Total War: Rome 2’s Patch 10 unleashed upon Steam

Weeping crocodile tears for your victims.

With a new expansion on the way (Hannibal at the Gates, on 25 March,) it seems timely to have another Total War: Rome 2 patch. This one is Patch 10, folks, which means an awful lot of patching has happened since Rome 2’s inauspicious release in September last year.

This update should download and apply automatically when you start up Steam. If it doesn’t, try restarting Steam. Reading through the patch notes (recreated in full below,) I noticed reference to fixes for a couple of issues that have been hanging around since launch day. “Eliminated battle pathfinding performance spike which caused battles to stutter,” is a godsend if it’s really fixed on all systems, as is “Improved coordination of AI defenders in city, port and town battles when they are outside the settlement. This improves the behaviour of disembarked naval units and reinforcement armies.”

No more standing around awkwardly on the shoreline, hooray!

Anyway, yes, here are the rest of Rome 2’s Patch 10 changelog notes:

Performance improvements

General performance improvements:

• Additional Support for AMD Crossfire multi-GPU configs.
• Further improvements to GPU performance and reduction in CPU-bottlenecks for all configs.
• Improved core Battle performance scenarios.
• Resolved CPU core-affinity threading issue.
• Implemented borderless window when running at desktop resolution in Windowed mode.
• There is no longer an upper limit on the graphics settings that a user can select in the frontend. Previously if the game determined that a user’s machine was low-end then it would not allow them to select high graphics settings. This limitation is now gone. Note that selecting high graphics settings on low-end machines will negatively affect performance.
• Improved consistency of reflections on shiny textures.

‘Unlimited Video Memory’ option improvements:

• Unlimited Video Memory is now selectable for all integrated GPUs running on 64-bit operating systems from Windows Vista onward. Integrated GPUs use system memory as video memory at all times, as they have no dedicated video memory of their own. This code change now allows our integrated GPU customers to use all of their system memory as video memory. When Unlimited Video Memory is enabled, discrete GPUs use system memory as an extension of their dedicated GPU video memory, when their dedicated video memory is not enough to run at their chosen graphics quality settings. Please be advised that in both cases, using system memory as GPU video memory can impact performance as it is generally not as fast as dedicated GPU video memory. Also, if system memory runs low (or out), the user’s hard drive will be paged, resulting in reduced framerates.
• For users running on an integrated GPU in 64-bit Windows (Vista onwards), with Unlimited Video Memory available but not selected, we have increased the amount of video memory that the game sees from 800MB to 1024MB.
• Fixed an issue causing Unlimited Video Memory to be unavailable for users with certain discrete video cards.
• Fixed an issue that was causing Unlimited Video Memory to become disabled on some multi-GPU configurations.

Battle performance improvements:

• Eliminated battle pathfinding performance spike which caused battles to stutter.
• Addressed a crash in siege battles which occurred on some maps after breaching walls with artillery.
• Addressed a crash in Egyptian Large City battle caused by the map data.
• Addressed a crash caused by squads within the same unit attempting to use different formations.
• Fixed a UI lock-up when opening the steam overlay during the introduction sequence at the start of an ambush battle (while defending).

Gameplay Improvements

Battle AI improvements:

• Fixed an issue which could cause the attacking siege AI to stall when attempting to breach the walls with artillery.
• Improved coordination of AI defenders in city, port and town battles when they are outside the settlement. This improves the behaviour of disembarked naval units and reinforcement armies.
• Addressed an issue which caused disembarked naval AI defenders in siege battles to become inactive.
• Improved the battle AI’s ability to predict the outcome of combat actions, allowing it to better commit its troops in combat.
• Battle AI in field battles is now encouraged to outflank earlier when necessary.

General battle improvements:

• Improved ladder docking in Rome city map.
• Addressed collision gaps in fort walls caused by auxiliary buildings, which sometimes allowed units to pass through walls.
• Prevented siege ladders/towers being pushed into the wall of a settlement on the battlefield.
• Settlement gates no longer close on friendly units during battles.
• Smoothed uneven terrain under a dockable wall in Egyptian port battle map.
• Fixed wall in large Barbarian city map.
• Fixed floating buildings in some Roman City and Barbarian battle maps.

General Campaign improvements:

• Improvements made to the campaign auto-resolver’s modelling of melee-based infantry, which corrects a wide range of auto-resolver imbalances.
• In campaign mode, garrisoned Hastati will now upgrade correctly after researching the ‘Cohort Organization’ technology, which converts Hastati to Legionaries.
• Slave army leaders will no longer always look Hellenic in Campaign mode.
• Unit cards no longer appear outside of the merge window UI while merging units in campaign modes.
• Settlement labels in Campaign modes now consistently display the diplomatic relationship status that is currently held with the owning faction. Red = War, Blue = Allied With, Grey = neutral.
• Improvements made to the accuracy of the unit tooltip threat indicator in the battle UI.
• Needs more Hamilcar.
• Cinematic Mode shortcut key now works consistently in different languages.

Usability Improvements

• Addressed a number of minor audio issues.
• Battlefield death animations no longer with the victim in a kneeling pose.
• Category icon no longer incorrectly appears on elephant units once the unit is out of control.

There are also balancing changes to some of the ‘Beasts of War’ DLC units, plus the addition of some new troops types to that DLC pack for those who own it. The crocodile-skin wearing, Egyptian Sobek Cultists (pictured right at the start of this news piece) are one such addition.