Interview with Mike Simpson on RPS

[al Roumi]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/12/21/talking-about-total-war-with-mike-simpson/

Not hugely revelatory, but some thoughts from Mike Simpson on why Shogy 2 will be good. I've picked the below out, on AI issues of previous games, as it seemed the most important (to me):

"To give an example of the kind of problem we faced: if you were playing against AI on a very high difficulty level in Empire or Napoleon, then you wanted a serious challenge, you wanted to be attacked. The campaign AI wasn’t aggressive enough for most people, it was passive, that problem has gone for Shogun 2, and the very hard and hard levels have beaten me already in testing. There is so much AI grunt that I think we are now dialing that back, which is a better position to be in. I don’t expect to get any of that kind of criticism of the AI in Shogun."

I don’t expect to get any of that kind of criticism of the AI in Shogun

Right, that probably just means the very narrow example of the AI not being aggressive -but that's not really the point, its about the AI being sensibly aggressive. Empire's campaign AI was fully capable of being agressive, even if it had no army left to do it with!

Sorry, I just can't read anything Mark S says without getting riled.

[Gregoshi]

Sorry, I just can't read anything Mark S says without getting riled.
Then why do you continue to read his interviews? It is easy to sit back and pick apart general comments made in an interview with countless "yeah, but"s on specific items in which they can't respond to (unless CA comes here and addresses your specific issue). We have to face it - we will only get solid info on the AI and the game when we have a chance to play it ourselves. All we can do at thet moment is read every word...fearing for the worse and/or hoping for the best.

Regarding the AI in general, I think it gets a bum deal with all the criticism at being stupid. History is littered with stupid human generalship - Nagashino, parts of the Waterloo campaign, Burnsides' Bridge, Fredericksburg, pretty much all of WW1, Dunkirk, Battle of the Bulge (definitely NOT sensibly aggressive), me in almost any STW MP battle, etc. Of course, human generalship does have competence and brilliance as well, and a healthy level of at least competence is desired for the AI in a TW game.

[pevergreen]

That may be true, but CA know they've boasted about the AI before and it has been bad. Yet they continue to boast. They can either wait and try to prove it to us on release, or they can get people that players will trust and believe to test it. I understand it still may be too early, but having places that have given the AI favourable reviews in the past give it the same high score again is meaningless. The actual TW fans want reports and reviews from other total war players.

If you read a review praising the AI from IGN, or one from Kagemusha, for example, which would make you think better of it?

[Gregoshi]

And what exactly is CA supposed to say about the AI? "The AI is turning out dreadfully bad for S2TW. The other day I started a campaign battle and was promptly called away from the computer. I came back five minutes later and found out I had won the battle." You know they are going to put a positive spin on the game, so it continues to amaze me when people get all worked up over it. It would be nice if they'd say "We think we've made some great strides in the AI. However, the TW fans will have to be the final judge on whether or not we've been successful", but that isn't likely to happen. :shrug:

[al Roumi]

Then why do you continue to read his interviews? It is easy to sit back and pick apart general comments made in an interview with countless "yeah, but"s on specific items in which they can't respond to (unless CA comes here and addresses your specific issue). We have to face it - we will only get solid info on the AI and the game when we have a chance to play it ourselves. All we can do at thet moment is read every word...fearing for the worse and/or hoping for the best.

Of course, it's all just empty words until we have the "finished" (ha!) product in our hands. I really do want to like shogun2 and would melt into a ball of slavish consumerism and hero worship of the CA team if they actually delivered. As Pever says however, this is another interview where Mr Simpson says some encouraging things which I'm too bitter and twisted to let myself be convinced by. Scepticism seems all the more apt when you look at the more tangible evidence provided so far (i.e. the battle videos).

Sega's marketing sucks badly, or it is aimed at consumers are just suckers for pretty graphics.

[pevergreen]

True, but I believe my last point still stands.

When someone has failed to deliver multiple times, you can't trust what they say anymore. SEGA and CA should realise this and take action to rectify it.

[al Roumi]

And what exactly is CA supposed to say about the AI? "The AI is turning out dreadfully bad for S2TW. The other day I started a campaign battle and was promptly called away from the computer. I came back five minutes later and found out I had won the battle." You know they are going to put a positive spin on the game, so it continues to amaze me when people get all worked up over it. It would be nice if they'd say "We think we've made some great strides in the AI. However, the TW fans will have to be the final judge on whether or not we've been successful", but that isn't likely to happen. :shrug:

But that last would be sensible marketing aimed at the fans -rather than the insipid tosh they've chucked out so far.

[Gregoshi]

I'm still convinced CA's best course of action would be to remain silent on the game aside from a teaser trailer or two until a couple of weeks before released. For the Org audience at least, they seem to cause more stress than relief, though the MP crowd seems reasonably happy at the moment...but after months of much gnashing of teeth. Too much hype is rarely a good thing.

[Phog_of_War]

Personaly, I dont understand the lack of an open Beta test phase.

Seems to me that many developers have gone away from open testing by their community and do it in-house. As we have seen, in-house testers....well.....suck. Now I'm not trying to come down on the work they do, I am sure its important for game quality, but even if they played a portion of an Empires campaign they would have seen some of the more glaring deficencies in the CAI and BAI. However it seems that the only thing their testers were intrested in was if it looks pretty and do the units properly respond it commands on the Campaign map (yes, for the most part) and pathfinding in battles (no, for the most part)

I dont know. Maybe the testers are told to look for certian things by the developer and not to worry about all those other things. If so, CA (or any Dev for that matter) are shooting themselves in the foot. Having your testers (in-house or otherwise) be so focused on one aspect of a game as complex and huge as the Total War games is foolish and sloppy. I know its expensive these days to get a game like Total War on the shelves in the first place. And then to have the game be even slightly sucessful to the point where you at least get the money back to cover your development costs is an accopmplishment in and of itself.

However, not having a proper Beta phase (open or not) and not taking suggestions by your testers or the community at large (Med2 - ETW) is just plain bad decision making. Kind of like asking a rodeo clown to do brain surgery, you might get it done cheap but, you might not be happy with the results. Or putting it another way: Good work ain't cheap, and cheap work ain't good.

Apologies for the rant.

[Gregoshi]

I don't think it is necessarily that the CA beta testers suck, but that there is just so much to test in a game like TW. It seems that increasing the pool of testers would help cover more ground. However, I do wonder how effective regular gamers are as testers. Most, I'm sure, just want to play the game ahead of time, but do they really test - "lets see what happens when I do this..." and then paying attention for things out of the ordinary? Still, one would think more testers would help quickly find the more glaring problems not necessarily obvious on an individual level but over a large set of testing data - such as the suicide daimyo in STW.

[Magyar Khan]

well greg u do sound a bit on sided... i personally gave a signal in willingly to test the game in their house in london.... i dont want to play the game ahead of anyone else its just i am 100% confident i can tell ca if the game is good or not and whats needs -much- more attention....

we all know the marketing is build around fancy graphics and gamemodes......which sells well in magazines but we are interested in gameplay, replayability and epicness....

the best AI opponent for an sp player would be good human opponents drop in battles is helping here.... but we cant trust CA when the boast these things. History probably repeats itself.... remember what we have seen over the years... like
- unbalanced units
- bad mp networkcode
- crappy foyer or none at all
- shooting thru hills

which btw didnt appear in all releases.... but every release had its own big mp-shortcommings what even a blind mp-player would see....

and some testers we could offer from the org are swoosh, amp, spoon, ducky and perhaps even u greg....

stw/mi had at a given point just like mtw/vi the brilliance to deliver a few epic 3 vs 3 games each night

[Gregoshi]

Magyar, I'm not trying to be one sided - just fair base on what I see as jumping to a conclusion with little basis. Also, regarding gamers as testers, I was refering to the average Joe Gamer, not someone such as yourself and the others mentioned who have a deep understanding of the nuances of the MP aspect of the game. I think it would be great if CA recruited a team of experienced TW players (of high skill) and let them be part of the testing.

You are right in that CA's claims in some areas need to be taken with a grain of salt at this point, but at the same time, just because CA boasts about something, doesn't automatically mean it will be terrible either - despite their track record on these things. We will each make our own assessment of the success of their boasts when we actually play the game. We can only take limited info from the recent battle report which was played in a very relaxed and sloppy manner. The limited info is also of limited value because the game is still under development and things will change (hopefully for the better).

I would only be a good tester of the dumb stuff in the game, not the tougher parts like balance and such. Also, testing is rather tedious and not too much fun in my book.

[TosaInu]

[QUOTE=Magyar Khan
- shooting thru hills
[/QUOTE]

There was and is (???) a problem with the balistics, but it was not shooting through hills nor the 'cruise missile'. It becomes hard to solve a problem when the analysis isn't good. It also doesn't help when a creator is summoned in a way he must feel harsh, for fixing something that isn't there.

[Ibn-Khaldun]

I did not read the article but I did watched the asassination movie. And I like it. I probably will buy the game just because of these. ~:)

[Beskar]

I think the main problem with E:TW and N:TW is that it was effectively gun versus gun, it wasn't that exciting having a bunch of men march to a spot, then fire at eachother.

[Swoosh So]

I think the main problem with E:TW and N:TW is that it was effectively gun versus gun, it wasn't that exciting having a bunch of men march to a spot, then fire at eachother.

Napoleon totalwar had its charms and was a fine game except for lack of a foyer lack of maps and some unit control bugs and lack of improved grouping functions. Id rather play NTW than mtw2 and rtw in Multiplayer any day of the week and im a bigger fan of the melee games, rtw and mtw2 were unplayable in multiplayer and ntw was a step back in the right direction.

[Magyar Khan]

the totalwar series need hand to hand combat to give it an extra thrill.....


mmm tosa i cant figure out what u exactly mean but i am referring to the moments in previous releases where u could still kill enemy soldiers even if they were 2-3 times furter away than the maximum range of teh shooting weapon.....

[TosaInu]

Hello Magyar,

I know what you mean. And it also seemed as if men hiding behind a hill, far away from the shooting still died. And they did.

That wasn't because of bullets flying through hills though. The problem was that bullets made a symmetrical arc and kept their full power throughout the whole trajectory (thus flying over hills). When a gunner was aiming uphill, it could cause an odd trajectory a gun couldn't have, resulting in a kill among normally covered and or out of range units.

[AMP]

Now we go to units shooting into hills when they don't have a clear shot (yes i know we have hold fire, but that's not the point). Maybe they'll get it right and give units true LOS so you won't have that along with stopping new players asking for restricted camera because units than can be hidden without LOS on them from an enemy unit. It was extremely annoying to have your camera suddenly stop right when you're just about to select a unit that has some distance away from your main army all because someone thought it was realistic, so I'd have to double click on the unit card instead... :/

Melee FTW! If they really do make a 20th century TW I will not buy such a thing, which is on their list... hah. I'd rather see a fantasy TW something like King Arthur the Role Playing which had mad potential, but blew it with very very very bad balancing.

“we want 8v8 campaigns” and we say “no, you really don’t.”

I don't know who the "we" is, but me along with others from what I've read want at least a 4 player campaign... I don't know where this 8v8 came up from. And yes I really really do want a 4 player mp campaign thank you very much. :)

And so many people seem dumbfounded as to why STW2? Maybe because it was their first game and it's been 10 yrs already? LoL

I would be happy with a STW2 with the new engine along with getting the much needed things added to the TW MP and battles where it's been 10 yrs already we've been asking/waiting for them... I mean at least a few would be nice.

[Magyar Khan]

skip the most things and present us a 4 vs 4 or 2 vs 2 campaign/.....

[TosaInu]

Now we go to units shooting into hills when they don't have a clear shot (yes i know we have hold fire, but that's not the point).

:/ The ballistic model was very poor, I'ld think the hardware from 10 years ago would have been able to handle something better, the more so today.


Maybe they'll get it right and give units true LOS so you won't have that along with stopping new players asking for restricted camera because units than can be hidden without LOS on them from an enemy unit. It was extremely annoying to have your camera suddenly stop right when you're just about to select a unit that has some distance away from your main army all because someone thought it was realistic, so I'd have to double click on the unit card instead... :/

Having an unrestricted camera is fine, but when a game is hosted with restricted camera, then everyone should have restricted camera. Some tactics work less well with free camera (so a player thinking 'restricted' is not just gambling with his move, he's just going to throw units away :( ).



“we want 8v8 campaigns” and we say “no, you really don’t.”

This is not nice to say. I think they mean that we don't want that waiting time with 16 players and their turns (that's an old last minute reason to cancel the whole MP campaign). It's up to each group to decide what does and does not work for them. When a 1 vs 1 can be made, a 128 vs 128 can work too (it may result in 3 days queues at minimum and CTD's every 3 hours, but when 256 people decide to accept that discomfort for all the fun, so be it).

[AMP]

Well it's just my opinion, but I think it's smarter to do away with the unnecessary options that are still being hosted to create more of a standard play which everyone follows so you have less of a divide in MP. They want MP to be much more popular and if you notice all the top RTS games have a standard play.

You shouldn't need a restricted camera in today's gaming when you can just add fog of war and have the need of line of sight on enemy units for them to be revealed. With this you should also have the standard camera be camerafreedom with a few tweaks, so you don't have 20% or less people going into the pref config and adding it in with every new TW that comes out and the rest are left in the dark not knowing about such a thing.

The thing that creates the biggest divide in MP is what people prefer on unit sizes and this will be hard to settle if they want to make a standard for MP. I would rather have more units over bigger units if I had to choose, but that's just me (I won't say what I would really like because it'll never happen) :-(.

Mike Simpson said that about the campaigns and I was just like "who was asking for 8v8"? Most of the posts I've seen including myself people were asking for atleast a 4 player campaign 2v2/FFA any combo just atleast 4 players. Having just 1v1 isn't very MP campaignish to me and everyone in the campaign should start about the same and work from ground up as well. And to go straight to saying 8v8 we don't want that because of time issues and people going afk etc... well if we didn't want that people wouldn't ask for it (we are the ones buying and playing the TW games after all) and people were mostly asking for something smaller, but a step from 1v1s anyway, so I thought that was abit rude. grrrr

I wouldn't mind the waiting in a bigger campaign and I'd really enjoy if you had clan vs clan campaigns. The one thing he said was the AI will be a problem... well in a 4 player campaign and up you don't need to much of an active AI because you can setup it up where the fighting will be mostly between the players (which is what MP is about) and not screwing around with the AI. As far as turns they can be designed to be played at the sametime, if they put their thinking cap on they can make it work, so the only real wait comes from battles.

[TosaInu]

Well it's just my opinion, but I think it's smarter to do away with the unnecessary options that are still being hosted to create more of a standard play which everyone follows so you have less of a divide in MP. They want MP to be much more popular and if you notice all the top RTS games have a standard play.

I don't agree with that. I agree about half implemented options. But unnecessary suggests that some do like those options, or are otherwise agreed upon to be the choice to play.

Divides in MP are caused by something else. Speaking for myself: I don't care whether the map is flat or an insane wooded hill, whether it's comp, friendly, 100 koku or 100,000, tiny or huge unitsize, winter or summer, win or lose.



You shouldn't need a restricted camera in today's gaming when you can just add fog of war and have the need of line of sight on enemy units for them to be revealed. With this you should also have the standard camera be camerafreedom with a few tweaks, so you don't have 20% or less people going into the pref config and adding it in with every new TW that comes out and the rest are left in the dark not knowing about such a thing.

I disagree again. When it's an option -and FOW with restricted camera is a new mode- perfect. But when I enter a map, I want the extra thrill of not being able to read all parts of the terrain. I agree that a lot should be done on the GUI for MP, being able to edit the cfg in Wordpad is very nice, but it should be GUI too.



The thing that creates the biggest divide in MP is what people prefer on unit sizes and this will be hard to settle if they want to make a standard for MP. I would rather have more units over bigger units if I had to choose, but that's just me (I won't say what I would really like because it'll never happen) :-(.

It's one of the performance settings. When it's set into the middle, it's still unplayable for older hardware, and people with state of the art hardware will feel held back.


Mike Simpson said that about the campaigns and I was just like "who was asking for 8v8"? Most of the posts I've seen including myself people were asking for atleast a 4 player campaign 2v2/FFA any combo just atleast 4 players. Having just 1v1 isn't very MP campaignish to me and everyone in the campaign should start about the same and work from ground up as well. And to go straight to saying 8v8 we don't want that because of time issues and people going afk etc... well if we didn't want that people wouldn't ask for it (we are the ones buying and playing the TW games after all) and people were mostly asking for something smaller, but a step from 1v1s anyway, so I thought that was abit rude. grrrr

I guessed it came from CA. My point is that the customers should decide: do we play 1 vs 1, 2 vs 2, 10 vs 3, whatever. The customers play the game, they decide what works for them. Maybe (part of) todays hardware holds them back to do a 10 vs 10, but within say 3 months they can.


I wouldn't mind the waiting in a bigger campaign and I'd really enjoy if you had clan vs clan campaigns. The one thing he said was the AI will be a problem... well in a 4 player campaign and up you don't need to much of an active AI because you can setup it up where the fighting will be mostly between the players (which is what MP is about) and not screwing around with the AI. As far as turns they can be designed to be played at the sametime, if they put their thinking cap on they can make it work, so the only real wait comes from battles.

There's still AI on the unitlevel, I really don't know what costs more CPU power.

There were 4 vs 4 ten years ago too, hardware advanced a lot. True, we have 20 units in an army now, instead of 16, but that's still only 25% more. How about a 8 vs 8 with 10 units per army? It would be the same number of total units. And when the hardware (today or tomorrow) allows it, have the 8 vs 8 with 20 units each. Give the customers the options and they'll figure out what works for them.

[AMP]

I was just speaking from my own opinion of RTS gaming XP of 13 yrs online. They said they wanted MP to be real popular and out of all my years of gaming online I've never seen a RTS like TW online with so much divide. Most RTS have pretty much a standard play which unites everyone. So all I have to say is good luck to them getting there with how things currently are. :)

[TosaInu]

That's your right AMP, but others look at it differently.

Speaking for the skirmisch battles: they are already different from many/all other games. Usually a RTS game gives almost nothing to each player from the start and they need to build up an army first. With TW, each player is given the 'right' amount of money and starts from there, right into the middle of the action. Some players decide to play with 1000 gold, others want 5k, 10k or 15k or 99k. Some prefer a certain amount, others insist on exactly x.

That was already true in the STW days, 10 years ago, and there was always a full foyer (at several points the server became the bottleneck, not the amount of people willing to play it). It's easier to hop into a game when you are equally fine with 100 gold as with 99,999 or anything in between, but even insisting on a fixed amount didn't mean you had to wait for a game for long.

STW had something like 70 maps, and MP'ers wanted more, MTW had 100's of maps and MP'ers wanted more, RTW did away with the diversification there and offered only 10-20 maps and MP'ers wanted more, NTW only offers 3 (?) maps and MP'ers want more.

The divide doesn't stop with the money or maps: same goes for units, sizes, unit types (!) and so on. All combinations were played, there never was a standard in TW. The lack of standard wasn't the problem, nor people insisting to play only one combination or a limited set of combinations. Many other factors caused trouble: software, hardware and social interactions.

[AMP]

I know TW battles are different from your traditional RTS and same goes with your more unique RTS games. I've been playing them for 13yrs now and I played many RTS games over that time. My thoughts to it are they aren't gonna get a very popular MP TW which is what they are now wanting to put their time into making happen. That's gonna happen without a standard, but that's just my opinion and if they did manage to get thousands of players with all these different settings/starting options I'd be shocked and happy as the sametime.

I never did like playing with high money/koku in stw/mtw:vi days because that defeated the whole purpose of knowing how to cope with moral. That's why I was also happy to see the more competitive scene never using such a high amount as a standard (tournaments as well), same with not using the larger unit sizes (seemed to blobish and less tactical).

The thing with maps is all we need is a map editor and you can just let the community do the rest of the work with that. It would also help to instead of only being able to go to a website to DL them to be able to DL them from the host of a game if you so choose (I've seen it done in other RTS games). I don't wanna soon see us in a future TW having to "pay" for addition maps in something like a DLC.... I really hope it doesn't come to that.

The divide is all of it together. That's what I mean and that lack of a standard wasn't a problem or isn't a problem in the TWs, but I think it will be if you want a popular MP. The biggest divide I saw in NTW the few months I've played it was the large/medium unit sizes. The list of games sometimes would be half and half, but that isn't the problem. When people start to bicker over it as to which is better, that's when it becomes a problem and I've seen it in forums. Something like that is just an example of what will be a drawback to having a very successful MP. I remember back in STW unit sizes were all 60 and no one complained or moaned about that, people suggested different unit sizes for units, but everyone still enjoyed the game very much.

You are right about that, others look at it differently and I find myself disagreeing with alot of people, so most of the time I don't bother to post at all. :(

Sometimes it feels better just to play the game and not to open my mouth. :p

[TosaInu]

You are right about that, others look at it differently and I find myself disagreeing with alot of people, so most of the time I don't bother to post at all. :(

Give me a hand :) Please keep posting.



The divide is all of it together. That's what I mean and that lack of a standard wasn't a problem or isn't a problem in the TWs, but I think it will be if you want a popular MP. The biggest divide I saw in NTW the few months I've played it was the large/medium unit sizes. The list of games sometimes would be half and half, but that isn't the problem. When people start to bicker over it as to which is better, that's when it becomes a problem and I've seen it in forums. Something like that is just an example of what will be a drawback to having a very successful MP. I remember back in STW unit sizes were all 60 and no one complained or moaned about that, people suggested different unit sizes for units, but everyone still enjoyed the game very much.

That's some of the social part. Some taunting can be ok, but the endless and rough bickering isn't getting us anywhere.

And I agree that any game or part of the game, needs several players or it won't be viable at all.

Instead of focusing on releasing the MP standard for TW, and making shortcuts in the code to make that to work, the focus should be on different things, such as:

-the very basics
-the ability for users to easily tweak their game (GUI and edit) and share it
-hot swap of profiles (stats, money, settings)
-CRC on all parts of those profiles to prevent odd games

I guess groups want a given profile to be the rubber stamped default. On first release there is no rubber stamped default, the time that's saved from trying to make that, is invested in a well thought out and stable core. The whole MP community will get an easy DIY GUI kit with the first release. It will be messy at first, with everyone wanting something else, but playing the game will become more important and addictive than that 10% more on this or that stat and there will be standards in a matter of weeks. One of those supported profiles will become rubber stamped in the next release and become the default, tie it to an official ladder. Yet the next release still has the GUI and all, so people who play it for another reason than to participate in a league, will get their fun.

[Magyar Khan]

amp is right that the game should be balanced around how a general handles moral of his units...... the balance between quality and quantity

I would be satisfied with a mapselector from the campaignmap and store it on your own pc....... and when u host a battle the enemies automatically has them.....

Another idea could be that when ur in sp mode in some way, in the campaign and u enters a battle that there is an option to save it to your mp-maplist.....

Another idea could also be that in the MP lobby interface there are some small banners linking tot www.twcenter.net www.totalwar.org and .com so new players can go there easily to obtain new info and perhaps downloadable maps....

[TosaInu]

Playing a 1k battle is great for that, but 15k works too. 99k is still using morale, it's just a smaller part of that, different players, different levels and needs. A commander goes to battle with rookies or vets, or he's still learning himself. Nothing wrong with that.

The simpler and the faster the better Magyar (regarding obtaining files). I recall sessions lasting an hour, just to explain how a new map should be installed. It's thanks to the persons patience to learn that we finally played it, but that's not always the case. One click is much better than two and the illusion of difficult.

Edit: oeps, we got an MP discussion in the SP forum. I'll see to move this part.

[Nikodil]

Short note on 1k vs 99k battles: I think you can safely reason that 99k battles where over-funded, given the 16 unit limit. How many units would you get if you had no limit? Probably more like 30 or 40. The imbalance comes from being able/forced to boost your morale without corresponding sacrifice in numbers.

[TosaInu]

Yes Blutzeit, for you and me that's true. I think this also suggest to rethink about the mechanics of the game. Instead of just having more morale, the whole balance changes. What if I'm a starting player and want to learn that balanced game played in the league and want to turn morale off and than back on step by step? That's just not possible.

A morale setting would be good for the more experienced players too. Recall all those times where we said: 7 k feels good, it just needs a little bit morale.

[Swoosh So]

Stop discussing 99k battles :p did u all become nubs in the last few years :)

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

Hey, we used to do 99K on the 2.01 server on VI Swoosh back in 2004 up until RTW came out because we always thought you 2.0 guys were noobs for doing 10K and here I am started on 99K lol.