3930k @ 4.5GHz, 2 Titans, SSD and 16GB of ram and the performance is shockingly bad. I've turned off / down almost everything and I still can't get a stable 60 at 2560x1600. What's even sadder is, on the campaign map it's making my GPU hotter than any graphically intensive game could, there's something really wrong.

Also spoke to an Nvidia Rep. and CA didn't even bother adding SLI support.

Can't play the prologue campaign as when it gets to the 'taking the city from the sea' mission I get a slideshow with a FPS between 0 and 15. Awful.

And the speed they run and the speed of the boats? What were CA thinking? It looks terrible and ruins gameplay. Ok we can mod it but not in MP battles, which I spend a lot of time in in past TW games.

Very disappointed with Rome 2 and it just seems like they want to get more people playing so speed up 'the boring history game' to C&C levels will get the kids in.

Definitely looks like your experience right now depends upon the processor you're using. No slowdowns at all for me with an i7 and GTX 480, but I've heard from quite a few folks that anything less than an i5 is murder, even with an excellent video card and lots of RAM. Hopefully they'll get that sorted soon.

For a more generalized review:

After about 7 hours of playtime (skipped over the prologue after a couple of missions and went straight to the campaign):

Positives:
- Scope and scale are amazing. Not only is the map significantly larger, but it has been filled out with tons of independant kingdoms as well. Sure, they all share a generally similar cultural "pool" of units related to their local region, but it's removed the whole "mild, rebel-held province" aspects of the previous Total Wars.
- Campaign AI appears to be improved a fair amount. The AI has a tendency to aggressively assault your cities with substantial armies/navies when at war. Tactically the AI still likes to flank with cavalry, and tries for local superiority and flanking opportunites with infantry as well. Not a massive improvement over Shogun tactically, but still a mild improvement.
- Love the new army stances and the fact that you raise individual, unique armies that garner their own tradition/history through battle. I find it great that I can take the "I Legio Italica" into combat with the "Warmongers" from Gaul, and that battle will be remembered within the unit's history.
- Breaking the provinces up into regions is fairly nifty.
- Each unit seems to have a plethora of new abilities. Sometimes this is annoying (they took away the "spread out" or "close up" command for ranged units, who are now perpetually spread out), but now each unit can have upward of 3 or 4 unique abilities that provide some flexibility.
- Lots of other little changes that are a welcome relief, such as automatically transporting armies and the like. Simply too many to list right now.

Negatives:
- As has been the case since the first Rome Total War: unit movement and combat speed are simply retarded. I'd say it's worse here than in previous titles. No biggie when the inevitable mods come out, but a battle usually consists of 5-6 minutes of manuevering, and maybe 1-2 minutes of actual combat if you are flanking and the like. Haven't had much of a chance to check out the eye candy in actual combat simply because the fighting is usually over by the time I issue my commands and start zooming in.
- Yet again, the AI seems to have a fetish for ranged units. For the sake of simplicity: if you take on a typical 10 unit army for the AI, at least 5-7 of those units will be slingers/skirmishers. Sometimes the AI will deviate on this and make for a pretty good pitched battle, but the majority of my time was spent chasing down slingers with my Hastati/Principes...
- Once a faction has lost its last province, they still remain "in play" until their last army/navy has been slaughtered. Ideally this could be pretty cool if they coordinated an assault against an unsuspecting city to reclaim their faction, but they don't. Instead, they proceed to take whatever they have left and throw it at the nearest city in futile assaults. This leads to several turns worth of battles against 1 unit armies at depleted strength in which their "strength bar" doesn't even register. I'll be damned if I'm going to wait to load a battle between my 5000 strong army/garrison and their 64 strong unit of depleted slingers, but the autoresolve function now has a tendency to kill off only 30-40 of the remaining 64 folks in the battle, so you get to either chase them down repeatedly until they die, or fight such a sad battle on the tactical map if you want it done right in the first go. Annoying...

Overall: Pretty good game with a ton of potential, but I don't think you could go that far wrong if you waited a few weeks/months for the patches or mods to flesh it out some.

I would urge people NOT to buy this now. Wait and see if CA actually fix it as it is NOT our PCs at fault but their game. There are so many people having serious game-stopping problems that it cannot be anything but the game.

I think they spent all their budget on Hollywood actors and speed for the armies that they forgot they were actually making a TW game.

Unfortunately it's C&C: Rome 2... Or as someone on the TW forums said:



True dat. RIP TW.

I'd say more emotion that review in there tbh. Not trying to be hostile here, but the inability of many folks to play the game in a stable state most assuredly is a failure on CA's behalf, but doesn't make it a "COD lite". I can wholeheartedly understand the frustration though (having put up with the same thing on Shogun II until I upgraded my computer). The speed of the units and boats has been going on since Rome I, so if that's the argument than TW has been dying for years... Wait for some mods.

Never had a problem with speeds in previous games, this is unbelievable though. Mods will not fix MP, its a shambles even without unforgivable technical issues.

I'm allowed to be 'emotional', I paid for this!

I like the fact naval battles have been speed up as the previous titles the naval battles were way to slow, but the land battles are to short and my army stack is steam rolling other stacks and it can't be down to them having an experienced hero with them and that they are so experienced! They are Spartans though

Overall I do enjoy it and the land/sea battles are good.

I'm quite happy, too.

Performance is OK and the game looks quite stunning on my 2 year old system. But of course I can understand that people with decent systems are pi$$ed off if they have technical problems. A patch should be released later this week, hopefully it will improve performance for those with problems.

Naval battles are pretty cool (love ramming enemy ships! ) and the fast battle speed isn't so irritating here IMO. The land battles OTOH really suffer from a combination of high speed and countless "special abilities" that just add to the mundane workload of getting your troops to perform basic maneuvres.

The AI so far is doing pretty well against me on hard, but then I usually go for realistic tactics and try not to 'out-game' the AI.

I love it so far, sorry to hear you are having problems and not enjoying it mace.

My load times are often longer than the actual battles unfortunately. Wish combat was a bit longer / slower. My main (positive) experience was with Shogun 2 over the last month or so with Darth Mod. Maybe if I had played more of the previous titles (I've owned most but only have about 10 hours or so with each) maybe I would't enjoy this as much.

For reference I play on Very High / Ultra with I5 2500k and a gtx 480 with a few things turned off. Mostly played coop so far. Think I'll turn particle effects down tonight as smoke killed my frame rate.

Bit of a difference here... http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/total-war-rome-ii

Seems there will be a patch already on Friday:

http://steamcommunity.com/games/214950/announcements/detail/1840007428756880314

So far i bought and played every TW game but for the first time i'am very glad i did not get this one. Will wait for a lot of patches, some mods and at least 50% off before i buy it.

Empire was the same on release and Shogun is still fairly unstable on my system even now.

Sadly I think most CA engine evolution releases have suffered from bugs on release which later get patched and easy gameplay that later gets tuned by mods, Napoleon was the only recent exception, mainly because the engine barely changed from Empire.

I think maybe many people have bought the CA games later during Steam sales and didn't experience the initial release bugs and so were not expecting it, but I don't find it surprising, although I feel bad for those experiencing the unplayable framerate, bugs are one thing, but unplayable state should not make it past QA testing.

I've had every TW game from launch day and never had a problem, Shogun 2 runs silky smooth. This is more like an early access/Greenlight/Kickstarter quality game ATM.

I think you got lucky in the past then Mace, I've certainly not been as lucky, and I swore I wouldn't buy Rome2 on release because of that, but somewhere along the way I got caught up in the hype for my favorite flavor of the series

So far though I am having fun with it and seem to have a lucky h/w combo.

Hope the Fri patch fixes you up.

I am really surprised to read all the negativity here. I have had no issues at all with this game. Actually, I have been really impressed with how "right" this game seems. More so than any of it's predecessors IMO. I was expecting there to be the familiar annoyances with this game and was presently surprised to see that so much had been improved. Diplomacy works much better. Public order/city management is better. The political intrigue is something new to me and I liked how much it reminded me of reading Livy and Suetonius. The changes to armies is innovative and realistic (the units keeping their history and legacies). Graphics and frame rate are amazing with extreme settings. My only complaint I guess at this time is the speed of the battles. It is really fast paced...but I am still having fun. All of my other complaints are due to my own lack of comprehension I think. I have managed to lose a few naval battles that the odds say I should have won...I think I am just not good at using the ships yet. There are a few minor hiccups with the AI, like a previous poster mentioned with the devastated army suicidally attacking you once its faction has been destroyed. But, on the whole I am greatly pleased by this new game. I am sorry for those of you who are having performance problems. I have an I5 w/ 560ti and quite a bit of RAM and have no issues with performance

I'm noticing more slowdowns on mine after putting 6-7 hours into it. It's not gamebreaking or anything, and I haven't had any crashes. Honestly not sure why TW fans should feel like waiting, just from what I've seen.

Feels like every other TW game to me so far.

First couple of minutes are really funny:) Well, maybe not for the CA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdpIENG0Y2k

Good summary of things wrong with this game, among many others

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/79419-Rome-2-A-casualty-of-the-casual

Indeed. Excellent points.

I've spent quite a few hours with Rome 2 so far and although I enjoy the game, many design decisions are simply baffling.