 Originally Posted by shootemindehead
It's Intel and the card's an Nvidia Geforce GTX460
Well the CPU should be fine then, but I can't speak for the graphics card. If I were you I'd post a thread in the official forums about it, asking what people there think. Refer to the "low standard" of the launch release and that it has you worried.
- - - Updated - - -
Ok, so my mini-review so far. There's good things and bad things.
First off, the game is what you'd expect pretty much. It's a Total War game. You choose a kingdom, you start training armies, you expand, you train generals and spies. You sometimes get to fight awesome battles (I've had a few memorable ones, so far, more on that below). I often find that each Total War game is an improvement over the last in the matter of features, unit rosters and skill levels. This is no exception. The factions are huge compared to Rome 1 and provide much greater variety than Shogun 2 (a great game, as well). Each faction has a great variety in itself, which the first Rome did not. I'm playing as Macedon currently, and you can train various hoplite, pikemen, skirmisher and heavy infantry units. And that's not counting the cavalry or siege engines. So there's definetly enough here to make any historical geek fullfill any dreams of creating that "realistic" army you've always dreamt off.
Regions work a bit differently. There are fewer of them, but they are larger and have 2 - 4 cities in them. Two factions can share a region, which makes it contested. For instance, Tarentum, Syracuse and Capua are all in the "Magna Graeca" region and not until you control all three do you control the entire region and there are even bonuses for doing that. But each region has sub-regions as well, which work more or less like the regions in older Total War games.
Generals work a bit differently. Depending on the faction, a general can be different units. Spartan generals are all various types of hoplites, whereas Macedon offers a wide variety of bodyguards for your general. Armies can not move around without generals either, but they are easily recruited. There's also a faction tab with possibilites for inner strife, so deciding which general you recruit is important. If you recruit a general from a rival family than the ruling dynasty, and that General proves his worth in several battles, then his family might become the dominant one in your faction, and a civil war might ensue.
Diplomacy is enhanced in a variety of ways. There's also no more "rebels". Every region is controlled by a unique faction. That means that underdog factions, like Pergamom for instance, might actually defeat a major faction and take their place in the balance of power that will eventually ensue. I also have to commend the AI on being thoroughly "random". For a variety of reasons, I've reloaded turns only to find that the AI does something different each time. Small variations that makes them unpredictable. Trade is enhanced as well, and securing a trade agreement can be difficult but rewarding. Overall, I really enjoy playing the diplomacy game. Whom do I ally? Should I support these guys in that war? My trade partner is under attack, should I intervene just to protect my interests?
The battles are beautiful and just as fun as usual. If I have any gripes it's that they've changed some of the controls, and that once a melee ensues the battle is soon over. The battles are short... Much like in Rome 1.
Now, that's plenty of good stuff right there. But there are a few drawbacks.
The most obvious one is that a wide variety of people, myself included, are suffering from very low FPS despite having decent gaming rigs. I can play Shogun 2 on the highest settings and I won't have any problems with the FPS, but here I'm forced to play on medium settings, and even so the FPS is pretty bad. What's weird is that the FPS is ESPECIALLY low in the campaign map. That makes no sense, as that's fairly standard stuff. All this lends itself to a pretty frustrating experience as the game just doesn't flow like the way you're used too and want it too. You can't really sit back and enjoy a game that's as slow as this one is.
Speaking of slow, the number of factions makes the end turn wait a chore. It's something like 30 seconds before its your turn again. Sometimes, the wait inbetween turns are longer than the actual turns themselves. There's little to do about this, I guess, save from eliminating all the dozens of small factions out there.
Gameplay-wise, there's one thing that's bugging the hell out of me. Chasing AI armies. You see, the AI armies always force march, which mean they can march a hell of a lot longer. You can do this too, but an army that's force marching cannot attack. Which means that an enemy army can enter your kingdom, and you can give chase, but you cannot attack until the next turn - by which time they're much deeper into your kingdom. Also, an army has a "zone of protection" around them that means that you cannot approach an army if you don't have enough movement points. What I mean is; lets say you have 10 movement points, and the enemy army is 11 movements away. So you should be able to get right up next to him, right? Wrong. Because every army has that little zone of protection around them, that means that once you reach that zone, and do not have enough movement points to reach the army, then you cannot even enter the zone. So your army will stop dead in its tracks 5 movement points away from the enemy, even though you could technically get right up next to him. But since you only had 10 movement points, and not the 11 that would take you all the way, you can only move 5... Also, attacking an enemy army allows them to attempt a withdraw, as usual. The AI does plenty of this and whenever it withdraws, it withdraws the HELL out of there. I mean, the movement a withdrawing army moves is extreme! It's like half the movement points of a regular army on a normal turn!
All of this makes it such a chore to chase down armies. Because there are so many roadblocks and obstacles that prevent you from catching up to a army (any army). But for the avoiding army, it's just such a piece of cake. I've had armies march right through my kingdom and capturing a few towns on their way, and I can't even keep up with them. So frustrating! And since this is part of the gameplay, this will probably not be fixed.
Speaking of moving armies, whenever you click on a spot, the army moves there. Makes sense. But the problem is that when you want an army to move from A - B, and there's something in the way, so the army detours around that mountain over there and suddenly what would take 1 turn is now gonna take 3. And the only way to "redo" that movement is to reload your last autosave - and the load times are pretty heavy too. This is why I reload so often - the idiot pathfinder system doesn't have a "undo" button. If it did, it'd be much simpler.
Anyway, for all it's problems, we can only hope the performance ones will be fixed soon. And the battles are top notch, even though they are quick. My most epic one yet was when I was gonna take a city on the coast of the Black Sea. There were transport ships offshore, with a rather large army, and they reinforced the defenders.
So I organized my army in a wedge formation and charged the port. I knew I had a time limit, and I could see the reinforcing ships coming for the port. So I killed the defendors at the port and set my army up in formation along the beach, waiting for the reinforcements to storm the port from their ships. Pretty epic stuff. So there's some nice stuff in there. I do enjoy the siege battles, but the new "control point" system makes them kinda easy to win. Distract the defenders with half your force and send the other half straight for the town square and capture it - wait a while - and win.
Here's a picture from a recent battle. It's the only screenshot I got. It shows a doomed pike unit about to get pierced. It's one of those damn armies I finally managed to chase down, after they had suffered major attrition casualties from my agents poisoning their supplies.
|
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks