have been what it was like in real life...:nope: Granted, women in Rome had more emancipation that is commonly remembered nowadays but I deny anyone to show me a single instance where a woman was ever elected Questor, Praetor of Pontifex Maximus....

Ah, you know what? I'm going to leave it there. I won't even mention the endless and silly barbarian migrations, the stupidly inconsequential battles, the utter lack of anything resembling the historical accuracy and depth that Paradox are famous for because I'm already feeling like I got cheated out of my cash. There are a lot of things I have not even bothered mentioning because they could simply be bugs. They can't even put the little icon of Rome on the correct side of the Tiber for God's sake.

The main problem is that bugs can get fixed but the real issue is that the implemented features (or lack of them,) are not very good. They may mostly Work as designed but, in this case, that is saying next to nothing. It feels like a really cheap attempt to cash in on the ROME tv series than make a decent in depth and captivating game. I suspect that it will do well enough but I also suspect it will lose them an awful lot of fans as well.

Don't mind me, I'm just bitter. but so are an awful lot of people. Not that you will ever find out, though, because the Paradox forum is so bad it crashes when more than three people are on it at once. Handy way of avoiding all the complaints.

3 out of 10. If you want an interesting and historically viable game set in the classical era stick with RTW with mods.

None of you know how much it pains me to say that. None of you...:/\\chop

[Laffertytig]

ive been swayin whether to buy it or not but based on what ive read on various forums i think im gonna wait a few month until (a) its patched up and (b) some decent mods are released.

it does appear that paradox are appealin to more broad market and makin their games less and less realistic, much like u and others have described.

[Egan]

well, I have to come back and say that it's not quite as bad as I first thought. Mind you, it is very, very rare for me to have such an immediate dislike to any game, particularly to one from a dev I respect so much.

I've been assured that the campaign season thing is in there....I'm really not so sure about that but I'm willing to wait and see.

It is a fun enough little grand strategy-lite game. I've upped my score to 5.5 out of ten but there is going to have to be one king hell of an expansion pack. The points I raised to begin with are still valid. I cannot for the life of me understand why they would do what they did to the Roman political system. it's like buying Hearts of Iron and discovering that Germany has a Social Democratic gov instead of National Socialist. If they did that people would laugh them out of town.

I'm hoping the women thing is a bug, but it was brought up on their forum and one of the mods responded with a link to a wiki entry about Cleopatra....:rotfl:..Yeah and that would be what, the exception that proves the rule I think? Nice of them to tell me who Cleopatra was though. I really didn't have a clue! :nope:

One major thing that would help the game is the introduction of at least semi historical events. It would help at least foster a feeling of uniqueness for the different nations. at the moment it really does feel like a couple of generic templates that are differentiated solely by size and civ level.

Really, if it earns them a few quid to invest in doing decent games then I guess thats ok. The thing is, i seem to be making that excuse for a lot of devs nowadays. If they are no longer interested in making the sorts of games I want to play, fine, but I'm not so sure I'm going to remain interested either..

Mods will help. no doubt about it. What remains to be seen is how moddable it actually is. I have as nasty suspicion a lot of the worst stuff is hard coded.

[Rilder]

I'l probably buy it one of these days, so far Ive been satisfied by HOI2 which, compared to RTW, M2:TW and EUIII is a much better game, despite its age.

[Laffertytig]

yeah hoi2 is also my fav paradox game. to be honest when i bough eu3 when it was 1st released that also felt very empty and i got fed up with it very quickly.

thankfully the engine seems very modable and there are some very good mods for eu3. im hopin rome will follow on in that same vein

[Egan]

Hoi2 is a fantastic game. Personally I was hoping that Rome would have been a hybrid of HOI and Victoria which - for all its complexity - remains absolutely the benchmark in terms of ambition as far as I'm concerned. It's Pop system and in particular the way troops can be recruited (Regular troops from provinces with a high number of your national pops, dropping down to colonial and native with the attendant drop of quality depending on where you are,) would have been utterly perfect for Rome. It's colonization and infrastructure building systems (much improved in the XP,) also would have suited a Roman era game down to the ground. There was a classical mod in production for it. I must find out how it was getting on.

[Laffertytig]

maybe we could have a mp game of hoi2 sometime, what timezone u in?

[Rilder]

Central myself but I'm not one for multiplayer to be honest.

[Rilder]

Sorry for Double post but...

I just got this game, its fun, (though it seems to run my graphics card warmer then any of my other games)

I Haven't noticed the female officials yet though I'm not that far in my current campaign.

Also Ive only had one Consul ever get re-elected and that was only 1 time...

Though I do have problems with it, for 1 is the army ping pong, which doesn't seem realistic that a victorius army would allow an enemy to walk past his army and into the victorius armie's land.

[Egan]

My record for re-election is 11 times. In game terms that 22 years! Very few emperors even ruled that long. In reality that guy would have been whacked long before he got there. problem is that that isn't too unusual. It was rare, of course, for anyone to be Consul more than once. I don't even think Augustus was consul that often and he awarded it to himself.

The women thing seem to be tied to the death of the husbands. For some reason they enter the pool for people you can use as governors or magistrates upon hubbies death. Hopefully it's a bug and will get fixed. i have a suspicion though.

You're right: it is a fun enough game. For all it's faults (and god knows they are legion,) I've begun to quite enjoy it. I modded the research rate so I doesn't take until 1978 ad for the Romans to invent roads, but I think there is a lot of work to be done to techs and national ideas via modding.

Personally, I'm looking into the possibility of semi-historical events being fired if certain conditions are met. I would just like something a bit more unique than what is there just now.

[Rilder]

Oh this is almost game breaking.

I had finally, after several long wars gotten every Carthaginian province, they had no army, no navy, they didn't even have an Alaskan Crabbing boat.

But apparently I can't annex?

What the bloody hell?

[Egan]

Ah, yes. The other 'Works As Designed' feature of the EU series. Basically it comes down to this: You cannot annex a country if they have more than one province. To defeat Carthage you will need to fight several wars, demanding more territory and forcing to cede core provinces until they have only one province left. I think it has been like this this since the first EU.

I would advice having a look over on the Paradox forum for information on how to deal with this. some people seem to like it, others hate it. Personally, I think the problem comes from the tiny amount of land the AI is frequently willing to cede you. I have been known to use a cheat code in the past to get more accurate settlements but I hate having to do that. The problem I think stems from the fact that Paradox haven't realised that the Classical era isn't the middle ages.

Anyway, I have to go. I have a very stupid four way war being fought at the moment. It's doing my head in.

[LaughingSwordfish]

Yes, those Carts are stubborn. I had taken 6 of their provinces including Carthage itself and I had a war score of 53%. But they insisted on a white peace. They refused my very reasonable demands every time. Not one province were they willing to give me:damn:

[Egan]

Well, it had to happen! I've started using mods.:D Two of them so far, as well as my modded unit speeds and research rates I'm using a mod that tries to eliminate the 'Ping Pong' effect of combat and one that allows Rome to elect a real Dictator for a period of six months when war weariness reaches a certain level.

I've just started a new game so I'll let you guys know how they shape up but they're looking good so far.

[TheSatyr]

Ping-ponging seems to be the norm for most Paradox games. The absolute worst was in the original HOI. An example would be 4 Infantry divisions Invading France,I defeat them,but they just kept going...all the way across Germany,through the Balkans and finally end up in Greece. Actually,I think HOI was the absolute worst Paradox game. 10 patches and they still couldn't fix the problems that game had. EU2 and EU 3 have major ping ponging as well.

On the other hand,I don't recall any ping ponging in Victoria or HOI2,which I consider to be the two best games Paradox has made.

As an aside,I really cannot stand the Paradox forums. They spend as much time bashing the total war games as they do talking about Paradox Games. (It takes more intelligence to play EU-Rome than it does to play RTW? Give me a break).

[Raptor1]

Ping-ponging seems to be the norm for most Paradox games. The absolute worst was in the original HOI. An example would be 4 Infantry divisions Invading France,I defeat them,but they just kept going...all the way across Germany,through the Balkans and finally end up in Greece. Actually,I think HOI was the absolute worst Paradox game. 10 patches and they still couldn't fix the problems that game had. EU2 and EU 3 have major ping ponging as well.

On the other hand,I don't recall any ping ponging in Victoria or HOI2,which I consider to be the two best games Paradox has made.

As an aside,I really cannot stand the Paradox forums. They spend as much time bashing the total war games as they do talking about Paradox Games. (It takes more intelligence to play EU-Rome than it does to play RTW? Give me a break).

There's no real reason to play HOI since HOI2/DD came out, is there?

I really need to get my hands on Victoria and the EU games...

[Egan]

I made the mistake of having a quick game of Vicky the other day. it's so good once you get used to the way it works. probably the most complex game I've ever played. I just can't bring myself to go back to Rome until the next patch at least. There are modders now doing valiant stuff but I just feel that Paradox have really screwed up on this one.

Never had any problems with ping ponging in HOI or DD: Cut an army off from supply by encircling it and thats usually all it takes. I once wiped out a 70 div stack in Monte Cassino as the UK. The other option is simply to dive bomb the hell out of any retreating troops. Their ORG will be so low during a retreat they often just fall apart in the face of concerted air attack.

As for the TW bashing on the forum I would say it a natural enough reaction to quite a few people who appeared on the forum after game was announced and seemed to demand that eu:Rome contained lots of features the the TW games have or it wouldn't be very good or suggested that unless Europa Barborum modded the game it would be rubbish etc etc. Fanboys are always tiresome, particularly when they come onto another forum to tell everyone how it is. I think that is where the beef comes from.

I still think EU:Rome done properly would simply show up the TW series for what it is: paper scissors stone 3d battles tied to a fairly basic strategic concept. At the moment, though, i think a fully modded up copy of Rome total war is probably more involving and fun. As for the tactical battle side: 3d is nice but no one has still some close to doing what panther games started with Red Devils over Arnhem. But I digress....It isn't A Paradox thing anyway...

[Raptor1]

70 Divisions? I would click the big grey "Attach Nuke to Unit" button at this point

Anyway, Can someone explain this "Ping-Ponging" so I know if I encountered it or not?

[Dowly]

Bump! :smug:

Could someone explain the advantage of regional troops (if any) vs. just having
small Legions cover the problem provinces? :hmmm:

Do regional troops get any defence bonus? Lower upkeep? Do they count towards the army supply limit when attached to regions? Anything??