Thats pretty funny! I guess its a Meme I didn’t pick up on.
Looks like the sieges take about the same amount of time as previous games. No worries about crashes wasting hours of effort at least. From RPS:
JR: The very longest battles tend to be 45 minutes or something like that, maybe an hour I think… It’s very rare to get that long. They vary from 20 minutes to 40 minutes for a big battle.
RPS: It says a lot about what that visual scale suggests, because I was watching it thinking ‘ah, this is Supreme Commander BC, this is going to have to take three hours’.
JR: No no. There’s no save point in battles.
Later in the interview, I still can’t tell if they understand what’s wrong with siege battles. He makes a lot of noise about it, but then describes a capture point system within the walls that sounds similar to the old design. He thinks that’s better than a central square system. He called the old system going for the headshot. But people go for that because it sucks and it’s boring to move troops around the narrow roads in a city. Now there are multiple capture points instead. Does that just spread the tedium around instead? Let’s hope the AI distributes its troops so each capture point is easier to steamroll.
It would also help if there’s some snowball effect to grabbing more capture points (morale?)
I wish they would admit their battle system is ill-suited for period siege combat, so they could just put the stuff on the campaign map, but i guess people like seeing their guys on the walls.
I just hope that they can get their load times shorter. Every time I fire Shogun 2 back up, I end up putting it down again fairly quickly due to the load times of the battles. (My CPU isn’t terrible - a three year old i7)
~C~
The trick is to think of something you need to do during the loading times. For instance, I’m currently studying for the bar exam. I can get a good 10 minutes of studying in every time I decide to manually control a battle.
I take those opportunities to rewatch the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
-TomSpeaking of which, I downloaded the Third Age mod to try it last night after someone mentioned it in the thread, and…wow. That is some seriously amazing work.
This a thousand times. The load times in Shogun 2 are the worst of any game ever. It takes my i7 about 5 minutes for reaching the start screen alone. Loading up C64 games feels like walking on light speed in comparison.
I have to quote this (shamelessly stolen from Bucky Carooe @ BF):
“Imagine games which have no “loading…” screens and simply stream data from the drive without having discreet levels… Imagine games with real interactive music and true-to-life, non-repetitive commentary. Imagine levels 20x the size of a typical console game.”
– Microsoft’s J. Allard, discussing the impact of the Xbox’s hard drive in 2001. 10 years later, I’m still imagining it.
It’s probably not your CPU. Hop on one of the 128 Gig SSDs for 100 dollars deals that are popping up almost every week now. It will breath new life into an old system.
10 to 15 second load times.
Even if you don’t want to use an SSD for your data drive (128 GB is a little small for all my Steam games, for instance), putting your OS and everything else on an SSD will a) make your computer boot up way faster and b) free up the entire other drive for just your games, which means far less I/O contention (and therefore faster loading times). I definitely noticed a change when I used this setup.
There are various apps that will let you install just a subset of your Steam games on the SSD too. Though even just putting the OS on there along helps a lot.
25 seconds my ass. i have a ssd and put shogun on it. shit is stupidly fast, but them shogun loading times aint drive related. its compiling shaders or something. turn off your graphics whizzbang and zzzzip it goes!
also, wtf is with that chicken? in what context does one get told to “keep on fuckin that chicken” ? is it like screwin the pooch?
yea saw it the 1st time. dont get it the 2nd time around either
I’m quite excited about this game - Shogun 2 and Napoleon did a lot to rebuild my trust in CA’s judgement and quality control.
Good luck with the bar!
After the critical battles of the first couple turns are won the horrendous loading times make me just auto resolve everything. Half an hour into the game I start asking myself why I am even playing a TW game this way and load up Civilization or a Paradox game instead.
Rome TW with the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod is a great game though, I’m tempted to reinstall it and start a game as the Seleucid empire.
I’m pretty sure that’s EB 1; EB2 is for M:TW 2 and isn’t out yet.
Yes, it’s still being worked on.
Yes, really.
A pair more
So…I need a new Cray computer it seems.
Yeah, no way my machine will be able to handle this. It can barely handle Shogun 2 as it is.