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Koramei posted:Medieval 2 is like 7 years old! Why would you assume the sieges are at all similar. So....they're almost exactly the same outside of being able to deploy in formation for sallies. I think the main reason sieges are better in shogun 2 are simpler castle layouts and avoiding the trap of maze cities, although the sally change is nice as well. TheNakedFantastic fucked around with this message at 07:16 on May 5, 2013 |
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May 5, 2013 07:14
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Mans posted:But sure, the road this game needs to go is the Starcraft way and have the gauls be composed of 6 specialized units to appease the multiplayer gods, even if the majority of the playerbase probably only plays Single-player This is completely contrary to what he is saying. The rest of your post makes a good point about how EB found the balance but this just seems like an excuse to take the piss out of him.
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May 5, 2013 07:39
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Plucky Brit posted:I miss the AI superpower factions. It was the best part of Medieval 1, that almost always there would be at least one superpower on a level with your own and you would fight absolutely monumental wars to beat them. I remember one time playing as the Byzantines where the Almohads had conquered half of Europe and I had the other half, so Denmark to Italy was one battlefield with ridiculous troop numbers on both sides smashing into each other. They seemed to remedy this somewhat in Shogun 2, but the battles were never to the same scale. It would be great if they could set up something in Rome 2 so one faction was actually a threat in the mid-to-late game. The Timurids' invasion was the highlight of ME2:TW for me because their elephants were great fun to try and beat. As long as there's a late-game horde of enemy dudes spawning in at some point, I'll be super happy. Like a Gaelic Chieftain comes to power, with 10000 heavy infantry that just pop into existence next to my biggest armies. It's a rare, rare thing for me to lose a city in any TW but whenever I have to sacrifice armies/cities to delay or weaken a large army, it's great.
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May 5, 2013 08:12
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Mans posted:I never played Shogun nor did i ever touch Napoleon after the free weekend because playing with clone armies with one or two different units is as fascinating as watching paint dry. It's also one of the reasons Medieval II was criticized when it was released. Is it really fun to have entire campaigns where every side is composed of sargeant spearmen + feudal knights? That's boring as poo poo. If you haven't played Shogun 2, you're straight-up missing out. I've never played multiplayer Shogun and don't care that much about balance, but I can say that Shogun 2 is one of the most tightly-designed Total War games to date, with each unit serving a specific role and with multiple army configurations possible. Yes, most of your troops are going to be samurai, and most of their troops are going to be samurai, but if they're bringing in a katana-heavy force you're going to need to make good use of your warrior monks to flank because your yari-armed force isn't going to stand up forever against the katanas. But that won't matter as much if you've focused on yari cavalry who'll be able to tie up opposing cavalry, wheel around, and then flatten the largely helpless katana samurai. But if they have a naginata reserve they could bring that around to counter the cavalry, and so on, and so forth. The fact that most units are the same does not, by any means, indicate that the ARMIES at all similar. In fact, I'd say that Shogun 2 allows for the most diverse army types of all Total War games thus far.
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May 5, 2013 09:19
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Shogun 2 has a great roster, and Med 2 is the absolute worst for giving every faction the same boring army for 90% of the game it's true. That doesn't mean Rome 2 has to be one or the other. Rome has the most potentially diverse set of units of any TW game period. Not just spears, archers, swords and Cav, but javelins, slings, legions, phalanxes, elephants, celt chariots, scythed chariots, wardogs, shields, axes, berserkers, cataphracts...the list goes on and on. CA can absolutely create a diverse set of distinct feeling units without just cloning them from faction to faction. Balancing will be hell, but that's how it goes. I mean, filling out the 108 minor factions is going to involve a lot of cloning and reskinning, but who cares? Even superficial diversity among NPC factions is an improvement over most TW games. I understand where Shalcar is coming from. Shogun 2 is very tightly designed, and a lot of that comes from decisions made to tamper down their usual excesses and focus on details and polish, but I'm just not concerned about Rome 2 yet. The game sounds massive, but the decisions the devs are making sound very well reasoned so far. I'm willing to give CA some credit after Shogun 2 until I have reason to think otherwise. Oh, and because TWC is very special and responded to a long mechanics post with a bunch of griping about "unit duels" and a 6 page derail on what the tetsudo formation is supposed to look like, this is the only substantive follow-up post I could find. quote:Well what isn't in the Teutoberg video is the formed attack attribute for units that makes units which have it try to keep in formation more. All Roman units, and other units who fought in organised blocks such as hoplites, pikemen etc. will also have it. So that's neat, I guess. madmac fucked around with this message at 13:31 on May 5, 2013 |
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May 5, 2013 13:21
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shalcar posted:I mentioned superficial diversity and I expect that this will be the likely outcome. I too want to see dead wolf guy vs dead leopard guy, but I also don't want to have them throw away all the massive strides the series has taken since Rome 1. I'm sure Carthage will play differently to Rome will play differently to Pontus, if for no other reason than I would expect those factions to have well developed armies which satisfy complimentary niches with each other and the minor factions simply draw from those army archetypes with different skins. Which would put the unique unit types around 30-50ish, which is a solid amount that is still workable in balance and understanding capacities, while still giving you plenty of templates for a million different skins to really up the spectacle. Yeah, but if you don't do that you end up with Shogun, and that game sucked.
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May 5, 2013 17:07
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CharlestheHammer posted:Yeah, but if you don't do that you end up with Shogun, and that game sucked. Well, there's a new opinion. Now why'd you think that?
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May 5, 2013 17:10
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I thought for sure he was joking, but now you have me confused.TheNakedFantastic posted:So....they're almost exactly the same outside of being able to deploy in formation for sallies.  I was talking about the sally mechanics (which are more different than just deployment times...); somebody else gave an overview of sieges in general post-Medieval 2. They're not even slightly the same. The only resemblance Shogun 2 and Rome/Medieval 2 sieges bear is that you're defending a fortification. They're about as different from each other otherwise as they could possibly be.
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May 5, 2013 18:32
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Tomn posted:Well, there's a new opinion. Now why'd you think that? The lack of diversity. I mean sure it was more mechanically solid, but the problem is if you don't really care for that (which I don't) you end up getting bored much more quickly. I mean I am not saying it objectively sucked, I know its fairly well liked here, but I never cared for it. It just didn't have the replayability of the older ones. This also happened in in Napoleon but was rather mitigated by Empire (even though empire had the worst AI of the three by far). Plus things like realm divide just killed any amount of fun that it could have had, because it took the worst parts of the older games and made it an important part. Shogun is probably the second worst TW game to me.
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May 5, 2013 21:13
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CharlestheHammer posted:The lack of diversity. I mean sure it was more mechanically solid, but the problem is if you don't really care for that (which I don't) you end up getting bored much more quickly. I mean I am not saying it objectively sucked, I know its fairly well liked here, but I never cared for it. It just didn't have the replayability of the older ones. This also happened in in Napoleon but was rather mitigated by Empire (even though empire had the worst AI of the three by far). Plus things like realm divide just killed any amount of fun that it could have had, because it took the worst parts of the older games and made it an important part. Shogun is probably the second worst TW game to me. I'm not sure what version you're playing but if it's FoTS, have you tried the radious unit packs and the artillery pack? I had the same feelings about Shogun 2 but once I got those mods(along with a few others) and I upped the difficulty to hard, it became my favorite total war game.
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May 5, 2013 21:50
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Fall Of The Samurai alone is pretty drat diverse. If you have issues with that I might suggest just waiting really for the Warhammer Total War game?
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May 5, 2013 22:09
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maker posted:I'm not sure what version you're playing but if it's FoTS, have you tried the radious unit packs and the artillery pack? I had the same feelings about Shogun 2 but once I got those mods(along with a few others) and I upped the difficulty to hard, it became my favorite total war game. Maybe, I haven't played for a long while. SeanBeansShako posted:Fall Of The Samurai alone is pretty drat diverse. If you have issues with that I might suggest just waiting really for the Warhammer Total War game?
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May 5, 2013 22:11
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I'd imagine what you want from the game comes down to whether you want a balanced tactical strategy game or a virtual toy soldier sandbox. I can easily see the appeal of both, since a lot of the appeal of the Total War series is the spectacle of it all.
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May 5, 2013 23:44
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Mans posted:You're still wrong. Given that we are discussing subjective design decisions and the respective costs of various design choices, this is not useful for the conversation unless you have a specific instance in which I have stated something demonstrably false. Given your previous post of: Mans posted:You might by the only person in the world who thinks unit variety is a bad thing. I hope no one responsible for Rome II hears anything you say because unit diversity was what made Rome so fun and the mods even better. I'm not actually sure you are interested in a serious discussion, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Mans posted:EB managed to give each region (not factions) a diverse and rich roster while never falling into over-doing it. It stretches credibility to believe that that many units could be unique to each region and still not be equally well served by simple re-skins, combined with unit type limitations to encourage army type diversity. Are every regions medium spear unit really so different as to warrant differing statistics? Mans posted:I never played Shogun nor did i ever touch Napoleon after the free weekend because playing with clone armies with one or two different units is as fascinating as watching paint dry. It's also one of the reasons Medieval II was criticized when it was released. Is it really fun to have entire campaigns where every side is composed of sargeant spearmen + feudal knights? That's boring as poo poo. You are right, it wouldn't be fun to have entire campaigns composed like that. Fortunately, that never happened and no-one is suggesting it should. There is no need to construct straw-men to prove a non-existent point. It's also interesting that you are writing off an entire game (several games, in fact), untouched and unseen, certainly unlearned, yet you claim extensive knowledge on how those games operate and play, enough to critique them heavily. Mans posted:EB is really liked not just because of :sperg:, it made a massive rebalance to the game itself. You can not only play with any faction and be sucessful because of the unit changes but you can also play as REGIONAL units and still kick rear end. The massive rebalance was required partially because CA wasn't too interested in balance at the time of Rome, in favour of the large variety of units you champion. The fact they couldn't do both at once (and even with mods it's taken a great many years to reach this point) ties in with my point that unit variety has a development cost associated with it that after a certain point that makes it detrimental to the final product. Mans posted:That's the way i'd like Rome II to go in, with local varieties to supplement your advancing campaign armies. I won't lose much sleep if that's not the case but it's absurd to attack a classical-based game for having unit variety. Another straw-man, no-one has attacked the game for the unit variety. Stating that unit variety has a cost which must be balanced against other factors is not, despite your thoughts on the matter, an attack on the concept of unit variety. Mans posted:It's the main reason why this era is exelent for these kind of games, every region had different cultures and approaches to war. EB "translated" this to change the barbarian factions from "guys with no shirts with one or two unique units" to light, ambush based Iberians, wild freemen Germans and a mix between the wildness of the Germans with the professionalism of Rome to make kickass Gaul factions. All of which can be accomplished by removing availability of units from a given army template to force certain army compositions due to availability and build to the remaining options strengths. An approach that allows solid balance testing while still allowing re-skins to give you your unit choices without impacting the underlying design philosophy. Mans posted:But sure, the road this game needs to go is the Starcraft way and have the gauls be composed of 6 specialized units to appease the multiplayer gods, even if the majority of the playerbase probably only plays Single-player Firstly, your statement relies on the fact that anything Starcraft did is automatically bad as if it is an evident truth. This is patently false (Starcraft has right-click move, so right-click move is bad?). It's intellectually dishonest and lazy discussion. Perhaps you meant to imply that you felt the game should shy away of competitive multi-player in favour of more bombastic single-player? Secondly, this is a complete straw-man statement. I never mentioned anything about Starcraft, nor about how everything should be sacrificed for multi-player. Your comment seems to have sprung into existence solely to imply that I am a moron. Thirdly, If it came to light that the majority of the player-base played multi-player that you would be happy with single-player being gutted and rendered unplayable to appease the multi-player crowd, so your argument about relative popularity is disingenuous. Fourthly, Starcraft II has 42 units, a respectable number of unique units for a strategy game, even if they are split between three races. Finally, I'm not actually sure that you are interested in having a discussion on the merits of certain design decisions, I have some questions I want to ask you. Since 42 unique units is woefully inadequate (implied in your Starcraft comparison), how many units should there be in Rome 2? How many units do you feel are the right amount for the 10 major factions and 108 NPC factions? How many units are there in Shogun 2 with existing vanilla DLC? What areas of the S2 roster do you feel limits your ability to create an army that is suitably varied and which type of units should be added to fix these glaring omissions?
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May 7, 2013 14:42
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Yeah, Mans, considering that this came up in the discussion on sieges a few pages ago too, you really ought to shut up until you actually play Shogun 2. Your opinion isn't necessarily invalid, but acting like an authority on a series while the only games in it you've tried are seven or more years old is a bit ridiculous. And I personally think the way Shogun 2 handles unit selections is more interesting, clearer, and ends up with more diverse battles than any of the previous games in the series. I would far rather fight compositionally different armies that happen to be the same culture than the same exact type of troops that just happen to be wearing different coloured shirts. I can see why some people like having a mess of units (although one of the main purposes of EB's system seems to be a way of getting around Rome's clone soldiers problem), but I tried that with Radious' unit mod in Shogun 2 and definitely felt the game was poorer for it. And that's sort of how I think it should go- if somebody wants a lot of units in their game, there are a wealth of modders that agree with them and will provide. CA's resources are far better spent polishing and balancing the more interesting and diverse units. .. and while the ancient world was certainly more varied than Japan, it was definitely not true that every region had different approaches to war. Yeah, the Germanics were different from the Gauls were different from the Iberians were different from the Dacians, but when you see a fighting style that works you won't go "oh no I can't use that I have to be unique"- you'll adopt it, or parts of it, to remain competitive.
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May 7, 2013 16:03
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There's unit variety and there's unit variery. One has 10 slightly different types of Line Infantry and then another 10 Colonial Line Infantry. The other has guys throwing toxic severed heads, flaming pigs, dog soldiers, elephants twice as large in all direction then other elephants(that are fairly large themselves) and elephants even larger then that. Also, CA's budget has significantly grown since Rome 1 so "balance" and creative unit designs aren't mutually exclusive.
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May 7, 2013 16:04
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I'm going to state once more for Empire in advance it had plenty of variety. Just a lovely looking beta engine and lazy artists/modelers.
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May 7, 2013 16:05
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Really? I'm not hating on Empire, enjoyed two full playthroughs as Britain and then as the Marathas (elephants in Siberia, gently caress yes). But it seems to me that the variety of units was limited to very minor variations on the standard units.
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May 7, 2013 16:36
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The musket leveled the playing field for the era so it didn't really matter how much of a special snow flake unique soldiers looked or trained a gun shot wound still fucks you over. You still got pretty good variety in my general opinion it really was more of the AI's fault of being so clinically brain dead all you needed to do was hammer and anvil with basic line to win. Alright this has kind of bothered me now for some time, and we could do with some fresh discussion here. But what kind of variety did people want/were expecting for the gun powder era games?
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May 7, 2013 16:50
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SeanBeansShako posted:But what kind of variety did people want/were expecting for the gun powder era games? Where were his majesty's Fightin' Cobras, famed for their cold blooded bayonets?
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May 7, 2013 17:29
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SeanBeansShako posted:The musket leveled the playing field for the era so it didn't really matter how much of a special snow flake unique soldiers looked or trained a gun shot wound still fucks you over. You still got pretty good variety in my general opinion it really was more of the AI's fault of being so clinically brain dead all you needed to do was hammer and anvil with basic line to win. More ruffled sleeves and pikes.  Seriously, though, I don't really know how much more variety you COULD get with line infantry. The only real way I could think of to make line infantry more varied is to institute different "infantry doctrines" that can change up the stats of your basic line infantry. For instance, if you researched a cold steel doctrine, you could have the option of training your line infantry to have faster running speed/charge bonuses/melee attack etc, while a firepower doctrine would see the option for more accuracy, faster reloading, more ammo, etc. Could have the option of fiddling with one general army doctrine to determine baseline stats for your basic line infantry, with better-trained units being more expensive, while also being able to construct specialist units with stats that differ from your bulk line infantry - perhaps allowing you to outfit them in distinctive uniforms to make them all special. ...actually, now that I've written that down, I don't reckon that looks too bad as a system. The ability to tweak the stats of your line infantry to adjust for different doctrines could allow for a reasonable variety of differing systems - melee or firepower? Charges vs staying power? Pricey elites or cheap conscripts? Be more interesting than just spamming line infantry (I'm aware basic line infantry DOES differ from country to country, but the differences are so small I don't expect most players notice or need to adjust their strategies).
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May 7, 2013 18:24
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That doctrine system, along with a much more detailed political system plus starting in 1600 and ending in 1822 like they originally promised would certainly in general would have made Empire a lot more interesting. It would have been goddamn nice if every unit had at least three different uniforms for early, mid and late 18th century too plus some Napoleonic looking stuff.
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May 7, 2013 18:58
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SeanBeansShako posted:That doctrine system, along with a much more detailed political system plus starting in 1600 and ending in 1822 like they originally promised would certainly in general would have made Empire a lot more interesting. Like, the problem is, the pike and shot era is difficult to implement without the formations being able to work well together, and without being able to have different means of musketry working.
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May 7, 2013 19:02
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How would it be possible to achieve a Shogun 2 level of unit balance in Rome 2 without going off the historical rails? The setting doesn't lend itself to a set of overarching stat rules, because there is an existential difference between a Gaulish warband and a Roman legion. How about the balance for a faction like the Iceni, matched against the Parthians? There's no equivalence between a chariot and a cataphract. I do enjoy Shogun 2 multiplayer, and I agree that the success of that is due to the tight sense of unit balance, and the lack of factional bonuses. That sort of design philosophy doesn't lend itself to realism, even pop history, when the competing factions don't come from the same cultures. It would be disappointing to fling some Dacians at some hoplites and find that they perform identically. There should be a fundamental statistical difference between two units of vastly divergent cultures, one that will actually influence playstyle. The game's MP balance can be maaintained alongside statistical differences by shifting the focus away from player controlled army composition to composition dictated by faction. I think that a small number of multiple-faction stat "templates", with factional variety represented through unique skins, would be a reasonable solution. A uniform system of attack/defense and so on would be underwhelming within the scope of the game.
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May 7, 2013 19:21
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Well you have to operate within parameters, you can't really simulate the effect that a shortsword has over a club or the effect that a big shield has over a buckler without introducing some unique mechanic that is hard to balance. You COULD, however, just give more armor to the big shield guys and more damage to the axes but then that makes all infantry behave about the same doesn't it. Changing behavior of units is difficult and time-consuming. You could make sword and shield Romans less numerous and more resistant to morale shocks and charges than the numerous and charge-bonused axe men and then that introduces different playstyles but actually just increases the learning curve for axe men. However, having balance fucks up history. Horse archers were OP as poo poo in real life so should they be OP as poo poo in the game? If so, why play anything but Steppe Nomads? Further, Romans kicked the poo poo out of pretty much every other army and nation in the world, should that be reflected as well? I think that having a shitton of units that function arguably the same but with small differences is a great thing. That way when you stop playing the Romans and play the Gauls or something, your units are similar but at a slight disadvantage if you aren't playing their strengths, which is charging or something. It's a game after all. All line infantry should be functionally similar because that style of fighting didn't really do much to develop any uniqueness. Which was fine and effective. Grab a peasant, give him a gun and a week's worth of training and you got an infantrymen who can do almost as much damage to people as a highly trained veteran infantryman. Sure he can't reload nearly as fast and might want to rout, but whatever you could just scare em into staying in line or training them more. I was fine with how they treated line infantry in Empire and Shogun because that type of unit is boring as poo poo but effective.
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May 7, 2013 19:43
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Koramei posted:Yeah, Mans, considering that this came up in the discussion on sieges a few pages ago too, you really ought to shut up until you actually play Shogun 2. Your opinion isn't necessarily invalid, but acting like an authority on a series while the only games in it you've tried are seven or more years old is a bit ridiculous. What is your paranoia with a good dev team not doing re-skins? Why should the factions spanning from Portugal to Poland and all the way down to Bulgaria share the same basic roster of units when in reality they had nothing at all in common (they had as much with each other as Rome had with them, yet Rome won't be a faction filled with naked spearman and swordsmen)? They could and should make the game have some good depth by making region specific units to spice the game up, even if those units are different by simple ornaments they wear and a different unit description. You talk about how every medium spearman unit really isn't any different anywhere, yet miss the point that the spearman represents the local culture and not the idea of medium spearman. Using that logic the barbarian spearman of Dacia should be a re-skin of the Iberian counter-part,the triarii, the low quality Greek Thureos units or a non pathethic Parthian spearman unit, since they have the same battle purpose. Obviously no one would accept such a thing because even though they share the same role in battle the unit represents not the unit itself, but the culture of the role that unit was used in. So they are different. Yet this difference was not seen in the original Rome while it was seen in EB with interesting results, and admittedly abused in Roma Surrectum to the point of overdose. Unit variety itself doesn't really do a game unbalance since, like you said, they can share general stats based on their battle role. The question here isn't that every unit should be hand-crafted with statistics completely based out of historical research of the units. They can be functionally the same unit, they SHOULD NOT be the same unit visually or descriptively however. This really shouldn't be hard to explain. You miss completely the concern people have with re-skins. And i never mentioned anything Starcraft did is bad, which is ironic due to your love for declaring strawmans (mods change my name to that please). Starcraft is a game completely focused on highly competitive multyplayer game. While it gets a lot of positives out of that it loses massively on variety and non-gameplay depth, which is perfectly natural for such a game but it's not really something that a game like a Total War should be adopting, since multyplayer isn't the focus of the game and while Rome II really needs good MP bases it shouldn't sacrifice SP gameplay for such a thing. Hell, like i said, unit variety or region richness doesn't put game balance into any kind of balance issues since stats can be manipulated with ease or even be equal, since the difference of stats weren't the main concern of mine. And while 42 units for a game like Starcraft seems sensible, Rome II has (or should have) a lot more depth, variety and richness that can't simply be grounded the way Starcraft is. Can Rome II be a good game with each faction having 14 different unique units? Maybe. But seeing how only eight out of 108 factions are playable at release that means 112 units to be shared across the whole world map, slightly more than one unique unit per province. shalcar posted:Thirdly, If it came to light that the majority of the player-base played multi-player that you would be happy with single-player being gutted and rendered unplayable to appease the multi-player crowd, so your argument about relative popularity is disingenuous. And again, i was really stupid to talk about Shogun the way i did. It actually seems like a game i should be spending money on. I'll never talk about it in the future.
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May 7, 2013 23:24
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Frankly, I won't be satisfied unless I can fill an army with nothing but WARDOGS 
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May 7, 2013 23:28
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MadJackMcJack posted:Frankly, I won't be satisfied unless I can fill an army with nothing but WARDOGS As long as their models are regionally accurate
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May 7, 2013 23:35
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I have to be honest with you - I'm no longer entirely certain what exactly you're arguing in favor of any more. Are you saying reskinning units but giving them identical stats is a good thing? I.E. Barbarian medium spearmen have the same basic stats as an equivalent Roman unit, so long as they look different? Because that's what shalcar is saying. At no point has he ever argued otherwise - he certainly hasn't argued that there needs to be one generic "spearman" unit for every single faction in the game, if that's what you're thinking. No, wait, I think I have it. When he says "reskin", are you thinking he means "Gallic spearmen are triarii models, but green instead of red"? Because that's not what he's saying at all, the "skin" he's referring to the decorative fluff around the unit whether it's a Roman legionary helmet or a wolf skin cloak. He's saying that the triarii should have the same stats as their Gallic counterpart, but the triarii should look like Roman soldiers and the Gallic spearmen should look like angry barbarians. If you're not talking about either of these, I'm honestly stumped as to what you're talking about by this point.
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May 7, 2013 23:47
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Hasn't CA outright said they'll have around 500 units in this game? I think the playable factions will all be nicely varied, and the others will be pretty similar to the playable factions. Except for major factions like Thrace, the Seleucids, Epirus etc. which will probably end up playable anyway. If nothing else, the fact that they've made a big deal out of revealing each faction shows they want the game to be diverse. I didn't really pay attention to the first game before it came out but I got the impression the marketing was all ROME ROME ROME LEGIONS.
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May 8, 2013 00:03
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Tomn posted:I have to be honest with you - I'm no longer entirely certain what exactly you're arguing in favor of any more. Are you saying reskinning units but giving them identical stats is a good thing? I.E. Barbarian medium spearmen have the same basic stats as an equivalent Roman unit, so long as they look different? Because that's what shalcar is saying. At no point has he ever argued otherwise - he certainly hasn't argued that there needs to be one generic "spearman" unit for every single faction in the game, if that's what you're thinking. I think that's it really. By reskin i'm having flashbacks to the entirety of non-Greco-Roman factios being nothing more than literally the same unit but with different pants and a few "unique" units and the Greek tragedy of all armies being composed of the same hoplite\phalanx model. I want all factions to be balanced but with unique aesthetic descriptions, not the drab that was the original Rome.
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May 8, 2013 00:38
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What I mean is that Line Infantry fit with Empire, I don't want to see Line Infantry in Rome. "here's a russian musket peasant so he gets +20% vodka and here's a german musket peasant so he gets +1 bratwurst" is fine if half the world is using similar musket peasants and it worked in Shogun because a samurai from Kyoto and a samurai from Edo are bothstill samurai but a lot of Rome era units have virtually no counterpart elsewhere in the world. "everybody gets elephants but only countries that are supposed to have elephants get elephants with +1 armor as their faction bonus, also the entire world has legionaries but Rome has legions with 2 extra pila"
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May 8, 2013 01:17
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Mans posted:I think that's it really. By reskin i'm having flashbacks to the entirety of non-Greco-Roman factios being nothing more than literally the same unit but with different pants and a few "unique" units and the Greek tragedy of all armies being composed of the same hoplite\phalanx model. I want all factions to be balanced but with unique aesthetic descriptions, not the drab that was the original Rome. Have you even been looking at the promo stuff for Rome 2? poo poo's diverse. The first Rome also suffered from a design philosophy that was more hollywood than anything, but it doesn't seem to be the case this time around.
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May 8, 2013 01:48
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Asehujiko posted:"everybody gets elephants but only countries that are supposed to have elephants get elephants with +1 armor as their faction bonus, also the entire world has legionaries but Rome has legions with 2 extra pila" I don't remember this being the case in Rome.
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May 8, 2013 02:29
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Ragingsheep posted:I don't remember this being the case in Rome. It's never been the case in any Total War ever. It's like our own little TWC in here. I'm so proud!
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May 8, 2013 02:37
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Napoleon was my favorite. Was Napoleon anyone else's favorite?  I grant you the battle AI wasn't a huge challenge but when has it ever been? AI has been CA's major failing since forever. I have a hard time playing any CA game's grand campaign mode after seeing Paradox's strategy AIs, and those aren't even that good. The diplomacy model desperately needs to be razed to the ground and rebuilt; a love-hate continuum just isn't a good enough model for AI if you want intelligent behavior. How many times does a CA AI make suicidal moves? Trick question: the answer is every time.In Shogun 2 it seems like the lines clash and the battle is over about 10 seconds later. Bows do almost nothing unless you have ultra-super Elven Bow Lords. So the result seems to be a game of jockeying for position followed by a brawl that's over in 2 seconds. That's really the only bad thing I can say about Shogun 2, I liked the strategy layer. But if they battle layer isn't too enjoyable that's enough for me to not play it and go back to Napoleon. In contrast, I liked the rhythm of battles in Napoleon. Real artillery and ubiquitous ranged weapons make terrain matter a lot more, makes dictating the pace of the battle matter a lot more important, and softens the counter system I think because just about everybody can shoot. I'm not saying the harder counters are braindead but Napoleon does sort of present more problems than queing up a flank attack on archers or artillery because your horsey men will get loving murdered if a musket line looks at them for two seconds; and musket lines are good at forming squares. I dunno I just think line infantry are great? They soft counter things that their equivalent, spearmen or heavy infantry, in the other games would either hard counter or die to, and they do it faster because they can reach out with those muskets, making the game more dangerous to specialist units. I think it results in a more deliberate playstyle where you have to devote most of your time to preserving the line and deploying properly and less time running around like a maniac with your spears and horses. They need to hurry up and make Napoleon II with a naval AI that won't poo poo itself and pull a Trafalgar, breaking its formation and just sending ships at you, and all the updates on the overmap that Shogun made (that Napoleon really experimented with anyway) and please for the love of god CA just crib Paradox's war system completely. I'm so tired of the AI picking fights it can't win and the pathetic way wars are still wars of annihilation. If I had one big complaint about the TW series its that every war is a war of annihilation and it makes no sense and ruins everything. From the AI to the pace of the game to the difficulty curve. You can't make an AI for it! You just can't. If the AI wins the player can't keep playing. So you need an AI that always loses, only that's no fun. But in order to keep things interesting you need an AI that attacks, so you end up with an AI that attacks but always loses. Adding in limited wars would fix this conundrum and let the player co-exist with truly scary AI empires that could end your game but won't. They already have an objective system, now they just need to take it further with war objectives and an AI that understands them. This would fix grand campaign pacing from "ugh okay let's expand and this is easy now I have a full stack or two and OH GOD ZERG RUSH okay now I'm unstoppable" to a controlled escalation that could maintain challenge throughout. Napoleon sort of got the idea with its limited campaigns that controlled the whole scenario to maintain the level of challenge, but with a limited war system you could expand that to the grand campaign without needing to control every variable. I also want to say I like your LP Shogetai.
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May 8, 2013 03:15
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I kind of like most of the bits of Empire, Napoleon and Fall Of The Samurai.
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May 8, 2013 03:19
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Napoleon is my favorite just because of the man himself. This thread always has me jonesing for a long campaign in one of the games, but having graduated I think it's time to take over the world again (because my degree won't do). I never played much of Shogun 2, but with everyone speaking well of it I think I should attempt that.
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May 8, 2013 03:22
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Get FOTS with a few mods too, you can totally be the Japanese Napoleon with that.
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May 8, 2013 03:22
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Mans posted:This is really the fundamental part of this argument, i got sussed and i got sussed hard repeatedly because of my ignorance of Shogun 2. After looking at a few youtube videos it really seems like the game is much better than i gave it credit, both in terms of quality and quantity. I'll forever shut up about Shogun since i really am making an embarrassment of myself because of my lack Shogun 2 knowledge. Solution: play Shogun 2. Not for naught is it considered one of/the best in the series by most of this thread. Arglebargle III posted:and please for the love of god CA just crib Paradox's war system completely. I'm so tired of the AI picking fights it can't win and the pathetic way wars are still wars of annihilation. Personally that's exactly what I want- wars with casus belli, that are extremely hard to get into and a mess of alliances and marriages and worrying about assassinating claimants and swapping out territories for peacetalks and so on... but I think at least much of it is sort of out of the ethos of Total War. People don't have fun being confined to a handful of provinces, getting forced back to units from the start of the game, or being locked into vassalage. It works for Paradox games because they're not about the battles at all, but for Total War, while there is a great deal of fun to be had in the campaign map, it's essentially there for the purpose of facilitating a slow build up of power and technology for you to fight better battles. I don't think we all play that way, but it's a bit of a series shift to make wars saner. You're supposed to be fighting all the time because fighting is what the series is about. I don't think it's fair to say the AI has the limitations you're giving it though. While I don't really remember any time I felt an existential threat in the earlier games, it's present fairly frequently in the last few titles. In fact in Shogun 2 I'm often in a position where I could get snuffed out for half or more of the game. CA just needs to make the AI even more aggressive. Alternatively work on multiplayer more. If they gave us something to do while the other guy was taking their turn it would be a hell of a lot more fun to play. And that'd fix the endgame problem very nicely.
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May 8, 2013 03:46
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