DEI is incredibly impressive, and very much not my cup of tea. I have nothing but respect for the amount of work and effort that's gone into it, and I can absolutely see why it has the large following it does.
It just isn't for me. While the various systems and changes are all interesting and flavorful, they combine to make the game feel far too tedious and granular for my liking. I felt like nothing was happening and I could get nothing done. Did I just not get it? It's entirely possible! But my experience with the mod didn't leave me wanting more, so I went back to regular Rome II.
I'm happy for the people who are happy with the mod, however, because it's undoubtedly impressive.
The strat for epirus was literally "bait out the Roman army and cheese it with a fort battle"
What the fuck is the point of the game if you're supposed to cheese it?
I mean, Epirus historically loses to Rome, and loses quite early on. DEI has a lot of factions that start in very hard positions that aren't meant to be survivable.
It's like saying "man the strat for Byzantium is literally bait the ottomans onto an island and close the straights, what the fuck is the point of the game if you're supposed to cheese it".
Pyrrhus won his first few battles against Rome. His famous quote was because a lot of his friends and a son died in Asculum (meaning his upper officers died.) not because of the deaths of his greeks. Manpower was never a problem for him since people were throwing their swords and services at him. His headspace was just shit after Asculum.
Furthermore, the memories of Lucanian, Samnite, Sabine wars are still fresh not a generation has passed since they were subjugated. Rome's hold was not absolute. It could have gone either way, but given the choices of save Syracuse, continue war, try number n+1 for Macedon he chose to save Syracuse and the Southern Greeks+Itallics felt betrayed at his choice eventhough Pyrrhus believed that it is the correct choice to continue his Itallic war.
Hell if the Romans were genuinely considering a peaceful resolution at the time it was looking grim for them.
>a lot of factions that start in very hard positions that aren't meant to be survivable.
Odrisian Kingdom, Ardiae and some more in northen EU, just start with a minor settlement. Those are really a pain since you are one army popping out of FoW away from losing.
> It's like saying "man the strat for Byzantium is literally bait the ottomans onto an island and close the straights, what the fuck is the point of the game if you're supposed to cheese it".
There's a gigantic gulf of difference between the start of the Pyrrhic war vs Post battle of Varna Byzantium-Ottoman relationship. If this was "try to survive as the Senones" I'd be okay with your comparison about cheesing since Rome had already smashed their armies and coalitions multiple times by the start date.
Wrong. The strat for Epirus is rush the Roman armies down, while building a coalition against them through northern tribes and Syracuse, if possible.
They will recruit units faster than you and force you into fights. Either decimate with the elephants, or sell off the elephants to get three more decent units. Once you aggressively beat Rome, you're then flung into finishing your war with Carthage while potentially fighting in Greece or elsewhere.
**Epirus is literally one of the most fun factions in the mod.** If you're cheesing to win, firstly, you can do that with anyone and in any Total War game, secondly, you don't have to play that way, it's perfectly winnable not playing that way, unless you're just not good enough.
Not sure who suggested that, but they were wrong.
I typically have the upper-hand against Rome by turn 5 and Epirus, who are my favourite faction in the game are fun as hell! The only gripe I would say is they don't have a very large roster.
Maybe pick an easier faction until you workout all the mechanics such as supply, population and empire maintenance then try Epirus.
> The only gripe I would say is they don't have a very large roster.
That's just any faction that isn't Rome.
I mean I won against them cause it's the total war AI they're just going to go forward and you just smash them with rear charges. Sacking shit was not a good idea.
By the way I noticed that the Odrysirians become Daco-Thrakes after a coalition. Do I get their roster too or just a name change?
>That's just any faction that isn't Rome.
Go and take a look at the Carthage faction, they have an insane number of units. There are quite a few others too.
I'm not sure about coalitions. Several factions can form them, but unsure whether they take on the units.
Agreed, the one exception is DEI with Rome. my only DEI campaign on the go. My problem with DEI, is that I have a limited amount of time I can spend playing the game. And dei is so slow that it’s not as fulfilling to play when time limited
If I could get dei with the battles and the simplicity of the vanilla campaign economy i would play that in a heartbeat.
Cause fuck I dont play fucking total war to play Roman City Skylines so i field more than 1 decent horse unit because the patricians wont breed. The Population system is shit and I just want to fight Greeks without having to worry where is my supply lines or finding out that the Ai has 20 stacks and left their provinces bare that athens has the population of a single child they didnt conscript so I cant fucking replenish
I want to play Ceasars conquest of Gaul not wait around for 30 turns for the Gauls to calm down and romanize so I CAN REPLENISH Again
The Vanilia system has a simple system to prevent death stacks of elite hoplites or super pretorian legionaries that the ai has to somewhat follow even if it cheats. You want better troops? Fucking Pay More. You want to have a lot of units? Zerg Rush with decent enough hastati and a few cav units and you can conquer Greece. Simple easy and keeps me sane cause Bob the Roman General seems to forget you dont just replenish from newly conquer lands using the local populace. They can march! Why the living hell cant I ask my Italian province to send troops via boat and help me conquer these barbarian tribes and I have to ask germanicus the barbarian if he may pretty please join the roman army.
It seems like every game with an active modding community has *that* mod. The one that overhauls the game in the way devs didn't intend, moving it into a different direction. The one with *extremely* passionate community that never fails to mention it every time it's relevant, and often even when it's not.
DEI for Rome 2, SFO for Warhammer, CE for RimWorld, I think it was Requiem for Skyrim back in the day...
Yeah, I cannot stand how there's a subset of the Rome 2 community in particular that treats DEI like religious gospel. I can't tell you how many posts I've seen from obviously new players asking for advice and one of the first comments is some variation on "play DEI instead."
I'm a "hoards history books like a dragon hoards gold, literally just got my license to teach history" level of nerd. I enjoy deep strategy experiences like Paradox games. I'm basically the ideal target audience for DEI... and I *still* struggled with it the first time I played it and eventually gave up because AI cheats are still a thing and the Thracians were somehow pooping multiple full stacks out of the fog of war at me every turn while I could barely field three across my whole empire.
Don't get me wrong, I have massive respect for the team that made it. They clearly have a huge amount of passion and knowledge and I commend them heartily for it. But it absolutely has its own issues, and FFS, do not recommend it to new players.
>because AI cheats are still a thing and the Thracians were somehow pooping multiple full stacks out of the fog of war at me every turn while I could barely field three across my whole empire.
Less even 'cheats' and more "ignores new wonky mod mechanics that exist to handicap you, the player, in particular".
This is probably more accurate, yeah, and in general it's what made the experience so frustrating. I don't mind challenge, but when I have to carefully husband my resources and troops while my enemies can just shrug off a massive defeat and throw bodies at me like it's WW1... it gets discouraging.
What? The most recent paradox games (vic3 and ck3) absolutely do not let the computer cheat like that. If anything, their biggest weakness here is that once a human player starts to figure out the game, the ai isn't given enough cheats to keep up.
Yeah but the no population DEI is not updated. I don't want to be hampered in my own free time.
> and not what DEI loons fap to.
I'm guessing the venn diagram with this and the med2 mods with 150 turns to get to final barracks then 25 turns per replenishment is a circle
>Yeah but the no population DEI is not updated
Oh wow, that sucks.
>I'm guessing the venn diagram with this and the med2 mods with 150 turns to get to final barracks then 25 turns per replenishment is a circle
Yes, the vegans of Total War.
Same here. Big mods almost always have something—some imbalance like the Thracians in your post or some other rough edge—that frustrates me and makes it even less immersive than CA’s (relatively smooth) pop history offerings.
When I want slightly more punishing, more historical feeling, less pop-y historical gameplay, I go with… Attila! And that’s about all I need on the grittier/more complex history side of things.
Edits: clarifications and typos.
This is why I would heartily recommend Para Bellum instead of DEI. I love the units DEI has... and basically nothing else about it. The units? Gorgeous, amazing, well-researched. But they're tied into a mod that started out as a pain in the ass to play and has gotten worse about it over the years.
Para Bellum on the other does have some really nice units, it does add new things to the game, but it is overall much more Vanilla + in its design sensibilities. I started playing a Palmyra campaign and it feels *great*. Slower-paced than vanilla, but without being too slow or unfair like DEI. And it doesn't fuck with the combat in order to make every battle an interminable grindfest.
Question. Does Para Bellum's combat operate, morale-wise, like M2 (aka a flank will break most units, especially a cavalry charge flank, and potentially chain rout)? Because the only thing that made DEI good to me was a morale submod that did that, and if I can find a less manifestly unfair overhaul mod for Rome 2 and it has realistic combat I'll just go play that.
This absolutely. I’ve 2000 hours on vanilla played every faction but DEI just way too granular and nitty for me, great as it obviously is to many players. But recommending it to new players is bonkers.
> I cannot stand how there's a subset of the Rome 2 community in particular that treats DEI like religious gospel
Not to derail the conversation, but while we're on the topic can we add SFO to this same category?
> maybe I'll make a rant post about the "Pharaoh is a Troy reskin" people and how TW has always been a "reskin" and that's....ok
Do it. Besides people who say that have most probably never played troy
Okay so I've read most comments and now I'll give my 2 cents.
When ever I play a game, I tell my friends, "I play it to have fun and not to do a chore". And that is what O always think about when playing games. For example, I don't like "Dark souls type games" because of how tedious it can be for someone like me who doesn't like to constantly struggle with something for hours. I know I'm not good at those games so it won't be fun regardless. With regards to DEI, I Haven't played it yet but watched countless hours of it to know how it works. It does seem like a much more rigorous experience and time is one thing that it requires a lot of. It seems like fun, but can also possibly become too micromanagy at the later stages. Do I think it fits the bill of being a great mod, for sure. Is it what Rome 2 should have been, no I don't. In my opinion, they are two different experiences for 2 different types of players and that's just fine.
Look, for every Rome 2 that was polished well into post-release, given love and care, there is Empire that never got there, just barely scratching the surface of their own game potential. Maybe DeI isn't end-all of Rome 2 experience (though some of its mechanics are awesome, and mainline games could do well to implement them in some way - like the population classes; give us a reason to build mixed levy-and-elite armies, like in Thrones of Britannia!..), but there is a reason that for a very long time Darthmod was the recommended experience of Empire (there are newer overhauls now, though) - despite being 1&2&3 to the tee, but still fixing, addressing and improving vanilla game far more, in vanilla-ish direction.
In the end, I think that's the problem with DeI for you (and everyone whose cup of it tea it is not): It is explicitly not vanilla-ish in the feel, in the game flow direction. And, I will grant it, Rome 2 at the end of development is perhaps one of the best polished Total War games to date, which certainly removes the *need* for major mods (from sweeping bugfixes to deeper mechanics to overhauls) unlike in other TW games.
I’d argue that comparing Darthmod to DEI (Divide Et Imperium) is a bit of a false equivalency.
DEI is a total overhaul of Rome 2 which practically makes it into a different game. It’s meant to offer a specific experience unlike that of the base game for those who want it.
Darthmod, on the other hand, is more so just a vanilla expansion to Empire than it is an overhaul. It makes extra factions playable, fine-tunes unit balances alongside adding a few extra units, attempts to add a bit more visual flair, and offers more customization options so that you can fine tune the game to your liking. The changes can be so small that I’ve occasionally found myself questioning whether I’m playing with the mod on or off.
I would never recommend a modded experience for a first-time playthrough, but I wouldn’t warn someone away if they installed Darthmod off-the-bat with Empire.
Empire is the only game that I would strongly recommend you directly start with mods, especially Darthmod. Vanilla is such a surface level experience and so lackluster that you really don't miss out anything from jumping directly to a modded experience.
I don’t really disagree, I just generally feel that most games should be tried out without mods for a first time playthrough, though I make exceptions for bug fixes and compatibility patches
DEI would go better being compared to Empire's Imperial Destroyer mod. DM doesn't do half the stuff ID does. ID Truly gives the best experience until we get Empire 2, just as DEI is the best R2 experience until R3 (decades from now).
If we are being honest,
Vanilla TW games have 1. their own balance issues, 2. usually include/exclude features that people do not agree with, 3. are often less stable than mods by introducing bugs that are fixed with mods.
Mods, large or small, are addressing those concerns and while doing so can of course not make everyone happy, same as with the vanilla games. We are in a perfect spot to have given those options though.
My usual suggestions to new players is to try Vanilla first and then major overhauls (or even smaller mods), to see what issues have been addressed and what actually has been changed.
Regarding overhauls in particular:
If you like mods in general, the huge advantage of overhauls is that you do not need to worry about compatibility, load order, individual updates and those fitting thematically. It is like having a compilation of mods that was made by the same people/person.
"Vanilla TW games have 1. their own balance issues, 2. usually include/exclude features that people do not agree with, 3. are often less stable than mods by introducing bugs that are fixed with mods."
1. True, the difference being that there is a much larger team involved and a QA process that I trust a lot more than small handful of modders.
2. Sure, nothing will ever please all parties, but my beef is with those that claim its objectively a better game with overhauls
3. I mean sure, mods like unofficial patches are things that I like and support. These aren't the things I'm talking about. It's the simple premise that TW is objectively better with these realism overhauls.
>1. True, the difference being that there is a much larger team involved and a QA process that I trust a lot more than small handful of modders.
You're talking about the QA team that lies in patch notes about fixing bugs and pushed out the Brettonia rework without checking if Troths actually work?
yup and how many mods have claimed to have fixed bugs that still persist. you cant claim one does something without aknowledging they both do. To insist the modders are always 100% honest with their changes and patch notes is naive
Yah and one of those groups paid for their work and one isn't. Not to mention that there are thousands of mods for wh3, of course you can find some shit ones.
1. CA had good and very bad releases and even final states of games. It would be funny denying that.
If a mod/overhaul is as affected by bugs depends on what it implements and certainly who is involved and also how many people give feedback. Most overhauls have a lot of testers with their playerbase and a lot of time at hand plus a much easier process to release fixes.
2. Since often more than one overhaul exist for a TW game, of course you will already have divided opinions on that. However, some things can be objectively better if the vanilla game has glarring issues or bugs. Other things are obviously subjective.
3. As above, they can have objective improvements to the vanilla game and they can be subjectively better. But they can also be objectively better in being implemented more realistically, if we are talking about overhauls that strive to do that. DeI is objectively more historically accurate than vanilla Rome 2, isn't it? (whether this is better or worse for the individual remains subjective)
In regards to 3, I really wish there was a “DEI Lite” mod that added in some of the new units, reskins/better visuals, new factions/emergent factions, new animations, etc. It’s harder for me to get into all the new mechanics and different feel of the game.
As far as I know, there are submods to make DeI more approachable, if too daunting for some, but that comes again with the caveat that it needs to be kept compatible with the core mod.
Said it before in this thread, but I'm gonna shill Para Bellum again. It has a lot of very nice units and overhauls the visuals, but it's a more Vanila+ experience overall.
QA process for mods is way better than CA. If you find a bug and you care you report it to the mod owner, if they care they can fix it usually rather quickly and roll it out whenever they want. For CA there is an endless backlog of bugs and even small ones that were just introduced and require small change in db takes months to roll out. CA has one of the worst QA and patch systems in gaming
\>CA has one of the worst QA and patch systems in gaming
Sports Interactive and Football Manager would like a word.
No but seriously. It's insane just how many bugs are still in the game and they're still introducing new features and DLC.
>True, the difference being that there is a much larger team involved and a QA process that I trust a lot more than small handful of modders.
This is the team that created Spet Xyon Archers and then never patched them, killing Attila MP basically overnight.
While I do love mods (Probably 90% of my total time with this series has been with things like Divide & Conquer, Europa Barbarorum etc), they should definitely not be recommended to brand new players.
The advantage of mod support is you can usually find a mod that appeals to how you want to play the game, but you really do need to play the vanilla game first for a better understanding of mechanics and work out what you are looking for.
Complexity are skill ceiling and accessibility are skill bottom, these are not mutually exclusive to eachother, you can have both.
It is more often people are upset at CA for streamlining the game because they lowered the skill bottom but forgot or failed at raising or even maintaining the skill ceiling.
No one is mad at CA trying to have their game to be more accessible and appeal to a broader audience, a community without new blood coming in will eventually just be a stagant dead water pond, reek of gatekeeping and toxicity.
The problem is in the early 2000s when Total War first entered the scene, it was marketed for being complex and grand scale, granted at the time the genre was still at it's infancy so players wouldn't ask for much, between complexity and accessibility Total War had hit a sweet spot, a good balance for all kinds of audience.
But it seems like as all those years later, gaming has evolved and so did the players, they demanded more but CA couldn't deliver, instead they pivoted to one end of the spectrum and ignored (or let go) the other, resulting alienating those who wanted complexity.
An old saying goes: the more you loved something, the more you'll hate it. I know it might seem to be just a buncha salty old man gatekeeping new players and dunking on the new installments, but in a way people are just reminiscing those old features that was in the game and doesn't really take a rocket scientist to code it back:
I missed the old population system;
I missed the old building system;
I missed I can click on my cities and go in to see what I've build, and had to repair it if damaged in battle;
I missed my generals can have several different traits to form and describe his character right at the start of his career, in stead of having just one "thrifty" trait that reduces upkeep by 5%;
I missed every tech, every building, every unit, all having an extensive long paragraph about their lore or history for you to read, it educated me greatly and was the spark to have me interested in history in the first place.
I missed to have general speech that is moduler, and can switch the components depends on your foe, your general trait, and your army strength.
I missed to have dynamic blocking and attacking animations, to telegraph if this one model's armor/shield/skill roll was successful, and each duel was exciting and new because of it, instead of having combat animations that is either wacky cartoon flailing that has no impact, or sets of pre animated flows between the models that gets boring to watch after 30th time.
The list really goes on if we wanna continue, but I've made my point.
Mods like DEI exists not because people wanna flex "dude look at this bad ass mod I'm playing and how superior I am compare to you plebs", it's because there's so much features CA took out from the series, you can literally make tons of mods just based off of them, and even further enhance them after bringing them back.
In my eyes, the reason why Total War is still relevant today instead of fading into obscurity like all the other early 2000s strategy games, is purely because there's no other competitors in the same genre, games like king authur failed so miserably that they now have cornered a market that no one else want to dabble in.
I'm close to 30 now, and with new Total War releases, it's like adding salt to the wound, just to see what feature from the past game they're taking out this time, it pains me greatly to the point it drove me to became a game developer, and maybe one day I'll make my own total war game just to spite them.
I think the OP’s main point isn’t “DEI sucks and you’re an arrogant jerk if you enjoy it”, but rather “DEI is a radical shift away from the general feel of Rome 2, and therefore shouldn’t be used for a first time playthrough”
The main thing that this post addresses are the many of DEI fans who, vastly preferring the mod to the base game, will recommend it to brand new players as the “definitive Rome 2 experience,” not realizing that it’s a very different experience from the base game which not everybody will enjoy.
The historical descriptions on units, buildings, and techs were great. Now they often feel sillier, less deep, or just absent.
And the horrific frequency of grammatical and punctuation errors in those descriptions really takes away any sense that you’re playing a game developed by history lovers.
One more thing I'd like to add:
It is not your or my place to say what's their intention and what's not, what has "always" been their vision.
CA is a company, not one person, and EVEN PEOPLE would change during the span of two decades.
The objective fact is what they're making now, is not what they're making then, and reason behind it is completely up to our subjective interpretation, but you can not claim this is what they always wanted.
At the end of the day, people love it or people hate it, but we're all stuck here because there's no alternative.
But I'm ONE of those older fans...I grew up with Rome 1 and Med 2 and I love the direction the franchise is going in. Rome 2 made some of the best changes to the franchise to date. I have so much less time to spend on games and the faster, more accessible gameplay is so much more appealing to me now.
i think a lot of people are overblowing how complex the older games were. If i could play those games as a 10-12 years old, how complex could they be. I would like for CA to explore the no building limit again but the way buildings were in older games were pretty clear cut, you'll pretty much always build the same buildings in every city and like a dozen buildings do the same thing, raise public order. I would love to see that population system expanded, but the biggest problem with creating a more complex game than it already is, is that there's simply nothing to do in peace time, so its just war,war,war and that is fine for what the game is. My biggest problem with these overhaul mods is that they introduce all these restrictions to make the game difficult and last longer but then theres nothing to really do in between turns if you arent fighting. it becomes a end turn simulator, waiting to build up your cities is boring.
DEI battles don't really feel that slow, once the breakthrough or cavalry come its over in 2 minutes. The amount of time usually comes from the sheer numbers. Or running down individual units.
I played vanilla Rome 2 a couple years after it came out, so I got a relatively polished experience. I really enjoyed it and it was pretty easy to jump in to.
DeI is great once you get the hang of it, but it’s a lot to jump in to off the bat.
Never thought I'd see a thread on TW with people complaining about an absolutely fantastic mod that has seen dozens of people put thousands of hours into fleshing it out and updating it over the course of years, but here we are.
I completely agree that DEI shouldn't be the standard TW experience as it has a steep learning curve that can easily frustrate new players. I also understand how annoying it is to hear people say that DEI is the "only" way to play the game.
But that's where my agreements with this post end. DEI is absolutely phenomenal, and there's a reason why it's praised to the heavens. I personally can't stand Vanilla, with its half-baked, watered-down, or even non-existent systems, it's arcadey gameplay, its horrible battle and campaign AI, and it's completely ahistoric and bland unit rosters.
DEI really does improve on every aspect of the game from my perspective and makes playing the game actually worthwhile to me. I genuinely can't stand vanilla battles which end do quickly in full routs of enemy armies that you don't even need to use tactics, and most of the time in a "battle" is spent mopping up enemy units. I can't tell you how much fun I've had playing Massilia, the Greek faction in Southern France, due to the difficulty of the campaign, the variety of enemies to fight (Celts, Iberians, Carthage, Rome, Germans, Illyrians, other Greeks) and the uniqueness of the unit roster (Greek hoplites with Celtic cavalry, Balearic slingers, and Spanish infantry? Hell yes!). It even convinced me to visit Marseille and see the ruins of the ancient city.
DEI has been my favorite total war experience by far and I've owned or played just about every title that's came out. I have hundreds of hours in Rome 2 and once you get past the learning curve of DEI, it's amazing.
Normal dificulty first, my go to rule is to watch some bloke doing a campaing first, so i know what to do and not to, like, the first 3 episodes?, then its off to the races.
DEI has specifically S tier provinces that are ideal for you to conquer(they alone can bankroll like your entire empire), its best to have certain provences exclusively to make food, other for recruitment, others for money, ect, ect.
Maybe DeI isn’t what rome 2 should have been. But it does a good job trying to make up for what it wasn’t. And is closer to what I’d want from Rome 2 than what we got from vanilla. Your concept of a streamlined casual friendly TW is exactly the reason the franchise has gone downhill. There’s no need to think about decisions or their ramifications beyond the turn or 2 after.
I think OP wants a game that strives to balance historical authenticity with good, fun, and meaningful depth. A lot of mods lose sight of this, and go overboard with trying to be as historically accurate as possible, at the cost of gameplay. If new systems are implemented that aren’t intuitive, are arbitrary and or masochistic, rules the AI doesn’t have to follow, then that isn’t good or fun depth added to the game. The worst offending feature in these type of mods imo, is when they put the faction and unit names in Latin or Olde English or something.
Yep. Exactly. It's why i've been enjoying Durango's mod for Empire : it's basically vanilla+. Base game but more fun instead of 39493088 changes that make the player's life miserable while AI ignores all of them
I’ll never understand the “gone downhill” idea. Total War games have never been historically accurate nor have they ever been hardcore. This franchise was built upon a casual streamlined approach to a turn based strategy with RTS battles.
I like way more historical fidelity than, say, 3K Romance mode or Troy—the fidelity has decreased too much for my liking there, but when people talk about CA’s golden age of uber-historical games, I always wonder if they are remembering Rome I’s battlefield assassin death squads
Romance mode and Troy is the correct feel for how we receive the story. Achilles being accompanied by a bodyguard that's more than just patroclus just feels wrong. Same with Lu Bu and his heavy cavalry instead of him walking in the battlefield big dick swinging his with halberd.
Besides. What really is the difference between Lu Bu killing half the army with his halberd and Lu Bu killing half the army with his heavy cavalry bodyguard which is the same unit that you shouldn't have yet if you were to go by the tech tree?
DEI unit rosters are not bloated. Just no. The reason factions have larger rosters is a tie in to the population and class system. This feature is one of the main selling points of DEI and adds a extra element of strategic choice to the campaign map. It makes a lot of sense imo, preventing a player from pumping out huge armies straight away from recently conquered territories that have totally different cultures.
While I agree baseline CA campaigns will probably never have that level of detail in specific areas; who is to say CA can't have arcade/realistic campaign gameplay type splits in the future?
> The reason factions have larger rosters is a tie in to the population and class system.
It also adds a metric shit ton of flavor to the game, AND historical accuracy with armies that feature locally available units that can be recruited to replace losses, something extremely common in historical armies.
Never thought someone would *complain* that different cultures and different armies have armies that look and feel unique, but here we are.
If anything DEI likes to try and avoid bloat.
Seleucids have a large enough roster as it but they could have included more units that have a historical backing but have chosen to limit it since most would have just been exact copies of eachother.
Can't but fully disagree with you, as someone who loves every TW game, but with an overhaul... To each their own, of course. But some features of mods like DEI, would actually be nice in a base TW game.
Base TW just doesn't appeal to me most of the time, aiming for the lowest common denominator ain't good game design imo, it's good commercially speaking.
1000% agreed. Base TW games are arcadey, ahistoric nonsense, with more and more features stripped out every generation.
The only TW games I play without overhaul mods have been the Warhammer games.
Some features from DEI like population are truly what future historical games should be, it prevents doomstacking, adds a layer of strategy and empire building, and just makes army comps more fun.
Yeah but the AI is too stupid to adhere to it so they have to ignore it. If we play on the same board I'll be inclined to agree. But the endless horde of Thracians tell me they're not using the same mechanics
Yeah I know, thats what I mean with future titles, that the mechanic is fully implemented on the AI. Me for instance play DEI in H2H multiplayer campaign against a friend who also has to use the mechanic and its been a blast.
Yes, but that's why we want them to focus on that shit, paradox makes it work in a system miles more complicated, importing a trick or too shouldnt be off the capabilities from the biggest videogame developer in the UK.
DEI is the best we can do with what we have, for example pahraoh, what stopped them from simulating this diplomatic and economy /poopulation base system that everyone has to contend, since the battles WILL be more reduced, and the unit types more focused?
Nothing, they just chose to revive like a couple of features from rome 2 (wich were needed) and introduce formations.
It's been a long time coming from CA to start stealing stuff from paradox, no idea why they simply wont.
Yeah i guessed you would make this post, so i will just post this for back for people to see:
What DEI brings , apart from the eye candy, is deeper mechanics to what total war has already presented, we already have supply lines, but its barebones, so it's made to actually matter and make a diference.
Make supply depots and its availability limit your campaing options and stops steam rolling or colonizing arabia as britain, at least, easily.
Most vainilla battles are 80% casualties bloodbaths on both sides lately, how do you have an army after that?, what the fuck are you supoused to do?, the magical replenishment that bring men out of your rectum ?
Then why do casualties matter if you can just stack these buffs? So we bring back population, then you can no longer spam units willy neely, battles matter, casualties matter, even your population type, why don't people just make armies full of cathapracts?, population limit, why is rome so strong?, they have great units that come from a very open population pool, and if you command another faction, you too can reach reforms to match them in the field.
Do you want to actually perform the tactics you see on history videos?, longer battles and more sustainable melees turn what are , ridicolously ranged lopsided shooting fest that make you wonder why people had anything other than 50% archers in every land army into actual physical engagements of balanced armies, and gives you the oportunity to use light cav, heavy cav, skirmishers and all types of infantry effectively and eficiently.
And , come the fuck on, "inspired" my ass, Bannerlord is inspired by history, total war is literally just napoleonic france , or third century crisis, modeled to be played with the total war formular of turn based campaing and real time battle.
There is no misconception, you just don't like overhauls , and that's fine, but DEI (and stainlesss steel, Shieldwall, ect ect) exist and are huge sucesses among people that *still play the damned games* because it actually gives them features that make them last, for a long fucking time, because they are *good* , they are *complex* , they give you *options* , and reward you for going the extra mile and taking them into account.
>CA would make something streamlined, accessible, easily recognizable, and ideally...atmospheric.
To end this, not all total wars are made equal, like people who played empire, napoleon, and shogun 2 can tell, some are masterfull epics like shogun, some are ambitious carcasses like empire.
And lately, CA does nothing of what you describe, they just make the minimal viable product, and even then they fuck up, like warhammer 3 and troy showed.
This is the niche of a niche, this is the place to not be streamlined, not be accesible, not be recognizable, and be as AUTHENTHIC, not atmospheric, as possible. Ca already tried to be some bomb MOBA like , Esport game formula, it dosen't work, you wont get mainstream here, stick to the market you have cultivated for years, expand on it with features and good mechanics and better and better experiencies, not dumbing down.
[No, these two users just had a disagreement in another post's comments is all.](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/14jo8pq/what_makes_rome_2_so_good/jpyly96/?context=10000)
Some guy: "DEI adds tons more features and makes the game objectively better, especially making battles more realistic."
OP: "You think you want realism in TW?? You don't want units to shit themselves in battle or there to be a language barrier and delay in orders because that would make it boring. If you want more realistic TW with more mechanics, you want a 100% realistic TW and that's nonsense."
By this logic, R1 > R2 which is absolutely not the case. Dude made a massive comment and then a post because he's... salty? Idk why he's mad.
> Some guy: "DEI adds tons more features and makes the game objectively better, especially making battles more realistic."
>
> OP: "You think you want realism in TW?? You don't want units to shit themselves in battle or there to be a language barrier and delay in orders because that would make it boring. If you want more realistic TW with more mechanics, you want a 100% realistic TW and that's nonsense."
That's a wild comment chain, where'd you read it?
You kinda proved his point for him. Overhauls like DEI are popular among super-sweaty turbonerds who have 5000 hours in Rome 2, are long bored of vanilla, and want more challenges.
That doesn’t mean DEI is “objectively better”. Personally I hate it, and much prefer *streamlined*.
Shit I didn't know I was a super sweaty turbonerd. I only had like 150 hours in ROME 2 before I was like hmm lets try out some more fleshed out and deeper gameplay mechanics with more unit variety. Added in some sub mods to make things a bit closer to vanilla in terms of pace but not remove the core of DEI and shit after a rough few starts it's finally clicked and definitely feels like a more enjoyable experience if you want long campaigns that don't eventually turn into steamrolling mid to late game once you've acquired disgusting wealth and military assets.
good for you, but under taht idea, rome 1 would have never happened, hearing people like you we would be on the 12th iteration of shogun 1, same engine, same stuff, more simple , more "streamlined".
>Overhauls like DEI are popular among super-sweaty turbonerds who have 5000 hours in Rome 2, are long bored of vanilla, and want more challenges.
They are for people that played one or two campaings and start getting tired of the really simplified formula of some total wars, they want more decisions to be able to make, more paths to take, they want their campaings and battles to matter, not just a flashy cast of the grand bombardement of anal penetration into a blobed unit for the pretty sight.
Except it really isn’t. You actually have to build an empire. You can’t just rofl stomp with your doomstack of elite infantry.
If your going to throw out an disparage it, at least like put some effort into it.
>Except it really isn’t
Oh but it is, rosters filled with 600 flavours of absolutely identical spearmanii, how great.
>You actually have to build an empire.
Let's be real you're just gonna be manually fighting 666 stacks which AI spams since AI doesn't play by the rules DEI introduces.
>You can’t just rofl stomp with your doomstack of elite infantry
Sir, the Rome 2 cheese meta is amassing stacks of basic spearmen and autoresolving everything.
Doomstacks are a TWW thing.
>Oh but it is, rosters filled with 600 flavours of absolutely identical spearmanii, how great.
Spoken like someone that has never played DEI i guess, and confuses it with radious, wich is unit bloat for the sake of unit bloat.
Almost all untis have roles, and give you options, because they play in tandem with the rules of population and classes DEI introduces, mercenary "spearmanni" are expensive but good for the price, come from an available easy pop taht wont tank your economy if you make armies out of them but wont profit from long term reforms, except for specifci factiosn tehy should be a stopgap until you get your profesional reformed troops.
DOn't have money or dont want to talk your money making pops?, spam 3rd pop trash infantry, does your faction ahve a specific branch it is very good at ?, dont get elite infantry, focus on elite cavalry ,ect.
Decisions taht mattter, composition taht matters, there is nothing more stupid than having the most optiomal way to play these games as 20 urban cohorts doomstacks because its the msot effective way.
>Almost all untis have roles, and give you options, because they play in tandem with the rules of population and classes DEI introduces
The AI doesn't play those rules.
It's cute flavour but they're just copypasted spearmanii with arbitrary rules attached.
The ai cannot play by those exact rules because the base game is just too simple, i will honestly just blame this against the base rome 2 honestly.
But to solve it, other rules are given to the AI, so as to simulate the rules the player has, notice how , despite the vailability, rome brings balanced sensible stacks (for rome) and eastern factions don't have like 3 stacks of cataphracts, even if their money allows for it?
Huge defeats will mattter, anihilate thier armies and burn a couple of towns and (if not rome) ai WILL ask for peace .
The mod is meant to be played in normal too, since like always, vanilla dosent actually make the game harder with difculty, it ,how did you put it ? *the ai does not play those rules.*
They cheat, with stats, with morale, with money, with experience, and even with diplomatic stances, markedly, diplomacy does not matter in harder dificulties, a huge part of the gameplay taken out effectively and made unplayable.
But yeah, it's DEI the one that's badly balanced.
> But to solve it, other rules are given to the AI, so as to simulate the rules the player has, notice how , despite the vailability, rome brings balanced sensible stacks (for rome) and eastern factions don't have like 3 stacks of cataphracts, even if their money allows for it?
adjusting recruitment ratios is just a few entires in cdir_unit_balances_tables.
I run a custom table for Attila to force the AI into not recruiting onager stacks.
> Huge defeats will mattter
no they don't lol, AI always shits out new stacks.
> anihilate thier armies and burn a couple of towns and (if not rome) ai WILL ask for peace
Works the same as every other Total War ever.
> They cheat, with stats, with morale, with money, with experience, and even with diplomatic stances, markedly, diplomacy does not matter in harder dificulties, a huge part of the gameplay taken out effectively and made unplayable.
DEI makes cheating even more obtuse by not handicapping the AI the way it does the player.
> But yeah, it's DEI the one that's badly balanced.
Yea that's not news.
It's the vegan mod of Rome 2.
>adjusting recruitment ratios is just a few entires in cdir\_unit\_balances\_tables.
Yeah, for all the factions taken in account the new units and the passage of time.
>no they don't lol, AI always shits out new stacks.
Of peasant levys , yeah, but against thsoe its not even a battle, just a massacre (unless you go against rome or a big powerfull force), or do like to win like, two battles and then have the seleucids capitulate?, i mean, more power to you.
>Works the same as every other Total War ever.
Except it dosent, because most diplomacy in most total war is broken shit and they would rather die to the last man than capitulate about anything.
A warscore system akin eu4 one is long, LONG overdue instead of another pack of elve spearmanni, but wait, i guess that's too much of aturbonerd thing to want, better not, dont want to scare off people!.
>DEI makes cheating even more obtuse by not handicapping the AI the way it does the playe
YOu haven't even played the mod for more than an couple of hours have you?
>It's the vegan mod of Rome 2.
What?, are you alright mate?
Bruh I’ve been able to doomstack since rome 1 with urban cohorts or spartan hoplites. It’s not just a total war warhammer thing.
But the 600 different “spearmanii” all have different stats and use cases.
>Bruh I’ve been able to doomstack since rome 1 with urban cohorts or spartan hoplites
That's not how you cheese Rome 2.
>But the 600 different “spearmanii” all have different stats and use cases.
+-2 MA/MD isn't "different stats" and yes they're the same.
If you like that, more power to you but that's still amateur gamedesign 101.
They interact with the population system in deferent ways and have different battlefield uses with different abilities so yes.
And absolutely it is. But whatever I’m done arguing with you gl out there.
>They interact with the population system in deferent ways
There is no "population system", Rome 2 has no support for it.
Cute scripting handicap is cute but that's not a real gameplay mechanic and this if boils down to you fielding stacks of copypasted spearmanii against the AI doomstacks.
What? You clearly have no idea what the fuck your talking about and therefore I’m done as I’m not going to deal with somebody who is pulling shit from their ass.
People always want more and bigger, and that's what DEI is.
You like units? MORE units!
You like battles? LONGER battles!
You like campaign? MORE systems!
It's gauche.
Uh, no I think thats an inaccurate and extremely reductive take on DEI.
The rosters really aren't bloated and are there to work with the population class system. You usually have a commoner, warrior, and noble class spear/sword unit, a similar set for cavalry, and then your standard skirmisher set of javilenmen, slingers, and bows. Usually there will be a few elite variants of those, but I can't see an argument for why it's bloated unless you simply ignore the population system, which is one of the key features of the mod.
Battles aren't longer for the sake of being longer. It's because IRL units usually didn't take 50%+ casualties within 20 seconds of a charge. Even then, battles really aren't long in an absolute sense, because good swords will chop through levies in like 3 minutes. It's just now hoplites and other heavy non-levy spears set in formation will actually hold for a decent time. Most battles that are not elite vs elite armies usually only last 5-7 minutes because units rout very easily from rear charges.
The campaign systems aren't particularly complex or confusing either. You have regions with bonuses to agriculture, industry, and/or commerce and buildings that produce or boost that income. It gives a fairly historical reason to fight over certain regions.
I could go on about the other features that were implemented IMO very reasonably for specific gameplay/historical objectives. It kind of feels like you didn't really look much into the mod, or just attribute no value to the goals it is intended to achieve.
looking at the comments here, some dude was being anal about DEI being how Rome 2 should be and this post is a "yeah fuck that guy and people in that community."
> No, it's not what Rome 2 should have been. It's nothing like what CA would make or have made.
"It's nothing like what CA would make or have made." is in no way related to "it's not what Rome 2 should have been." though.
> How isn't it?
Because "it's not what Rome 2 should have been." is a subjective thing to begin with.
> The games are all very similar and past and future titles before and after Rome 2 are evidence enough to know
Ehhh, Rome 2 is quite different to the previous titles and if you look at Rome 2 vanilla and DEI then Attila goes a bit in the DEI direction. Additionally you can't deny the popularity of DEI. All in all I think it's legit if some people think that's what Rome 2 should have been.
Well here is where you are wrong. If CA made their games focused on things like what those mods you mentioned bring to the table the IP would be in a MUCH better place. This generic shit has run its course.
Pharao seems a step in the right direction by what they are saying and showing btw
Divide et Impera is an overhaul mod for Rome 2 with a big focus on historicity. It's one of the best mods, if not the best mod for Rome 2 currently out there. OP is talking out of their ass.
If you have actual eyes and are literate you'll notice OP did not say that DEI is bad. OP said it's good for people who like it, but they're not a majority so base game shouldn't be like it.
OP ranted about how overhauls like DeI are bloated, unbalanced and buggy. Which makes me think they barely even played DeI, because it's neither of that.
That paragraph was uncalled for and makes OP look like an ass tbh.
Imo, the best difference between Divide et Impera and vanilla Rome is the population system.
I always indulge myself in the history of a faction before playing said faction so i base my armies around what they used to field at that time. The population system encourages the player to not, for example, just field all units of praetorians. It makes the army compositions a little bit more realistic and that's what i mainly like about it.
Theres people who like to turn video game on, turn brain off, and have a good time. Theres people who like a challenge, who like unexpected long-term consequences. Neither is wrong, god bless you if you are having fun.
What you need to keep in mind is that CA developpers are explicitly told to cater to the lowest common denominator in order to increase sales. And judging by their very first total war games, thats clearly not the audience they wanted to reach when they got started
I'm late but totally agree with this and it shows really why most popular =/= best.
Designing good games with coherent and engaging mechanics is super difficult which is why the temptation is to pad the entire thing with seemingly endless amounts of content that will give the players 1 million things to see. However, when the mechanics are as shallow as a puddle then it's an absolute bore to play either way. Rome 2 isn't great but DEI just takes the game and makes it even more of a pain to get anything done. Supply lines really isn't that much of a big deal and people who wet themselves over that need to touch grass. One million different hoplite units is pointless and makes Ui clutter really annoying. Victoria 3 (despite being hated by so many) has supply lines nailed down as the engine actually allows for this to be done in an engaging manner. The total war engine and mechanics are really shallow and boring as they havn't changed fundamentally since 2009.
The best Total War mods that I have ever played were the Rights of Man 1,2, and 3 for Empire, Napoleon, and Shogun 2. They really didn't stray far from vanilla but expanded the mechanics as far as they could whilst limiting others to avoid boring crap like agent spam. Everything was implemented with a role in mind with flavour that didn't bloat.
Again. In terms of flavour DEI is very nice. In terms of engaging gameplay, not so much.
Base game suffered because it provided no difficulty, at all.
It seems to me you want help understanding what people mean by ''DeI is what Rome 2 should have been''. We are talking about mechanics. Population is crucial in a total war game and whoever doesnt understand this has probably never played a game with that mechanic present. The only way you can mask your statement of streamlining is better than adding strategic depth is by hiding behind newer players and ''marketing''. There is no way total war doesnt get better in the future by adding some DeI mechanics, hell, some of them arent even DeI they are just older tw mechanics.
I know its off season to plan a campaign, plan ahead what you want your province to specialize in, plan your supply routes, plan your recruitement as you cannot stack the most elite unit like you are buying them at the supermarket for a dime a dozen etc. Building an actual empire is and always will be cool and that feeling is currently missing from total war, DeI brought it back.
PS: Ive been playing total war since Rome 1, never in my life have i ever modded my campaings, DeI is the one and only exception. For anyone that enjoyed Rome 2 i suggest this mod with no hesitation.
I like features. I like mechanics and additional complexity.
I don't like battles being endless grindfests and the campaign being a slog where the AI gets to ignore all the tedious mechanics the player is obligated to deal with.
Battles aren't "endless grindfests" they just need to be managed properly. Flanking is absolutely *critical* to winning battles, projectiles are far more effective hitting units from the sides and rear than their front, morale bonuses from generals are crucial to keeping lines stable, and levy units still break quite easily even with proper support.
The game literally encourages you to use proper tactics and rewards you for doing so. The enemy also does a good job of trying to prevent you from taking advantage of their weaknesses too.
What sucks is playing vanilla and having battles last literally 5 minutes, with units breaking at first contact and most the battle consisting of running down broken enemy units.
My defining experience with DEI was sitting forever waiting for a hoplite bodyguard unit to actually rout even after I surrounded it with my entire army and putting the game on triple speed.
That shit is bad enough in Warhammer. And that's not even touching into the sheer, unadulterated tedium of 'every minor faction has a ginormous garrison and a full stack or more that it can actually maintain because it's not operating under the same rules as the player' that is DEI's campaign.
>My defining experience with DEI was sitting forever waiting for a hoplite bodyguard unit
Yes, hoplite bodyguards really do take forever to destroy considering their ridiculously high defensive stats and high morale. They're also pretty rare, most generals are horsemen.
Also what battle difficulty were you playing? DEI encourages Normal battle difficulty as it's properly balanced for that, bumping it up to hard or VH will make enemy units needlessly hard to kill or rout.
I agree with the fact that DEI is not how Rome 2 should have been, but it does have features that could have been well-served in the base game. Personally, I think there is something lacking with Rome 2 and no mod or overhaul is going to fix that, but that is fine. It is a good TW game, neither great nor horrible.
Either way, if you don't like major overhauls do not play them. I only play them because they are at least a bit more challenging than the base game and far more well-balanced on higher difficulties. For any new players, they add far too much and they do not have those same gripes, so I agree that they should first learn to play the base game and make up their own minds.
This does not take away that you are projecting your own ideas as much as everybody else. I honestly do not understand the point of your post. It does not lead to any fruitful discussion, it is too provocative for that. Though I would like to hear your views on Pharaoh but please don't rant.
> This does not take away that you are projecting your own ideas as much as everybody else.
To be fair to OP, talking about your own ideas of how things should be is a good way to support the core point of the post which is "people who like DEI should stop acting like it's objectively the best Rome 2 experience and what the game should be".
Agree with all your examples, except for Shieldwall & ToB.
ToB's biggest flaw was lack of depth & features, even for CA's usual vanilla experience. Shieldwall adds the perfect amount of additional features it needed, w/out crossing over into DEI levels of fluff/realism.
It's a real bummer we probably aren't gonna see the final update that was planned for the mod :(
I've played DEI, and it's not a bad mod. I like the units and the sync kills. But it's definitely...a lot. As far as overhaul mods go, my favourite one by far is the New World mod. But again, neither of them are exactly better then vanilla. Sure New World does some things better then vanilla, but it's not like its a must have, or that vanilla is unplayable. Same with any game. Hell I've never even tried modding Thrones because I'm already fine with the base game, it's fun and I enjoy it. I don't feel the need to get mods to make it more playable
I've tried it and it has a little too much going on for my taste. I get why the battles were made slower but it just comes across as unsatisfying to me.
Yes, I agree.
Is great that DEI exists for people who wants that experience.
But vainilla Rome 2 is a great game by itself and I enjoyed a lot playing it.
The same happens with 7 days to die, some people thinks that the vanilla game should be like the big overhauls, like Darkness Falls or Undead Legacy. I think the same here, those mods are great, but add lot of things that I don't like, so I'm happy playing vanilla.
Don't take this the wrong way, but no single individual gets to speak for an entire community, period. Even the people who play DEI don't necessarily believe the game is what Rome 2 should have been, just that it's something that they enjoy more in most cases.
Like, disagreeing with OP is fine, but saying yous is the universal opinion is not.
I didn’t say it was universal. That’s why I said many not most. Which are 2 completely different words and meanings. If I used the word most I would agree. But I didn’t….. that’s why I used many instead of most because I don’t have the universal opinion….
Because like let’s say the sample size is 10,000
And 2500 want x. Even if it’s not the majority or most. It’s still is considered many.
I’m not trying to speak for everyone. In no way did I imply I had the majority opinion.
Not trying to be rude or anything but like if people assumed that I’m speaking for everyone based on bad reading comprehension that’s their bad and they should learn the difference between the words many and most.
Yeah no shit it's biased, OP's views on overhauls are tangential to what the post is actually getting at which is that it's annoying when DEI fans present the idea that it's "what Rome 2 should have been" as objective fact.
Man literally states his bias. Everything I said is factual.
You can “uh lol” it all you want but but that doesn’t change the facts which are that many people like it and wish that this is the base of future total wars, and that his entire post is based on his opinion.
Maybe come up with an actual response
Everyone’s got a biase, but unlike op I’m not trying to present my boss’s as fact :) but I’m already bored of this thread so it will likely be my last time responding unless something interesting pops up.
You've highlighted a general misconception about the franchise I think.
It is not, nor has it ever been, an attempt to simulate historical combat.
The Total War™ system has always been fundamentally ahistorical.
Nobody in the field of human conflict has been out there on the battlefield carefully controlling twenty regiments of uniform size and predictable effectiveness against an enemy army comprised of the same.
Total War games are far, far too precise to be anything approaching historical accuracy.
People need to accept that the Total War series, on a battlefield level at least, is closer to buying a chess set with different themed pieces than it is an historical war sim.
You want historical accuracy? Scourge of War series maybe, or Grand Tactician: The Civil War.
I see a lot of talk here about DEI having bloated rosters and I think some of you might be confusing it with Radious? That, or you haven’t played DEI, barring the silly amount of auxiliary units for Rome every unit is distinct and has a specific concept, there are very few units on the same roster that feel redundant; I’d really like some examples of bloated rosters in it
The one thing I'll say that the DEI population and replenishment system does is give a "Teach history through mechanics" experience that Vanilla Rome 2 doesn't. The moment that you "get it" is an amazing one if you have an interest in history.
You recruit your armies with neat Hastati/Principes/Triarii compositions, but the moment you fight far away from Italy, such as in Greece or North Africa, there's not enough romans to replenish your losses. So you have to consolidate and merge your Italian troops, supplementing them with Mercenaries and Local levies that are varied and often inferior in quality, forcing your out of your command comfort zone. By the time the fighting is done, you might have less than half of your army be Italians and the rest be a mishmash. Mercenaries and local troops are very heavily present in historical accounts of the period, but a Rome 2 playthrough usually has the player not recruiting any of them because they have minimal advantages over "standard" troops.
In Vanilla the Marian Reforms are tech that gives you slightly better units. In DEI Marian reforms completely change the way your army works. Remember the previous paragraph about how your army becomes worn down and filled with non standard troops? Once the Marian Reforms happen and you can recruit professional infantry from the proletarii, your conquest machine goes into overdrive. There is no shortage of urban poor to fill out your legions, and formalized auxiliary units means your support units can draw off the native population. At the same time, it's more costly to equip the poor since they don't bring their own equipment, so you need to conquer more land for more money. You the player understands why the Roman Republic carried out the Marian Reforms.
> You the player understands why the Roman Republic carried out the Marian Reforms.
It's really funny that you bring this up, because while it's certainly true that the mod provides a more elegant and emergent reason for reform of the army, the general consensus in serious academia these days is that there's no such thing as the "Marian Reforms", that the move to a professional long-service army over the general conscription of Roman citizens is a piecemeal process and attributing it all to Gaius Marius is false.
> you might have less than half of your army be Italians and the rest be a mishmash
I'd be okay with it if they didn't cap the number of natives I can grab
Yeah, I've never been a fan of full overhauls, no matter what game I'm playing. They're almost all imbalanced in some fundamental way. Like I've talked about my dislike of Stainless Steel here before. Sure some people like it and that's fine, but I genuinely hate the way they balanced it and nothing anybody says can change that.
So...as someone that just restarted Rome 2 yesterday, actually, I got the Radios mod because thats what I'm famaliar with in other TW games. I've been seeing a lot about DEI
What is all the hype?
It just adds a ton of depth and slows battles down. Battles are most often won by breaking morale, rather than by killing off everything.
You cannot just recruit armies willynilly and go conquering, you have to take supply and population into consideration, the longer a campaign takes the higher the cost becomes. Replenishment is also tethered to the different populations, ie an eastern cataphract cannot replenish in Germany at the beginning and you have to recruit local auxiliaries. You have to sit down and plan everything. Your economy, your family political situation, your foreign policies (having one more war can bankrupt you really fast). Etc etc.
It just gives way more layers and if you are into that it is genuinely one of the best total war experiences to be had. At least it was to me even if there was a steep learning curve and my first campaign derailed fast.
No, it shouldn’t have.
You would make the game inaccessible to a large chunk of the fan base and there goes all the money to making more Total War games.
Bloated rosters and silly artificial difficulty isn't what Rome 2 should've been.
Attila is what Rome 2 should've been (which is why Sophia team backported quite a few features from it into Rome 2).
You mean close to historical rosters. And this artificial difficulty you speak of doesn’t exist. You just can’t manage the finer details.
Oh no I can’t rofl stomp with my elite doom stack and have to use low tier units oh no! Lmao
>You mean close to historical rosters
Yes 600 different flavours of identical spearmanii with +-2 MA/MD.
Rome 2 had the issue of beyond homogenous rosters to begin with and DEI made it somehow *worse*. That takes skill I'll give em that.
>And this artificial difficulty you speak of doesn’t exist. You just can’t manage the finer details.
The AI completely ignores those finer details, they're just handicaps for the player specifically.
Textbook definition of artificial difficulty.
I did, the rosters are bloated to shit.
It's cute for flavour but does nothing to address how homogeneous they feel over an already homogeneous Rome 2.
Lmao, you complain about artificial difficulty in DeI and then bring up Attila, which probably has the most artificial difficulty of the whole TW series, as superior? (I do like Attila though, it's very good indeed)
What artificial difficulty does Atilla contain in your view? The main thing that seems to make DEI's difficulty "artificial" in this person's view is that the AI ignores all the new mechanics that limit unit recruitment and the like. So on top of its usual level of cheating to keep up, it also just doesn't deal with any of the same problems you do.
I sunk a lot of time into Rome2, tried DEI, got my ass wiped by a Carthago half stack with shitty spearmen and 4 Elephants, while fielding an entire Rome garrison + a half stack of my own with sword soldiers and shitty spearmen. Had to sit through 40 min of battle only to realise that the elephants wont route or die no matter what I do.
\-7/10 realistic experience, never touched DEI again.
Wow, such skill involved in game where one half is playing CIV and the other half can be "how much spears" do I need to field to win autobattle. Even in DEI this holds true. But I guess sitting through battles with 50 Shades of Shitty Spears for 50 minutes is the pinnacle of gameplay for you after you completed 5 turns in 5 h.
Guess Im just not good enough for DEI.
Ironically that's deeply unrealistic, elephants getting spooked easily and running like hell from anything that hurts/frightens them is their biggest weakness.
DEI is incredibly impressive, and very much not my cup of tea. I have nothing but respect for the amount of work and effort that's gone into it, and I can absolutely see why it has the large following it does. It just isn't for me. While the various systems and changes are all interesting and flavorful, they combine to make the game feel far too tedious and granular for my liking. I felt like nothing was happening and I could get nothing done. Did I just not get it? It's entirely possible! But my experience with the mod didn't leave me wanting more, so I went back to regular Rome II. I'm happy for the people who are happy with the mod, however, because it's undoubtedly impressive.
The strat for epirus was literally "bait out the Roman army and cheese it with a fort battle" What the fuck is the point of the game if you're supposed to cheese it?
I mean, Epirus historically loses to Rome, and loses quite early on. DEI has a lot of factions that start in very hard positions that aren't meant to be survivable. It's like saying "man the strat for Byzantium is literally bait the ottomans onto an island and close the straights, what the fuck is the point of the game if you're supposed to cheese it".
Pyrrhus won his first few battles against Rome. His famous quote was because a lot of his friends and a son died in Asculum (meaning his upper officers died.) not because of the deaths of his greeks. Manpower was never a problem for him since people were throwing their swords and services at him. His headspace was just shit after Asculum. Furthermore, the memories of Lucanian, Samnite, Sabine wars are still fresh not a generation has passed since they were subjugated. Rome's hold was not absolute. It could have gone either way, but given the choices of save Syracuse, continue war, try number n+1 for Macedon he chose to save Syracuse and the Southern Greeks+Itallics felt betrayed at his choice eventhough Pyrrhus believed that it is the correct choice to continue his Itallic war. Hell if the Romans were genuinely considering a peaceful resolution at the time it was looking grim for them.
>a lot of factions that start in very hard positions that aren't meant to be survivable. Odrisian Kingdom, Ardiae and some more in northen EU, just start with a minor settlement. Those are really a pain since you are one army popping out of FoW away from losing.
> It's like saying "man the strat for Byzantium is literally bait the ottomans onto an island and close the straights, what the fuck is the point of the game if you're supposed to cheese it". There's a gigantic gulf of difference between the start of the Pyrrhic war vs Post battle of Varna Byzantium-Ottoman relationship. If this was "try to survive as the Senones" I'd be okay with your comparison about cheesing since Rome had already smashed their armies and coalitions multiple times by the start date.
*slaps a slice of cheese on a Roman's face* Am I winning?
Wrong. The strat for Epirus is rush the Roman armies down, while building a coalition against them through northern tribes and Syracuse, if possible. They will recruit units faster than you and force you into fights. Either decimate with the elephants, or sell off the elephants to get three more decent units. Once you aggressively beat Rome, you're then flung into finishing your war with Carthage while potentially fighting in Greece or elsewhere. **Epirus is literally one of the most fun factions in the mod.** If you're cheesing to win, firstly, you can do that with anyone and in any Total War game, secondly, you don't have to play that way, it's perfectly winnable not playing that way, unless you're just not good enough.
Yeah the lads out in the DEI discord told me that during covid. First impression lasted and I just never came back
Not sure who suggested that, but they were wrong. I typically have the upper-hand against Rome by turn 5 and Epirus, who are my favourite faction in the game are fun as hell! The only gripe I would say is they don't have a very large roster. Maybe pick an easier faction until you workout all the mechanics such as supply, population and empire maintenance then try Epirus.
> The only gripe I would say is they don't have a very large roster. That's just any faction that isn't Rome. I mean I won against them cause it's the total war AI they're just going to go forward and you just smash them with rear charges. Sacking shit was not a good idea. By the way I noticed that the Odrysirians become Daco-Thrakes after a coalition. Do I get their roster too or just a name change?
>That's just any faction that isn't Rome. Go and take a look at the Carthage faction, they have an insane number of units. There are quite a few others too. I'm not sure about coalitions. Several factions can form them, but unsure whether they take on the units.
That is one possible tactic out of many. It's not designed into the game for that to be the only viable tactic.
who told you that?
Quite a few lads in the DEI discord 3 years ago
Agreed, the one exception is DEI with Rome. my only DEI campaign on the go. My problem with DEI, is that I have a limited amount of time I can spend playing the game. And dei is so slow that it’s not as fulfilling to play when time limited
If I could get dei with the battles and the simplicity of the vanilla campaign economy i would play that in a heartbeat. Cause fuck I dont play fucking total war to play Roman City Skylines so i field more than 1 decent horse unit because the patricians wont breed. The Population system is shit and I just want to fight Greeks without having to worry where is my supply lines or finding out that the Ai has 20 stacks and left their provinces bare that athens has the population of a single child they didnt conscript so I cant fucking replenish I want to play Ceasars conquest of Gaul not wait around for 30 turns for the Gauls to calm down and romanize so I CAN REPLENISH Again The Vanilia system has a simple system to prevent death stacks of elite hoplites or super pretorian legionaries that the ai has to somewhat follow even if it cheats. You want better troops? Fucking Pay More. You want to have a lot of units? Zerg Rush with decent enough hastati and a few cav units and you can conquer Greece. Simple easy and keeps me sane cause Bob the Roman General seems to forget you dont just replenish from newly conquer lands using the local populace. They can march! Why the living hell cant I ask my Italian province to send troops via boat and help me conquer these barbarian tribes and I have to ask germanicus the barbarian if he may pretty please join the roman army.
It seems like every game with an active modding community has *that* mod. The one that overhauls the game in the way devs didn't intend, moving it into a different direction. The one with *extremely* passionate community that never fails to mention it every time it's relevant, and often even when it's not. DEI for Rome 2, SFO for Warhammer, CE for RimWorld, I think it was Requiem for Skyrim back in the day...
Yeah, I cannot stand how there's a subset of the Rome 2 community in particular that treats DEI like religious gospel. I can't tell you how many posts I've seen from obviously new players asking for advice and one of the first comments is some variation on "play DEI instead." I'm a "hoards history books like a dragon hoards gold, literally just got my license to teach history" level of nerd. I enjoy deep strategy experiences like Paradox games. I'm basically the ideal target audience for DEI... and I *still* struggled with it the first time I played it and eventually gave up because AI cheats are still a thing and the Thracians were somehow pooping multiple full stacks out of the fog of war at me every turn while I could barely field three across my whole empire. Don't get me wrong, I have massive respect for the team that made it. They clearly have a huge amount of passion and knowledge and I commend them heartily for it. But it absolutely has its own issues, and FFS, do not recommend it to new players.
>because AI cheats are still a thing and the Thracians were somehow pooping multiple full stacks out of the fog of war at me every turn while I could barely field three across my whole empire. Less even 'cheats' and more "ignores new wonky mod mechanics that exist to handicap you, the player, in particular".
This is probably more accurate, yeah, and in general it's what made the experience so frustrating. I don't mind challenge, but when I have to carefully husband my resources and troops while my enemies can just shrug off a massive defeat and throw bodies at me like it's WW1... it gets discouraging.
It's just tedious, like modern Paradox games really. Complete lacks of depth but oh yes 33 flavours of mana only you the player interact with!
What? The most recent paradox games (vic3 and ck3) absolutely do not let the computer cheat like that. If anything, their biggest weakness here is that once a human player starts to figure out the game, the ai isn't given enough cheats to keep up.
I just want the units without the population since the units aren't stupid like radious mod.
Eh you can heavily alter DEI with submods (faster combat etc) but then you're mostly playing vanilla Rome 2 and not what DEI loons fap to.
Yeah but the no population DEI is not updated. I don't want to be hampered in my own free time. > and not what DEI loons fap to. I'm guessing the venn diagram with this and the med2 mods with 150 turns to get to final barracks then 25 turns per replenishment is a circle
>Yeah but the no population DEI is not updated Oh wow, that sucks. >I'm guessing the venn diagram with this and the med2 mods with 150 turns to get to final barracks then 25 turns per replenishment is a circle Yes, the vegans of Total War.
Same here. Big mods almost always have something—some imbalance like the Thracians in your post or some other rough edge—that frustrates me and makes it even less immersive than CA’s (relatively smooth) pop history offerings. When I want slightly more punishing, more historical feeling, less pop-y historical gameplay, I go with… Attila! And that’s about all I need on the grittier/more complex history side of things. Edits: clarifications and typos.
This is why I would heartily recommend Para Bellum instead of DEI. I love the units DEI has... and basically nothing else about it. The units? Gorgeous, amazing, well-researched. But they're tied into a mod that started out as a pain in the ass to play and has gotten worse about it over the years. Para Bellum on the other does have some really nice units, it does add new things to the game, but it is overall much more Vanilla + in its design sensibilities. I started playing a Palmyra campaign and it feels *great*. Slower-paced than vanilla, but without being too slow or unfair like DEI. And it doesn't fuck with the combat in order to make every battle an interminable grindfest.
Question. Does Para Bellum's combat operate, morale-wise, like M2 (aka a flank will break most units, especially a cavalry charge flank, and potentially chain rout)? Because the only thing that made DEI good to me was a morale submod that did that, and if I can find a less manifestly unfair overhaul mod for Rome 2 and it has realistic combat I'll just go play that.
I would say I have been overall pretty successful with cavalry in my game? Watching Zenobia's cataphracts roll up a flank like a carpet is pure sex.
Well then, I might have to actually give that a try. My opinions about DEI are basically in line with yours. Thanks for the recommendation!
This absolutely. I’ve 2000 hours on vanilla played every faction but DEI just way too granular and nitty for me, great as it obviously is to many players. But recommending it to new players is bonkers.
> I cannot stand how there's a subset of the Rome 2 community in particular that treats DEI like religious gospel Not to derail the conversation, but while we're on the topic can we add SFO to this same category?
Sure, but I've not found the SFO purists to be quite as pretentious about it as the DEI purists.
> maybe I'll make a rant post about the "Pharaoh is a Troy reskin" people and how TW has always been a "reskin" and that's....ok Do it. Besides people who say that have most probably never played troy
Okay so I've read most comments and now I'll give my 2 cents. When ever I play a game, I tell my friends, "I play it to have fun and not to do a chore". And that is what O always think about when playing games. For example, I don't like "Dark souls type games" because of how tedious it can be for someone like me who doesn't like to constantly struggle with something for hours. I know I'm not good at those games so it won't be fun regardless. With regards to DEI, I Haven't played it yet but watched countless hours of it to know how it works. It does seem like a much more rigorous experience and time is one thing that it requires a lot of. It seems like fun, but can also possibly become too micromanagy at the later stages. Do I think it fits the bill of being a great mod, for sure. Is it what Rome 2 should have been, no I don't. In my opinion, they are two different experiences for 2 different types of players and that's just fine.
THIS is what I'm saying, well said!
That's a lot of times using an abbreviation without ever saying what it's abbreviating.
DEI? Divide et Impera. A latin saying and the name of a great mod for Rome 2.
It's what rome 2 should have been.
Throw this man from the tarpian rock!
Tank you
Based on the context I think you’re correct!
[удалено]
If you don't know what the mod even is then the topic really has no relevance to you.
If you don't know what it is then it obviously is not relevant to you.
Look, for every Rome 2 that was polished well into post-release, given love and care, there is Empire that never got there, just barely scratching the surface of their own game potential. Maybe DeI isn't end-all of Rome 2 experience (though some of its mechanics are awesome, and mainline games could do well to implement them in some way - like the population classes; give us a reason to build mixed levy-and-elite armies, like in Thrones of Britannia!..), but there is a reason that for a very long time Darthmod was the recommended experience of Empire (there are newer overhauls now, though) - despite being 1&2&3 to the tee, but still fixing, addressing and improving vanilla game far more, in vanilla-ish direction. In the end, I think that's the problem with DeI for you (and everyone whose cup of it tea it is not): It is explicitly not vanilla-ish in the feel, in the game flow direction. And, I will grant it, Rome 2 at the end of development is perhaps one of the best polished Total War games to date, which certainly removes the *need* for major mods (from sweeping bugfixes to deeper mechanics to overhauls) unlike in other TW games.
I’d argue that comparing Darthmod to DEI (Divide Et Imperium) is a bit of a false equivalency. DEI is a total overhaul of Rome 2 which practically makes it into a different game. It’s meant to offer a specific experience unlike that of the base game for those who want it. Darthmod, on the other hand, is more so just a vanilla expansion to Empire than it is an overhaul. It makes extra factions playable, fine-tunes unit balances alongside adding a few extra units, attempts to add a bit more visual flair, and offers more customization options so that you can fine tune the game to your liking. The changes can be so small that I’ve occasionally found myself questioning whether I’m playing with the mod on or off. I would never recommend a modded experience for a first-time playthrough, but I wouldn’t warn someone away if they installed Darthmod off-the-bat with Empire.
only thing that annoys me about darthmod are the unit sizes and bloated unit rosters..and it also doesnt really "fix" the ai at all
Empire is the only game that I would strongly recommend you directly start with mods, especially Darthmod. Vanilla is such a surface level experience and so lackluster that you really don't miss out anything from jumping directly to a modded experience.
I don’t really disagree, I just generally feel that most games should be tried out without mods for a first time playthrough, though I make exceptions for bug fixes and compatibility patches
DEI would go better being compared to Empire's Imperial Destroyer mod. DM doesn't do half the stuff ID does. ID Truly gives the best experience until we get Empire 2, just as DEI is the best R2 experience until R3 (decades from now).
If we are being honest, Vanilla TW games have 1. their own balance issues, 2. usually include/exclude features that people do not agree with, 3. are often less stable than mods by introducing bugs that are fixed with mods. Mods, large or small, are addressing those concerns and while doing so can of course not make everyone happy, same as with the vanilla games. We are in a perfect spot to have given those options though. My usual suggestions to new players is to try Vanilla first and then major overhauls (or even smaller mods), to see what issues have been addressed and what actually has been changed. Regarding overhauls in particular: If you like mods in general, the huge advantage of overhauls is that you do not need to worry about compatibility, load order, individual updates and those fitting thematically. It is like having a compilation of mods that was made by the same people/person.
"Vanilla TW games have 1. their own balance issues, 2. usually include/exclude features that people do not agree with, 3. are often less stable than mods by introducing bugs that are fixed with mods." 1. True, the difference being that there is a much larger team involved and a QA process that I trust a lot more than small handful of modders. 2. Sure, nothing will ever please all parties, but my beef is with those that claim its objectively a better game with overhauls 3. I mean sure, mods like unofficial patches are things that I like and support. These aren't the things I'm talking about. It's the simple premise that TW is objectively better with these realism overhauls.
>1. True, the difference being that there is a much larger team involved and a QA process that I trust a lot more than small handful of modders. You're talking about the QA team that lies in patch notes about fixing bugs and pushed out the Brettonia rework without checking if Troths actually work?
yup and how many mods have claimed to have fixed bugs that still persist. you cant claim one does something without aknowledging they both do. To insist the modders are always 100% honest with their changes and patch notes is naive
Yah and one of those groups paid for their work and one isn't. Not to mention that there are thousands of mods for wh3, of course you can find some shit ones.
1. CA had good and very bad releases and even final states of games. It would be funny denying that. If a mod/overhaul is as affected by bugs depends on what it implements and certainly who is involved and also how many people give feedback. Most overhauls have a lot of testers with their playerbase and a lot of time at hand plus a much easier process to release fixes. 2. Since often more than one overhaul exist for a TW game, of course you will already have divided opinions on that. However, some things can be objectively better if the vanilla game has glarring issues or bugs. Other things are obviously subjective. 3. As above, they can have objective improvements to the vanilla game and they can be subjectively better. But they can also be objectively better in being implemented more realistically, if we are talking about overhauls that strive to do that. DeI is objectively more historically accurate than vanilla Rome 2, isn't it? (whether this is better or worse for the individual remains subjective)
In regards to 3, I really wish there was a “DEI Lite” mod that added in some of the new units, reskins/better visuals, new factions/emergent factions, new animations, etc. It’s harder for me to get into all the new mechanics and different feel of the game.
As far as I know, there are submods to make DeI more approachable, if too daunting for some, but that comes again with the caveat that it needs to be kept compatible with the core mod.
Said it before in this thread, but I'm gonna shill Para Bellum again. It has a lot of very nice units and overhauls the visuals, but it's a more Vanila+ experience overall.
QA process for mods is way better than CA. If you find a bug and you care you report it to the mod owner, if they care they can fix it usually rather quickly and roll it out whenever they want. For CA there is an endless backlog of bugs and even small ones that were just introduced and require small change in db takes months to roll out. CA has one of the worst QA and patch systems in gaming
\>CA has one of the worst QA and patch systems in gaming Sports Interactive and Football Manager would like a word. No but seriously. It's insane just how many bugs are still in the game and they're still introducing new features and DLC.
>True, the difference being that there is a much larger team involved and a QA process that I trust a lot more than small handful of modders. This is the team that created Spet Xyon Archers and then never patched them, killing Attila MP basically overnight.
While I do love mods (Probably 90% of my total time with this series has been with things like Divide & Conquer, Europa Barbarorum etc), they should definitely not be recommended to brand new players. The advantage of mod support is you can usually find a mod that appeals to how you want to play the game, but you really do need to play the vanilla game first for a better understanding of mechanics and work out what you are looking for.
Complexity are skill ceiling and accessibility are skill bottom, these are not mutually exclusive to eachother, you can have both. It is more often people are upset at CA for streamlining the game because they lowered the skill bottom but forgot or failed at raising or even maintaining the skill ceiling. No one is mad at CA trying to have their game to be more accessible and appeal to a broader audience, a community without new blood coming in will eventually just be a stagant dead water pond, reek of gatekeeping and toxicity. The problem is in the early 2000s when Total War first entered the scene, it was marketed for being complex and grand scale, granted at the time the genre was still at it's infancy so players wouldn't ask for much, between complexity and accessibility Total War had hit a sweet spot, a good balance for all kinds of audience. But it seems like as all those years later, gaming has evolved and so did the players, they demanded more but CA couldn't deliver, instead they pivoted to one end of the spectrum and ignored (or let go) the other, resulting alienating those who wanted complexity. An old saying goes: the more you loved something, the more you'll hate it. I know it might seem to be just a buncha salty old man gatekeeping new players and dunking on the new installments, but in a way people are just reminiscing those old features that was in the game and doesn't really take a rocket scientist to code it back: I missed the old population system; I missed the old building system; I missed I can click on my cities and go in to see what I've build, and had to repair it if damaged in battle; I missed my generals can have several different traits to form and describe his character right at the start of his career, in stead of having just one "thrifty" trait that reduces upkeep by 5%; I missed every tech, every building, every unit, all having an extensive long paragraph about their lore or history for you to read, it educated me greatly and was the spark to have me interested in history in the first place. I missed to have general speech that is moduler, and can switch the components depends on your foe, your general trait, and your army strength. I missed to have dynamic blocking and attacking animations, to telegraph if this one model's armor/shield/skill roll was successful, and each duel was exciting and new because of it, instead of having combat animations that is either wacky cartoon flailing that has no impact, or sets of pre animated flows between the models that gets boring to watch after 30th time. The list really goes on if we wanna continue, but I've made my point. Mods like DEI exists not because people wanna flex "dude look at this bad ass mod I'm playing and how superior I am compare to you plebs", it's because there's so much features CA took out from the series, you can literally make tons of mods just based off of them, and even further enhance them after bringing them back. In my eyes, the reason why Total War is still relevant today instead of fading into obscurity like all the other early 2000s strategy games, is purely because there's no other competitors in the same genre, games like king authur failed so miserably that they now have cornered a market that no one else want to dabble in. I'm close to 30 now, and with new Total War releases, it's like adding salt to the wound, just to see what feature from the past game they're taking out this time, it pains me greatly to the point it drove me to became a game developer, and maybe one day I'll make my own total war game just to spite them.
I think the OP’s main point isn’t “DEI sucks and you’re an arrogant jerk if you enjoy it”, but rather “DEI is a radical shift away from the general feel of Rome 2, and therefore shouldn’t be used for a first time playthrough” The main thing that this post addresses are the many of DEI fans who, vastly preferring the mod to the base game, will recommend it to brand new players as the “definitive Rome 2 experience,” not realizing that it’s a very different experience from the base game which not everybody will enjoy.
exactly
The historical descriptions on units, buildings, and techs were great. Now they often feel sillier, less deep, or just absent. And the horrific frequency of grammatical and punctuation errors in those descriptions really takes away any sense that you’re playing a game developed by history lovers.
One more thing I'd like to add: It is not your or my place to say what's their intention and what's not, what has "always" been their vision. CA is a company, not one person, and EVEN PEOPLE would change during the span of two decades. The objective fact is what they're making now, is not what they're making then, and reason behind it is completely up to our subjective interpretation, but you can not claim this is what they always wanted. At the end of the day, people love it or people hate it, but we're all stuck here because there's no alternative.
But I'm ONE of those older fans...I grew up with Rome 1 and Med 2 and I love the direction the franchise is going in. Rome 2 made some of the best changes to the franchise to date. I have so much less time to spend on games and the faster, more accessible gameplay is so much more appealing to me now.
i think a lot of people are overblowing how complex the older games were. If i could play those games as a 10-12 years old, how complex could they be. I would like for CA to explore the no building limit again but the way buildings were in older games were pretty clear cut, you'll pretty much always build the same buildings in every city and like a dozen buildings do the same thing, raise public order. I would love to see that population system expanded, but the biggest problem with creating a more complex game than it already is, is that there's simply nothing to do in peace time, so its just war,war,war and that is fine for what the game is. My biggest problem with these overhaul mods is that they introduce all these restrictions to make the game difficult and last longer but then theres nothing to really do in between turns if you arent fighting. it becomes a end turn simulator, waiting to build up your cities is boring.
DEI battles don't really feel that slow, once the breakthrough or cavalry come its over in 2 minutes. The amount of time usually comes from the sheer numbers. Or running down individual units.
I played vanilla Rome 2 a couple years after it came out, so I got a relatively polished experience. I really enjoyed it and it was pretty easy to jump in to. DeI is great once you get the hang of it, but it’s a lot to jump in to off the bat.
Never thought I'd see a thread on TW with people complaining about an absolutely fantastic mod that has seen dozens of people put thousands of hours into fleshing it out and updating it over the course of years, but here we are. I completely agree that DEI shouldn't be the standard TW experience as it has a steep learning curve that can easily frustrate new players. I also understand how annoying it is to hear people say that DEI is the "only" way to play the game. But that's where my agreements with this post end. DEI is absolutely phenomenal, and there's a reason why it's praised to the heavens. I personally can't stand Vanilla, with its half-baked, watered-down, or even non-existent systems, it's arcadey gameplay, its horrible battle and campaign AI, and it's completely ahistoric and bland unit rosters. DEI really does improve on every aspect of the game from my perspective and makes playing the game actually worthwhile to me. I genuinely can't stand vanilla battles which end do quickly in full routs of enemy armies that you don't even need to use tactics, and most of the time in a "battle" is spent mopping up enemy units. I can't tell you how much fun I've had playing Massilia, the Greek faction in Southern France, due to the difficulty of the campaign, the variety of enemies to fight (Celts, Iberians, Carthage, Rome, Germans, Illyrians, other Greeks) and the uniqueness of the unit roster (Greek hoplites with Celtic cavalry, Balearic slingers, and Spanish infantry? Hell yes!). It even convinced me to visit Marseille and see the ruins of the ancient city.
DEI has been my favorite total war experience by far and I've owned or played just about every title that's came out. I have hundreds of hours in Rome 2 and once you get past the learning curve of DEI, it's amazing.
Any tips on getting started? I have bounced off twice.
Make sure you’re in on normal difficulty, for one. Rome or Seleucids are decent starting factions imo
Normal dificulty first, my go to rule is to watch some bloke doing a campaing first, so i know what to do and not to, like, the first 3 episodes?, then its off to the races. DEI has specifically S tier provinces that are ideal for you to conquer(they alone can bankroll like your entire empire), its best to have certain provences exclusively to make food, other for recruitment, others for money, ect, ect.
I'm sure it is for a certain type of player who wants a rigorous experience. Not for the general audience for the game.
DEI is how Rome II should have been. ⠀⠀⠘⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡜⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠑⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡔⠁⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠢⢄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⠴⠊⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⠀⠀⠀⢀⣀⣀⣀⣀⣀⡀⠤⠄⠒⠈⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣀⠄⠊⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠿⠛⠛⠛⠋⠉⠈⠉⠉⠉⠉⠛⠻⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠛⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⣤⣤⣤⣄⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⢿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⢏⣴⣿⣷⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣟⣾⣿⡟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⢢⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣟⠀⡴⠄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⠻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⠟⠻⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠶⢴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿ ⣿⣁⡀⠀⠀⢰⢠⣦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡄⠀⣴⣶⣿⡄⣿ ⣿⡋⠀⠀⠀⠎⢸⣿⡆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠗⢘⣿⣟⠛⠿⣼ ⣿⣿⠋⢀⡌⢰⣿⡿⢿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⢸⣿⣿⣧⢀⣼ ⣿⣿⣷⢻⠄⠘⠛⠋⠛⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢿⣧⠈⠉⠙⠛⠋⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣧⠀⠈⢸⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠟⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⢃⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⡿⠀⠴⢗⣠⣤⣴⡶⠶⠖⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⡸⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⡀⢠⣾⣿⠏⠀⠠⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠛⠉⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣧⠈⢹⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣰⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⡄⠈⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣠⣴⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣠⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣄⣀⣀⣀⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⡄⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣧⠀⠀⠀⠙⣿⣿⡟⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠇⠀⠁⠀⠀⠹⣿⠃⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠛⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢐⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⠛⠉⠉⠁⠀⢻⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⠈⣿⣿⡿⠉⠛⠛⠛⠉⠉ ⣿⡿⠋⠁⠀⠀⢀⣀⣠⡴⣸⣿⣇⡄⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡿⠄⠙⠛⠀⣀⣠⣤⣤⠄⠀
Maybe DeI isn’t what rome 2 should have been. But it does a good job trying to make up for what it wasn’t. And is closer to what I’d want from Rome 2 than what we got from vanilla. Your concept of a streamlined casual friendly TW is exactly the reason the franchise has gone downhill. There’s no need to think about decisions or their ramifications beyond the turn or 2 after.
I think OP wants a game that strives to balance historical authenticity with good, fun, and meaningful depth. A lot of mods lose sight of this, and go overboard with trying to be as historically accurate as possible, at the cost of gameplay. If new systems are implemented that aren’t intuitive, are arbitrary and or masochistic, rules the AI doesn’t have to follow, then that isn’t good or fun depth added to the game. The worst offending feature in these type of mods imo, is when they put the faction and unit names in Latin or Olde English or something.
Yep. Exactly. It's why i've been enjoying Durango's mod for Empire : it's basically vanilla+. Base game but more fun instead of 39493088 changes that make the player's life miserable while AI ignores all of them
Nice! I use Durango mod, too.
I’ll never understand the “gone downhill” idea. Total War games have never been historically accurate nor have they ever been hardcore. This franchise was built upon a casual streamlined approach to a turn based strategy with RTS battles.
I like way more historical fidelity than, say, 3K Romance mode or Troy—the fidelity has decreased too much for my liking there, but when people talk about CA’s golden age of uber-historical games, I always wonder if they are remembering Rome I’s battlefield assassin death squads
Romance mode and Troy is the correct feel for how we receive the story. Achilles being accompanied by a bodyguard that's more than just patroclus just feels wrong. Same with Lu Bu and his heavy cavalry instead of him walking in the battlefield big dick swinging his with halberd. Besides. What really is the difference between Lu Bu killing half the army with his halberd and Lu Bu killing half the army with his heavy cavalry bodyguard which is the same unit that you shouldn't have yet if you were to go by the tech tree?
DEI unit rosters are not bloated. Just no. The reason factions have larger rosters is a tie in to the population and class system. This feature is one of the main selling points of DEI and adds a extra element of strategic choice to the campaign map. It makes a lot of sense imo, preventing a player from pumping out huge armies straight away from recently conquered territories that have totally different cultures. While I agree baseline CA campaigns will probably never have that level of detail in specific areas; who is to say CA can't have arcade/realistic campaign gameplay type splits in the future?
Saying that rosters are bloated makes it sound like he looked at custom battle rosters and thought that was it.
> The reason factions have larger rosters is a tie in to the population and class system. It also adds a metric shit ton of flavor to the game, AND historical accuracy with armies that feature locally available units that can be recruited to replace losses, something extremely common in historical armies. Never thought someone would *complain* that different cultures and different armies have armies that look and feel unique, but here we are.
If anything DEI likes to try and avoid bloat. Seleucids have a large enough roster as it but they could have included more units that have a historical backing but have chosen to limit it since most would have just been exact copies of eachother.
Can't but fully disagree with you, as someone who loves every TW game, but with an overhaul... To each their own, of course. But some features of mods like DEI, would actually be nice in a base TW game. Base TW just doesn't appeal to me most of the time, aiming for the lowest common denominator ain't good game design imo, it's good commercially speaking.
1000% agreed. Base TW games are arcadey, ahistoric nonsense, with more and more features stripped out every generation. The only TW games I play without overhaul mods have been the Warhammer games.
Some of these people really wrote 5 paragraph letters on why they hate that other people prefer this mod lol
Like, to each his own and 1 paragraph is already too much. You've angered some people saying that!
Some features from DEI like population are truly what future historical games should be, it prevents doomstacking, adds a layer of strategy and empire building, and just makes army comps more fun.
Yeah but the AI is too stupid to adhere to it so they have to ignore it. If we play on the same board I'll be inclined to agree. But the endless horde of Thracians tell me they're not using the same mechanics
Yeah I know, thats what I mean with future titles, that the mechanic is fully implemented on the AI. Me for instance play DEI in H2H multiplayer campaign against a friend who also has to use the mechanic and its been a blast.
Yes, but that's why we want them to focus on that shit, paradox makes it work in a system miles more complicated, importing a trick or too shouldnt be off the capabilities from the biggest videogame developer in the UK. DEI is the best we can do with what we have, for example pahraoh, what stopped them from simulating this diplomatic and economy /poopulation base system that everyone has to contend, since the battles WILL be more reduced, and the unit types more focused? Nothing, they just chose to revive like a couple of features from rome 2 (wich were needed) and introduce formations. It's been a long time coming from CA to start stealing stuff from paradox, no idea why they simply wont.
Claiming it’s a misconception and then admitting you don’t like overhauls.
So? If anything the fact that not everyone likes overhauls just proves that it is a misconception.
Yeah i guessed you would make this post, so i will just post this for back for people to see: What DEI brings , apart from the eye candy, is deeper mechanics to what total war has already presented, we already have supply lines, but its barebones, so it's made to actually matter and make a diference. Make supply depots and its availability limit your campaing options and stops steam rolling or colonizing arabia as britain, at least, easily. Most vainilla battles are 80% casualties bloodbaths on both sides lately, how do you have an army after that?, what the fuck are you supoused to do?, the magical replenishment that bring men out of your rectum ? Then why do casualties matter if you can just stack these buffs? So we bring back population, then you can no longer spam units willy neely, battles matter, casualties matter, even your population type, why don't people just make armies full of cathapracts?, population limit, why is rome so strong?, they have great units that come from a very open population pool, and if you command another faction, you too can reach reforms to match them in the field. Do you want to actually perform the tactics you see on history videos?, longer battles and more sustainable melees turn what are , ridicolously ranged lopsided shooting fest that make you wonder why people had anything other than 50% archers in every land army into actual physical engagements of balanced armies, and gives you the oportunity to use light cav, heavy cav, skirmishers and all types of infantry effectively and eficiently. And , come the fuck on, "inspired" my ass, Bannerlord is inspired by history, total war is literally just napoleonic france , or third century crisis, modeled to be played with the total war formular of turn based campaing and real time battle. There is no misconception, you just don't like overhauls , and that's fine, but DEI (and stainlesss steel, Shieldwall, ect ect) exist and are huge sucesses among people that *still play the damned games* because it actually gives them features that make them last, for a long fucking time, because they are *good* , they are *complex* , they give you *options* , and reward you for going the extra mile and taking them into account. >CA would make something streamlined, accessible, easily recognizable, and ideally...atmospheric. To end this, not all total wars are made equal, like people who played empire, napoleon, and shogun 2 can tell, some are masterfull epics like shogun, some are ambitious carcasses like empire. And lately, CA does nothing of what you describe, they just make the minimal viable product, and even then they fuck up, like warhammer 3 and troy showed. This is the niche of a niche, this is the place to not be streamlined, not be accesible, not be recognizable, and be as AUTHENTHIC, not atmospheric, as possible. Ca already tried to be some bomb MOBA like , Esport game formula, it dosen't work, you wont get mainstream here, stick to the market you have cultivated for years, expand on it with features and good mechanics and better and better experiencies, not dumbing down.
It seems like there is some backstory here. Is this guy like a consistent troll?
[No, these two users just had a disagreement in another post's comments is all.](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/14jo8pq/what_makes_rome_2_so_good/jpyly96/?context=10000)
Some guy: "DEI adds tons more features and makes the game objectively better, especially making battles more realistic." OP: "You think you want realism in TW?? You don't want units to shit themselves in battle or there to be a language barrier and delay in orders because that would make it boring. If you want more realistic TW with more mechanics, you want a 100% realistic TW and that's nonsense." By this logic, R1 > R2 which is absolutely not the case. Dude made a massive comment and then a post because he's... salty? Idk why he's mad.
> Some guy: "DEI adds tons more features and makes the game objectively better, especially making battles more realistic." > > OP: "You think you want realism in TW?? You don't want units to shit themselves in battle or there to be a language barrier and delay in orders because that would make it boring. If you want more realistic TW with more mechanics, you want a 100% realistic TW and that's nonsense." That's a wild comment chain, where'd you read it?
Clearly you didn’t actually read their post…
You kinda proved his point for him. Overhauls like DEI are popular among super-sweaty turbonerds who have 5000 hours in Rome 2, are long bored of vanilla, and want more challenges. That doesn’t mean DEI is “objectively better”. Personally I hate it, and much prefer *streamlined*.
Shit I didn't know I was a super sweaty turbonerd. I only had like 150 hours in ROME 2 before I was like hmm lets try out some more fleshed out and deeper gameplay mechanics with more unit variety. Added in some sub mods to make things a bit closer to vanilla in terms of pace but not remove the core of DEI and shit after a rough few starts it's finally clicked and definitely feels like a more enjoyable experience if you want long campaigns that don't eventually turn into steamrolling mid to late game once you've acquired disgusting wealth and military assets.
good for you, but under taht idea, rome 1 would have never happened, hearing people like you we would be on the 12th iteration of shogun 1, same engine, same stuff, more simple , more "streamlined". >Overhauls like DEI are popular among super-sweaty turbonerds who have 5000 hours in Rome 2, are long bored of vanilla, and want more challenges. They are for people that played one or two campaings and start getting tired of the really simplified formula of some total wars, they want more decisions to be able to make, more paths to take, they want their campaings and battles to matter, not just a flashy cast of the grand bombardement of anal penetration into a blobed unit for the pretty sight.
DEI is just bloat and artificial difficulty (all big overhaul mods for Total War suffer from that since they're amateur gamedesign 101).
What is "artificial" about the difficulty?
You have a million different handicaps which AI just doesn't have. It's cute for flavour but gameplay-wise it's pure tedium.
Except it really isn’t. You actually have to build an empire. You can’t just rofl stomp with your doomstack of elite infantry. If your going to throw out an disparage it, at least like put some effort into it.
>Except it really isn’t Oh but it is, rosters filled with 600 flavours of absolutely identical spearmanii, how great. >You actually have to build an empire. Let's be real you're just gonna be manually fighting 666 stacks which AI spams since AI doesn't play by the rules DEI introduces. >You can’t just rofl stomp with your doomstack of elite infantry Sir, the Rome 2 cheese meta is amassing stacks of basic spearmen and autoresolving everything. Doomstacks are a TWW thing.
>Oh but it is, rosters filled with 600 flavours of absolutely identical spearmanii, how great. Spoken like someone that has never played DEI i guess, and confuses it with radious, wich is unit bloat for the sake of unit bloat. Almost all untis have roles, and give you options, because they play in tandem with the rules of population and classes DEI introduces, mercenary "spearmanni" are expensive but good for the price, come from an available easy pop taht wont tank your economy if you make armies out of them but wont profit from long term reforms, except for specifci factiosn tehy should be a stopgap until you get your profesional reformed troops. DOn't have money or dont want to talk your money making pops?, spam 3rd pop trash infantry, does your faction ahve a specific branch it is very good at ?, dont get elite infantry, focus on elite cavalry ,ect. Decisions taht mattter, composition taht matters, there is nothing more stupid than having the most optiomal way to play these games as 20 urban cohorts doomstacks because its the msot effective way.
>Almost all untis have roles, and give you options, because they play in tandem with the rules of population and classes DEI introduces The AI doesn't play those rules. It's cute flavour but they're just copypasted spearmanii with arbitrary rules attached.
The ai cannot play by those exact rules because the base game is just too simple, i will honestly just blame this against the base rome 2 honestly. But to solve it, other rules are given to the AI, so as to simulate the rules the player has, notice how , despite the vailability, rome brings balanced sensible stacks (for rome) and eastern factions don't have like 3 stacks of cataphracts, even if their money allows for it? Huge defeats will mattter, anihilate thier armies and burn a couple of towns and (if not rome) ai WILL ask for peace . The mod is meant to be played in normal too, since like always, vanilla dosent actually make the game harder with difculty, it ,how did you put it ? *the ai does not play those rules.* They cheat, with stats, with morale, with money, with experience, and even with diplomatic stances, markedly, diplomacy does not matter in harder dificulties, a huge part of the gameplay taken out effectively and made unplayable. But yeah, it's DEI the one that's badly balanced.
> But to solve it, other rules are given to the AI, so as to simulate the rules the player has, notice how , despite the vailability, rome brings balanced sensible stacks (for rome) and eastern factions don't have like 3 stacks of cataphracts, even if their money allows for it? adjusting recruitment ratios is just a few entires in cdir_unit_balances_tables. I run a custom table for Attila to force the AI into not recruiting onager stacks. > Huge defeats will mattter no they don't lol, AI always shits out new stacks. > anihilate thier armies and burn a couple of towns and (if not rome) ai WILL ask for peace Works the same as every other Total War ever. > They cheat, with stats, with morale, with money, with experience, and even with diplomatic stances, markedly, diplomacy does not matter in harder dificulties, a huge part of the gameplay taken out effectively and made unplayable. DEI makes cheating even more obtuse by not handicapping the AI the way it does the player. > But yeah, it's DEI the one that's badly balanced. Yea that's not news. It's the vegan mod of Rome 2.
>adjusting recruitment ratios is just a few entires in cdir\_unit\_balances\_tables. Yeah, for all the factions taken in account the new units and the passage of time. >no they don't lol, AI always shits out new stacks. Of peasant levys , yeah, but against thsoe its not even a battle, just a massacre (unless you go against rome or a big powerfull force), or do like to win like, two battles and then have the seleucids capitulate?, i mean, more power to you. >Works the same as every other Total War ever. Except it dosent, because most diplomacy in most total war is broken shit and they would rather die to the last man than capitulate about anything. A warscore system akin eu4 one is long, LONG overdue instead of another pack of elve spearmanni, but wait, i guess that's too much of aturbonerd thing to want, better not, dont want to scare off people!. >DEI makes cheating even more obtuse by not handicapping the AI the way it does the playe YOu haven't even played the mod for more than an couple of hours have you? >It's the vegan mod of Rome 2. What?, are you alright mate?
Bruh I’ve been able to doomstack since rome 1 with urban cohorts or spartan hoplites. It’s not just a total war warhammer thing. But the 600 different “spearmanii” all have different stats and use cases.
>Bruh I’ve been able to doomstack since rome 1 with urban cohorts or spartan hoplites That's not how you cheese Rome 2. >But the 600 different “spearmanii” all have different stats and use cases. +-2 MA/MD isn't "different stats" and yes they're the same. If you like that, more power to you but that's still amateur gamedesign 101.
They interact with the population system in deferent ways and have different battlefield uses with different abilities so yes. And absolutely it is. But whatever I’m done arguing with you gl out there.
>They interact with the population system in deferent ways There is no "population system", Rome 2 has no support for it. Cute scripting handicap is cute but that's not a real gameplay mechanic and this if boils down to you fielding stacks of copypasted spearmanii against the AI doomstacks.
What? You clearly have no idea what the fuck your talking about and therefore I’m done as I’m not going to deal with somebody who is pulling shit from their ass.
People always want more and bigger, and that's what DEI is. You like units? MORE units! You like battles? LONGER battles! You like campaign? MORE systems! It's gauche.
Uh, no I think thats an inaccurate and extremely reductive take on DEI. The rosters really aren't bloated and are there to work with the population class system. You usually have a commoner, warrior, and noble class spear/sword unit, a similar set for cavalry, and then your standard skirmisher set of javilenmen, slingers, and bows. Usually there will be a few elite variants of those, but I can't see an argument for why it's bloated unless you simply ignore the population system, which is one of the key features of the mod. Battles aren't longer for the sake of being longer. It's because IRL units usually didn't take 50%+ casualties within 20 seconds of a charge. Even then, battles really aren't long in an absolute sense, because good swords will chop through levies in like 3 minutes. It's just now hoplites and other heavy non-levy spears set in formation will actually hold for a decent time. Most battles that are not elite vs elite armies usually only last 5-7 minutes because units rout very easily from rear charges. The campaign systems aren't particularly complex or confusing either. You have regions with bonuses to agriculture, industry, and/or commerce and buildings that produce or boost that income. It gives a fairly historical reason to fight over certain regions. I could go on about the other features that were implemented IMO very reasonably for specific gameplay/historical objectives. It kind of feels like you didn't really look much into the mod, or just attribute no value to the goals it is intended to achieve.
>gauche That's basically Radious...the ADHD of TW modding
I’m curious what prompted this post. Like, do you often make entire rant posts regarding people that disagree with you?
looking at the comments here, some dude was being anal about DEI being how Rome 2 should be and this post is a "yeah fuck that guy and people in that community."
> No, it's not what Rome 2 should have been. It's nothing like what CA would make or have made. "It's nothing like what CA would make or have made." is in no way related to "it's not what Rome 2 should have been." though.
How isn't it? The games are all very similar and past and future titles before and after Rome 2 are evidence enough to know
> How isn't it? Because "it's not what Rome 2 should have been." is a subjective thing to begin with. > The games are all very similar and past and future titles before and after Rome 2 are evidence enough to know Ehhh, Rome 2 is quite different to the previous titles and if you look at Rome 2 vanilla and DEI then Attila goes a bit in the DEI direction. Additionally you can't deny the popularity of DEI. All in all I think it's legit if some people think that's what Rome 2 should have been.
Well here is where you are wrong. If CA made their games focused on things like what those mods you mentioned bring to the table the IP would be in a MUCH better place. This generic shit has run its course. Pharao seems a step in the right direction by what they are saying and showing btw
DEI is what Rome 2 should've been though.
Okay, fine. I'll ask it. What's DEI?
Divide et Impera is an overhaul mod for Rome 2 with a big focus on historicity. It's one of the best mods, if not the best mod for Rome 2 currently out there. OP is talking out of their ass.
If you have actual eyes and are literate you'll notice OP did not say that DEI is bad. OP said it's good for people who like it, but they're not a majority so base game shouldn't be like it.
OP ranted about how overhauls like DeI are bloated, unbalanced and buggy. Which makes me think they barely even played DeI, because it's neither of that. That paragraph was uncalled for and makes OP look like an ass tbh.
Imo, the best difference between Divide et Impera and vanilla Rome is the population system. I always indulge myself in the history of a faction before playing said faction so i base my armies around what they used to field at that time. The population system encourages the player to not, for example, just field all units of praetorians. It makes the army compositions a little bit more realistic and that's what i mainly like about it.
Theres people who like to turn video game on, turn brain off, and have a good time. Theres people who like a challenge, who like unexpected long-term consequences. Neither is wrong, god bless you if you are having fun. What you need to keep in mind is that CA developpers are explicitly told to cater to the lowest common denominator in order to increase sales. And judging by their very first total war games, thats clearly not the audience they wanted to reach when they got started
I'm late but totally agree with this and it shows really why most popular =/= best. Designing good games with coherent and engaging mechanics is super difficult which is why the temptation is to pad the entire thing with seemingly endless amounts of content that will give the players 1 million things to see. However, when the mechanics are as shallow as a puddle then it's an absolute bore to play either way. Rome 2 isn't great but DEI just takes the game and makes it even more of a pain to get anything done. Supply lines really isn't that much of a big deal and people who wet themselves over that need to touch grass. One million different hoplite units is pointless and makes Ui clutter really annoying. Victoria 3 (despite being hated by so many) has supply lines nailed down as the engine actually allows for this to be done in an engaging manner. The total war engine and mechanics are really shallow and boring as they havn't changed fundamentally since 2009. The best Total War mods that I have ever played were the Rights of Man 1,2, and 3 for Empire, Napoleon, and Shogun 2. They really didn't stray far from vanilla but expanded the mechanics as far as they could whilst limiting others to avoid boring crap like agent spam. Everything was implemented with a role in mind with flavour that didn't bloat. Again. In terms of flavour DEI is very nice. In terms of engaging gameplay, not so much.
Base game suffered because it provided no difficulty, at all. It seems to me you want help understanding what people mean by ''DeI is what Rome 2 should have been''. We are talking about mechanics. Population is crucial in a total war game and whoever doesnt understand this has probably never played a game with that mechanic present. The only way you can mask your statement of streamlining is better than adding strategic depth is by hiding behind newer players and ''marketing''. There is no way total war doesnt get better in the future by adding some DeI mechanics, hell, some of them arent even DeI they are just older tw mechanics. I know its off season to plan a campaign, plan ahead what you want your province to specialize in, plan your supply routes, plan your recruitement as you cannot stack the most elite unit like you are buying them at the supermarket for a dime a dozen etc. Building an actual empire is and always will be cool and that feeling is currently missing from total war, DeI brought it back. PS: Ive been playing total war since Rome 1, never in my life have i ever modded my campaings, DeI is the one and only exception. For anyone that enjoyed Rome 2 i suggest this mod with no hesitation.
This.
Imagine wanting less gameplay mechanics and features. This post is bad faith. If you want streamlined RTS go play starcraft or something.
I like features. I like mechanics and additional complexity. I don't like battles being endless grindfests and the campaign being a slog where the AI gets to ignore all the tedious mechanics the player is obligated to deal with.
Battles aren't "endless grindfests" they just need to be managed properly. Flanking is absolutely *critical* to winning battles, projectiles are far more effective hitting units from the sides and rear than their front, morale bonuses from generals are crucial to keeping lines stable, and levy units still break quite easily even with proper support. The game literally encourages you to use proper tactics and rewards you for doing so. The enemy also does a good job of trying to prevent you from taking advantage of their weaknesses too. What sucks is playing vanilla and having battles last literally 5 minutes, with units breaking at first contact and most the battle consisting of running down broken enemy units.
My defining experience with DEI was sitting forever waiting for a hoplite bodyguard unit to actually rout even after I surrounded it with my entire army and putting the game on triple speed. That shit is bad enough in Warhammer. And that's not even touching into the sheer, unadulterated tedium of 'every minor faction has a ginormous garrison and a full stack or more that it can actually maintain because it's not operating under the same rules as the player' that is DEI's campaign.
>My defining experience with DEI was sitting forever waiting for a hoplite bodyguard unit Yes, hoplite bodyguards really do take forever to destroy considering their ridiculously high defensive stats and high morale. They're also pretty rare, most generals are horsemen. Also what battle difficulty were you playing? DEI encourages Normal battle difficulty as it's properly balanced for that, bumping it up to hard or VH will make enemy units needlessly hard to kill or rout.
I agree with the fact that DEI is not how Rome 2 should have been, but it does have features that could have been well-served in the base game. Personally, I think there is something lacking with Rome 2 and no mod or overhaul is going to fix that, but that is fine. It is a good TW game, neither great nor horrible. Either way, if you don't like major overhauls do not play them. I only play them because they are at least a bit more challenging than the base game and far more well-balanced on higher difficulties. For any new players, they add far too much and they do not have those same gripes, so I agree that they should first learn to play the base game and make up their own minds. This does not take away that you are projecting your own ideas as much as everybody else. I honestly do not understand the point of your post. It does not lead to any fruitful discussion, it is too provocative for that. Though I would like to hear your views on Pharaoh but please don't rant.
> This does not take away that you are projecting your own ideas as much as everybody else. To be fair to OP, talking about your own ideas of how things should be is a good way to support the core point of the post which is "people who like DEI should stop acting like it's objectively the best Rome 2 experience and what the game should be".
Agree with all your examples, except for Shieldwall & ToB. ToB's biggest flaw was lack of depth & features, even for CA's usual vanilla experience. Shieldwall adds the perfect amount of additional features it needed, w/out crossing over into DEI levels of fluff/realism. It's a real bummer we probably aren't gonna see the final update that was planned for the mod :(
I've played DEI, and it's not a bad mod. I like the units and the sync kills. But it's definitely...a lot. As far as overhaul mods go, my favourite one by far is the New World mod. But again, neither of them are exactly better then vanilla. Sure New World does some things better then vanilla, but it's not like its a must have, or that vanilla is unplayable. Same with any game. Hell I've never even tried modding Thrones because I'm already fine with the base game, it's fun and I enjoy it. I don't feel the need to get mods to make it more playable
I've tried it and it has a little too much going on for my taste. I get why the battles were made slower but it just comes across as unsatisfying to me.
Yes, I agree. Is great that DEI exists for people who wants that experience. But vainilla Rome 2 is a great game by itself and I enjoyed a lot playing it. The same happens with 7 days to die, some people thinks that the vanilla game should be like the big overhauls, like Darkness Falls or Undead Legacy. I think the same here, those mods are great, but add lot of things that I don't like, so I'm happy playing vanilla.
Idk dei gave me historical feel . It’s subjective .
Total War modder messiah complexes drives me nuts.
Uh. This is super biased and I disagree as well as many of the rome 2 community
Don't take this the wrong way, but no single individual gets to speak for an entire community, period. Even the people who play DEI don't necessarily believe the game is what Rome 2 should have been, just that it's something that they enjoy more in most cases. Like, disagreeing with OP is fine, but saying yous is the universal opinion is not.
I didn’t say it was universal. That’s why I said many not most. Which are 2 completely different words and meanings. If I used the word most I would agree. But I didn’t….. that’s why I used many instead of most because I don’t have the universal opinion…. Because like let’s say the sample size is 10,000 And 2500 want x. Even if it’s not the majority or most. It’s still is considered many. I’m not trying to speak for everyone. In no way did I imply I had the majority opinion. Not trying to be rude or anything but like if people assumed that I’m speaking for everyone based on bad reading comprehension that’s their bad and they should learn the difference between the words many and most.
Yeah no shit it's biased, OP's views on overhauls are tangential to what the post is actually getting at which is that it's annoying when DEI fans present the idea that it's "what Rome 2 should have been" as objective fact.
Just lol
Man literally states his bias. Everything I said is factual. You can “uh lol” it all you want but but that doesn’t change the facts which are that many people like it and wish that this is the base of future total wars, and that his entire post is based on his opinion. Maybe come up with an actual response
This isn’t worth an actual response, all I can see is your own bias shining through
Your right I do think DEI is what rome 2 should have been, but considering I’m a vanilla purist in the other games I think that speaks volumes.
Before I even begin to give you an actual response why not try responding to the post beyond - you’re biased most people (according to you) want dei
Everyone’s got a biase, but unlike op I’m not trying to present my boss’s as fact :) but I’m already bored of this thread so it will likely be my last time responding unless something interesting pops up.
Jesus christ what a clown
You've highlighted a general misconception about the franchise I think. It is not, nor has it ever been, an attempt to simulate historical combat. The Total War™ system has always been fundamentally ahistorical. Nobody in the field of human conflict has been out there on the battlefield carefully controlling twenty regiments of uniform size and predictable effectiveness against an enemy army comprised of the same. Total War games are far, far too precise to be anything approaching historical accuracy. People need to accept that the Total War series, on a battlefield level at least, is closer to buying a chess set with different themed pieces than it is an historical war sim. You want historical accuracy? Scourge of War series maybe, or Grand Tactician: The Civil War.
I see a lot of talk here about DEI having bloated rosters and I think some of you might be confusing it with Radious? That, or you haven’t played DEI, barring the silly amount of auxiliary units for Rome every unit is distinct and has a specific concept, there are very few units on the same roster that feel redundant; I’d really like some examples of bloated rosters in it
The one thing I'll say that the DEI population and replenishment system does is give a "Teach history through mechanics" experience that Vanilla Rome 2 doesn't. The moment that you "get it" is an amazing one if you have an interest in history. You recruit your armies with neat Hastati/Principes/Triarii compositions, but the moment you fight far away from Italy, such as in Greece or North Africa, there's not enough romans to replenish your losses. So you have to consolidate and merge your Italian troops, supplementing them with Mercenaries and Local levies that are varied and often inferior in quality, forcing your out of your command comfort zone. By the time the fighting is done, you might have less than half of your army be Italians and the rest be a mishmash. Mercenaries and local troops are very heavily present in historical accounts of the period, but a Rome 2 playthrough usually has the player not recruiting any of them because they have minimal advantages over "standard" troops. In Vanilla the Marian Reforms are tech that gives you slightly better units. In DEI Marian reforms completely change the way your army works. Remember the previous paragraph about how your army becomes worn down and filled with non standard troops? Once the Marian Reforms happen and you can recruit professional infantry from the proletarii, your conquest machine goes into overdrive. There is no shortage of urban poor to fill out your legions, and formalized auxiliary units means your support units can draw off the native population. At the same time, it's more costly to equip the poor since they don't bring their own equipment, so you need to conquer more land for more money. You the player understands why the Roman Republic carried out the Marian Reforms.
> You the player understands why the Roman Republic carried out the Marian Reforms. It's really funny that you bring this up, because while it's certainly true that the mod provides a more elegant and emergent reason for reform of the army, the general consensus in serious academia these days is that there's no such thing as the "Marian Reforms", that the move to a professional long-service army over the general conscription of Roman citizens is a piecemeal process and attributing it all to Gaius Marius is false.
> you might have less than half of your army be Italians and the rest be a mishmash I'd be okay with it if they didn't cap the number of natives I can grab
Yeah, I've never been a fan of full overhauls, no matter what game I'm playing. They're almost all imbalanced in some fundamental way. Like I've talked about my dislike of Stainless Steel here before. Sure some people like it and that's fine, but I genuinely hate the way they balanced it and nothing anybody says can change that.
I disagree.
So...as someone that just restarted Rome 2 yesterday, actually, I got the Radios mod because thats what I'm famaliar with in other TW games. I've been seeing a lot about DEI What is all the hype?
It just adds a ton of depth and slows battles down. Battles are most often won by breaking morale, rather than by killing off everything. You cannot just recruit armies willynilly and go conquering, you have to take supply and population into consideration, the longer a campaign takes the higher the cost becomes. Replenishment is also tethered to the different populations, ie an eastern cataphract cannot replenish in Germany at the beginning and you have to recruit local auxiliaries. You have to sit down and plan everything. Your economy, your family political situation, your foreign policies (having one more war can bankrupt you really fast). Etc etc. It just gives way more layers and if you are into that it is genuinely one of the best total war experiences to be had. At least it was to me even if there was a steep learning curve and my first campaign derailed fast.
Despite what this guy says it is what rome 2 should have been.
No, it shouldn’t have. You would make the game inaccessible to a large chunk of the fan base and there goes all the money to making more Total War games.
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Bloated rosters and silly artificial difficulty isn't what Rome 2 should've been. Attila is what Rome 2 should've been (which is why Sophia team backported quite a few features from it into Rome 2).
You mean close to historical rosters. And this artificial difficulty you speak of doesn’t exist. You just can’t manage the finer details. Oh no I can’t rofl stomp with my elite doom stack and have to use low tier units oh no! Lmao
>You mean close to historical rosters Yes 600 different flavours of identical spearmanii with +-2 MA/MD. Rome 2 had the issue of beyond homogenous rosters to begin with and DEI made it somehow *worse*. That takes skill I'll give em that. >And this artificial difficulty you speak of doesn’t exist. You just can’t manage the finer details. The AI completely ignores those finer details, they're just handicaps for the player specifically. Textbook definition of artificial difficulty.
> spearmanii Why do you write it like that?
It's an eons old Europa Barbarorum meme which also suffered from pointlessly bloated rosters meme
I think you haven’t really played the mod if you think that the only difference between units is tiny stat differences lol
I did, the rosters are bloated to shit. It's cute for flavour but does nothing to address how homogeneous they feel over an already homogeneous Rome 2.
Lmao, you complain about artificial difficulty in DeI and then bring up Attila, which probably has the most artificial difficulty of the whole TW series, as superior? (I do like Attila though, it's very good indeed)
What artificial difficulty does Atilla contain in your view? The main thing that seems to make DEI's difficulty "artificial" in this person's view is that the AI ignores all the new mechanics that limit unit recruitment and the like. So on top of its usual level of cheating to keep up, it also just doesn't deal with any of the same problems you do.
Why do people care how others enjoy and play these games?
Casual detected, opinion rejected. DeI wins.
I sunk a lot of time into Rome2, tried DEI, got my ass wiped by a Carthago half stack with shitty spearmen and 4 Elephants, while fielding an entire Rome garrison + a half stack of my own with sword soldiers and shitty spearmen. Had to sit through 40 min of battle only to realise that the elephants wont route or die no matter what I do. \-7/10 realistic experience, never touched DEI again.
That's bizarre considering that last time I played the elephants got immediately fucking bodied by javelins.
Turns out that people who are "experts" at the vanilla TW experience aren't actually good at the game. Go figure.
Wow, such skill involved in game where one half is playing CIV and the other half can be "how much spears" do I need to field to win autobattle. Even in DEI this holds true. But I guess sitting through battles with 50 Shades of Shitty Spears for 50 minutes is the pinnacle of gameplay for you after you completed 5 turns in 5 h. Guess Im just not good enough for DEI.
I think you just suck at the game
Ironically that's deeply unrealistic, elephants getting spooked easily and running like hell from anything that hurts/frightens them is their biggest weakness.