Total War: Rome II - Custom Battle (Rome vs Macedon)

Hey, what's up guys? This is Oakley and I'm gonna cover a video that was just released check it out in the description below for yourself the full version I'm gonna do a recap as always and I will warn you that I am on vacation as you may have known So basically what I'm gonna be doing is covering Screenshot by screenshot. I have pretty crappy internet right now, and you should see me I'm kind of stuck in the basement of the hotel trying to get as far away from everyone and Man, I'm just having a heck of a time trying to upload and upload this and get it to you But anyways, I hope you enjoy for the full video. Go ahead and check out the annotations in the description. I'll link you that anyways I'm just gonna go ahead and talk about the key points in these sort of high-definition screenshots where I highlight the most important things and Again, we're gonna pick it apart Also, check out my Pompeii video where I try and share some of the adventures I'm having with you right now. I'm over in Italy So anyways, this battle is gonna be the humans against the AI and it's gonna be Macedon against the Romans So the first thing I wanted to point out is the map itself The map itself looks beautiful. If you look at the campaign map another campaign map the battle map at the bottom, right? It looks awesome. It's asymmetric I like the way you can kind of see the details of the different units Of course, that's something we've seen in every game. But look at the forest I like how both Fort sides have a chance to engage in that sort of stealth mode going into the forest and you'll see the deployment later The Macedonians make use of it. And anyways, you can see right here the forces the bar at the bottom that shows the various troops There's 11 Macedonian forces So of course not the full 20 out of 20 and you can see here just at a glance the blue bar Indicates your sort of how much how many weapons and projectiles you have left and the green is a glance at your health In any case I wanted to talk about how this battle We're not really sure what it is it all that we know so far is that it's gonna be Rome against Macedon human against AI and Basically, it's gonna be a skirmish type of battle, but it's a very hard AI Anyways, the units you see here are the shield bears at 160 men hop lights at 160 slingers at 120 and Thessalian cavalry at 80 So the troops are gonna vary now this I would think this would be larger settings But again, this may be the default. We'll have to wait and see how that pans up. This looks like a pretty big force But again, it's not the full 20 of 20 something that I heard is each army will be 20 of 20 But on a battlefield you can field up to 40 land units or 40 C units or have a mix of 20 land 20 C That's kind of how it pans out here. You can see the sort of the new forest It looks great and second off the line-of-sight dynamic is in play here The cavalry are not exactly hidden in the forest yet But because the force blocks is in between essentially the cavalry and the Roman forces the cavalry are hidden with the line-of-sight mechanism So that's something that's cool And here you can see some of the Macedonian units here These are gonna be the shield bears and the hop lights. So, you know with the hop lights, of course, it's a shorter spear You don't see the full-length Sarissa that's most notable with the Macedonians, but look at the troops Look at the shields look at the details on that Look at the the armors the curious the different leather brooches and all this stuff They have the helmets the facial expressions all of it is highly detailed the dings on the armor the damage It's all super interesting. And when you look at that whole video in its entirety with the audio You can see the footsteps of the troops the the troops yelling at each other the commanders yelling all this stuff It's really cool Now I wanted to point out one of the things that these units can do is sort of form a phalanx or a hop light and that's where they kind of lock their shield and it's like you saw in Shogun 2 It's a shield wall and something they mentioned is there's gonna be two types of these Phalanxes one is gonna be for the longer Sarissa's and one's gonna be for the more Greek style phalanx, which was of course shorter Anyways, you can see them forming up here It's not the overlapping shields that would have you know But it's close enough and I think it looks good and you'll see the real staying power that these forces have of course the deeper You make them the longer they'll be able to hold out. So it really depends on you And I guess you can see the Roman forces moving out here They're pretty substantial and it's kind of historical in the way It's set up that you have the village a screening the forces and you sort of have the triplex Axis with the you know, the three layers of the precursor study and the triarii Moving forward so the AI is gonna sort of play off of that Historical feature and then you can see the cavalry wings on the sides in any case the human player decides to move up and he Is hidden Macedonian cavalry on the left hidden Macedonian cavalry on the right and take a look at the UI at the bottom These are the companion cavalry That are going moving up moving up with the general and they have a bunch of abilities at the bottom that I'll point out As they get used during the battle But this is something you're gonna have to take take notice of is how many of these special skills there are Anyways, you see this is the salient cavalry moving up here and they're labeled very heavy shock cavalry So I like how they have these more specific names for everything, you know Very heavy versus heavy versus medium and then the additive of the shock cavalry So for example, the slingers as well are very light. You might have light so you have all this variety also the details here in terms of how they look the animations the All this stuff is really really cool. I was super impressed by this battle and all the minute details Anyways, you see that the troops here have gone down to 115 They've lost five men and that's because of the incoming Pilla coming from the legionnaires in the distance Anyways, you see some of the cavalry forces here and what of their abilities they have is called stampede it has a five minute cooldown and what it allows you to do is kind of a burst of energy as you move forward and Moving forward basically what it does is it revives your troops and increases your movement speed So this is something you want to do when you're chasing down routing units Or if you're breaking out of cover and you want to have a you know A sudden charge or if you want to exploit a gap in the enemy lines This is kind of what you're gonna want to take advantage of as you move forward So there's gonna be all these different abilities for different troops loose formation Form the phalanx stuff like that There's gonna be a lot to get used to but it's gonna be really interesting and it offers a lot more variety You can see the forces moving forward here The Greeks are gonna be on the defensive Sort of doing their skirmishing and falling back as the legions move forward take note that the legions are moving forward in their triple lines Screened again by the velites, which I think is really cool and that the AI is using that I was really impressed by the AI in this game now It it was almost to the point where it sort of felt scripted But again, I don't think CA would you know pretend that this is a free-range thing Whereas, you know, it was in fact scripted So what I think is I think this is an authentic human versus AI type of scenario and it was really impressive I thought and again, it's on a it's on very hard difficulty But anyways, you can see the Romans moving up and look at those green icons over their heads That means they've been influenced by some sort of a tribute. So in this case, it was the general I believe Giving them buffs to attack and defense and morale and stuff like that So that's something you can do with your generals is as we saw a shogun have these morale effects and you know inspire them and do various things now the way this works to make it a little less of like Sort of arcadey is it would be you know a banging of the shields kind of like pumping up the forces Inspiring the men by being right behind them and you can see this is something that the AI is gonna do So look at the left Those are gonna be the Macedonian cavalry and they're facing off against Roman forces and right behind that is the general who's providing moral support Giving the buffs and he's not engaging. He's not a suicide general. That's very important The general is just sitting right there, you know encouraging on his troops And then you have the velites in the back adding additional cover and support So that's something that I think did a good job of showing off everything in the battlefield and the AI AI specifically I should say battle rhythm is one of the things that you can do two minute 40 second cooldown and It basically targets a friendly unit to gradually improve their combat abilities for an extended time And that's gonna be something that's gonna help stationary troops or anything that you know Troops really need to hold the line and do well So this is gonna be very important as well as second wind which is a 45 second cooldown ability where you can select troops And basically you cancel how tired they are. So that's gonna be very good again for troops that are in combined Battles like this with the sustained melee and this is what allows these Basically forces right here to hold out really long now what I anticipate using the second wind for it would be for cavalry So because I'm very active with cavalry, I'm gonna have them charging around I'll have them retreat to my general my general will like give them the second wind and they'll be ready to go out Again, anyways, you can see this as a later stage in the battle as the Roman forces are holding forces in reserve Waiting for sort of their main forces to be tired out and then they'll commit these strategic reserves That's something they said in the battle and I didn't quite believe it But uh, you do see instances of it in this battle and I think it was pretty authentic and it's cool It's historical and it will definitely help the AI sustain combat and eventually win You can also see some of the lighter troops engaging I just wanted to show the detail present in the ground how these forces look in terms of differentiation and how you can have these You know forces engage in melee, even though they're skirmishers. So using them in all sorts of abilities Here again, you know later in the battle the shield wall the phalanx is basically holding up although it's starting to crumble under the pressure The Roman forces still have their strategic reserves and they're starting to flank you can see that so again, it's very impressive and this is a crucial turning point in the battle where the Cavalry the companion cavalry with the general charge these velite troops and a lucky Spear basically hits the general and takes him out and that's the turning point in the battle that leads to the collapse of the Macedonian forces, but in any case take a look at that general unit in the background for the Romans He's basically moving forward and he's trying to probe for weaknesses at the same time He'll move up to strategic positions engage the enemy and also sort of help give buffs to his forces Take a look at the diamond Bonuses as well that you can take up for the companion cavalry now, I like both of those how you have all these specific You know traits that you can take up in different formations as well as the fact that you did in fact see the enemy general Bouncing around doing all those things doing general things. That was very believable. I really like that. It's a nice touch Anyways, you can see the Roman forces starting to prevail here and something that someone had mentioned before is that when units start to route? There'll be a trickle from the back and eventually the whole unit will break instead of it kind of being an instantaneous Break, and I thought that was pretty cool Now it wasn't necessarily confirmed. I didn't hugely see it in effect in this battle You know, we may have missed it with the camera angle So that's something we still have to wait to see if it's confirmed or not in any case the Romans end up Taking the battle winning it and yeah, it was a cool Video, I really look forward to playing this game and seeing more of it. Anyways guys check out the full video I'll link it in the annotations and also to the description Anyways again, sorry for not having the full video anyways because I'm on vacation and I'm recording this from the bottom of a hotel So yeah, I'd like to share my adventures with you. Check out this video right here This is gonna be for Pompeii upload more of these in the near future. See you guys next time