Ye Olde Blah

With the Game Wanking Board being dead, I thought I'd post it here instead.

What game are you currently addicted to? Does it coincidentially happen to be R:TW (like me)? ;)

-Devlyn, who got so addicted to horse archers that it inspires him to resume that project again.

Sorry for getting you addicted :P

p.s. Great game, and parthia4life!

If you happen to have experienced its predecessors you'd know that the singleplayer campaign in Rome is MUCH better than the earlier games in the series. Plus the ability to look at your cities on the battle map without having to be attacked is neat.

Wish you could observe naval battles but i guess that's a small price to pay.

Ive found the romans to be far...far..too easy to play as. You start with a kicked up economy, huge regiment size (sure its light infantry..but sometimes numbers matter) plus they're roman legions..trained and bred for war. They get archers semi-early, and get to have some hardcore trade partners right off the bat.

Solution? for me anyway..ive decided to beat my head against the wall playing as the Carthagenians! muahaha! Now ive got romans bearing down on me like crazy and i could care less! standing behind my huge thick stone walls and such!

Currently ive got big alliances with The Greeks, and The Egyptians. So far my military technology is...lacking, but ive got Onagers and such for some serious destruction if need be.
Havnt invaded too much, mostly just the numidians around the higher parts of africa.

Very neat, very addictive..and that's ok :)

I'm currently playing with Scythia, and after wiping out Thrace in the early game I'm now on full war with Macedon. If I'd gather troops and attack I could probably make some impact, but I find it much more fun to sit back and let them besiege me.

Then when they arrived, I lure them to the gates and give them a rain of horse archer arrows!

Kills: 622
Casualties: 20 (forgot about a few archers ;) ).

P.S. the Noble Horse Archers RULE :D

Still addicted on diablo II

Playing on battlent is sooooooooo much more fun.

The continuous additions in new patches and items make it worth my time.

Thumbs up for the old game.

Is R:TW out for PS2? If it is then i might get it. Last game i've played was Onimusha 3: Demon Seige which i found to be fairly enjoyable.

<i>"Is R:TW out for PS2?"</i>

*chokes in his drink*

It's currently in my download queue... I nearly finished downloading when I realized I had the SPANISH version, so I had to start over :(.

But from how you people are talking, I suppose it's worth the wait?

Yup :D. And Osiwm may provide you with a method to ...obtain a copy by more effective means :).

Oh? Explain...

Well, it would be irresponsible to do so in plain public ;).

On ICQ then, perhaps? :)

or you could PM me

I'm still playing Gladius. 60 hours of game, and I'm still to learn what it is about...

On a side note, thanks for the offer but I've already... acquired the game :).

I'm gonna try it tonight, I hope it's any good.

Where could i... acquire the game? Tomahawk, if you are happy with your...  provider, then maybe you should direct me to them as a way of thanking them for their fine service.

PM'd you :).

Good work everyone - nobody will ever guess what this is about.

To get back on topic, I must say I like the game quite a bit... it just sucks that you have to have defeated a race first before you can play with it... I don't want to be a smelly Roman, and the only thing I've conquered yet is the Greeks.

It reminded me a lot of Civilization, without the tech and with some "family" features.

Oh, and without the huge kickass realistic battles

btw, you can cheat and search on the internet for a way to unlock all factions.
Its done by just cutting and pasting a few lines in a textfile, and certainly not difficult.

The last game I was addicted was Farcry - by far the best shooter (I even prefer it to halflife 2).
Great graphics and a highly variably gameplay, multiple ways to solve a situation cool vehicles make it my number one.
It's even the first shooter that doesn't need a quick save option - the automatic saving is nearly perfect.
The sad thing is that it took me only one and a half week to finish it.

Next to that I finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - from my point the best Tomb Raider like game since Tomb Raider 1 - cool graphics, insane moves and good riddles make it one of my favorites. I'm going to get the "Warrior Within", the second part, soon.

Back to Rome - I played its prequals and at the moment it's too much work for me - strategy games force you to play rather long to see any real success. Nevertheless it seems to be a hell of a game from what I heard and saw.

After about 2 days of playing, I have some more comments...


1) I'm out of family members! You need family members for riot management, but you never have enough to cover ALL of your cities. I started using a diplomat to bribe other family members into joining me (and deporting them to safer parts of my empire, because they're sensitive to being bribed back) but I still don't have enough... any hints on how to manage without them?

2) Time-consuming! Managing 25-30 cities isn't exactly much fun to do... is the "Auto-management" feature any good? The advisor keeps telling me to build Catapult Ranges and I hardly use Siege weapons, so that's useless... if I let it auto-manage, will it lower taxes and organize plays so the people remain happy or do I still need to check all the time?

3) Riot riot riot! How do I keep everyone from rioting? My empire is spread from Carthage in the west to some empire far in the east, and there's yellow faces all over the place. I noticed a lot of it comes from the distance to my capitol, but if I shift it I'm just moving the problem from one place to another... suggestions?

4) Stupid specs :(. Quite often, my leaders end up being useless because they have more penalty points than bonus points... is there a way to make sure they get the good things and avoid the bad things, or is it all random? (I noticed fighting a lot helps your Command rate, but Influence and Management are more difficult to increase).

5) Silly Senate! The Senate is angry at me for some reason (my popularity is way low, even though I rarely ever miss an assignment. By the time I finally get it back to the middle, it drops back to one point and I don't know why. Does that just happen when my empire's too large, that they feel threatened or something?

Thanks in advance :).

Well for the traits and family member stuff, it is possible to switch retinue characters sometimes. You won't be able to get rid of that Drunken Uncle of course, but a couple of others can be switched. That may help :).

Also, if you have such a huge empire, perhaps it's time to play the game on a higher difficulty level? :)

1) breed them, keep them safe, bribe new ones, and dont let them be bribed or killed, thats all that helps. And face it, you cnat have a govenor in each city.

2) its a bitch, micromanagment, but i dont trust them AI's either, so i just manage by doing a complete check every 2 or 3 turns, wich takes +/- 5 min at most for 30 provs. Thats still less then a battle.

3) build every hapiness building available and keep large garrisons (20 units really isnt a strange garrison size im afraid).
Another method i adopted later on in the game was just exterminating every city i conquered. The less people there are to revolt.

4) shit happens with stats. Its actually linked to what you do with the family member and what buildings you build in his city. Temples have the most obvious effects, war temples leading to leaders hitting family members and stuff

5) Like you give a damn about those bureaucrats in Rome. As soon as you have enough support from the people, you can overthrow them anyway.

Okay... the garrison tip may help, I was always pretty cheap on my armies, hoping to save a few bucks that way (but then I had 1.4 million gold and decided that wasn't quite the most effective way either).

Another thing that kinda surprised me is how many men go in a unit... one game, one Hastati unit contains 20 soldiers, and another game that same unit of Hastati had 80 soldiers! For battles it's nicer to have more soldiers of course, but it's quite a drain on my population. I did start "migrating" by making units of 120 Peasants every turn in larger towns and moving them to smaller underdeveloped towns, and disbanding em there.

And the family traits are a tad weird... it's like the larger my family gets, the more negative traits they all develop. O well, maybe I should have them all fight more battles.

unit size depends on game settings.

And we all use the peasant deportation tactic one time or another :P

Must be somewhat random settings then, I don't remember deliberately setting it so that it'd be so many troops per unit :).

Do you always fight out all your battles manually?

yup, since that saves losses

pm me the dodgy method :D

The Romans should be overpowerful at the start if the game follows history :P

I want to play this game, but i haven't got round to getting a 6800gt yet :sob: and nforce 4's aren't out over here yet :doublesob: Laptops pWnZ j00!

The Romans ARE indeed way overpowered... especially after the Marcus Gaius revolution, the troops are very strong.

The game doesnt really follow history though, that would eb kind aboring :-P

But what makes the romans so powerfull is that you have 3 allies form the start of the game, protecting two-third and as result i never had any defense in my 2 starting provinces.

And the romans also have good units, especially after the reform.
I love auxiliary archers, for their range is unsurpassed

Who are your allies at the start? :P

4 roman factions.
-The senate
-The julii
-The Scipii
-The Brutii

I'm playing Julii, and my home cities do get attacked all the time by the Gauls (that is, before I finish up killing them).

And when I play, I tend to get more casualties from friendly fire than from the opponents... why do those Hastati INSIST on throwing their javelins before fighting?

I guess the 4 Roman factions break up half way through the game right?

Throwing the javelin is a good way to pick off some of your opponents before scrapping, makes good sense... unless you got others in their beforehand :S

Well, if you insist on them not throwing, you can always press alt when clicking to attack, since they wont throw then

It makes good sense, yes... but if one of your Hastati groups is already engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the group, having another group throw spears first will most likely cause more victims to your first Hastati group (since they're getting the spears in their backs) than to the enemy troops.

And thanks, I didn't know about the Alt thing :).

What spec pcs are you guys using? I thought this game required nice specs since PC Gamer Recommended 2.5ghz and 128mb gfx. But my ?ber 1.4GHz Socket A Athlon (not 1400+ just 1.4, twas before the XP), with it's old trusty Geforce 3 Ti 500 (64mb) can run it at medium quality nice and smooth :D

i sue a 2800+ with 512 ram and a TI 4200
I can imagine that if you set most stuff on medium, that you do fine though :)

Good olde Ti500 kicks ass :D, always thought they was something wrong with my Graphics Card... it's just too good. NFSU at 1600x1200, max all runs smooth, UT2004 at 1600x1200 runs better than on my mates GF4

This game is good though, when I make my new pc I'll get a 13641 copy, maybe I'll be able to whack out the high quality settings :D

I'm on a P4 3.0 GhZ with 512 RAM and a 256MB video card.


Well, that's my dad's comp... I doubt I can get my PII 350 to run it :P.