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!
Empire is interesting because it’s not about a zillion different units with tiny differences between them. In fact most rosters only have 8-12 total units of cavalry and infantry to choose from, and most European factions share about half of those between them. Also the maps are interesting, there are only a few major capitals, most cities are just buildings on the map. And the naval combat, for all its limitations, doesn’t suck like modern games.
I’d love love love them to go back and try an Empire 2. Every so often I reinstall Empire and one of the big modpacks but it all just feels a little too clunky and unfriendly compared to newer TW games so I just don’t stick with it very long.
Not a fan of video dev diaries. TL:DR version
- More on the outpost system. You can put soldiers from an army into a fort outpost (don’t need a leader).
- Sync animations. Previously units drew from a list of generic animations, now they have unique animations per weapon type.
- Victory points in sieges give morale debuffs.
- Civil wars - early game now instead of a late game feature.
- General skill tree has been reduced to attack/defence/speed.
- Traits are back
- Your general’s weapon will decide the unit they are in - equip a spear get a spear unit etc.
This sounds more and more awesome! I REALLY love the historical TW games, and this sounds just great.
For some reason, I also really enjoy games taking place in the desert!
Absolutely! So many battle maps in 3 Kingdoms are full of forest. If I open the map preview and it’s all trees, auto resolve straight away.
I like these extended showcases of the game mechanics. The civil war stuff looks pretty good actually.
A bit concerning the video is like 90% siege battles though. But the sieges do look light years better than the War3 ones.
Have to say, siege battles always look goofy when they’re on massive city walls. Were real Egyptian walls 100 feet high and 50 feet deep? I don’t know. But even with hundreds of little dudes running around, the massiveness of the walls and environment makes the (only) hundreds of dudes to man the defences or attack makes the whole thing feel out of sorts. Even worse, I imagine, when you’re playing a campaign and you have play a battle with a small reserve of three units of spears against 5 units of attackers on the massive city map, it’s just auto-resolve dumb. At least most castles in Shogun2 were smaller, they felt much better.
I’m just coming off playing a whole ton of Field of Glory 2, and watching these little ant squares move through each other like fish shoals, mush into enemy formations at all kinds of weird angles, repositioning the whole square every 3 seconds at different lengths etc, you realize just how gamey this whole system is. Always has been, granted, but I’ve taken a break from TW since Shogun2 and I guess other than graphics and maybe better pathfinding, it still feels like the same thing from a decade ago.
Ironically, I kinda feel the behaviour of the troop formations in the original Shogun TW felt more real in terms of manoeuvring, unit cohesion, and speed… more blocky, unyielding, unhappy about constant formation change in teh heat of things… that might have been more basic programming but it felt better. But yeah, the overall look of the units manoeuvring here just looks gamey and silly, and I wouldn’t mind something way more realistic, even if it limited the players micromanagement.
I feel like the best game in the entire series in terms of representation of the tactical aspects of historical battles was the first Rome. Some people found the pacing too slow but it really conveyed the ponderousness of formations like the phalanx, and pretty much all of my personal best historical-type battles were in Rome I. I had a great deal of enjoyment with Shogun II and Rome II but Rome I was the peak, tactically speaking (but not as great strategically IMO.)
Now if you throw history to the winds, I feel WH1 and WH2 were pretty fantastic tactically.
If you don’t want to wait to October to play this, the Age of Bronze mod of Rome 2 is coming out this month.
Does this hold true in the Rome remaster thing or did they mess with battle pacing there? The strategic layer in the first Rome turned me off of it quite a bit so it’s been a very long time since I’ve played.
Me too. The scale of individual units was bigger too, so you could enjoy the close up battle detail better.
I didn’t play the Rome remaster so I don’t know. It looked like they updated tactical stuff a lot so maybe they “fixed” the slow pacing, which would suck. They did not as far as I could tell, do anything to the now-outdated strategic level, so I did not get the remaster.
No-one should ever play the Rome remaster. Its a shoddy mess of brokenness that has a ton of bugs that the original didn’t. What should have a great release from CA, ended up being one of their worst ever.