My +1 year review. Suggestion for game progression to author

[Landorin]

Hi,

I started playing the campaign with this mod in 2010, I'm still playing it (just not all the time anymore), trying to conquer almost the complete map.
Anyways I'd like to write a few bullet points of positive impressions and issues I noticed for new players plus suggestions on how to improve these for Rome 2 for the author.

Positive:
- just 1 Roman faction
- AI is way more challenging on strategic and battle maps, makes it challenging and fun (yet not always fun, see below)
- cool looking units. We all want the cool red uniform looks on legionnaires etc.!
- no crashes I experienced on other mods

All that creates a great immersion and a challenging game, I still love it after years! This is what my map looks like 2 years later:



Issues:
- just one but it affects the whole gameplay:
game progession is really, really slow for a long, long time, resulting in possible frustration.

For at least the first half of the game you cannot be a turtle player. However, the game progress itself is turtling. It's fun fighting battles but will quickly tiring your motivation when you end up fighting 4-5 battles almost each turn!
Build units, town upgrades, move armies just like in the normal game but bring a cup of coffee (and a few bags of beans too) because the progress on these actions will be extremely slow as you easily spend hours fighting battles and only get 1-2 turns done, the AI will continously send troops to Italy. Sometimes I came home from work, fought one battle and exited the game if there were 2-3 more as it simply consumed too much time. A player also wants fun and reasonable progress on the strategic map.
This drove me close to a point where I considered giving up on the mod.
So I took a break and then decided to slightly cheat; I always re-loaded the savegame in order to decrease or eliminate battles after clicking the next turn as well as putting armies on bridges to squeeze the AI armies into a narrow gap and shooting them with ballistas. It went on for months like that until I slowly expanded into western Europe.

Once you conquered most of the Gallic towns the game finally starts catching up to a normal speed and that's where SPQR expands its full fun potential in my opinion. Finally, there is time for attacks, not just defense, you really feel the progression on the strategic map now, it now feels useful to develop towns and armies.

My suggestion to lt_1956 if there will be a SPQR mod for Rome 2:
keep most of the mod the way it is but please tweak something so there is a reasonable progress on the strategic map. Fighting several battles in real time almost every turn severly hurts the motivation of a player. Maybe make auto-resolving as powerful as it once was and leave the choice to the player or make the AI less aggressive in the beginning, you'd figure something out for sure.
If that can be somewhat tweaked it would make the mods an even better recommendation and even more fun mod to play in Rome 2.
Thanks for your consideration.

[lt1956]

The RTW Engine is limited, hence why a lot of modders had trouble with AI. If they Do an RTW2 I am sure they will have better AI if based off of Shogun2, so more balanced Autoresolve will be nice, but that is a hardcoded item.

I agree its tough when you first start, especially if you don't have the time. But then when Rome first started out it was Defensive until they had a solid Empire. The player Experiences this in very short time, compared to the decades it took for Rome. lol

Thanks for the feedback. :-)

Lt1956

[Landorin]

Thank you for the detailed reply!
Yeah, I actually like defense, it would just need to be more stretched in the game so you don't get bombarded each turn as mentioned and just wanted to raise it for a possible successor .

Looking forward to Rome 2 (and mods). Until then I'll keep conquering the world, maybe I can make it in time.

[czePowerslave]

Reading these I always wonder....ONLY five battles? dont get me wrong, ive played this aloooooooot. Heck, in one of my campaigns the death toll of enemies was like 1.6 million, go figure how many battles I fought and I didnt have nearly as much ground as you, or about the same.

It is grind yes. Blitzin is way to avoid but thats an exploit. Rageraids are the same.

[Landorin]

Maybe I was "lucky" or it was because of the mod version (playing with v7). On the v7 map there was at least one less gap leading from Gallic territory to Italy. Yet it was still too many battles per turn.

Anyways, keep in mind at some point I managed to turn the tide (when I conquered a few Gallic towns and thus smaller Gallic population around) but that was much much later. Whenever I feared I couldn't hold a conquered city I wiped out its population.
I intentionally left "buffer zones" intact, i.e. leaving a single Gallic territory between the Gauls and me in Gallic hands so the Gauls wouldn't start attacking me too. You can still see that on the map I posted.

Once the tide turned to my favor, progress starts to catch up completely. Suddenly you become really busy in logistics, shipping lots of armies around etc and it is you who decides how many battles are fought (most of the time). Some nations even stayed neutral so far and the Egyptians don't dare crossing the border at all!
Additionally, I received the Marian reforms earlier than expected (and I did not cheat here). Yet I'd say that's a really nice plus but not a "win button" for battles, they're challenging as before.

[czePowerslave]

I found a thread of mine of old
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=291426

Thats on how much troops i had, and eventually about 1/3rd of all I killed, 6.4 ) this game is logistic pain, but so was the empire.