I tried Third Age, and while I was impressed by the attention to detail, I was kinda put off by the combination of: (1) Cities are hidden by default, and (2) the ‘zones’ those cities are in are incredibly huge. Is there some workaround to this? Or do I need my PhD in Middle Earth Geography before being able to have a battle?
The cities in M2 Total War were always hidden by default.
Yes, but (1) I know where Rome is, wheras I didn’t even know most of the cities in Third Age existed in Tolkien’s oeuvre, and (2) as I said, the regions in Third Age are about 6 times the size of the Medieval regions, which turns “Oh, a new region, I’ll take 3 or 4 steps to explore and find the town” into “Oh, a new region. I’ll wander around aimlessly for 6 turns and still not find the town.”
Is there an option to exempt cities from Fog of War?
Use cavalry to scout. :p
Or spies. Seriously, they’re cheap and endlessly useful. Just don’t do anything stupid like try to infiltrate and risk killing it. They’re much better simply for giant-ass view areas in enemy territory.
You know one of the areas where I think EmpireTW totally messed up? The loss of the dynasty/family importance. In Rome and Medieval2, you needed those family members to manage provinces and lead your armies. You were excited when another prince was about to “come of age.” And you choose your generals carefully, not just based on who had the best stats, but with an eye towards giving your leaders experience. It was like a mini-RPG element.
They threw that all out in Empire. Need a general? Just buy one. Who’s your king or heir? Who cares.
RTW was itself a pale immitation of MTW, where you could produce your own line of inbred bastards by dragging princesses onto mass murderers :)
Rome is my all-time favorite of the TW games…loved it to bits -probably because it was the first one I tried.
Btw -thanks for the heads up on the LOTR mod for TW:MWII - thats one seriously cool mod. Is it even a mod, and not a full game? holy cow they’ve done a lot of stuff!
And yeah, from my brief stint playing, you’ll want tons of scouts sent out. Oh, and I’ve build a LOT of Watchtowers since my terriorties are so big, so its easier to keep watch on my enemies like that
… All along the watchtower… princes kept the view… while all the women came and went… barefoot servants too.
Makes a lot more sense for the ETW time period, anyway. I’d argue that they threw out a lot more important stuff from M2:TW than that (e.g. the reinforcement system).
Multuplayer campaign is pretty cool, though we keep hitting an irritating bug where you can only autoresolve battles after a certain point (usually in the first few truns of the campaign it seems).
I just fired this up for the first time in months. I was thinking about buying a new game, but figured I needed to see where this was at. My random battle with the Brits didn’t really convince me that much had changed. I won rather easily despite having little recollection of tactics or controls, which tells me the AI is not really improved. Firing up a campaign would be the only way to know for sure, I guess.
I’m reinstalling ETW against my better judgment. I’m going to see whether the blurry text bug still hits me on my new system. If it doesn’t, maybe I’ll check whether the tabs in the original campaign are working now post-Warpath. If they are, maybe I’ll start a new campaign.
What I can be sure I won’t do is get Napoleon at anything over $20 unless word of mouth is uniformly positive, and by uniformly positive I mean there’s no one on the official boards complaining that there are major bugs or that ETW’s problems remain. The official word from the developers is that people on the boards always complain, so I figure the odds I’ll buy their new game are pretty low.
FWIW, I never had blurry text the last time I played a few months ago. I just fired up the game last night, and after updating, I noticed my text was really blurry…
…alt+tabbing out and back into the game often fixes the blurry text problem. At least for a while.
That’s pretty discouraging, I was looking forward to having my coop buddy control my armies so we could conquer the world together (ala Dawn of War 2 coop).
Yes, some people have had blurry text problems in the past, but for what appears to be most of the people suffering from the blurry text bug (including me), it was introduced by a recent update.
That hasn’t worked for me.
I wonder if toggling the screen resolution down a few notches and then up again fixes it. Reminds me of a bug I was having in my code where I wasn’t reseting the sizes of pixel offsets correctly to align the text glyphs.
I’ll have to try that once it’s reinstalled. This thing takes forever on Steam – it’s like 15 gigs.
And… bug’s still there. Resolution trick didn’t work. This fuckin’ game, man.
You should buy Napoleon. Everything will be fixed in Napoleon. Promise.