Yeah, I’ll admit I get easily confused by who I’m dealing with, I suspect I’ll get used to it.
As for the problem of not being able to get intel around who is making offers to me, this is a common problem I’ve had with all TWs, so not a new thing. Basically the menu pops up asking you to accept or decline or negotiate and then you’re stuck with that menu choice w/o being able to fully navigate away from it to gather the info needed to make the decision.
As for diplomacy, still figuring it out, I absolutely love that that is something to figure out, this one is so much more fleshed out than any previous TW in the diplomacy department. If I had to guess, you’re going to need to sort it out sooner or later because you will likely find yourself being attacked from multiple fronts if you don’t work to keep the peace from one if not two directions.
Duong Zhou died within the first year of second game. I think it was some event, because there was something about a minister poisoning him. So, it looks like there may be some dramatic differences between games.
I’m the complete opposite - this is the worst performing TW I think I’ve ever played. It doesn’t just CTD, it crashes so badly my computer shuts down and reboots. The crashes just come at random times - sometimes it’s 2 minutes after I start, sometimes it’s 2 hours. Seems a lot of people have the same problem on the TW forums so I’m hoping a hotfix is out soon.
I’ve had two CTDs. Once when trying to open the diplomacy screen and once after winning a battle (this one was particularly frustrating, it was a long and difficult one I couldn’t auto-resolve).
The other extremely annoying bug is that Yuan Shao vassalizes everyone. Even people who really shouldn’t be accepting. At first I thought it might have been a fluke in my game, but it is heavily reported on the forums.
The last one is kind of questionable. Corruption reduction mechanics reduce a % of a %, for example if you reduce corruption by 10% in a province with 50%, you end up with 45% corruption rather than the 40% I would expect. It’s possible this is intentional and either my expectations are out of whack or the UI isn’t doing its job explaining the game mechanics to me.
The Yuan Shao one is enough to make me kind of disinterested in a new game until it’s fixed, though otherwise I think it’s a pretty fantastic game with a pretty small amount of bugs for a PC release.
After some earlier failures, I finally pushed back against Yuan Shao in my Gungsun campaign, and it felt pretty great. This might also be the first time in a TW game in which I had to surrender out of a war and still managed to recover.
In first dozen turns I expanded by following the quests and then tried to go up against Yuan Shao. He wiped out my stacks and took a commandery, as well as regular food & gold payments. As I spent time rebuilding, he began to vassalize everyone, but then the western factions started a coalition against him. They eventually invited the few holdouts in the east, including me, and now we’re carving up his territory.
I’m pretty pleased with how the current game is going so far. I was pretty sure I was going to lose for about a third of it, but thanks to some diplomatic opportunities I now control most of the northeast.
Yes - but it’s not a phenomena isolated to TW3K - archery is always overpowered in these games, thanks to the myth of the Longbow. It’s a rare computer wargame that doesn’t use that myth to justify a missile/infantry/cavalry mechanic which - at least from a historical perspective - never existed.
Yuan Shao tends to sort itself out later in the game, but early on it is definitely an issue.
I played as Cao Cao and just set everyone on his ass ASAP. If you can keep Liu Bei out of a coalition with him, he doesn’t get crazy. Hell, we collectively destroyed him before he got rolling.
Other options are playing people not in his immediate area. Or play as Yuan yourself. Or just keep him mostly friendly and eventually his whole empire will usually start to implode.
I had quite a fun campaign playing as Yuan Shao, but I don’t really feel like going out of my way to play a specific playstyle to deal with an acknowledged bug, so I’ll personally just wait on the patch to play again. Even in the Cao Cao campaign I started I’m sure I would have beaten him, it just felt so dumb and game-y that all these factions that had no business capitulating to him were. Constantly.
I’m not really complaining, I played an awful lot of Total War in the last few days, I could use a break!
Trebuchets are good you guys (this was me with 3k dudes attacking a secondary settlement [so chokepoint galore] vs 5k defending dudes)
Another amusing instance, I kept having to reload a savve because I kept accidently killing my spy who happened to be a general in the enemy army. You think I would’ve learned after the first reload, but apparently I am bloodthirsty.
On another note, despite the entire rework of diplomacy into something functional, the very ancient vassal problem is still around. That is, when someone you have a deal with declares war on your vassal, you are the one who take diplo hits (untrustworthy) for defending them. Oh and if you choose to not defend your vassal you also get an untrustworthy hit for good measure.
Strat that is what I thought. I mean if we had a significant piece of ancient warfare historical data that stated “Ancient Chinese compound bows were twice the pull strength of western bows” or something I’d get it. So its just the usual CA thing “we need to make bows good so people won’t complain”
Rome 2 missiles were op. Attila were op but you could go into missile formations to block (as in rome 2 I guess but )
Looks like this was a harbinger of the complete collapse of my gaming PC. Other games are arbitrarily deciding not to launch, and I’m hitting a black screen with blinking cursor on half of my reboots. So now I get the special joy of reformatting and reinstalling windows and everything else, followed by testing my drives and hardware piece by piece until I figure it out.
So not CA’s fault. I just needed to vent for a moment.
