Total War thread

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I'm a little underwhelmed about bronze age Total War again. I really was hoping for Medieval 3. But I'll wait and see how this one turns out.
 
Hell yeah. Chariot warfare is something Total War has never explored. Middle East is great. I hope Israel is a faction.

Edit: Fuck yes, this is exactly what I wanted. My wishlist of Total War periods - stuff they haven't ever really done but would fit perfectly - was Bronze Age Collapse, Renaissance Italy, and Thirty Years War/Reformation Europe. Boom, Bronze Age Collapse. They confirmed Canaan is in. Sounds like it might go survival strategy like Total War: Attilla. Fantastic. I hope they dont' go cartoony with it like they did those Three Kingdoms games.

@OutInTheRain Like what, Troy? Okay, I assume you probably mean more ancient times in general (Rome II, Attilla, the ching-chong times), but if they try to have any historical accuracy with it, I think this will be more different than anything else non-gunpowder they could have done.
 
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Funny, I just played a bit of the Bronze Age mod for the original Rome Total War and it's pretty fun. I just hope the battles won't be fucking terrible like they were in Troy.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Like what, Troy? Okay, I assume you probably mean more ancient times in general (Rome II, Attilla, the ching-chong times), but if they try to have any historical accuracy with it, I think this will be more different than anything else non-gunpowder they could have done.
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Yeah, like Troy and the other antiquity ones. I'll have to see what they do to differentiate themselves from the others. I will still probably get it after some bugfixes happen though.
 
Okay, this is looking worse as I think about it. Canaan in this game is just Egyptians in Canaan, and Mycenaeans and Mesopotamians are not included (stock), nor playable Sea Peoples (who i think they say, now, are Philistines), some of which people are justifying as that they were already destroyed/were irrelevant to the chosen setting, but still.

If the game doesn't fail I hope they would consider - even if it is a huge stretch due to controversy - a DLC or Saga based on Biblical Canaan.

If they ever do Mesopotamia it should be a feature to capture/demand as a hostage the enemy's god idol.


I got an Ikko-Ikki run going in Shogun 2. Every time I tried to play Shogun 2 I'd find it frustrating, this time it actually went pretty well, until I quit for tonight because I overexpanded and everyone declared war on me simultaneously. Ikko-Ikki are neat because, while I don't think they were anything you could actually call republicans (like Islamic republicans or Calvinist republicans were), that's how I like to roleplay them, Buddhist peasant jihad against the samurai.
 
Is it normal for Shogun 2's AI to be very passive strategically?

I was Chosokabe, turtled up on Shikoku and have since been expanding along the Honshu coast north and east of me. It seems like I very rarely encounter a doomstack to fight. Granted, I intentionally was fighting powers that were geographically dispersed (Hatakeyama to my east) or engaged in some brutal war on another front (Otomo conquered Kyushu and then Urakami, the major western Honshu power, began a pointless back-and-forth that's been on for a decade), but I would have expected some more resistance than I've run into. At the moment it looks like there's little stopping me from just parking my Nanban Trade Ships (basically invincible) off Kyushu, blitzkrieging Ikko-Ikki (they became the major power around Kyoto), and just winning the game without ever having had a real war.
 
Something I keep seeing people say about Total War on inferior websites (Reddit) is that they want a Victoria: Total War, and then usually they'll start rambling about industrialization. This seems like a bad idea to me.

Now, in the end people will play a game however they want, and if they want to blob with Victorian era armies I guess that's fine, but there's a certain identity to Total War. It's not nearly as detailed as a typical grand strategy game (the maps, for example, are simplified, as are most mechanics), and that's intentional and okay. They also tend to all be set in a time period where there was considerable blobbing. Rome, Attilla, Shogun, Three Kingdoms, Napoleon, etc. all were set around periods of massive expansion or multi-sided internal war. Empire is less obvious, but the three theaters it included all make sense: large land swaps in North America (fall of the French Empire), India (fall of the Mughals), and Europe (you have at least like six major European wars in this period, and by the end of it Poland and the Netherlands were wiped of the map).

What does the Victorian Era have? Nothing but one sort-of general European war that was confined to a single tiny theater with no significant territorial change, some unifications (sequences of small wars) and revolutions (generally not real wars), New World civil wars and small country v country fights, and in the rest of the world one-sided beatdowns of Europeans on natives.

I cannot imagine a worse setting. If Creative Assembly goes back to gunpowder, they need to go Reformation/TYW or Empire/Napoleon (I think Napoleon should have been an advanced start/more detailed map built on top of Empire's world), not Victorian Era though.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
What does the Victorian Era have? Nothing but one sort-of general European war that was confined to a single tiny theater with no significant territorial change, some unifications (sequences of small wars) and revolutions (generally not real wars), New World civil wars and small country v country fights, and in the rest of the world one-sided beatdowns of Europeans on natives.

I cannot imagine a worse setting. If Creative Assembly goes back to gunpowder, they need to go Reformation/TYW or Empire/Napoleon (I think Napoleon should have been an advanced start/more detailed map built on top of Empire's world), not Victorian Era though.
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I think the TW franchise is wiggly enough with its claim to historicality that you could make something of it. The Boshin war with FOTS was comparatively tiny but they made a very good expansion out of it. I do think that CA would struggle making it anything approaching reasonable or accurate. There's also the fact that touching an era filled to the brim with 'unsavory' topics like slavery, colonialism which means its unlikely.

I really would prefer they try Gunpowder era again but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
 
Agarathium1066 said:
I think the TW franchise is wiggly enough with its claim to historicality that you could make something of it. The Boshin war with FOTS was comparatively tiny but they made a very good expansion out of it. I do think that CA would struggle making it anything approaching reasonable or accurate. There's also the fact that touching an era filled to the brim with 'unsavory' topics like slavery, colonialism which means its unlikely.

I really would prefer they try Gunpowder era again but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
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Yeah, the Boshin War was the smallest scope event they made a game of, and even that was really stretching the limits of it (especially with things like recruiting in actual European marines) and tied, if ultimately sold separately, into an existing game. It also had the advantage of playing into a time period with a unique concept but still (due to The Last Samurai) inherently interesting to consumers.

I think the one way a Victoria Total War could work would be as a Saga for a Napoleonic/Empire game and a narrower scope, maybe mini campaigns as filler like Napoleon had where it took the Italian and Egyptian campaigns and separated them off. The core campaign could be 1848-1870 roughly, Europe, so that German wars of unification, Italian wars of unification, and the Crimean War - the only three events that mattered in Europe - are represented. Then any select wars from elsewhere in the world could be extras, like Mexican/ACW/Spanish, War of the Triple Alliance, Boer War, Boxer Rebellion/Taipings, etc.

It annoys me that they canned the rest of the world for Napoleon, I can appreciate that general audiences don't give a shit about the War of 1812 or India but they were theaters of Napoleon and angling to attack the latter was the whole point of his Egypt campaign.
 
Let's address the elephant in the room already: the updates which have systematically been killing off in-game chatrooms for Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, Rome 2 and today the ones for Attila and ToB dropped. I'll get to the good points first: Empire and Napoleon now run on my PC and I don't have to play them on my old laptop anymore. I ran the benchmark for Attila and it actually doesn't run like complete ass anymore. Not perfect but not complete crap either. In Shogun 2 they changed spawns for rebel armies. For example in the Chosokabe campaign it used to spawn in the northwest of your army and now it spawns east, right towards your early possible areas of expansion.

Have you noticed those updates fucking up something else in the process? The Napoleon one fucked up all gun and cannon sounds and to fix it they put in sounds from Fall of the Samurai... for some reason. Now don't get me wrong the firearm sounds in vanilla Napoleon were shit but now it's even more jarring to hear gunshots from rifled barrels while most units are still rocking smoothbores. Shogun 2 completely killed off workshop support and that shit has to be intentional. The first update just broke it and there was an easy community fix which didn't involve rolling back the update, but the second recent update killed it off completely. CA hating us once again and wanting us to buy and play Plebhammer and We Wuz Pharoz. Also while they did change the rebel army spawns in a good way for Shogun 2, they didn't bother to fix some obvious oversights that have been plaguing this game for a decade, like the fact that Hattori and Tokugawa battlefield ninjas are still inferior to every other clans' because they carry 9 fewer bombs than them. They also didn't fix any known oversights in Attila, like some upgrade paths not working (that's why for example you go from 4 Germanic Levy garrisons in your cities to just 1 Germanic Spearman once you research their upgrade tech), Salian Lancers for the Franks having no recruitment building in the Last Roman campaign while they did have it in the Grand Campaign. Venedian income bonuses and maluses don't work either, they are still missing extra garrison units once you build their farms, though their farms do produce no squalor just as advertised. There are many others and they have not been fixed.
 
I have good memories of playing Rome 1 online with randos and using chat to agree upon rules, discuss strategy and gang up on the guys who broke the rules in FFA games. I haven't played Rome1 or Medieval 2 multiplayer in almost a decade but it makes me sad that CA and the Bristish government have killed it off, probably for good.

I could see work around for it though. Use a separate online chat on a forum or chat service and the password protect games so you'll know only the people you can talk to can join. But that's a lot of steps and idk how dedicated the already small casual multiplayer communities are.
 
Attila is a really unique experience. It's hard as hell and I haven't enjoyed land battles much (I've gotten used to them in Empire/Napoleon and Shogun 2 by now), but the experience of leading a migratory tribe around running a raubwirtschaft, and still having buildings (something things like shitty Paradox game migration mechanics don't have), is really unique. I enjoy it more on the strategic level than the tactical one.

Western Rome dies entirely too fast, though.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Attila is a really unique experience. It's hard as hell and I haven't enjoyed land battles much (I've gotten used to them in Empire/Napoleon and Shogun 2 by now), but the experience of leading a migratory tribe around running a raubwirtschaft, and still having buildings (something things like shitty Paradox game migration mechanics don't have), is really unique. I enjoy it more on the strategic level than the tactical one.

Western Rome dies entirely too fast, though.
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It's kind of comical how fast the WRE dies when played by AI (also when played by shitty players but hey that's not the point). By the time Attila takes over the Huns they're either just gone with 2/3 of their territory already razed and the rest taken by various barbarian and rebel factions or they might as well be gone because they only have a single island left, usually either Corsica or Mallorca. ERE also dies or might as well be dead in my campaigns, just not as quickly. However, unlike the WRE where they just die unless you play as them, I did see the AI ERE do well in 2 of my campaigns (as the Hephthalites and as Himyar) and in both cases it's because I was bullying the Sassanids so the ERE ended up being able to focus on just repelling the various barbarians attacking them from the north.
 
WULULULULU said:
If you want to shit on Creative Assembly even more, Total War: Pharaoh released and its dubbed as the worst Total War in a long while.
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I wish I could say I'm shocked, but I just can't even feign surprise. Is it like, launch Rome 2 bad, or Thrones of Brittania bad?
 
Mr.Miyagi said:
I wish I could say I'm shocked, but I just can't even feign surprise. Is it like, launch Rome 2 bad, or Thrones of Brittania bad?
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Probably Thrones given that Pharaoh seemed like a shit idea at first but its starting to become like Rome 2 launch especially with the AI and the mountain of issues that has been plaguing nu-TW for a while.

Also, devs are from Throne of Brittania and Troy devteam so there is that.
 
Mr.Miyagi said:
I wish I could say I'm shocked, but I just can't even feign surprise. Is it like, launch Rome 2 bad, or Thrones of Brittania bad?
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Thrones, the core game isn't really that bad (it's not amazing either), but the amount of content is shit. The game is about the Bronze Age collapse but there's no Greece or Mesopotamia. Seems like an easy way to nickel'n'dime the paypigs with DLC.
 
WULULULULU said:
If you want to shit on Creative Assembly even more, Total War: Pharaoh released and its dubbed as the worst Total War in a long while.
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Amazing given that I haven’t been made aware of it’s release. Been like a thing I’ve kinda seen but also not really. Now we know why.

Tbh them doing Warhammer has kinda fucked them. Can’t really do historical games now in the same way they used to. Always got to have hero units that do cool things that change the battle.
 
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