Beefy's Corner - The Off-Topic Chat Thread

It's a classic. You choose to play as any one of the three Roman houses, and you're given orders from the Senate to attack certain places or reach diplomatic agreements with other factions, and the aim is simply to expand the empire. You play on a map of Europe, with all of the factions that existed there at the time, and when it comes to battle you zoom in to the battle map that you've seen on Time Commanders.

It's a turn-based game, and each turn you can choose to build new buildings or train new units in each of your cities, and you can move your armies a certain distance each turn. There's also quite a complex financial system, by which you earn or lose money each turn depending on your spending, the efficiency of your trade routes, the resources available in your land, your trade agreements with other factions, and various other factors.

When you defeat a faction (i.e. completely wipe them off the map), you may unlock them as a playable faction. The unlockable factions are: Greece, Egypt, Seleucid Empire, Carthage, Gaul, Germania, Britannia and Parthia.

Rome 2, which comes out in September, will be have far more advanced and realistic battles and will also have proper naval battles, which the original doesn't really have. You can get ships and use them as transport, but battles between ships are just simulated on the world map and you don't have any control over them.

 

You can also download a mod to unlock every single faction.

Scythians ruuuuuule

 

Thank you Mikey. That was very informative. I do like the idea of playing these games that a decade ago would have got the then latest CPU's all hot and bothered, but now can be played on their highest realism settings without an increase in fan speed. Besides, I want to see what my free-from-the-recycle-centre AMD 4 core Phenom is really capable of. Everything else I throw at it barely wakes it up.

 

You don't need a mod, you can just go into the program files and edit it yourself. If you want to experiment you can also edit the attack and defense attributes of each unit, allow Britannia to train war elephants, or whatever you want.

 

Also when you have a big enough army(and mad enough) you can attack the other Houses and then the Senate.

 

Thanks Joe. That's also very informative and helpful. I think I'm going to look for a cut-price TW: Rome somewhere on ebay and go from there. I might even do a download or two, as PL suggests. Could be fun.

 

There's loads of sequels based on different eras or places. There were ones before Rome as well but that was the one that really launched it (first one I played too), but they all have the same turn based map + real time battles idea. The latest one is based on Feudal Japan. They are all CPU and graphics heavy, though (no problems to your garbage tip build TSS).

 

It's available for £6.99 on Steam, and the Alexander expansion (which I am not familiar with) is £2.99.

 

There's some seriously extensive mods as well which are still updated/maintained, worth taking a look at (not that the game isn't big enough already).

 

Hee-hee, there is a demo version of the Battle of the Trebia from the game which can be downloaded and played, as a taster. If I peaked some interest in others, from reading the posts, here's the link: http://www.fileplanet.com/144640/140000/fileinfo/Rome:-Total-War-Demo

Completely legal, so no worries.

 

Ah yeah, there's a small assortment of historical battles on the game. They're all bloody hard.

 

w00t got a massive £15 back from my huge £2.50 free bet on Soldado to score first today

 

I've got a couple of adverts posted in my ebay watch list. It's going for as little as a £1.00, but I might buy a totally new/sealed one for less than a fiver. I'll see about the demo version I'm downloading.

BTW, Rome II appears to be out already £34+p&p on ebay.

Oops, my 164mb download has already finished. I can see I'm not going to be making dinner at this rate.

EDIT: Downloaded and installed. Cripes, this looks great..! I see its minimum requirements are:

English version of Microsoft® Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP
· Pentium® III 1.0GHz (1000MHz) or Athlon(TM) 1.0GHz (1000MHz) processor or higher
· 256MB RAM
· 8x Speed CD-ROM drive (1200KB/sec sustained transfer rate) and latest drivers

Well how about my AMD Four Core 3.3Ghz
3Gb DDR 3 RAM
DVD Re/Writer..?

Hopefully, it'll be compatible, that's my only fingers crossed issue.

 

**** you guys.

 

Right click on the .exe file, click properties. Select the compatibility tab, select in the run mode the windows xp service pack 3 mode and check the box above it. Then click apply in the lower section. This should remove any compatibility problems.

 

Cheers Cove. So the Eredivisie isn't the only thing you know..!

I'm watching the Moto3 race at the mo.

 

I've run the game on XP and Win7 and not had any problems. What Cove said will definitely do the trick, but you may not need to do anything.

 

I didn't win most knowledgeable poster on the Swans board for no reason

 

No, to be honest I wasn't expecting any, to be honest. Whatever people say about Windows, it does do its utmost to be backwards compatible as far as it can. To its detriment in many ways.

 

Ahhhh, all this talk of Rome Total War is making me feel quite nostalgic. The only problem with it, aside from squalor pissing me off, was the fact that men always seemed to run away really easily. The city sieges were epic though and the general's speeches could be quite amusing.