Yeah, I think from what I understand some of the complaining was due to some of the new victory conditions proving pretty easy to achieve, no doubt in part because some of them are faction specific. I could see how play testing for balance for these might prove harder than the older TW’s where it was essentially paint the map.
I’m glad to hear they’re listening to the feedback and implementing improvements to address some of them, that’s what they did with Rome 2 and by the time the Emperor edition was out they had it hammered into a pretty good title.
Broadly speaking difficulty is tough to address, for the most part they just buff the AI stats, which is not really ideal as it basically makes diplomacy fall apart, In previous TWs on higher difficulties everyone sort of just loses their minds and attacks the human player and refuses to work through diplomacy at all which for me sort of breaks the game a bit from an immersion stand point, i.e. irrationally traveling half way across the map from your one province to attack me with your one stack just feels silly, just as watching the AI shuffle stacks back and forth between points for no reason does.
My 2 cents: The AI for TW stopped working so well at a strategic level at the point they introduced 3D maps w/ Warscape (Empire forward). S1 and M1 were Risk style maps where the AI could be scripted to handle it pretty well, everything since has been a long slow slide sacrificing good game play for pretty. To their credit though on the tactical level the AI feels much improved.
Net: I look forward to keeping tabs on what they do on this one and eventually getting it.
Good is indeed relative. R1 and MTW2 are at a transition point in map design though, they opened it up so you can wander around but had yet to transition to warscape and make it 3D. The result was the same, meandering units incapable of adquately dealing with the human or even each other for that matter.
So the the good I’m referring to strategically was specific to S1 and M1, both of which used a Risk style movement on the campaign map. That’s something a lot easier to script to than an open area that as anyone who has played any TW from R1 forward can attest to the AI doesn’t handle very well.
It’s a little strange since I thought the “Saga” spin-off series was going to focus on strict historical settings. Maybe the fantasical elements from Warhammer and the Romance version of Three Kingdoms are just being received better.
I didn’t quite catch this from the images I posted (though the effect is certainly present in the first one); but the skyboxes sometimes have a unique aesthetic flair inspired roughly by the era.
It might not work for everyone, but I like the contrast between the sky and the more realistic style of the terrain. Seems like this approach is utilized on the Strategic campaign map.
I picked up Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia during the steam xmas sale and while I’ve only gotten a few hours into my first campaign, I must say I’m pleasantly surprised by what I’ve found so far.
I rather like the art style, find the setting engaging because I love the time period and think it’s well suited for TW and very much like the limitations built into recruitment which really make you stop and think about treating your guys like a bunch of easily replaced cannon fodder (because they very much are not given the very slow pace at which they replenish and the restrictions on how fast you can recruit new units).
I’ll circle back periodically as the campaign progresses with further observations and based on how it goes might even go so far as an AAR not unlike the one I did for Aggressors: Ancient Rome.
P.S. So does this mean we’re going to lump all the Saga CA works into one thread? Seems like rather shoddy treatment don’t you think?
Hmm, judging from the lack of response and low activity in this thread apparently the interest in the saga series is low and combining them all in one thread is the right call.
Thrones was ok, but it made two cardinal sins, imo; it was too big and too ahistoric.
Total War games at this point are about a bunch of small factions duking it out until one of them wins. Pretty much, 1-2-3, every game since Shogun 2 follows this formula exactly. Only Atilla managed to come up with a somewhat different setup (at least on the surface).
Thrones though - not only are most of the minor factions historically irrelevant if not actually non-existent - it doesn’t play like history. If I want English vs Vikings (and maybe some Celtic nations for good measure), I don’t want to start on a giant 300 settlement map with 40-odd randomly named factions and spend my game years duking it out with minor factions that literally never existed. I just want my Heptarchy, and throw in a few Celtic and Viking factions for good measure.
Thrones’ map is too big, and too generic, with little interesting geographic dilemmas or geographic narrative going on. Honestly Attila’s Age of Charlemagne feels more like I wanted with thrones. If they had been brave enough to make a tighter, smaller scale game, I think it would have been better received. Instead they tried to shoehorn a much smaller theatre into the generic grand strategy shoebox that everything they make fits in, including giant maps, dozens or hundreds of settlements, bragging about how “large” the map is, such that getting across Britain takes like 6 or 10 years of game time or something stupid.
Sure it’s a bit streamlined by comparison, but not by a huge amount. It feels rather wide and shallow, when i’dve preferred narrow and deep.
Academy Game’s 878 board game, simple and straightforward, feels like a Viking invasion of England. Total War Saga Thrones feels like a reskinned Rome 2 spread out too thin on a giant piece of Britain sized toast. I try to play Thrones every now and again, and almost immediately get bored and wander off to play something else. And it’s not that strictly speaking Thrones is bad - if it were the only Total War game I owned, it’d be great. It’s that it’s just so ordinary compared to most of the Total War games released in recent years, it simply loses on opportunity cost.
