Good to hear the full release is more story heavy than the demo made out to be :D

Character build is indeed very important to me (as part of RPing rather than just combat survivability) - I generally like playing support class but I may pass on that in Rome because of how female characters are treated. Probably a charismatic spy/rogue like character will suit more I think.

Edit: in terms of which I value more - that's tough to say. Both story and character bullding have to be at least up to certain standard for me to enjoy the game - from what I've seen in Rome demo, character building also fell short of what I want but I guess its because the demo only showcased combat as you mentioned earlier.

Character building isn't in depth at all. You make a grand total of one choice that isn't combat related (your rhetorical bent: logos, ethos or pathos), and all of the perks you choose are shared by every other character of your chosen class, of which there are only four.

Which isn't to say there aren't a lot of interesting abilities. But many of them are given to you by your equipment and you'll duplicate abilities across several different characters. There isn't much distinctiveness at all outside of the differences between those four classes.

Btw, though your own character may not be treated differently by the game, two of your companions are women and the fact that they are women is quite heavily acknowledged.

You can normally see all the skills in the demo, even if you can only unlock a few of them.

Something else I find limiting is the cap of 3 weapon ability slots and 6 character abilities. I haven't had any problem with the char abilities so far, but only 3 for weapons is often an issue for me. That and few other limitations seem artificial.

Is it a case of you don't get more than 3 weapon abilities or you just choose 3 of however many weapon abilities? I'm guessing its the latter?

Game would be too easy with unlimited weapon uses and the "untrained" mechanic.

Yes, the latter. Each weapon (or shield) has between one and three abilities from what I've seen, so in total you could have anywhere between 2 and 6 overall from which you would choose 3 to be on your action bar. Changing abilities is as simple as putting down one sword and picking up another (or a spear or dagger or whatever)

I don't know - I saw some very angry posts about how female characters get treated badly in Ex: Rome. I think its a tough one - treating female characters too badly may result in irritating female players (including me) but if not then it doesn't reflect the Rome setting very well (imo).

There were particularly angry posts about Caeso's personal story for female players who decided to romance him - I decided to spoil it for myself and read on :P Have to admit, Caeso was the companion I was thinking of romancing and the whole spoiler post turned me off from it ~_~ So if I end up picking up Rome, I think my character will be forever alone D:

I would imagine that if a woman posed as a Roman soldier and was discovered, in real life things would have gone much differently (and worse) for her than in this game. I don't think a female ex-gladiator would have become a member of a Legate's inner circle, either. I'm far from someone who insists on "historical accuracy" (which is often code for "I don't want women and dark complected people in my fantasy games"), but it would be strange if they acted as if women were the social equals of men, given the setting.

I'm not that far, though, and haven't done any romance stuff. So we'll see how it goes.

That's why I said its a difficult one. I understand Ex: Rome is alternative historical setting which is why you get to play female character but at the same time, it need to have some sort of disadvantage for female characters or the whole Rome setting falls apart (imo). Everyone will have different expectations and that's why I think there are so many angry posts around the issue (whether it be from those who think there shouldn't be female characters at all or those who think female characters are way too mistreated in the game).

More than the male-female issue, I was expecting an outrage against racism. As far as I have understood, the Romans were among the more (or most) racistic cultures in the history. Have they really handled that side so well that there is no internet raging against the devs?

They must have made this game interesting for both genders, or they wouldn't have bothered at all. I think that had to be a delicate decision and they must have thought it through. I only replayed a part of the demo with a female character and the differences were different dialogues but nothing to discourage the player.

I found this review interesting; here's the part about playing as a woman legata ("legatus" is masculine):

In his review, Mortismal also said we had to play the game with both genders or miss a good part of it.

Are you sure? I've often head they were a mixed culture and very tolerant about that. Very pragmatic, actually, if you could prove your worth, it didn't matter what background you had.

Of course, if you were a slave, you had to be freed first. ;)

I meant that there were Romans and then others (i.e. racism against anyone who was not a Roman), but I am no historian.

I have no doubt devs have put a lot of thoughts into it but from what I've read, the opinions are divisive depending on who's post you read ;)

I'm not keen on playing male PC tho, purely because I suck at RPing male character.

IIRC, there were quite a few posts regarding Bestia before the full release but they seem to be mostly gone from Steam forums now for whatever reason - hopefully because devs pulled it off with decent writing. If you go to Codex tho, there are a lot of complaints regarding this (I guess, that's typical of them tho) ;)

I don't think so, it works both ways. In Pathfinder you have a huge amount of abilities and feats, so many it's actually a problem to display them, and it's far from easy.

It is even more aggravating in Rome because the most interesting skills have a limited number of uses per combat. Yesterday I spent more than 1 hour fighting against enemies who were 3 times as many, and 50-50 same level or one level below. My sagittarius had 2 limited skills out of 3, so for most of the combat she was limited to one basic shot (the other weapon set was a dagger for assassination, which was not an option except at the end).

On the other hand, those combats are very rewarding :D I won by the skin of my teeth, my main character (the only Veles unfortunately) was down in the first two rounds, so it was 3 against 12. Parties of 4 don't easily forgive any unbalancing.

So I'm guessing Bestia was sitting out yesterday? ;)

I wish it was party of 5 instead of 4 - not only combat more difficult with limited party size but it means one of your fully developed companiom have to sit out!

Out of curiosity, how far in does Amazon female companion join? I was surprised she is princeps, thought she might be veles

Yes, he had to, poor Bestia. There are restrictions in some of the missions, so it's not always 4. In others you can only have praetorians who are not companions, maybe to encourage variety.

I'm watching it again, always a pleasure to rediscover. How they dare make Pullo responsible for at least two important facts! :D



You may find a few praetorians with known names in Expeditions: Rome by the way ;)

I don't see why there would there be any raging against the devs. Making a (somewhat) historically accurate game about a culture that was racist is probably going to include some in-game racism. That's common sense. Anyone who complains about that is just looking for something to bitch about.

From my understanding, you're both right. Being Roman was paramount, but Rome was multicultural.

Yeah, Pullo really gets around. :biggrin: Caesar does comment at some point, that "Vorenus & Pullo" appear to be "pets of the fates" or something similar…so best not to mess with them. ;)

I do find this series kind of addictive, I only planned to watch a couple of eps, just to get in the right mood for "Expeditions:Rome" but now I'm already in the second season.

I thought quite a few names sounded very familiar to me but after a while all the various roman names starts to blur together a little.

They found the standard, were the only survivors when sailing to Greece and so on, they must be protected by the gods! ;) It was fun, and the episodes do fly by. It must be a nice game for an historian to insert fictional characters in famous events and play with it.

There are a few series like that, making it easy to grasp history or science and making the audience want to know more. It's a good motivator. :) Games like Expeditions too, though they're limited to what is playable, we won't get a deep understanding at Roman politics or even its society, but it's a start. It surely works better than trying to force someone to read historical books first.

I'm about 30 hours in that gameplay and I'm counting 17 quests (active & done).

I must have about 20-25 hours in my gameplay of Viking and I count 41. Sure, there are a few short fetch quests, but I have to admit that the combats take more time in Rome than in Viking or other games (in Encased after 50-55 hours I had about 65 quests), and there seems to have fewer quests overall.

Something I don't like too much but which can be tuned in the difficulty settings are the random encounters. Some only have bad outcomes, I had one a few times (*) and apparently you can either give money, lose a small amount of reputation or fight one of two innocent parties (which just don't fit my RP). On the plus side, those road encounters are nicely implemented with varied vignette formats.

So I'm not ashamed to scum-saving and I'd recommend to save before any road trip.

In general, in both Viking and Rome, I'm still surprised how often the game encourages you to fight and kill people rather than resolve the situation more sensibly - most of the time it's not even possible. That, and L.A. do like their looting :p At least they've calmed down in Rome; I'm always shocked in Viking how you can loot almost everyone's property without even raising anyone's eyebrows.

(*) You may have repeated encounters, but it's rare. This time I had it several times because I reloaded a lot to re-do a legion battle differently to see the possible outcomes. Which are, by the way, quite random.