Kevin's Watch

Urk.
Installed patch, went fine. Started game, went fine. Continued campaign, went fine - except that the colours on the campaign map were messed up; no problem, Gloss Map is turned off by default. Video Options>Gloss Map> Apply. Screen goes black for a second while it updates display. Game crashes to desktop.
Start game, yup. Continue campaign, yup. Game loads, loading screen finishes, game crashes to desktop.
Gah.

Hmm, I might stick to my patchless game for a little while yet. I'm finding the AI a little more challenging now that I've dispensed with the Carthiginians. The greeks and the gauls are stretching me a bit more. The reinforcement AI is absolutely shocking though, I had to force quit the other day because my 'allies' decided it would be a good idea to charge 400 cavalry straight onto the pikes of my enemy.

Incendiary pigs!

What are suicide generals?

AI controlled generals in the unpatched game have a bad habit of charging cavalry full pelt into the middle of a melee. Generals are cavalry. 1+1= a lot of dead generals.

Update: I reinstalled the unpatched game, and it crashed on a battle. The game always craches on some sort of graphic/video thing. It's only did it during the past week. I installed WMP10 last weekend. 1+1= Welcome back, WMP9 series.

Here is my response from Activision support. Typical.

Thank you for contacting us - unfortunately what is happening here is that the 1.2 patch does increase the game's coding in that you would need newer video drivers. There is a further problem in that your S3 Pro Savage graphics chipset is not fully supported to play Rome Total War; we rarely hear of this graphics chip being able to play the game at all.

Guess I'm stuck with v1.1.
The 'newer drivers' are dated a few days after the ones I have, and they blue-screen my computer on start-up. I had to go safe mode and rollback.

ouch. That's unlucky.

My hard drive had some kined of bizarre, windows activation-associated accident. Lost my game and about half of my OS, grr!

Ouch!

Yeah, I was testing a hard drive I'd bought for a friend and found that it had XP Home installed on it. I tried to activate it, it wouldn't so I phoned Microsoft and tried to blag it. They were having none of it so i decided to reboot on my HD and format the thing. I logged back in and my system had fallen apart. For some reason the only saved games I lost were this and Football Manager 05, probably the most labour-intensive games I own.

Ugh, I just found out that my game is one of a batch of high quality forgeries that Play, MX2 and dvd.co.uk were all suckered into buying. I can play the unpatched version, but the patches have updated copy protection and won't have it.

dvd.co.uk say they'll refund my money if I send the game back, but they don't have any replacements. Talk about adding insult to injury, bloody gullible channel islanders.

Have you tried it with a no cd crack?

Aah, I suspected it when you mentioned that you couldn't play after patching it. If you do go for the cr*ck, make sure that you get one for the version of patch that you're installing, i.e. 1.1 or 1.2.

Good luck.

BTW, love your new title. Possibly my favourite Iain M. Banks novel.

--Avatar

Cheers, it's quite hard to rank the Culture books because they're nearly all top notch (Look to Windward wasn't quite on par IMO), but PoG stands out quite well, largely because Gurgeh is such an unlikely hero.

I've decided that I can't be bothered sending the game back to Jersey, so I'm looking around for a 1.2 crack. No joy so far, so I may reinstall with 1.1 instead.

Yeah, I haven't even bothered yet. Am just playing original unpatched version till I can get one. Not bothering me, although it's a pain when it crashes.

Am busy playing a campaign with the Scythians at the moment. Love covering the landscape with hordes of horse-archers.

--A

Is this real?
The Minotaur bit sounds like someone's taking the piss:

As the Spartan tried to avoid the various smaller enemies running around the room, he did his best not to get too close to the minotaur and attack by shooting barrels to make them explode next to the beast. All the while, the minotaur was picking up the smaller enemies and throwing them as ammunition, providing an intense battle that will serve as one of "eight or nine" boss fights in the full game.

It's real, Creative Assembly and Sega have been making a big deal about their new partnership and there are discussions all over the forum.

Loads of people are saying snobbish things like "dumbed down for the mass console market".
I've never seen such a concentration of PC-only, elitist gamers as on the total war forums. They all seem to know everything about everything and they think historical realism is more important than gameplay.

Well, while I'm pretty keen on the whole historical realism thing, I don't have a problem with this. It's not like they're trying to pawn it off as a Total War title, so let them enjoy it. I don't really like console games anyway, and it's highly unlikely I'll ever play it.

--Avatar

To be fair, I doubt that a console will be able to do a game anything like Rome: TW much justice, purely on a technical level. I don't know if any of you played Medal of Honor: Frontline, but the opening level is so much better on PC. There's hundreds of allied soldiers storming the beach with you, but on PS2 there's only about two dozen.

Agreed. (Not that I played it on a console, but the opening PC level was brilliant.)

And I'm sure that that is at least part of the reason that, although collaborated on by the same guys, they're not even trying a TW title on console.

--Avatar

Well, I recently re-installed Rome, after a long hiatus from it. I've been mostly playing multiplayer; I still need to beat the campaign. I always got depressed though, because my armies were kicking everybody's butts but I always ended up losing money every turn!

I've been playing as the Greeks in the last two multiplayer battles, both of which I won. I think the Spartan hoplites are possibly the most kickass unit in the game; they saved my butt numerous times, and I've never once seen them break--even when heavily outnumbered and being flanked by cavalry!

I've seen spartans break twice, both when they were the last unit on the battlefield and completely surrounded, so they fought to the death.