Lets hope that they somehow dive into Age of Sigmar in Total Warhammer 3. Lots of cool new stuff there.
As for Three Kingdoms, the game is going to live or die depending on how good the AI is. Consider how open-ended the game looks on the strategic side, I am a bit worried. That said, I have been waiting for a good historical China game for a long time, and I really hope it succeeds.
Has it ever been good? I only played the first Rome:TW and a bit of Shogun 2, and it was abysmal in both case — and I am arguably one of the most inept strategy gamers around here.
For eye candies, this Total War: Koei sure looks bland and uninspired, compared to the barroque Warhammer games.
I agree, I’d rather go play Shogun 2 with its beautiful map and seasons, than this new game.
I thought Shogun 2 after patches worked ok AI wise, but perhaps mostly because the siege rules in that one are better for the AI (and for a human player, I think).
I’ve been hammered in many battles in Rome 2, but there the siege battles and settlement fights do break the AI a lot. The field battle AI is effective enough. Not great, but far from abysmal and workable.
I think they have a competent AI for general cases, but one that doesn’t quite manage the more complex procedures needed in a closed terrain battle.
Am I the only one who likes how this game looks? As much as I like Warhammer, it has kind of a silly, over-exaggerated aesthetic. Kind of reminds me of the later 3D Heroes of Might and Magic games. I like how understated and minimalist this game’s aesthetic is in comparison. It seems like a refined version of Shogun 2.
I think Warhammer may have an unfair advantage to some of us because of its material — the uncanney valley is a far remote destination from the Old World!
That video looks nice but it moves around so fast. It claims to be the campaign but all he shows are battles and battles and more battles! The guy even says he has no patience to explore the options for offices and whatever, what a tease! that’s what we want to see!
Which is a very good point, because the battles are the part CA has mostly gotten right for quite some time now.
It’s the strategic layer and things like diplomacy that have fallen down for me in the past.
It’s hard for me to play something like Rome 2 and watch on the strategic layer as AI stacks wander aimlessly about and the only way difficulty actually gets accomplished is by giving one settlement AI’s insta stacks to attack you with to make up for the fact the AI scripting clearly can’t handle navigating intelligently on a large 3D map. Which is just one example of how I don’t trust the AI in Three Kingdoms will or won’t manage to do better than the past because strategic has been a struggle and diplomacy often just not making sense at all.
Net: need to see more game play on the map and showing how all these new nuances of diplomacy really work to know if they actually do integrate properly.
This is where I disagree. For the historical games, I feel like the scale is too small, the units way too fast relatively speaking, way too much micromanagement of special abilities. I don’t feel like a historical general.
To me, the TW battle engine is closer to an action/RTS than to a strategic type experience. And that works GREAT in the Warhammer milieu of fire breathing dragons and powerful spellcasters. But not so much historically speaking.
For historical TW games, I want a more strategic, less action-y experience. For the TW games that choose to offer the more action-y experience, bring on more fantasy and sci-fi licenses I say. WH 40K, Horus Heresy, Game of Thrones, you name it. Bring it on.
But that doesn’t work nearly as well in the historical setting. In the historical setting, I want battles that give me the sense of being a historical general, and the TW series has steadily drifted away from that since the time of the first Rome: TW, which was the high point of a more stately, more strategic feel to the battles. (You can dig up some of my decade-old AARs on this forum for examples of what I mean.) Shogun 2, to me, was a good iteration of the more strategic battle style, but Rome II, despite the fact I love that game, was a move towards more action, more speed, less thoughtful play, and the trend was accelerated by Attila IMO. And Three Kingdoms looks like its going in the same direction.
Basically, if you are making action battles, then fun fantasy/sci-fi genre stuff is better than historical stuff. If you want the historical stuff to work, you have to cut way back on the action-y stuff and focus on a more strategic feel to the battles.
That’s where I am. After almost 20 years of buying every single TW game evar, I skipped TW: Thrones of Britannia last year and, unless something happens to change my mind, I’ll also be skipping Three Kingdoms. WH3 otoh, I’m buying that sucker day 1. YMMV.
I went back and dug up one of the old threads I was referring to above. This is the kind of thing I want to see in the TW historical games.
Let’s do the Time Warp again!
[quote=“Sharpe, post:169, topic:133403, full:true”]
This is where I disagree. For the historical games, I feel like the scale is too small, the units way too fast relatively speaking, way too much micromanagement of special abilities. I don’t feel like a historical general…etc [/quote]
I get that scale and slower resolve might be your thing, heard that plenty over the years, and I certainly agree about the special ability piece.
I think you might be suffering from a mild dose of nostalgia though if you’re recollecting R1 tactical is better than say R2 or S2 or even warhammer for that matter. Because in all of those cases the AI does quite a bit better job tactically now than it did in R1 or M1/S1 or MTW2. The fact that it took longer to resolve a battle in MTW2 didn’t mean the AI was doing a more intelligent job. I get you want things less actiony, but my experience is while it’s true the battles are over quicker than perhaps either of us would like, that doesn’t equate to a more intelligent AI “back in the day” as compare to current.
And on the subject of AI, my experience is on the strategic level the AI has been varying degrees of brain dead every since warscape was introduced. Well, really even before that since it wasn’t exactly great in MTW2. The last point the strategic map worked was when it was a risk style design in S1 and M1. Since then we’ve traded increasingly pretty 3d maps for increasingly stupid AI behavior.
What Easytarget said. I’ve played them all, the campaign AI was best in the earlier Shogun with the simple map, however Battle AI has been the suck until Attila, and only really getting okay with Warhammer, and Medieval 2 was an unplayable mess of a game, those Sieges was unbearable.
Don’t let nostalgia fool you, it really wasn’t better before. Campaign AI in warhammer is decent, but there are jarring problems, like city building is just sad, it can’t skill its heroes to save itself, and some units, like corpse carts are poorly understood by the AI.
That said…
I think this China TW will be a huge flop, it just doesn’t cover an era that’s interresting for most western folk, and these games don’t enjoy an audience in China, its just not catering to a buying crowd.
I appriciate the try though, lets just hope they get to Medieval 3 next and stop fucking around.
You mean Shogun 2: FOTS? I am convinced it spawned armies in the fog of war. I would reload, reposition to minimize fog of war and it would spawn them somewhere else. I can’t remember if base S2 did the same.
Battle AI is better in more recent games, no question, but the pacing and micromanagement are worse, IMO. I view Rome 1 as the high point of the overall battle experience, with Shogun 2 in second place.
In my view, battle AI is only a part of the overall battle experience. It’s an important part but it doesn’t define the experience IMO.
I thought Rome 1 cumbersome and slow, later versions were worse, Shogun 2 was amazing and a return to atleast some gameflow that didn’t suck, also since troops could climb walls, scaling battles didn’t turn into a shit show like ALL the others from earlier…
I bet you felt that way about MECHWARRIOR too, didn’t you? I liked total war when I still had time to think, time to see things happen, time to salvage a bad turn. At a certain point it became a kid’s game, all APM and looks and no room anymore for brainy shit.
Mostly talking about the campaign part, and I like Mechwarrior online, it was fun, I find Warthunder with Tier 6+ tanks like playing a game of molasses and spot the pixel.
The mechwarrior game i meant was the turn based one. Single player.
The first one, I remember playing that, it was good fun.
I think you’re wrong on both counts. I think there are many strategy fans that have been dying for an ancient China game for quite some time. Also, Steam became utterly swamped with Chinese users last year (see PUBG), which is sure to help. I bet half the reviews for the game will be in Chinese, when its released. Also, this time period is pretty popular all throughout East Asia, including Japan and Korea. I’m not at all worried about it finding an audience.