Man, I doubt I’ve autoresolved more than 10% of battles, really only doing so for battles that are extremely lopsided kill fests. Partly because I know that I can outperform the AI every single time. I just… can’t go into a battle with 2:1 odds, knowing I could take a major victory with minimal casualties, while the AI stands a decent chance of losing, and even in victory take losses that will take several turns, and lots of money, to recover from.
Which also ties in to the fact that the battles are some of my favorite parts, and that I have more hours in Total War than any series except Europa Universalis. So I guess I’m the outlier. The campaigns are mostly a battle generator for me.
When I finally get a nice lopsided battle I don’t want the AI to auto-resolve either. I want to win with the barest number of casualties - always less than what the auto-resolve would divvy out. But then I quibble about just a few units in a thousand.
I just started playing this after accidentally not cancelling my Humble Bundle subscription. Anyway I started as the Dwarves which was ok but then I realised I hate Dwarves. I would rather be killing them than leading them into battle, so I switched to the vampires and they are really cool. I am not that far into it but I love the bats, being able to raise cannon fodder zombies and skeletons from the dead, and the opening hero/lord/whatever seems more interesting with his capabilities than the dwarf on a chair.
I’m the exact same way. It’s an instance of the whole “water finds a crack” problem in game design where the game makes you choose between the most enjoyable approach (playing out a moderate number of battles to keep the overall game moving at a reasonable pace) and the optimally effective approach (spending a lot of time on repetitive easy battles to get better outcomes in terms of casualties).
The design solution that seems optimal to me would be to attach some game mechanic cost/benefit tradeoff to the auto-resolve. Maybe the ability to personally take command of your forces is a consumable item to purchase, or the ability only recharges every X turns. Or choosing to auto-resolve means your faction leader is paying more personal attention to the people at home, granting some sort of economic boost. Wonder if there are any games with a strategic/tactical split that have tried something like that.
I was thinking about something like that @Thraeg. Maybe heros have a command rating that controls how often the player could control battles, but make it limited in some way. That way you need to choose which battles are important to command yourself.
I’m ordinarily a big auto-resolve hater in Total War games, but I never found Warhammer:TW’s autoresolve to be anything but generous. Oftentimes, it gives me zero-casualty victories in situations where I couldn’t reasonably expect to win with no losses myself, if only because of ranged friendly fire.
The trouble is no one much does what CA does, least not that I’m aware of. For whatever reason they seemingly own a kind of monopoly on this whole strategic map / tactical battle thing. I’m not really even sure why, but then I don’t know much of anything about how hard TW games are to make (apparently given the lack of competition maybe it’s hard, I don’t know). In any case I’ve never seen CA play with this piece of their game mechanic, at most they mess about tweaking the casualty rate from auto’ing.
Thanks for the follow up mention on those, I may have to give them a second look, I didn’t take much notice of them at the time they released because I was convinced MTW2 was likely to prove, at least for me, the better game of the two since I considered it the 2nd best of the TW series I wasn’t expecting it be surpassed.
However, always willingly to give any attempt at this game design a shot, so I think I’ll favorite these and wait for the next sale.
Besides what factions are next the thing I’m actually more concerned about is how they intend to meld these together into one campaign map for all three releases. They’ve not done this before, so I’m hoping they’ve been playing around with it along the way and feel confident they’ve got a grip on how they’ll implement it.
They’re great games, I have to say, and often to be found quite cheap. One unique mechanic to keep in mind, however, is the way XP is assigned to the hero characters (this differs dramatically from TW: Warhammer);
Let’s say you win a battle and your side earns 100XP. That is divided equally among your heroes.
If you have one hero and 19 regular units (regardless of how powerful), that one hero gets all 100 XP. However, if you have an army with nothing but heroes, it’s divided among all of them and they only get 5XP a piece. Because of this, you typically want only two or three heroes per army so they can level up decently. Making multiple armies allows for more battles, which in turn allows for more XP to be spread in the same time frame, etc…
Imo, it almost has to be. The forums are full of people convinced it has to be DoC and not Skaven, but that seems insane to me. DoC could still be the Big Bad and not be one of the base races. In fact it seems more likely that is the case (because that’s how Game 1 did it). I can’t see Skaven being delayed any longer, they’re just too big a race. That they’ve been held off this long is kind of crazy, but given all the unique animations/skeletons involved I can see it. DoC would probably be even worse in that regard and the leaked Game 3 is basically all DoC anyway.
Shaven will be game 3, because of their popularity. The order of races seems to be the inverse of their popularity. If Beastmen, Vampires and DoC were last, how many people would’ve skipped?
Thing is… Skaven are everywhere, so it seems unlikely that a “new” area of the world would focus on Skaven. It already feels weird to not have them in Game 1. Skavenblight is sitting on the map unused, which is just strange. Game 2 is the New World. Game 3 is… presumably Chaos areas, which feels like an odd place to toss Skaven in and then try to retcon them into the other games to make them feel right.
But no one really knows at this point.
I suspect it will be Skaven with a limited DoC-roster as the Big Bad for the New World. Skaven will get back-added to Skavenblight for Game 1 as an incentive for people who might not care about Elves and Lizards to get Game 2.
The one I can’t figure out really is Tomb Kings. They’d be on Game 1’s map and really there isn’t enough down there to be it’s own game. The leak indicated they should be the next race, but we’re already on to Game 2 and it would require an expansion of the map to get them in there.
If you load up Lizards, HE, DE, Skaven and… maybe DoC… you don’t have enough to make two full games. Almost certainly the Elves are getting a new map, so it’s going to be Elves + whatever. Lizards are getting a new map as well, probably with DoC plus… something else.
Well the reveal is obviously Lustria, so we’re getting Lizards 100%. With them comes either Skaven or DoC and… nothing really. There isn’t anything else really over there other than maybe minor factions of stuff from Game 1 and Amazons (who don’t really have an army book so they seem unlikely).
The leak revealed the Elves in the same expansion as the Lizards, presumably because it can all be one big map and Ulthuan is in the way, so you pretty much have to include it if you want to go to Lustria.
Wait, so I haven’t been following this. The next game is going to a standalone type deal that joins up with the current game if you have it, and you’ll be able to play them together?
