Does Total War: Rome 2 Have Meaningful Battles?

A few weeks ago, I tested Volound's Rome 2 test to the best of my Rome 2 abilities and found that on Very Hard difficulty, the battle was impossible. The test consisted of 7 Gladiators, 3 Socii Extraordinarii, 1 Veteran Legionary, and 1 Legatus VS 1 Legatus, 5 Praetorian Guard, and 1 Veteran Legionary. In light of this test, I decided to take a more holistic approach by covering multiple units and demonstrating their abilities in the same test to ask the question of whether or not Rome 2 has 'meaningful' battles where your choices in the battle itself matter rather than the units you bring. I do this through a test of 6 different unit composition philosophies and see how they stack up to the Praetorians to measure the value of units and ask the question of if Rome 2 has meaningful choices in the battles themselves and if the unit balance is interesting or engaging.
Intro and What Meaningful Means: 00:00
Macedonian Pikes and Companion Cavalry: 05:33
Roxolani Horse Archer Spam: 17:07
Athenian Pikes and Peltasts: 25:18
Carthaginian Spearmen and Elephants: 31:58
Spartan PIkes, Spears, Slings, and Archers: 39:17
Iceni Chariots, MLG Freemen, and Cheap Javelins: 47:51
Conclusion: 59:20
Original Test: • Rome 2 is a Miserably ... @Volound
My Attempt to Win It: • The Closest You Can Ge...

[@Dolfy]

I really hate how everything is just boiling down to dealing damage, nothing interesting.

[@nsawatchlistbait289]

Rome2/Attila were the start of Total War's spreadsheet simulators

[@fredhickeyA]

Great testing of the different unit types, sir. And your conclusions seem reasonable.

[@camilocarena]

Welcome back my man. I miss your eu4 vids.

[@petrolsan6597]

You have a great calming voice that is very relaxing. It’s a shame that you stopped uploading videos. I go on your channel once in a while and replay the old videos. Peace :))

[@PerennialSash]

Fine work!

[@wladyslawderstreiter9078]

Like your content drops.

[@Toshiro_Mifune]

is this another channel where we take a shit on modern tw and ca? subbed, liked, commented.

[@darkfireslide]

I thought I'd make at least a few videos about it for sure

[@Toshiro_Mifune]

@@darkfireslide i mean you have to, no matter how much people scream that it's fine, it's not. there has been a clear decline in gameplay/mechanics/fun in the battle engine, in the one title that stood out exactly because of it's battle engine.

[@enldd]

A few takeaways from your video and some scenarios of my own: 1) Cavarly, specially heavy shock cavarly need to be way more effective, specially from the back acting as the hammer. 2) Spearmen, specially hoplites in Phalanx formation, need to at least be able to hold the line for a lot longer, to buy time for you to make a move. This Sort of happens in DEI, but not to the degree that I would consider it to be fixed sadly.

[@jarlnils435]

Hoblites can hold the line for ethernity in DeI. Exept if they face pikes. And the cavalry is also effectiv.

[@Volound]

first test shows really conclusively that cavalry charges are impotent. also the fact that you can sit charging repeatedly (hammering units with pure tactical punishment over and over) and get almost nowhere, just shows that the game is borderline pointless to "play". it doesnt get much better than a hammer and anvil (unless youre talking about magic spells to delete units. the pikemen getting more kills than the cavalry is just embarrassing. easily repeatable test and damning of the game. i remember when rome 2 first came out and was on patch 3 or 4, shock cavalry dominated and i even placed 2nd (very nearly 1st) in a CA sponsored tournament, on the back of cataphracts. and now? just nerfed beyond relevance. if heavy infantry and heavy cavalry cant get a job done with proper tactics, what can? completely frivolous game. 2nd test answers my question and shows what warhammer 2 has cemented in peoples minds - that skirmishing just circumvents fake difficulty completely effortlessly and frivolously. 3rd test does something similar to what test 2 does, but also shows how incompetent the AI was for this game. ive heard that pikes are pretty much useless in the game when the player knows they can just pull-through. apparently you can just pull through pikes and murder them effortlessly, which is why pull-through is banned in tournament play in rome 2. is this true? 4th test is the only one im relatively happy with - elephants doing elephant things. the sheer bulk of elephants just sticks the middle finger up to the fake difficulty and otherwise shitty design. elephants were always strong. units should arguably rout before they get murdered, though. elephants are a psychological weapon as much as anything else. i remember i would use them to get 1000-2000 kills when rome 2 launched. it trivialised campaigns and made me just stop uploading my egypt "lets play" campaign on part 5 or so. game was just dumb. as long as each elephant had 1hp left (of their 1000 or 2000 or whatever), they survived the battle and could just be chained across the campaign map from battle to battle, ploughing everything with no losses. 5th test is similar to test 2 and 3, both described theses on show at once. 43:35 just look at the praetorians pinballing and wobbling around. 44:00 look at the ugly as fuck synchronised gliding around. so ugly. 6th test shows that the whole game is just a rollercoaster of complete nonsense, moreso than any of the others. in addition to harnessing the ranged combat simulation that the engine is built for, they circumvent the difficulty modifiers. what a mess of a fight. actually looked like you were losing at a few points. when youre doing ranged damage, youre wrecking. when youre in an actual fight, youre losing horribly. and the fight just drags on and on and on. what a bad game. good testing with plenty of sound conclusions. hard to contradict your closing thoughts at all and you summed it up perfectly. will share the vid in 12 or so hours (so it doesnt overlap with my last community post and get suppressed by the algorithm). also hope to see more from you along these lines after so many months of good write-ups and insights. P.S. the soundtrack of rome 2 sucks so much.

[@darkfireslide]

1. I wasn't aware that they nerfed cavalry, which just shows how much forum whinging about legionaries not being invincible there actually was. It's just depressing charging into the rear of something with cataphracts now, just completely devoid of impact 2. Yeah, test 2 really shows the origins of Warhammer's gameplay. I'm not sure how they got this so wrong after the excellence of Shogun 2 3. Pulling through appears to be doable but only by units of similar quality. I tried pulling through Foot Companions with a variety of units and only Praetorian Guards could execute the maneuver, perhaps owing to their sheer bulk. So once again a situation where only the highest quality infantry matters, even in the goddamn exploits 4. Units should rout before they get murdered, for sure, morale is the defining system of Total War relative to other RTS/RTT experiences like Age of Empires that makes those more archaic games feel outdated and less interesting. And yeah like I said in the video, the pain of Rome 2 is having all these unit types but only a few of them matter. In a Carthage campaign you would be better for skipping the shock cavalry they get and instead just getting Elephants, once again demonstrating that high cost units are always the most valuable, even if the Elephants are functioning properly and have nuance to them 5. The state of spears in this game is fucking pathetic 6. Yeah, 210 point Levy Freemen outscoring 1300 point Royal Spartans just because they can throw javelins. Absolute nonsense.

[@King.Leonidas]

alright we know it won't work but you try a similar scenario in divide et impera?

[@sudeshnamukhopadhyay5214]

What is your opinion on Total War Attila ? Will you do a test video like this for TW:Attila ??

[@darkfireslide]

I don't have a very high opinion of Attila at all. Ranged units are still extremely powerful in that game, with cavalry being given extremely strong bonuses to compensate for the jank of the engine itself. Infantry combat overall still feels wrong. Furthermore, Attila runs like shit because CA can't be assed to replace it with the ToB base that would make it run better, and I hate playing games that don't run well, so I have no interest in the game in that regard as well.

[@sudeshnamukhopadhyay5214]

@@darkfireslide fair enough

[@war-mou3264]

Your point of"spears only have one role to just kill cavalry" can be denied when a spear unit cant bring javelins(eastern spearman, all getae spears, steepe spears), it will be common to see people bringing hillmen to put cavalry at bay than eastern spearman cavalry in rome 2 is in a weird place, they can theoretically keep charging until the enemy die because the penalty of cav losing units on the charge is almost zero, and since the infantry is geting on the ground they cant attack the cavalry in time so the cavalry can just run away and go for a cycle charge The reason why cavalry are so bad in this game is because 90% of all units has some kinda of missile attack with bonus vs cavalry, making so the ideia of cavalry dealing less damage in a instant and more about overtime not that good You can see in a example of royal cataphracts and azaat knights, both are together with best melee and shock cavalry in the game yet one of them is considered not worth bringing because its a melee cav while the other is super heavy cavalry (more mass than companions) and can do the job of shock so well Other thing, hoplites and spears for the game have less melee attack and damage while swords are high on both and instead of hoplites and spears geting some kinda of edge like more range in rome 1 their only reason to bring is to have a unit to hold the enemy in place while your peltasts go on the flanks, but again you can just bring pikeman or a sword unit to do actually damage

[@jarlnils435]

Or install divide et impera

[@samt9468]

Something that bothers me a lot in rome 2 when it comes to how hoplites work is how dissociated from what the current understanding of how they fought. A roman legionnaire formation was seemingly at a disadvantage against a hoplite formation of high skill in frontal close combat. The reason stems from actual mass collision effects in real life. A hoplite could stand shoulder to shoulder and at times shields touching the person in front of them. It is actually theorized a hoplon was bowl shaped to put the pressure of the press on the thighs and collarbone of a person rather than their chest which might suffocate them. Romans meanwhile according to their own manuals were trained to maintain 3 ft distance between each other outside of testudo to let them perform their combat techniques properly. So imagine a rugby game where one side is keeping 3 ft distance and the other side is forming an illegal flying wedge to get an idea. With that in mind its important to realize that with current understanding of how the match up between legionnaires and hoplites with both being well trained. The Hoplite formation would be the aggressor while legionnaires would be discouraged from direct frontal engagements.

[@darkfireslide]

what's weird is how we see that happen with 'pikemen' but with the shorter spear hoplites this is not the case

[@samt9468]

@@darkfireslide It's because Hoplites don't share the pike combat animation and collision mechanics like they did in rome 1 and they didn't give them anything nearly as good in exchange for that. If we are speaking how close combat in the equivalent shoulder to shoulder formation seen would work in real life. A hoplite phalanx's goal would be to press in so close to their opponent that they would not even be able to use their weapon (something that occurred to surrounded Romans in Cannae, rendering them helpless at the battle's conclusion). Spartans being experts of traditional phalanxes exploited this phenomena and had their swords made to be 50%-75% the length of the shortest known Roman gladius with a backward facing scabbard so they would still be able to draw and use it when in tight formation. I doubt the warscape engine would be able to simulate that interaction though.

[@wizardcat7654]

@@samt9468 And the advantage the Romans had was mobility. They could get around the edges of units. Something well demonstrated in Rome 1 with how engaments played they would keep trying to surround the other unit if they could. That was the disadvantage of the hoplite. They had to stay tight in order to remain effective.

[@samt9468]

@@wizardcat7654 Also skirmishing is another way romans could punish slow moving phalanxes. Rome 1 did a good job with this as well since legionnaires could avoid melee combat with a phalanx and throw their pila. Ideally at an exposed side to maximize damage. It is something they can do in Rome 2 but it's not something you want to do as it wastes ammo, which is just strange but that is due to how hoplite units were implemented.

[@jarlnils435]

@@samt9468 I don't think that a hoblite phalanx would push into the enemy in most cases. Two hoblite phalanx armies would more likely fight most of the time on spear range until the elite right flank pushes into the weak enemy left flank. The attacked left would retreat because they don't want to die. That causes the entire phalanx to break and retreat. Against other armies, well would you let a wall of bronze and wood press into you? With two or three ranks of fighters pointing spears at you? On the other hand, would a hoblite would want a roman close in and stab him over the shield into the face? No. Because they did not want to die. The push or othysmos is, for my understanding something that occured during the battle at strategic points. To break a weakspot. Historical, I don't see the legionaries with his big shields and swords being inferior to a hoblite phalanx. I would say that both are at the same level. Which would mean on both sides unwanted casualties. Clear is, both formations were very dangerous for people who fought in other formations. And the romans won because of superior cavalry. They had not the best, but better than other italian tribes (exept for the campanians) or greek city states. And against the macedonians they had a really large cavalry left over from their war against hannibal. When the greeks fought against the persians in the greco persian war, they charged into the persian formation and caused the persian army to retreat. I believe, as a charge would break the formation, they charged against the enemy but slowed down, went into formation and marched in good order with many pointy sticks against the persians. The lighter armed and armored persians had the choice, charge against the greeks and die in a wall of spears, or retreat. There is the real danger for them. Greeks knew how to retreat from hoblites. Retreat meant a lost battle and all would retreat. But a retreating persian front would run into a pushing back line. That causes chaos and the greeks would push into that, killing the persians who are at that point in panic. And I can't believe how much I have written here!

The fun thing is that the most "tactics matter" Total War game ever is probably Empire.

[@Crouchy232323]

Thank god for Voluond we are so lucky to have him

[@magnus4945]

its no wonder that starting with rome 2 and continuing with all the nu-tw games, auto resolve rates have kept rising- as confirmed by CA when they released those numbers a while ago. theres just not very many interesting things you can do in the battle

[@pedroholsbach8592]

The original Rome simulated pikes a lot better than Rome 2. Pikes were not damage dealers, they would hold infantry at bay for the cavalry to flank them. In Rome 2, Pikes demolish infantry because, for some reason, CA thought people used to sprint into pikes back in the day

[@zubirhusein]

Pretty silly when chasing 'balance' ends up just ruining the game

[@youshouldknow5481]

I know when I played Rome 2, all I would do is just spam some artillery and take out half the enemy army and just play defense the whole time. Rinse and repeat

[@lukacrc]

What the fuck?Shouldnt sword units absolutelly destroy pikes and spears?Why pikes win against swords?

[@Ivane_Maskhulia]

It is horrible game. it is really dissapointing. Missle units are OP, Cavalery is trash and unit contact ist most strange one out of all total wars. try to engage 2 malee units in shogun 2 and then in rome 2, you will see that something is odd about rome 2 contact.