Suggestions for the next TW game

[CraigTW]

Hi guys,

You might have noticed I posted up on TWC and our forums for suggestions as to what should be in the next TW game. Well you guys are included in that, too.

Please reply to this thread with any suggestions and I'll make sure they're all put into my report.

Thanks!

Craig.

[Andres]

A suggestion that keeps coming back around here is the Warring States Period.

I'm well aware that this might not be a very popular opinion, but personally, I wouldn't mind to see a fantasy TW game. A Wheel of Time TW would be great, but a TW game set in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire universe would be awesome too.

EDIT: btw, you can find a lot of discussion about this in this thread

[xploring]

I like the Spring-Autum, Warring States period too, been reading a lot of stories about it. But lack of historical records, and primitive weapons and tactics may count against it. Chariot (horses with soldiers in towed carts) seemed to be the premier weapon in those days. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is probably the most well-known and most marketable for Total War in China, but I am happy with any period in Chinese History.

Edit: misunderstood thread purpose, added feature wishlist/ideas at TWC
Disorganized with not much consideration to feasibility
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...21#post9727621

[econ21]

Wearing my moderator hat, let's keep this thread clean - constructive comments only; no CA bashing - to and fro stuff can go in the "What's next thread" that Andres linked above.

Wearing my gamer hat, here's my 2 cents: I'd like to see a Rome 2, taking a similar "sandbox" approach to RTW but with the battlefield and especially campaign AI brought up to STW2s standards.

But Andres makes an interesting point. Being a big fan of HBOs Game of Thrones, if I were in CA, I'd also explore the possibility of getting a licence for that source material. It would fit the TW approach perfectly and seems to be a setting that has legs (five plus books, HBO confirming second season...).

[Vladimir]

My question is what's next after Total War? Even though Rome 2 is the most logical choice and China would be nice I'm curious about what you guys are up to after this. Most all of the interesting time periods are covered. Maybe something about behind the scenes interactions that lead up to war. Battles should be the climax. I don't know what time period or area would be best but I've always been fascinated with northern Italy. It all seems so easy to conquer in so many games but the area was hotly contested by many players for quite some time.

I know TW is about, well, war, but I'm more interested in the battles fought along the road to war.

[hoom]

I think this request is not so much about the time/places we'd like to see but game features to make TW games better?

Game engine changes I'd like to see:

Bigger armies.
Historically TW games have tended to be scaled something like 10|1 in terms of number of soldiers on the field.
Partly thats about keeping unit counts controllable, partly about performance.
TW is so far ahead of any other game in terms of number of units on screen at once that there really is no competition but its still disappointing to find yourself playing a big historical battle like Cannae with only 3-6K rather than 30-60K soldiers.
Third Age gets decent numbers in some battles & its great fun to load up a custom battle with a super-elite elvish army vs 8 armies full of the lowest quality biggest number Ork units but it still rarely manages battles equivalent to Helms' Deep let alone the attack on Minas Tirith.
Keeping it controllable can be done by splitting armies into sections controlled by AI generals eg Left, Middle & Centre with the AI generals being orderable in some detail but the AI would have to be really making good use of terrain & units.

Fix unit pathfinding on walls & quit having it so that walls basically offer no restriction to enemy movement.
In Shogun, Empire & Napoleon all units can just walk up to walls and climb up them without hesitation. Typically the approach is done with few casualties contrary to history (& presumably at least in part due to the comparitively small army sizes).
This basically makes it impossible to emulate historical cases of small garrisons holding key fortresses against massive armies.
Even in Med2, Rome & Med1 it was always too easy to bring along a bunch of siege gear then blow so many holes in walls that they might as well not be there so you end up defending the central square instead.
Historically it was about making one or two entry points not 8.

3rd level of the game.
Currently Theatre level maneuvre is mixed in with the Strategic/Logistic level in a way that makes counter marching, allied actions & strategic retreat (which was one of the great things about Shogun & Med1) nearly impossible, while also unnecessarily cluttering up the Strategic/Logistic map.
I say bring back the Drag & Drop proper Strategic level, with maneuvre only occuring where opposing armies meet in a province (zoomed in province Theatre map) several Theatre turns per Strategic turn or a period of realtime maneuvre per Strategic turn.

A defending army needs to have a chance to counter the actions of an invading army.
In Empire for example a single unit can pop into a province, raid several villages & move back out of range of a much larger defensive force then do it again next turn inflicting an infeasably high economic toll.
Historically Leonidas had warning & opportunity to setup the delaying force at Thermopylae. If the Persians invaded in the current style they'd just come out of nowhere & sack Athens then plonk down outside Corinth before the Spartans could do anything.

Its also currently impossible to retreat in the face of a superior army most of the time.
Out of the fog of war comes a massive army, marches up to you & attacks. If you retreat you probably won't get away far enough & the enemy just marches up again, you have the non-choice: fight an unwinnable battle or lose the army outright without inflicting any casualties but now you are probably on weaker terrain than you were on before retreating.

In Shogun & Med1 in the face of superior invaders you could strategically abandon the province without loss of soldiers (adding to defense of the next province) or retreat to the castle then send in a relief force next turn or two.
This was to the advantage of the AI at least as much as the player.

Baggage train/camp.
A bunch of historical battles hinged around threats to, capture or successful defense of one armies' baggage train/camp, so I think it'd be a good thing to bring that into TW battles somehow.

Veteran & Avatar customisation in singleplayer campaigns.
I enjoy setting colour schemes & giving custom titles to units in the multiplayer of Shogun2 & its kinda disappointing being unable to do the same in singleplayer.
I guess its arguably a historical thing but I think its the sort of bending history to our will that is OK, plus some would really enjoy naming & colour scheming as close to historically as possible.

Bring back Town view & add Army view.
Town view in Rome was cool.
I also want to see my armies marching around in glory. Either a camp/town parade if they've been sitting around or marching along a road/track if they've been moving that turn.

Improve visual quality of the campaign map.
The battlemaps of Shogun2 are amazingly atmospheric but the Strategic map still looks like a tarted up version of the Rome strategic map & the Rome strategic map was already visually sub-par when it came out.
This incongruity breaks my immersion in a way the old parchment style never did (I could believe I'm sitting in a tent looking at a map).

Related to the above 2: Continuous zoom.
Play RUSE to see how cool this can be. At full zoom out you're in a command bunker looking down at a 3d war map with tokens representing your units.
You have background bunker visuals & audio but you can scroll in continuously down to a close-up view of individual tanks & soldiers in appropriate scale with properly proportioned & good looking towns etc.
At intermediate ranges the level of detail & the schematic/realness gets gradually changed in a way that feels just right.
Probably would be impossible to do on the scale of full TW campaign map but might be doable for individual provinces via Theatre mode.

More Python.

Most of all: Keep the scope to things you can implement in budget & time.

-----------------------------
But since others have mentioned time periods...
I agree with Warring States or Three Kingdoms.
Its an area that hasn't been previously covered, has wide variety of interesting weaponry & bunch of factions ie should be pretty ideal for a TW game.

I'd prefer a Successor/Helenistic period centered game over a direct Rome sequel.
See Rome Total Realism & Europa Barbarorum.
Doesn't mean Rome isn't involved but gives that wider historical flavour & context.
Plus polyreme naval battles :D
A Western Mediterranean focus like RTR VII would also be very cool while enabling the Punic wars to be covered in much better detail than in the bigger map of RTR6 & EB.
Could even be done in several parts with smaller campaign expansions adding more detail/provinces & start position/time periods: West (Carthage, Iberia, Rome & Gauls), East (Successors, Steppe & Indians), Greek peninsular (various Greek wars, Persian invasions, rise of Macedon), Italy (rise of Rome, Gallic invasions, threat of Carthaginian intervention).

You could buy the rights (hah! $$$) to LoTR & put Third Age: TW mod in a box.
I'd buy it no question as is but with extra possibilities provided by official rights (access to Weta art, designers etc) & being put out by the game engine devs it could be even better.
But a non-Tolkien based fantasy setting I wouldn't be interested in.

[econ21]

From the fourth post in this thread:

... let's keep this thread clean - constructive comments only...

[Nelson]

I would like to see Rome 2.

I would also like to see a game with moats! Six Total War installments and still no moats!

[edyzmedieval]

As for the game, I vote for a Medieval 3 Total War.

[A Nerd]

Medieval 3, ancient China or ancient Greece! :D

[jackie_fish]

Muiltplayer has come leaps forward in shogun but I am not sure about you guy but I see it as a start to something. You guy should look at other successful muiltplayer games such as say starcraft with all the separate ladders ect and life a practise league would be cool to see.
Also whilst talking about starcraft when you go to see a battle replay you can throw up stats of all different thing and i think that would be really cool to see in the new Game.
As the next game I assuming wont be about civil war you will be able to play different faction with different build and troops. I would love to see the player pick a leader of a nation and lvl up that nation and your own leader. obviously you could keep people to only one faction but maybe give more benefits for winning with the faction they chose.
Jake

[Marshall Louis-Nicolas Davout]

India total war.

China total war

[smooth_operator]

Medieval 3, ancient China or ancient Greece! :D

Ancient China would be great. How about ancient Greece trying to fend off the Persian Invasion?

[Hamata]

ancient Greece! :D

fixed and also please make it be greece

[FasT]

Any news on the next era?
I would like Vietnam war era but don't think that possible!
Would rather they stick with the stw2 era and just improve on wot we got now. If they wanna make more money just add a expansion pack to push this game forward and improve and remove the bugs issues we already got!
Won't hold my breathe though:p

[Akka]

Hi guys,

You might have noticed I posted up on TWC and our forums for suggestions as to what should be in the next TW game. Well you guys are included in that, too.

Please reply to this thread with any suggestions and I'll make sure they're all put into my report.

Thanks!

Craig.

First suggestion : NO STEAM ! I want to own my game and not require third-party malware to run it, especially considering how intrusive, abusive and restrictive it is, thanks.

Now for the game itself...

- Work on AI and diplomacy. I know it's what you hear every game, but seriously, it's always been the weak point of the serie. It should become an actual relevant part of the game.
- More developped "conquest" part. It's always bothered me how you can conquer a province and it's immediately added to your possessions and you can churn out units quickly from it. I think a rather long "assimilation" time should be required.
- In the same vein, manpower. The idea was here in RTW (though, again, the AI was prone to fail at it), and it would be nice if it could make a comeback. I always found it weird that huge stacks of units, thousands upon thousands of men, could be slaughtered without it being a big deal as long as you have money to replace the losses (and with STW2, money comes in such large sums I can easily afford to lose one full stack every two turns or so, which means I'm pretty much immune to attritional warfare).
- Speaking of it : ATTRITION ! Logistic lines and the like. It really makes the strategy much deeper and more interesting than having some kind of immortal stack that can walk in the far-away mountains for some centuries without problem.
- Immersion. You got it right with STW2, keep it up !
- Better mélée fighting. MTW2 was ATROCIOUS in this respect, STW2 is better but not perfect. It's a bit "weak" if you know what I mean, lacking in power and energy (RTW was the best by far in this domain, even though it caused the "blob" problem). Also it's just a collection of duel. Units should fight as unit, and you should NOT have five guys standing around a foe and doing nothing but looking at a sixth fighting alone. This make close-up fighting look ridiculous. It's nice to have these neat animations, but what is the point if their principle is defeated by making the hand-to-hand fighting disjointed.
- Harder sieges. Fortress in all the TW games are either easily assaultable (walls are barely able to slow down attackers, you wonder what's the point building them) or easily starvable. In history, fortress and castle were quite a big deal. MAKE them a big deal ! (again, it would require a better AI)

As for the setting...
I'd like either a RTW2, a very ambitiout "Civilization : Total War" (I guess you can imagine the idea) or maybe a "Fantasy : Total War", as long as it's light on fantasy and doesn't make standard soldiers look like peasants.
But please, NO GUNPOWDER ERA ! I hate, hate, hate it.

[Marshall Louis-Nicolas Davout]

No.The Gunpowder is excellent! I love that era! I only wish that CA could make the Korean expansion.

No fantasy total war.Stick to history.Otherwise I would never buy it.

[Marshall Louis-Nicolas Davout]

even though it caused the "blob" problem). Also it's just a collection of duel. Units should fight as unit, and you should NOT have five guys standing around a foe and doing nothing but looking at a sixth fighting alone. This make close-up fighting look ridiculous. It's nice to have these neat animations, but what is the point if their principle is defeated by making the hand-to-hand fighting disjointed.
Units should fight as unit

That's european style.Not Japanese.If you looked at it,the samurai came and fought like the old guard.One samurai vs one samurai,2 samurai vs 2 samurai.

Erm...This is Japan we're talking about.Samurai would never have always just faced one samurai,they would have faced manother samurai in battle.Shogun 2 has excellent combat.RTW has no combat at all.One slash at a enemy's shield and he;s dead.How is that real? You're making the total war series numb again.No way.CA has to move forward,

[Madae]

You know, I actually wouldn't mind seeing some sort of "fantasy" Total War. There was a game a few years ago called Warhammer Mark of Chaos, and it was almost like Total War, except it had a defined story and was strictly linear; you fought a battle, you moved on in the story to the next battle. It was actually a really good game - I enjoyed it a lot. If CA were to grab an IP like Warhammer, I could see a Total War game using that being somewhat interesting.

But still, I'm hoping for Medieval 3. I can't think of anything that should change or be added from what the series already has. Things like "work on diplomacy" are pretty much always going to be a work in progress, and should be a given.

I'll also agree with the post 2 posts above me - Gunpowder really isn't that bad. Empire was a really good game.

[Hamata]

Suggesstion/persinal prefrence

time frame:Germany world war 2
Factions: nazi germany with swastikas please, USSR france british empire nazi italy the republic of spain the ottoman empire sryia ukraine sweeden poland denmark all the other factions that took place in this war
emerging factions: afrika corps.

Faction leaders aldolf hitler stalin and the rest.


campaign should inclued diplomacy. goverment slider were you get to chose if you want to be more right or left. right means the nazis of the population will favor you more and left means all will be normal except a nazi revolt might happen,
air battles these will be basicaly played like shogun 2's naval battles but without the boarding just select the plane unit you want to controle right click on a enemey plain and it will attack atoumanicaley.
tanks should behave like tanks get hit in the rear a few times by another tank and boom.

battle map size should be about the size of napoliean battle maps basicaley wide open aeras but expect small squad sizes and fast paced battles

[Marshall Louis-Nicolas Davout]

You know, I actually wouldn't mind seeing some sort of "fantasy" Total War. There was a game a few years ago called Warhammer Mark of Chaos, and it was almost like Total War, except it had a defined story and was strictly linear; you fought a battle, you moved on in the story to the next battle. It was actually a really good game - I enjoyed it a lot. If CA were to grab an IP like Warhammer, I could see a Total War game using that being somewhat interesting.

But still, I'm hoping for Medieval 3. I can't think of anything that should change or be added from what the series already has. Things like "work on diplomacy" are pretty much always going to be a work in progress, and should be a given.

I'll also agree with the post 2 posts above me - Gunpowder really isn't that bad. Empire was a really good game.

Yes,Medeivial 2 felt like a cheap game.Dont get me wrong here,but it just felt bad with huge amounts of historical inaccuracy.It looks good,but a Mediveal 3 would do,And spain never existed as kingdom during its early history.