I haven't been this hyped for a game in a long time

It's almost here! Unfortunately it's just a pre-load and I have to wait til Wednesday to play it. And I already had two sick days from work this week (damn actually getting sick) so that strategy is gone.

I try to avoid hype where possible but I love the Total War series, Rome especially. Everything I have seen for this so far looks fantastic and I'm psyched. My Masters of History (with a Roman focus) and my PhD aspirations are partly due to the passion instilled in me at school by the teachers and also the countless hours I put into this when Rome 1 came out in 2004.

Then GTAV, then new consoles. In terms of games this year has been alright.

Now back to Europa Universalis IV to fill the time before this gets here.

I know exactly what you're feeling. I think Skyrim may have been the last game i spent any sort of time really researching before release. I simply can't wait till i get this mother fucker in my hands. Also doesn't it come out tuesday not wednesday?

I believe it is Tuesday, you're right. I think it releases here in Aus on Tuesday night, so I'll get stuck into it then.

I'm a big fan of the Total War series. I'm almost shocked that there isn't competition to speak of at all for Creative Assembly. They've somehow kept whatever this strategy genre is, all to themselves. :)

I hope it's good.

Rome Total War was the BEST of the entire Total War series by a good deal. Making another one's pretty risky.

I'm not sure ... I will probably end up getting in in the end (I had a decent ammount of fun with shogun), but I didnt follow the game at all ... can you guys sell me on it a little? Whats new/exciting about it?

I've only recently started playing Shogun 2 after wanting to dive into a Total War game for ages. Really want to get Rome 2, city battles that actually have cities rather than the barren walls for castle in Shogun looks real cool.

Its only 10 Gigs. Thats cool Shogun 2 was like 20 with the dlc stuff. I'm waiting for my copy but will probably get it a day before I leave to China (them b-stards have Total War Blocked). I hope I will manage to download the game before going there and play it that way.

Yep, haven't been this hyped since Diablo 3. Can't wait to stomp some barbarian scum with my elephants

The same basic concept of other Total War games they've expanded naval battles (which I'm not huge on). The more interesting things seem to be improved/varied victory conditions (just straight out conquest isn't the only way), less of a reliance on sieges for every single province (which is good), improved diplomacy (if they bring over sort of what they had in Shogun 2 that's great) and a whole variety of stuff. Their developer diaries have been pretty decent in putting forward what they've changed. As much as I love Giantbomb, the full strategy stuff (other than Civ) seems to not get as much love/promotion. Not exactly as many videos in proportion to Assassin's Creed IV. That said, the Creative Assembly doesn't seem to be sending out a new trailer every freaking day either.

What types of games do the staff enjoy, and be honest; It seems like they're burnt out on gaming and they only like special games like indy games and whatever is controversial at the time from a media standpoint.

I know Brad likes Starcraft and DOTA. Drew likes to play flight sims.

That's all I know. :)

Yep, I can't wait. I loved Rome I sooo much

This is what I plan to do with the game, once I get it, I hope I can play it over that the computer labs of my college. I don't have a PC, but damn do I want to play this game really badly! The original Rome is possibly my favorite game ever and I can't miss out on this!

I hope not to offend the master race, but I really wish a game like this would come to consoles. I'm not a pc gamer, but this type of game seems like it could be one of my favorites. Maybe it'll be possible eventually for the ps4.

Gonna be fresh as hell. Does anyone wanna play co-op with me? Maybe do some streaming of a grotty all day session?

It's not a matter of the power of PC/Console ... you just can't reasonably control a game like this with a controler.

@2headedninja: That's what everyone always says but I don't understand why it's not possible. Could you elaborate? Also, they could offer a dumbed down version similar to the civ rev console experience.

I'm a huge Total War fan and I couldn't believe it when I saw this was so close, I hadn't realized it until a couple days ago.

Now it's all preloaded and man I can't wait. Rome I was one of my very favorite games of all time.

Even Civ was dumbed down and this has basically all the same controls and set up as Civ on its strategy map (if not the same depth or mechanics) and then when you go into the battles its a large scale RTS and it just couldn't work.

Just watch this video and you can see. No one has figured this out with a controller:

I think back in the day it would have been Dave taking a look at this but now i'm not sure if it will receive any real attention despite being one of the biggest PC exclusive titles this year.

I believe the main reason myself and many others are pretty pumped about this total war in particular is it's a return to older total war games. It's been about 7 years since there has been a total war game set in a pre gunpowder age that covers a sprawling amount of geography and cultures.

I have been waiting to get paid and will be buying it tomorrow, i will loose a lot of my life to this game

i hope it sticks more to vanilla shogun then the extras that in my opinion killed the fun in expansions in Shogun......

i cant wait till Wednesday

I can't believe I'm saying this but I'm really soured on this TW game. CA and Sega going completely insane with the DLC for the last few TW games have turned me off. Bonus units and such as DLC is fine, but withholding entire factions as preorder boni? That's just some bullshit to me.

But there are already about 10 playable factions, withholding a few additional factions is hardly a big issue. Additionally, only one faction pack is going to be available at launch and will be free for all pre-orders, meaning that any future faction packs are going to require extra work and probably would not exist if they were not being made for DLC anyway.

As has been said countless times in this debate, how do you determine what was withheld? Did you work on it? The game seems to be very full featured. I didn't spend a dime on Shogun DLC and had a lot of fun with the game, played it for close to 100 hours.

This game already is going to have the Rome scale of factions and map, and seems to already have a nice selection of factions (as well as at least one faction that will be free DLC, they've said more probably too).

Just a heads up to anyone who hasn't bought the game yet but is going too. It is currently $47.99 on greenman gaming. Comes with steam codes for the game and the pre order bonus. You also get the keys right away so you can preload. Hope this helps someone!

Want to get in the right mood for Rome 2, watch this documentary on YouTube.

I wish I had checked this out before... but if there is any game I don't mind spending $60 on it's a Total War game. Talking at least a dollar an hour with a Total War game.

If Sony would just let usb keyboard and mouse be used in game like they have in a few other games then it could work. They could shoe-horn a controller interface in. Letting you give orders while the game is paused, (maybe even automatically pausing the game the minute you started to put any input into the controller) and then heavilly recommend you pick up a keyboard and mouse to play the game. Hell Sony could even sell a PS4/Rome 2 branded keyboard mouse.

That said i will be playing this on my PC, but I do feel for those who can't play these games. :(

@artisanbreads: I watched the video. Obviously the exact controls would have to be worked on but I still think its possible to tweak it for consoles. Maybe they just think it wouldn't he profitable to make it work on consoles.

I think that overall the campaign map would work with consoles but quickly navigating a battle, going to different areas on the map, moving units (and getting them in the right position as which way they face is really important too) would be a freaking nightmare with a controller. For it to work in any meaningful way the entire 'Total War' battle section would have to be changed so that it didn't resemble Total War anymore.

As frustrating as it is for console only players, I think that's the reality.

The DLC thing doesn't bother me too much. I thought Shogun was pretty good without DLC, though I got bored with Shogun due to the lack of any real variety in the units. The diplomacy was greatly improved from others though. Empire + Napoleon were okay but ranged combat isn't my thing. For some reason I didn't get into Medieval 2, despite having played the hell out of the original Medieval Total War. I think it was partly due to the fact that I only had a PC capable of playing Medieval 2 a long time after its release and I'd lost a bit of passion for it.

One day closer to Rome II !!!

I hope that a new series of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Commanders gets made now theirs a new total war, really liked this programe, Oh and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decisive_Battles was another good prgrame i used to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/user/THFEProductions is the info guy if you wanna learn about Rome 2 in more detail

how about we form a clan when the game is out on steam?

So hyped, start a new job the morning it comes out so It's going to be a day of joy.

For some reason I ALWAYS buy only physical copies of Total War, I just have to, it's been like that since Medieval 1. So it kinda sucks that mine won't be here for the labor day weekend. Scratch that. It comes out Tuesday. I'm a dummy.

I would be down for co-op dude. I have a friend I might be playing with also. However it's unlikely I could do an all day because of work :(

@fattony12000 said:

Listening to the Death Throes of the Republic series while I play does sound like a good idea.

Well, any time and any place would be fine also! There is also a thing called weekends and holidays.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!

It's funny, the time of Rome is one of my favorites and I love everything about it but I'm just not excited for this game. I even bought it a few months back when it was on sale on Greenmangaming for like $30 and have it preloaded on Steam, but I keep forgetting it's coming out this week.

Maybe this has been shown already but I have been avoiding videos on the game as I find trailers for games these days just ruin and spoil the game, like the Johnny Gat coming back spoiler in Saint's Row IV trailers, but is the overworld strategy getting any deeper? I was really into the Shogun TW game, but I found that the overworld strategy was rather boring because all you had to do was pick off a couple little guys, turtle and build a massive army, and then you just won every fight with numbers. Then at some point there was no one left to challenge you because you had such a massive army that they couldn't touch you.

Sir I think you will find that is spelt Medieval.

@scroll said:

No he had it right.

Also: LIKE A DAY LEFT WOW

Well they've talked up the AI (as always we will see). I hope you can rely on alliances this time and have the computer reliably surrender and things, those were always my biggest issues with the campaign map AI.

It seems like there are a lot of interesting tweaks though. The coolest to me is the regional capital system, which in some areas makes it so there is only one real large city that has to be sieged, the rest of the battles take place just in settlements but aren't sieges per se. There are also a lot of different ways to set up and customize your armies abilities, they have stances of some sort (that I think will pertain to things like having them in a kind of ambush mode, a travel mode, etc) and it seems like you'll be able to have less armies in general, capped at how many regions you control.

It's hard to say how a lot of the changes will effect your play until you really get your hands on the game, but so far this does seem like it's make a lot of changes to the formula, more so than the last few games for sure.

Just got back into the europa barbarorum mod for the original Rome TW. My PC can't run the new Rome, but this is good enough. Anyone else play this?

Weird thing, I was in a book shop last week and there was a total war Rome 2 book, pretty sure it was an actual history book but just branded with the Rome total war name, it also had the same cover as the game. So, if you want the full Rome total war experience, read that book! Obviously.

So the reviews are starting to come in and it appears to have all the classic Total war problems. I'll wait for a sale.

Also just got this. Hit me up for some games. Same name on steam.

I envy you people that enjoy these sort of games. They seem to offer so many hours of gameplay.

@vuud said:

True, but on the other hand, they always were pretty liberal with the steam sales.

Oh, man. You do not even know. I clock 2000h (yes twothousand) in Civ 5, hundereds over the different TW titles, and a coule of hundereds in CK2/EU4. I always want to play those story based games I got on steamsales, and then I end up on another "map-game".

@vuud said:

True, but on the other hand, they always were pretty liberal with the steam sales.

Oh, man. You do not even know. I clock 2000h (yes twothousand) in Civ 5, hundereds over the different TW titles, and a coule of hundereds in CK2/EU4. I always want to play those story based games I got on steamsales, and then I end up on another "map-game".

@wuddel: Oh I believe you. I'm mainly drawn to things like Tomb Raider or Gears of War - games that have roughly 8-12 hours campaigns if I'm lucky and then they're done. For the same $65 you get so much more.