Hi everyone,

I wanted to give my first impression and provide feedback in terms of gameplay as well as technichal issues. I really like what I have seen in my nine hours of playing so far and want to contribute to make this an even better game :)
First of all, is there some device to report bugs directly? I am quite tech savvy and can provide specific bug descriptions.
For now I will just list them here:

1. In windowed mode, the interface does not adapt to a change of aspect ratio until the next restart

2. The description text of the slaves mentions that it can hold up to 40 slaves. That seems to only work if you capture a group that is bigger than 20; otherwise the maximum number is 20.

3. In chapter two I get a LUA exception, right after I capture the bridge west of Bratuspantium:
The instruction at 0x00000001404EDEED referenced memory at 0x0000000000000018. The memory could not be read.
Stack trace:
[C]:-1
...esources/Campaigns/Caesar2/Scripts/Bratuspantium.lua:46
Help us debug this script! Type 'clipboard(history())' to copy everything above into your clipboard, so you can send it to a dev!

4. Some weird pathing issues not only for the units but for the trade routes as well. I can not quite remember it from the top of my head, but if I can reproduce it I will certainly hand that in later.

5. The city improvements seem to do nothing. The nightwatch (and consecutive buildings) always give +0 morale which makes them utterly useless. Also, I tried to improve my recruit production which also ended in an incredible change from 2.3 per week to 2.3 per week.

In terms of gameplay, things that crossed my mind:
1. There are achievements for completing the chapters in less than x days. Maybe I overlooked it, but i could not find a calendar or something to see how much time already passed or at least get a feeling for time in the game. The same holds true for the seasons, I suspect that the icon right below the pause button represent the current season, but the tooltip justs mentions the pause button.

2. If I try to capture a city with a unit that has no food and no morale left all that is needed by the defenders is a unit with one (!) manpower to drive them away, even if that one also has no morale. Yes, they do not have any morale, but nonetheless 40 people should not be driven away by only one. That just does not feel right. In terms of mechanic maybe it should not even be possible to issue anything else than movement orders to units with no morale. Or maybe have some kind of intimidation stat that is required for routing.

3. I do not quite get the manpower reinforcements. If a unit is inside a city with the same, let's call it 'ethnicity', it will be reinforced. But if unit and city do not match, reinforcements happen nonetheless although at a much lower rate. How does this work? Is it some kind of resource transportation or does this just work the same but with lower speed?

That's it for now, I will add points here as they come along.

Gameplay 2:

Think of it as 1000 heavily armed, well fed roman legionaires walking up to a city defended by 40000 starving and dying citizens/town watch/soldiers... pretty sure they would surrender :)

Gameplay 3:
Every unit has a "Home City" that you can see from its tooltip information and which you can change (as long as the new home city as the correct ethnicity). From that city the unit (and all other units that have this city as a home city) will draw its recruits. It does not have to be in that city, it just has to be close to a city/supply line that is connected to its home city. The much lower rate you are talking about is probably due to a completely drained manpower pool of the units home city which slowly replenishes and directly sends its newly grown able men to that the unit. One way to solve this is to temporarily or permanently reassign this unit to another city of the correct ethnicity that still has some manpower left to replenish the unit more quickly.

Gameplay 2:

Think of it as 1000 heavily armed, well fed roman legionaires walking up to a city defended by 40000 starving and dying citizens/town watch/soldiers... pretty sure they would surrender :)



I agree, but in this case it was a starved roman legion of 40000 running at the sight of 1000 starved spearmen ;) It is not the numbers alone I find strange but the fact that in any comparison possible the legion would come out ahead. But it didn't, it was a simple matter of who attacked first.


Gameplay 3:
Every unit has a "Home City" that you can see from its tooltip information and which you can change (as long as the new home city as the correct ethnicity). From that city the unit (and all other units that have this city as a home city) will draw its recruits. It does not have to be in that city, it just has to be close to a city/supply line that is connected to its home city. The much lower rate you are talking about is probably due to a completely drained manpower pool of the units home city which slowly replenishes and directly sends its newly grown able men to that the unit. One way to solve this is to temporarily or permanently reassign this unit to another city of the correct ethnicity that still has some manpower left to replenish the unit more quickly.

Thanks for clarifying this. I guessed it was something to that effect, but was not quite sure.

Hello all,

Perhaps its a good idea to use this thread as a central feedback thread as now everything is spread out over numerous posts and pages making it hard for us forumnites and the devs to keep track of everything. That said, I will now contribute my own observations on H:Rome.

First off let me say that I think the Philip of Macedon and Gold games were excellent, sure they had their shortcomings but overall they were well executed. My feedback then is in part in comparison to those titles. Second, I understand that some of the things I mention here might still be WIP so my apologies if I make some redundant comments. Here goes:

Graphics:
Considering the artwork, this has been much improved in the area of 'cut-scenes' as well as the voice-over in the various intro's. The visual style is very pleasing and much better than the previous games. However, I do not feel the same towards the little 'chesspieces' and the overall UI. The sort of upper-body cut-off figurines don't seem as fitting to me as the full-bodied ones in the Greece era. The same goes for the city models which all look like grand greco-roman cities on the overhead map when in fact they are sometimes more like hovels when zoomed in. Since this is gallic territory it seems to me a more gallic city model would be more appropriate. Finally, I miss the original slavemodel I thought it was very fitting as opposed to the new one. But I suppose that is also personal taste and perhaps some are just placeholders as is mentioned which will be changed later. The other models (farms and the like) seem fine as is.

The UI then looks pretty solid with nice little sketches and the like, much more rounded out and complete, but at present it occupies too much of the screen. I play on the highest resolution and still the UI elements loom pretty large, taking up valuable screen room. It feels as if your playing the game on a much lower resolution to compensate for your graphics card. I hope these will be toned down some.

The gameworld looks impressive and much better than its Greek counterpart. It has really come to life now. Chapeau! Hopefully we can appreciate it more without the large UI elements :). When zoomed out the map is nice as well, althoug I found the red line demarqing the playing area an unwelcome addition not really adding anything usefull but detracting from the visual experience.

Gameplay:
The fast battles and lack of formations were mentioned elsewhere and is still WIP so I won't comment on that. I never realized it before how important the formations were though untill I had to fight without them and had to manually setup a battle line. This is also due to the high game speed with your enemy at your doorstep within seconds of encountering them.

I liked the fact that slaves don't seem to rebel when left to their own devices as long as they are in your own territory. Escorting slaves to mines and such always was a pain, in part due to their slow pace. On the other hand, the fact that farms and woodcutters all have to be supplied with workers/slaves seems to me a realistic but unwelcome addition to the micromanagement area. As your empire grows there is enough to do allready without worrying about that.

Cities seem to have unlimited accespoints now for supply lines. On the one hand that is a good thing as in H: Philip and H:Gold it sometimes made no sense to me why a city would have multiple mines and farms nearby but only four accespoints and thus being unable to connect them. At the same time tho I miss the orginisational element that went with constructing logical and solid supplylines with big hubs surrounded by smaller settlements.
Also, maybe I missed it but an explanation that bridges have to be connected like buildings could be handy. It took me a little to figure out.

Overall:
Lots of improvements and some regrettable losses. I will buy the game or DLC regardless simply because of its originality and scope and that by such a small dedicated team. My observations are strictly personal and I in no way intend to belittle or detract on the hard work that has been put into the game. I look forward to further improvements.

Salutations,

Uddhava

PS: I had no crashes whatsoever in about three hours play
PPS: maybe, if the forum supports its, this could be stickied so every one can post their observations here.

What do you think about bringing back visualisation (like in gold) of unit cards in grey inside cities menus of units witch are located outside the cities. It is good for knowing from within the city about witch unit it supports. It was very convinient, why it was striped?