Ok you’ve got me to take an interest in this game.
This quote piqued my interest.
Once I made a tactical decision in Pharaoh — to advance my left flank in the hopes of pushing the enemy into a marsh, for one — I had to live with it
I think it would be awesome to try a Total War game where you start each battle by assembling the position of your troops (as we do now) but also assign orders of how they should move and engage the enemy prior to combat start. Each segment of your army is headed by a commander that has his own personality.
Once the battle is underway and your plan comes into contact with the enemy’s plan, you can adjust your plan on the fly but it relies on your general or his couriers physically delivering orders. So if your right flank needs your personal touch you ride your general over there and yell at the commander. Otherwise, the commanders will make decisions based on their AI personality.
No idea if that would be more fun than what we have now, but it would certainly be very interesting to try in my view.
Decades ago, I loved the battles in Centurion ( I think that was the name) where you set your armies positions and then just started the battle and watched it happen. I don’t think there was any input after the battle started but watching the lil dudes march into each others formations and battle was awesome.
It’s not Total War but the Scourge of War/Take Command games operate much as you describe, at least as far as commanders with personalities and courier-based orders delay.
Probably reading too much into it. It was probably just referring to units stuck in mud.
Heavier units will tire out faster, and they’ll also get bogged down in mud, less able to fight in these unfavourable conditions than their lighter counterparts.
OK wow there is a ton of content dropping for this already.
No, Centurion had input mid battle. The UI was so obtuse that I played for years without realizing, though (and indeed liked it more that way).
But that input was limited by the command range of your general - basically a radius in which he could be heard. Units outside that range ignored anything you tried to tell them to do and stuck to the original plan.
I loved that game.
OK I am getting hyped for this - a straight down the line, historical Total War. Looks absolutely gorgeous. The weather and fire effects work great. Matched fighting animations. Sieges worth a damn.
I was a bit dubious about siege towers in Ancient Egypt - some 2000 years before they were used on battlefields in medieval Europe - but apparently they were!
In the Middle Kingdom tomb of General Intef at Thebes a depiction shows a type of mobile siege tower.
This is one of the most amazing interviews. The production is great - but then the responses from the devs and their appreciation for the period are great!!
Bonus Akhnaten reference.
Strategic map gameplay reveal. Same 5 resources as Troy. Outposts are back.
Interesting take from Zerk - Pharaoh is very similar strategic wise to Troy so… Bronze Age Immortal Empires map anyone??
Wait, the guy in the second video speculates it will be connected to Troy via a third game covering Anatolia, is this game not covering that? Does that mean the Hittites are mostly off-map? I can’t really see a third game covering such a tiny niche.
Yeah he is wrong on geography - Anatolia is confirmed in this game. GBG even says this is the “largest campaign map ever” (outside IE).
… and suddenly my internet plummets, like tears in the rain. How many 200 hour CA Total War game does one have to have before you can save you’ve seen it before?
Even though my interest in this started out very low, the more I see from y’all the more interested I get. Ancient stuff is interesting, it’s not an area well covered in games, and they have funky outfits.
You even get a chaos invasion, of a sort.
Yeah I’m pretty hyped for this game. I love Warhammer, but 7 years and hundreds of hours sunk into each of the 3 games is a lot. And War3 has ended up on a sour note - the sieges are just terrible.
I want to go back to what this series does well and explore a historical period. The problem is pre-Warhammer titles are unplayable for me now - the UI, game design decisions - lots of rough edges that have been smoothed over since Attila.
There’s Troy, but I have that on Epic and its kind of orphaned there without mods. There’s ToB which is terrible. Then there’s 3 Kingdoms, which I have been playing a lot recently - it is still great. But it’s not a straight historical title.
Map size is neither a positive or a negative for me - the last Total War game where I conquered the whole map was Medieval 1. I’m happy to play out a couple hundred turns and then move onto the next campaign.
So hell yeah, give me chariots and pyramids and Nilotic culture and I’m all in. Time to dig out River God and read that again as well!
I dunno, I’m trying to go back to Empire, and it seems pretty nice back there.
I played a lot of Empire (and later Napoleon) back when I was plowing through the Sharpe books on my train commute. I even watched the TV movies!