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From this article, which we've probably all read:quote:That integration is key to Total War, he argues. “The point of Total War games isn’t just to recreate history. What we’re trying to do is get a counterfactual history going. We start from a historical point of view – this is how things were at, lets pick a date at random, 325 BC – and from that point onwards, it’s about player action and interaction, with the AI and their environment. That determines how the game develops.” If you think back to the original Rome: Total War, you'd see some factions fielding knock-off legionaries (the Numidians, Armenians, Pontics and Seleucids). That was sort of a reflection of real-life practices whereby tactics and equipment would diffuse throughout the world and you'd get countries trying to emulate the military successes of others. I'd like to see the same thing in Rome 2, but perhaps in a more "organic" fashion. Say you're some Asian faction and you're trading with the Greeks. It'd be nice if, as a consequence of that peaceful contact, you'd get the ability to further customise your units (you could give your spearmen Hellenised armour, for example, or train them to fight in a phalanx). At the same time, perhaps the same options could be unlocked through warfare. Real-life examples: the Romans attributed the design of their quinqueremes to that of a Carthaginian battleship that washed up on their shores; the Germanic tribes that defeated the Romans in the Teutoberg forest included defecting militiamen armed and equipped in the Roman style. Perhaps, playing as Gaul, you'd defeat Rome and march on to the rest of the world with your new Romanised Gallic legions, picking and choosing the equipment and tactics you prefer and creating custom troop types in the process.* Having this kind of customisation might also solve one of the issues I noticed in the original Rome and in Medieval 2 as well: Some of the factions had a definate shelf-life, with no good late-game units because they ceased to exist within the game's historical period (e.g. the Byzantine Empire in Medieval 2 had no musketeers or advanced artillery because their real-life counterpart was destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453). With the ability to benefit from the diffusion of military techniques from other factions, even the weaker ones would be viable for full-length campaign play, without the player feeling hamstrung. Playing as some steppe faction, for example, it'd be annoying to conquer your way across the planet and fight a million sieges without the benefit of weaponry equal to that of the people you've been destroying. This kind of thing, applied to the AI factions, could also have some interesting effects. While you've been salting the earth in Carthage, perhaps the Macedonians have reconquered Asia and when you turn up to fight them there you find their phalangites supplemented with cataphract archers. Presumably this kind of customisation would be barred from (or toggleable in) instant-action multiplayer because otherwise there wouldn't be much to distinguish the factions. *Here I'm reminded of that Medieval 2 Let's Play where the guy packed his Scots onto their ships and colonised Egypt. EDIT: gently caress that's a lot of words daydreaming about a game nobody's going to play for over a year.  I bet they toss the entire customisation idea a few months into development and we end up with static unit lists like in the previous games. 
Ghost of Babyhead fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Sep 3, 2012 |
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Sep 3, 2012 23:40
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Considering that Shogun 2 had a few different unit types that you could equip in different ways, I don't see why they couldn't do that kind of customization in Rome 2. Just replace monks and samurais with different ethnicities.
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Sep 4, 2012 06:09
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Lord Hypnostache posted:Considering that Shogun 2 had a few different unit types that you could equip in different ways, I don't see why they couldn't do that kind of customization in Rome 2. Just replace monks and samurais with different ethnicities. Yeah? That's encouraging. I haven't played a TW since Medieval 2 (lovely computer). So as I said before, in an ideal world they'd tie this kind of customisation to your interactions with other factions in the strategy map.
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Sep 4, 2012 07:34
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I was looking through Steam's player stats http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ and I noticed that Empire Total War is #15 on the list, just behind Shogun 2 by two spaces, and Napoleon is way further down. What gives? I always had the impression that Napoleon was the better game.
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Sep 7, 2012 05:30
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Alot of us got burned by Empire and didn't buy Napoleon for a long time, or not at all. When you play it its easy to see that Napoleon is better, but the scope is much smaller than Empire, and I dare say, "boringer".
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Sep 7, 2012 10:35
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Plus, Empire does have an American faction whilst Napoleon doesn't. Some people just like playing as their own dudes.
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Sep 7, 2012 15:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was looking through Steam's player stats http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ and I noticed that Empire Total War is #15 on the list, just behind Shogun 2 by two spaces, and Napoleon is way further down. What gives? I always had the impression that Napoleon was the better game. You cannot imagine the unbelievable shitstorm that was unleashed when Empire came out. There were extremely high expectations and when the game was released as a buggy mess where the AI couldn't even load troops onto ships people went ballistic. Many swore never to by another TW game again and were only lured back later by the great reviews Shogun 2 got.
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Sep 7, 2012 17:40
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Is there any way I can "sharpen" the font in this game? It looks really blurry and it's giving me a headache.
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Sep 9, 2012 05:00
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Flippycunt posted:You cannot imagine the unbelievable shitstorm that was unleashed when Empire came out. There were extremely high expectations and when the game was released as a buggy mess where the AI couldn't even load troops onto ships people went ballistic. Many swore never to by another TW game again and were only lured back later by the great reviews Shogun 2 got. Honestly if I wasn't such a whore for Total War and also gunpowder era combat I'd have sat Napoleon out too. I'm glad I didn't since Napoleon is my favorite of the series now, but Empire was just really terrible. I'm pretty sure I posted a lot in whatever thread was going at Empire's release defending it, but I had my hype glasses on at the time and once they came off I felt seriously burned. Napoleon also seemed to come out of nowhere, and aside from actually being good, which is kind of hard to prove without playing it, it looked like it might as well be an expansion for Empire or a needless retread.
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Sep 9, 2012 05:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:Is there any way I can "sharpen" the font in this game? It looks really blurry and it's giving me a headache.
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Sep 9, 2012 06:20
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Zettace posted:Are you running the game in 1440x900 resolution? If you are then try fiddling with the resolution settings and trying a larger resolution. I used to use that resolution on my smaller monitor and the newer Total War games seems to hate the 1440x900 resolution. I get it on my monitor at 1366x768 too. It's part of the reason I never really play Empire anymore. (That and the fact that Shogun 2 is SOOO much better.)
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Sep 9, 2012 06:23
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Zettace posted:Are you running the game in 1440x900 resolution? If you are then try fiddling with the resolution settings and trying a larger resolution. I used to use that resolution on my smaller monitor and the newer Total War games seems to hate the 1440x900 resolution. And speaking of DarthMod, it's pretty cool running with 300-385 man regiments. Really gives a sense of huge battles.
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Sep 9, 2012 10:18
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I never bought Napoleon either, Empire was literally unplayable after a patch that made it inevitably crash on next turn after you played a while, and there was no way to continue. When Napoleon came out and Empire still didn't work I just said gently caress off. Some day I will get it on sale.
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Sep 9, 2012 10:43
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That issue with the font and a million other things always back up my theory that Empire was always in early beta. gently caress you SEGA.
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Sep 9, 2012 13:28
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Really, all I would want them to do for Empire 2 is just fix a few things like: Every faction has the same generic "line infantry". What the gently caress? MTW2 had a vast amount of variety compared to that. And by that I don't mean make more lovely rip-off DLC. Some of the province choices are really bizarre. Why is France one province while backwaters like Greece and the US east coast have several? A tiny sloop is able to blockade your main port (which we have wisely decided to have ALL of our trade go though despite having several other trade ports) and make your whole empire collapse in 2 turns. Blockades should work like raiding the trade route does: you need a full stack of ships to stop all the trade. The cannons sort of piss me off as well. If your cannons get touched by an enemy, they jump off the guns and instantly lose 4 men because the horses run off, leaving your cannons immobile. I know people pushed cannons by hand back then too, I've seen movies! Also the remaining men would sometimes refuse to resume firing, preferring to stand like idiots. Anyway I should be able to just pull some men from a line company to replace them. They know how to use the cannons on the fort walls, so why not these? And that leads us to probably the worst part of combat: the siege battles. Your idiot troops can barely fire their muskets or cannons from the walls. Not that it matters since the AI totally sucks at siege assaults anyway. But is is super annoying that all of the enemy troops have been to ranger school (including peasant militias) and can spider-man their way up any wall they like. In houses, the same guy will sit in the window firing and reloading instead of rotating with another guy with a shot ready. So your rate-of-fire with a garrisoned unit is pretty much zero. On top of the fact that putting a unit in the house just made it a bulls-eye for cannons or a melee attack made garrisoning buildings worse than useless. But most importantly: unlock the loving game to modders! The whole TW series would probably have ended if it weren't for people making mods for MTW and RTW, extending the life of the games for years. Now we have these total lackluster mods (admittedly they do a good job with what they have) which are only able to change mainly superficial things. They really expect us to believe they can't figure out how to make the game moddable?
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Sep 10, 2012 22:16
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Durgoc posted:They really expect us to believe they can't figure out how to make the game moddable?
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Sep 11, 2012 04:33
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So is Shogun 2 not actually as mod-able as M2TW? I never looked in to the Shogun scene before.
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Sep 11, 2012 10:03
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concerned mom posted:So is Shogun 2 not actually as mod-able as M2TW? I never looked in to the Shogun scene before. Shogun 2 is very unmoddable. Its impossible to add anything, you have to work 100% with poo poo that is already in the game. Most mods are just balance + a handful of units made out of existing models.
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Sep 11, 2012 11:14
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Oh crap I was going to try to make my own unit and put it in, is this not possible?
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Sep 11, 2012 11:17
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concerned mom posted:Oh crap I was going to try to make my own unit and put it in, is this not possible? Only if you use only assets that are already part of the game. You can't like, make a new hat and put it in. You'd have to construct the hat out of textures already in Shogun 2.
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Sep 11, 2012 11:20
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That's really bad considering people are still playing Rome and Medieval to this day because of the mods  So there's no decompiler or anything to get my own meshes, textures and animations in? Wow that sucks! Thanks for the info.
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Sep 11, 2012 11:23
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concerned mom posted:That's really bad considering people are still playing Rome and Medieval to this day because of the mods That's not the point. This is the trade-off for living in an age of DLC content - it means we get awesome stuff like Rise/Fall of the Samurai but the offset is that the game has to be locked down so that CA can actually make money off that stuff.
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Sep 11, 2012 11:39
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I understand that, and it's a good point but the older games had amazing expansions too and although they were pre-dlc who can say if people would not have bought dlc with free mods. Perhaps not. However there are plenty of very successful games that allow modding. It's a shame really, I guess it's just the way the market's gone. They could always open up a valve/blizzard/etc style marketplace where they take a cut. I'd pay full retail price for Stainless Steel mod or The Third Age.
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Sep 11, 2012 11:52
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Alchenar posted:That's not the point. This is the trade-off for living in an age of DLC content - it means we get awesome stuff like Rise/Fall of the Samurai but the offset is that the game has to be locked down so that CA can actually make money off that stuff. Even with the best mod tools available, modders would have been very unlikely to release anything comparable to FotS in size before 2013 or so, or in size and quality before 2015. And even for a relatively  franchise like Total War, tracking down, comparing and installing mods is still the pursuit of a minority.
NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Sep 11, 2012 |
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Sep 11, 2012 12:13
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A couple of months ago I got into Europa Barborum and it's AMAZING. Incidentally, does anyone know what the school chain of buildings in Rome (and EB) actually do? The flavour text sort of suggests it makes your family members smarter, but it's unclear.
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Sep 11, 2012 12:33
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I think a large part of the lack of modding capability or tools is that the last few games (Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2) use the Warscape engine and suffer from Empire's legacy, that is, it was obviously rushed out early and it's honestly hard to tell which bits are locked down on purpose and which is just hasty code designed to plug a gap in a sliding schedule. I'm sure with Sega and their opinions on gaming at the time of Empire there is some degree of locking down taking place, but that's true of a lot of games in that era. Most game companies have moved past that with the demonstration of both backlash against the lack of modability as well as real live examples of games which support modding but still sell DLC well. Even if they wanted to, there would never be any funding for rewriting Warscape to be more moddable, since they would basically need to rewrite the entire engine from scratch. Rome 2 is going to be in an entirely new engine, so we will see if this bears out, but I'm confident the dismal moddability is due more in part to old business choices and the limitations of their engine than any outright animosity towards modders.
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Sep 11, 2012 12:36
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Krazyface posted:A couple of months ago I got into Europa Barborum and it's AMAZING. It ups the chance of getting the 'philosopher' based traits by alot and if you're playing as a Greek faction or the Romans your more likely to get a historical philosopher/poet as part of your routine, and they generally provide pretty good bonuses.
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Sep 11, 2012 12:37
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Alchenar posted:That's not the point. This is the trade-off for living in an age of DLC content - it means we get awesome stuff like Rise/Fall of the Samurai but the offset is that the game has to be locked down so that CA can actually make money off that stuff. "Being allowed to pay money for stuff" is not a trade-off for "not being able to mod the game."
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Sep 11, 2012 16:56
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In the Total War Center forums there is a thread with over two hundred pages of guys just desperately trying to find how to mod the world map from Empire. They haven't gotten very far. It is a sad thing.
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Sep 11, 2012 18:05
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A few bits of info on Rome II here:quote:Q. Rome 1 did not differentiate between the Hoplite phalanx and the Macedonian phalanx, will both formations be in the game this time round? 
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Sep 12, 2012 00:03
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Aw, goodbye "The Mummy Returns" Egyptians. It's for the best, I suppose.
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Sep 12, 2012 00:15
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You'll always have vanilla Rome 1 if you actually give a drat about them.
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Sep 12, 2012 00:20
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Chexoid posted:Aw, goodbye "The Mummy Returns" Egyptians. Led by the Scorpion King, natch
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Sep 12, 2012 02:31
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Ramming bitches with my quniqueremes better be as amazing as I hope it will be, or I'll be sad.
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Sep 12, 2012 02:39
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Since they're keeping naval as a big thing and doing this mixed battlefield stuff, I really hope they don't gently caress up the corvus and marines. It's so central to Roman naval warfare that they must be paying attention to it but I can imagine it going really wrong. AI incompetence or guys running around in circles instead of crossing the drat bridge or whatever.
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Sep 12, 2012 02:41
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Gonkish posted:Ramming bitches with my quniqueremes better be as amazing as I hope it will be, or I'll be sad. The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Total War Megathread 2 - Ramming bitches with my quniqueremes
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Sep 12, 2012 03:04
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Grand Fromage posted:I never bought Napoleon either, Empire was literally unplayable after a patch that made it inevitably crash on next turn after you played a while, and there was no way to continue. When Napoleon came out and Empire still didn't work I just said gently caress off. Some day I will get it on sale. I was about to defend Empire a bit until I remembered the Kingdoms expansion was for Medievel II. Man, there really wasn't anything redeeming about Empire.
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Sep 12, 2012 03:32
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Could someone explain to me the difference between Hoplite and Macedonian phalanxes?
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Sep 12, 2012 07:22
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It's kind of a misnomer, hoplites are a type of soldier. The Macedonian phalanx is differently organized than the traditional Greek ones. In those, the phalanx is a solid, unbroken line of shields and pikes, the pikes are about eight feet long. It's the traditional phalanx you picture. The Macedonians adjusted this. First, they use a much longer pike called a sarissa, which was about 20 feet. This allowed them to keep more distance and present a much deeper wall of spears. However, probably the biggest difference is that it's not in a single line. Macedonian phalanxes are organized in individual squares. Each square acts like its own phalanx--it's a spear wall all facing one direction, but the squares can act independently. This gives them more maneuverability. It's similar to the maniples that Roman legions are divided into--probably where they got the idea. One of the most famous situations where this was an advantage was fighting against scythe chariots in Persia. The chariots would charge the Macedonians, and the blocks of soldiers just moved aside and let the chariots charge through harmlessly, then they were enveloped and obliterated.
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Sep 12, 2012 07:28
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Did the hoplites hold their spears overhand or underhand? I've heard it both ways.
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Sep 12, 2012 07:57
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