Kenzie posted:

I disagree, the key word being gameplay here. The unit graphics in Warhammer certainly look a lot different from the other games, but the basic gameplay and tactics are not really that different. Most units are just basic blocks of troops that form line, crash into each other and start hitting each other until hit points and morale go down, just like any other game. The AI is pretty much the same. Flying units are not much more than fast moving cavalry that can go over enemy units. Otherwise they're the same as any other. Giants and monsters are just units with more hit points. The biggest difference would probably be with spell-casting.

Pike and shot warfare though? You start getting really weird looking formations with entirely different dynamics, like the four-cornered tercios:


Pike and shot warfare is about groups of skirmishers who retreat inside of hollow pike squares whenever threatened by cavalry. The pikes were usually not used to fight, but were there as a deterrent, to protect the shooters, with a standard unit being around 2/3rds shot and 1/3rd pike. Swordsmen would also hide inside the pike squares and launch sorties outside of them every now and then. You can do this in Total War, but it involves clicking on every individual gunpowder or sword unit one by one and moving them inside of a separate pike unit manually, and it would be impossible and horribly tedious to keep moving them back and forth inside and outside of their pike protection over and over again in a large battle. And there's no way they could get the AI to do that intelligently.

A traditional Total War battle, including Warhammer, is all about hammer and anvil flanking tactics, with infantry in line and cav on the flanks, but in pike and shot warfare, this was often not the case, as each pike and shot unit could protect its own flanks as a self-contained combined arms unit. Army formations in the pike and shot era got to be very complicated, with deep, staggered checker-board formations with alternating infantry and cavalry instead of lines. The tactics are entirely different from anything in any Total War game.

To make a good pike and shot game at the Total War scale, it would require a pretty big reworking of the battle engine, so that the gunpowder and pike troops can be integrated together into a single mixed unit. And this is in a game series where you're lucky if the AI pikemen can even point their pikes in the right direction at all.

Randarkman posted:

Well, units in the pike and shot era while they operated together, weren't really completely mixed together. Pikemen and arquebusiers actually mostly fought in separate detachments that covered each other rather than beign mixed together in alternating ranks or anything. Actually a kind of good representation is the whole detachment system that the Empire had in Warhammer Fantasy Battles tabeltop game.

This is perhaps a much better picture of a formation (Maurician I think, that is the style pioneered by the Dutch) typical of pike and shot in the 17th century.


Something like this is actually a pretty fun formation to use as the Empire in Total War Warhammer, though not the most opitmal of plays.

Cavalry was also very important in the pike and shot era, both in the Thirty Years War and in wars such as the English Civil War. Though they required alot of finesse and skill to be truly effective, but were still devastating when used effectively. So the hammer and anvil isn't completely gone.

Some kind of function where you can bind units together in formations and maybe this gives you boosts and special behaviors depending on the makeup of the unit might be interesting and the way to go rather than having straight mixed units. That way the player could experiment with what mix of shot and pike (and cavalry) works well for a given situation rather than just be tied to pre-set mixed unit.

quote:

Groups of tercios were typically arrayed in dragon-toothed formation (staggered, with the leading edge of one unit level with the trailing edge of the preceding unit; see the similar hedgehog defense concept). This enabled enfilade lines of fire and somewhat defiladed the army units themselves. Odd units alternated with even units, respectively one forward and one back, providing gaps for an unwary enemy to enter and outflank itself, where it would become subjected to the combined direct and raking cross fire from the guns of three separate tercios. From their inception, tercio formations were meant to co-ordinate their field operations with cavalry.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Total War would benefit from more individual unit AI in general. It’d be nice if units wheel, charge, fall back, etc on their own without standing orders to do otherwise, especially in 40-unit battles. No more just standing and eating a rear charge or a bazillion arrow volleys when there’s nothing else going on.

I played this ACW game way back with a system I liked. Individual units would do basic survival stuff on their own, like wheeling to meet a flanker if no one was in front of them. Then you could select a group and tell them to passively hold, defend but they’re allowed room to move, probe, or commit to a full attack. Microing was still optimal but the AI would act on its own if your attention was elsewhere, so it felt like your units had officers and ncos interested in winning and not dying instead of all being robots. They’d also do stuff like fall back to cover before routing completely, or advancing if they were trouncing the enemy without “hold” orders

nessin posted:

Wrong? About what? I explicitly said in the very quote you used in your post that the Vikings existing in Britain. What amazing history am I missing here?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Total War would benefit from more individual unit AI in general. It’d be nice if units wheel, charge, fall back, etc on their own without standing orders to do otherwise, especially in 40-unit battles. No more just standing and eating a rear charge or a bazillion arrow volleys when there’s nothing else going on.

I played this ACW game way back with a system I liked. Individual units would do basic survival stuff on their own, like wheeling to meet a flanker if no one was in front of them. Then you could select a group and tell them to passively hold, defend but they’re allowed room to move, probe, or commit to a full attack. Microing was still optimal but the AI would act on its own if your attention was elsewhere, so it felt like your units had officers and ncos interested in winning and not dying instead of all being robots. They’d also do stuff like fall back to cover before routing completely, or advancing if they were trouncing the enemy without “hold” orders

Don Gato posted:

The fact it's pretty well known and lasted a while? This isn't a mini-campaign based off of a war that lasted a few months, only killed a few thousand men and also is entirely unknown outside of Japan like the Boshin war (The Last Samurai was set during the Satsuma Rebellion), but that's the scale they're aiming for here. Besides, the average person's grasp of history is pretty abysmal anyway and the fact it involves vikings in any way means it isn't obscure to the average person, it's not like they're going in and being disappointed that it isn't about the Vikings in Normandy, or their permanent base in Spain, or the Varangians basically appearing everywhere in the East.

Arcsquad12 posted:

I think that mixed units would be possible given the success of Warhammer. Skarsnik and Gobbla are a single unit but one is a caster and the other is melee. I could see something similar happen with musket and pike.

nessin posted:

Don Gato posted:

Actually that gave me an interesting idea, would it be possible to port the allegiance from FotS into this new Viking game? It wouldn't be 100% historical, of course, but representing how many people have immigrated to your territory, with the more elite units locked behind having a certain number of people of your culture in a province could probably work pretty well.

Arcsquad12 posted:

I think that mixed units would be possible given the success of Warhammer. Skarsnik and Gobbla are a single unit but one is a caster and the other is melee. I could see something similar happen with musket and pike.

nessin posted:

And I didn't bring up the movie or any other cultural reference, but if you want to go down that route then you're casually discounting a large number of games that get passed around in East Asia that reference the Sengoku period (notably the ROTK and Dynasty Warrior variants) and the absolute poo poo load of media (movies, books, tv shows, whatever) about the time period. Granted a lot of them don't make it English or European languages, but considering most them at least make it into Chinese, Korean, and the various South East Asian languages your basic premise is somewhere between elitist and ignorant.

Don Gato posted:

how would you even represent the 30 years war properly, in terms of armies? Would mercenary companies be like horde factions that you pay to fight? Mercenary companies could and did switch sides a lot, and my impression is that they were paid in both actual cash and whatever they could loot.

Mans posted:

It would be impossible to simulate without being extremely frustrating. All activities basically stopping in winter time, having to find your troops during spring or recruting fresh troops again, looting villages that have already been looted, beating the crap and almost winning the war only for another foreign interference brings it all back to square one. Your emperor is a dolt and destroys an almost agreed upon peace settlement. You end the game with a status quo treaty and 10000 florins in the negatives.

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

Yes because TW games have always appropriately modelled the seasons or politics of the era.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Help, im playing rome but i can only recruit 10 legion units in my stack before i have to make crappy auxiliaries, my general keeps getting replaced every year and i have to dishand my stacks every winter so i cant fight outside of italy

Don Gato posted:

how would you even represent the 30 years war properly, in terms of armies? Would mercenary companies be like horde factions that you pay to fight? Mercenary companies could and did switch sides a lot, and my impression is that they were paid in both actual cash and whatever they could loot.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Total War would benefit from more individual unit AI in general. It’d be nice if units wheel, charge, fall back, etc on their own without standing orders to do otherwise, especially in 40-unit battles. No more just standing and eating a rear charge or a bazillion arrow volleys when there’s nothing else going on.

I played this ACW game way back with a system I liked. Individual units would do basic survival stuff on their own, like wheeling to meet a flanker if no one was in front of them. Then you could select a group and tell them to passively hold, defend but they’re allowed room to move, probe, or commit to a full attack. Microing was still optimal but the AI would act on its own if your attention was elsewhere, so it felt like your units had officers and ncos interested in winning and not dying instead of all being robots. They’d also do stuff like fall back to cover before routing completely, or advancing if they were trouncing the enemy without “hold” orders

Mans posted:

It would be impossible to simulate without being extremely frustrating. All activities basically stopping in winter time, having to find your troops during spring or recruting fresh troops again, looting villages that have already been looted, beating the crap and almost winning the war only for another foreign interference brings it all back to square one. Your emperor is a dolt and destroys an almost agreed upon peace settlement. You end the game with a status quo treaty and 10000 florins in the negatives.

Deltasquid posted:

I wouldn't mind an open-ended TW game where you get points for looting, winning fights and converting provinces' lords to your cause until all that is left is a ruined hellscape and you fight over scraps to get +10 points to eke out a high score. Make it as chaotic and frantic as possible over the course of, say, 60 turns, and make it more volatile and less formulaic so every time you play weird, wacky poo poo happens.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Help, im playing rome but i can only recruit 10 legion units in my stack before i have to make crappy auxiliaries, my general keeps getting replaced every year and i have to dishand my stacks every winter so i cant fight outside of italy

New Butt Order posted:

On the other hand, the AI fare a lot better if it could fight like like historical Rome. Lose 20 battles in a row, raise a new massive army each time, then barely win 1 battle and take over another quarter of the Mediterranean.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

I just wish AI Rome wouldn't field all-triarii stacks. MY IMMERSION

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

Yes because TW games have always appropriately modelled the seasons or politics of the era.

Mans posted:

issa joke

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

In DeI I like how the RoRs keep things more interesting. Like as Carthage I liberated a gallic faction in Ariminum who went on to take all of Latium, and when they finally turned on me, they had a lot of italian units as well as gallic ones. My armies have a lot of italians and sicilians, massalian hoplites, etc in addition to iberians and libyans because I took Italy and southern Gaul. I wish there were computers powerful enough to generate unit developments on the fly, like my gallo-italian kingdom could adopt units of gallic infantry fighting in a pseudo-polybian style.

Tarezax posted:

Excuse me, that's the Boshin War era

Mans posted:

You already have a kicking rad medieval campaign about it so yeah, if they want to touch boring britain in the Saga franchise they should definitely play with the crusades too.