The "drumroll" sound glitch occurred mainly when the raiders were burning a resource.

I'm still looking into this one, but we'll get it sorted out before the next update (early next week probably)

I got this error: "class GK2LanguageException. . . . . No string name found for string index Factions#ADJECTIVE."

Thanks, I've fixed it now.

Also, when I captured defeated raiders, I got a message that hostility increased with [blank--no faction mentioned].

Thanks, the raiders are a little unique and require a few exceptions from the regular rules. I've fixed this now.

I noticed at least twice, that my skirmishers seemed to leave 3-4 stragglers behind when they advanced. I don't know if this is just graphics or affects gameplay.

I'm not sure either right now, but I'll look into it. One of the big changes under the hood in Rome, is that the unit graphics have been completely detached from the underlying movement and combat. This is to help optimize all the battles going on offscreen, but it has resulted in some synchronization bugs we're still working on.

For some more general impressions, I like the more limited scope of the sandbox ...

That's exactly what we were going for so so I'm glad to hear that. When we get closer to release we'll take some votes from the community on what other sub-maps we should include e.g. Briton, Alps, Aquitania, etc. It will also be pretty easy for modders to set up their own configs.

I like the expanded skills for armies. Is the description on "Sentinel" incorrect?

Nope, the descriptions give a better idea of what the officer should do, but I haven't implemented all the functions yet.

The skill names for non-Roman armies still sounded Roman

Our original plan was to have a unique officer set for each faction group, but there's so little documentation on the other groups that it was difficult to find appropriate names/characters for them. The underlying code still supports filtering upgrades by faction group and if we get the time this is something I'l like to expand on.

Finally, is there a way to split slaves into multiple units?

Not at the moment, but I'll add it to the wishlist and we'll see what we can do.

-On the main menu, there seems to be a semi-transparent layer while the camera is flying over the map.

That is a bit of a hack right now. I wanted to do a more procedural filter, but that requires some structural changes to the rendering engine and so it's been pretty low on the priority list.

-Game freezes when trying to load ingame. Only loading from the main menu seems to work.

Thanks. We've documented this and are working on it.

The enemy AI doesn't seem to care much about their units staying idle. I can just wait until they run out of supplies and then attack them.

Yes, there's still a lot of AI work to do. This is one of the challenges we've always faced with the games because we've purposely designed it to make it difficult to leave your army in a location indefinitely.

Generally, a lot of our focus for the next update has been on the really major issues that are getting in the way of gameplay e.g. the nVidia crash and some of the quest blocking bugs. However, beyond that most of remaining focus will be on AI and balancing issues.

I captured an British port and got "no path found" when trying to make a supply line across the channel to the Belgian port (both had deep water ports).

You should be able to connect paths across the channel. To create a water route you need to hold down the right mouse button and select water route from the list. I hope to detect this more automatically in the future.

Thanks for the feedback on the supply mechanics. We've still got some balance work to do, but I'm glad you like the changes.

Edit: not sure if allowed here. gonna shoot a pm.

We're not really trying to keep things secret, so anyone is welcome to post here whether you're in the current tester group or not. The main reason we're doing this as a closed beta is so that we can pace the feedback so that we don't get overwhelmed.

We don't really use cohorts in Hegemony, each legion acts as a single unit. We brainstormed a few possible ways we could do it when we were first designing Rome, but ultimately they only complicated the game without adding any real strategy so we left them out.

You can definitely field multiple legions in the game. During the campaign, you get pretty much the same legions that Caesar documents in his writings, but in the sandbox you'll have the flexibility to recruit more based on the population of the Roman territories.