Is what this is. Yo. Not previews, naw. Real deal here.
So anyway, the entire internet is spooging about it. 9s and 9.5s popping up like daisies. I’m getting excited enough to consider buying it right away even though I have yet to even launch the Civ IV Complete I bought during the recent Steam sale. I’m easily impressionable. Also I cashed in $100 worth of change recently.
Anyone played it yet? If so, what’d’ja think?
Pre-ordered prior to seeing reviews. I just saw IGN give a 9.5, though I have trusted reviews less and less these days. Still, that puts hope in my heart that this will be a Total War game worth playing more than 1 campaign on. Shogun is still the best of any, I’d say, and I am hoping this will provide the same entertainment.
Preordered also… Cannot wait. I played Medieval to death, but sadly never got into M2TW or Rome much… Looking to get back in about now.
-Chris
I started playing a Byzantium M2TW:Crusades campaign last week in preparation for this. The Turks are almost gone, now I need to take the remaining Anatolian territory away from Antioch and Jerusalem.
Not giving in the hype …for once:D
I will wait for Steam sales or something.
Gah! No steam preload anymore. How long does it take to download 15 gigs from a steam content server being hammered into crashing every few minutes? I’m excited for the game as well… I just don’t expect to have it downloaded until the weekend at earliest given the steam’s track record with non preloading major releases.
I just bought the bastard on Steam. Got carried away. Oh well :-D
Grr, people in the other thread are saying the game is too lethal (people die too fast or have to die too much before morale breaks, etc.), and the game “will have to be modded.” Poop. How true is this? Everyone says Civ IV is finally decently balanced with Beyond the Sword… does it really take that long?
Put it this way: if I’ve NEVER played a game in this series (which I haven’t – I played the Medieval demo once and that’s it), and if I’m not a major historical grognard, and if I don’t get blocked on the interface and like the basic play style, will I likely get terribly offended by the lethality / balance issues in the game’s initial release? In other words, should I just not even bother launching my new Steam purchase of the game for a couple of months, or will I probably not even notice the issues the grognardish ones complaineth of?
I don’t think you would be bothered by any of that during the course of a short campaign. I didn’t have enough time to notice in the demo because I was having too much fun shooting mans.
Yeah, if too many men die in battles, thats not gonna bother me that much. I don’t look to Total War games to provide wargame level accuracy.
Total war games always have been about utter carnage. Try a battle over a bridge lol.
No preloading? well that’s a bummer. Two days to go (for me)…
People always find things wrong with strategy games, partially based on their own personal preferences and partially based on being easily worked up over minor historical details. The nice thing about the TW series is that the games are very moddable.
Personally I’ve always found the TW games very playable at release and expect the same here. You may later find some things that you would like to see changed, but I doubt you will be offended by the release product unless you are a huge fan of the historical period and know the kind of details that have the grognards in a hissy fit already.
The number of people dead and dismembered in a given battle isn’t exactly a minor detail. Certainly wasn’t to them.
Which has nothing to do with the question asked by RepoMan.
Most of a Total War game is non-historical other than in a general sense of the era. While the casualty levels should generally be correct, it’s not like even the historical battle scenarios are accurate - I sure don’t see the 15,000 troops each side had in that demo battle, do you?
And in general you can look at sites like twcenter.net and see discussions that are pretty much minor details. Like whether the decision to make the US colonies a protectorate of Britain is fair or whether the blunderbuss is represented in the game as it should be. People need to calm down and remember it’s a game.
In the end the TW games are not historical sims. If that’s what you want out of them then you need to wait for the mods or go look at one of the excellent hard-core games that are aimed at the grognard wargamer crowd.
Unless you’re playing a video game, in which case nobody gives a fuck, they like the 'splosions.
The balance is between actions happening fast enough so you’re not bored or taking all day to play a battle versus having the time to survey the battlefield and make decisions in time to have them be effective. Over time the TW games have been leaning towards the former and away from the latter.
Maybe because it was so new at the time, but I seem to recall Shogun being a thrillingly different real-time wargame for how engagements would come down to morale rather than casualties. Units would break and run before they would die. It was more about the rout than the slaughter. I remember the original Close Combat (I think that’s what it was called) doing something similar on a much smaller tactical scale. Both games made the point that you didn’t need to kill your enemy if you could just get him to stop fighting somehow. I really liked that.
Maybe I’m misremembering or reading too many message forums, but it seems like Creative Assembly has increasingly moved away from that model with successive games.
-TomFirearms are not as powerful in Empire than they are in Medieval 2: Conquest, or at least thus it appears from the demo. Those Irish Gun-Cavalry were almost like semi-automatic English slayers, and that stupid Mangonel-of-Doom, a catapult like weapon that threw flaming and exploding barrels, was so overpowered relative to the battlefield it’s a wonder anyone bothered with gunpowder at all.
From the demo, at least, the gameplay was much slowed relative to Medieval 2. The biggest problem with the Medieval games was the engine’s over-emphasis of ranged fire. In skirmish after skirmish my ranged troops - regardless of faction - would do the lion’s share of damage, even useless European peasant bows fired by useless European peasants. Medieval always tried hard to make melee relevant, but it was the age of the Mounted Horse Archer, and it showed.
What changed between Medieval 1 and Rome was the ease by which routing troops were slaughtered. In Rome, rout = death, most of the time. This sort of pushed unit balance and the syncopation of battle in a certain direction, culminating in Medieval 2 (in which it was changed to a moral/financial choice, but still just as catastrophic).
That’s been exactly my problem with the Total War series after Shogun, which was easily the best of the bunch despite all its warts. It all became so fast and overly arcadey, with barely any chance to maneuver while forces were engaged in melee, and way too much slaughter during battle. That, and they gave everyone +3 arrows of Major Human Bane. :-P
It’s my favorite genre, so it wouldn’t take much to get over my skepticism despite feeling burned in the past several outings. I was a bit non-plussed by what I’ve read about the naval engagements though, but I still hold out hope I’ll hear that morale is once again key…
In the end, I just hope battles plays out somewhat akin to the old Sid Meier’s Gettysburg.