He’s actually making me less likely to buy this even from an objective standpoint. He starts by talking about how artists and designers can move on to the next game while programmers fix bugs, but then says 1.5 will be the last patch. He says the campaign AI had more potential but is running on three cylinders (but still “great”), and ought to be better going forward (i.e., in future games). I guess that’s just a business call you have to make but doesn’t inspire me. Nothing about the tactical AI, which is all I’m really interested in.
I thought it was funny how he said American players prefer passive AI so they can plan their own maneuvers without distraction. I did this a lot in M2TW because my goal was to slam a lot of knights into each other, and I wanted to game the campaign AI to make sure my huge stack met with the enemy’s huge stack since I didn’t trust it would happen naturally. Having them pick off a few outlying colonies is just tedious attrition gameplay. Have fun with that I guess. Perhaps in the campaign there is a no-mans-land between passive and brilliant that I don’t want to bother with until they make it superb.
For real? That comment about “american players” does explain a lot about videogaming over the last decade or so, like why I have to buy something obscure from some central european or russian developer to get a properly hard game these days. That’s just a terrible thing to come out and admit, at least if you are trying to sell me a game.
Really, why not just include a big satchel of ranch dressing in Napoleon ?
Properly hard games are still very rare. As much as I love eastern European stuff, a lot of them get stuck with attrition gameplay as well. If western developers won’t spend the time and money to make a properly difficult game I’d rather it be passive than a time-consuming grind. This is more for strategic type stuff rather than tactical battles.
One common complaint we get from the community is that so long as there are defects in Empire: Total War, we shouldn’t be working on any new products. If there was just one of us, or all of us could work on any issue that would make sense.
Strawmanned!
Might not be so annoying if your new game didn’t appear on the face like something that should have been an aspect of your existing, still incomplete game …
You silly devs, you can’t make a ‘passive AI’ in your TW game, it’s not the kind of game that supports it. I can’t focus in trade and culture and research playing a pacific game in Empire TW because the game isn’t enough deep outside of war and combat. Or i don’t have the finer issues and historic subtleties of a European Universalis game. And of course your diplomacy still sucks. I have to go to war to enjoy the game, so cut the crap.
Actually that’s what i would say if i really believed that was the issue with the AI campaign. Because the AI isn’t passive, it’s just dumb. It’s not like before it was too pasive and the game was too easy for that. Even when it was passive, when decided to go to war and attack, it still sucked strategically speaking. That’s the issue.
And lol to this comment
As we approached release, bringing more subsystems on line, it was looking amazingly good, but at some point the level of chaos reached a tipping point and we lost control. Our AI did a “HAL” on us and gained the AI equivalent of multiple personality disorder. The net result is an AI that plans furiously and brilliantly and long term, but disagrees with itself chronically and often ends up paralysed by indecision.
If this is their rationale, then fuck 'em. They know we’re not going to buy Napoleon unless word of mouth is good, right? If you sell a broken game, people who buy it will say it’s broken, and people will not buy it when they hear it’s broken. The audience for Empire and the audience for Napoleon include – to put it mildly – many of the same people. There are COMMERCIAL reasons to make a good game.
The game itself is better than okay, but the condition of the game is far worse. They introduced serious bugs into the main campaign, and a really annoying graphics glitch that doesn’t show up for everyone but does show up for me (blurry text). I’ve gone from being excited about getting back to it to shortlisting it for uninstallation. How the mighty have fallen.
After reading that second blog, I’m just amazed that the PR folks for CA haven’t told Mike to STFU. Seriously. He’s too embarrassed to send out copies of the game to his friends, but he thinks we shouldn’t complain and give the game lousy Metacritic scores because it might hurt future sales of their product? What…the…fuck?!?
Yeah I love how he was too embarrassed to send his friends free complementary copies of the game, but he was perfectly happy for me to pay full price on release for the bloody special forces edition!
I have enjoyed the game, but can certainly see the lost potential.
Well, the Empire AI is way more complicated than any of our previous products, but the team is bigger and has more talent that we had in my day - PhD’s, and coders sharper than a box of razor blades. It’s a V12 supercar compared with Shogun’s 50cc moped. When it’s firing on all cylinders, it will be way, way ahead of anything we’ve seen in any PC strategy game before.
So the AI is so good, it’s bad? I think they need to fire some of those PhDs.
I dunno I buy a pack of cheap Thrills gums every once in a while and it tastes like soap. So I’ll probably get a copy of Empire and Napoleon eventually.
I just checked Wiki and it states "Comparisons of its flavour to soap are so prevalent that recent packaging states “it still tastes like soap!” "
My crashes have gone with Nvidia’s older 180.48s as has the blurry text.
I have a weird issue where Britain took my Marathi capital from me… I retook it after a while but most of my trade seems to have evaporated - the Trade screen says it’s blocked, but I can’t see how. The trade from the rest of India (which is all mine) is apparently blocked too. There is one British blockade in the region adjacent to my capital, but I can’t see how that would cause this. Any experts here?
All overseas trade in trade goods is handled through a single port. It’s either the trade port in your capital, or (if your capital has no trade port) the trade port nearest your capital, or (if you don’t have a trade port to start with) the first trade port you acquire. If they’re blockading the trade port your trade routes go through, then yes, they’re interdicting your goods trade.
I dare not update my nVidia drivers because my current ones are the only ones that work.
Thansk. That seemed to be it… but I could see the trade routes going into the next port along (the free one) and those weren’t blocked, so can’t really tell what’s going on.
I’m skipping the battles this campaign, as they all seem much the same, slow… and not very interesting any more…
