Turks - Initial Impressions on the Game.

First off, I wouldn't call this a review, I haven't had nearly enough play time to review it. This is just my initial reaction.

So, I told myself I had other stuff to do and couldn't play this till the weekend...but I cracked. Spent the lengthy 30-minute installation process looking at my manual, as well as the map and tech tree that came with my limited edition.

I fired the game up and immediately went to the historical battles. Arsuf sounded cool, so I played it. Won on my first try, average victory. After that, I played a custom battle as my favorite faction, the Turkies. I played a very large scale battle with 4 armies, Me (Turks) and Russia vs. Sicily and the Papal States. Put tons of units in to see how it would handle. Here's what I've found.

1. The game looks beautiful. Having never played BI before, I played a night battle for a change. The battlefield looks fantastic. The map I chose was a mostly open field with a few scattered forests, and my Russian allies even started behind a large cathedral with a small village in front of it. The cathedral was on a big hill, giving them an excellent defensive position.

The maps are huge, much bigger than I ever remember RTW's being, and have a large variety of terrain with a whole bunch of nice defensive and flanking positions. I was extremely impressed.

2. The game chugs a bit. I never had lag problems in the demo, and I put my settings on the same settings I had them on with the demo. My battle totalled about 7,500 troops, and I had quite a bit of lag near the beginning, but nothing huge or game-breaking. I grinned-and-beared it and hardly even noticed it once things got underway. It quickly got better as guys died, and about ten minutes into the battle there was no lag.

3. Battles can last for a very long time. My custom battle lasted for about 45 minutes. Yup. Much longer than any MTW or RTW battle ever lasted for me. Well, not counting the 3-hour battles against the Golden Horde invasion in Khazar in MTW, heh. Found it quite exciting to see battles lasting for a while. Most of the long length, however, was caused by the next point:

4. The AI tries very hard to impress, and sometimes succeeds, but usually doesn't. My battle was on Very Hard. It took at good 10 minutes or more to get things underway. I took on Sicily first, and they spent a long time getitng their stuff together before moving up. During that time, I hammered on them with my horse archers and killed a good bunch of their forces before the fighting even started.

During the battle, the AI tried really hard to beat me. I'll give it that. It did some thing I'd never seen the RTW AI do. Here are the things I saw the AI do that made me go wow:

a) It tried to flank me with cavalry.
b) It tried to screen my cavalry with their own. I had my Qapakulu on my flanks, and it charged its knights right into them - caught me off guard with one unit which they nearly destroyed.
c) When I started hammering on their knights and general with my horse archers, they moved them into a forest to take cover. When I persisted in attacking them, they sent one unit of knights to chase off my horse archers while the rest of their cavalry retreated to the other side of their army, far away from my archers. The knights they used to chase my archers down only chased for longer enough for their knights to get away, and they broke them off quickly knowing my archers were much faster. I was quite impressed by this.
d) They moved their army up a narrow valley under the cover of a forst because my army as composed largely of archers, musketeers, and a cannon. This was smart in theory, but the valley opened into a steep hill that I moved my guys on top of. When I charged my infantry down, I stopped their advance, and they had cornered themselves in the forest. Unable to advance up the hills, they tried to fight their way through. At this point I surrounded them on all sides and charged all my heavy cavalry AND horse archers into them. Surrounded, they broke quickly and not a SINGLE unit escaped.
e) The AI is very good with handling cavalry. They know how to use them. Immediately upon the start of the battle, they moved their mounted crossbowmen up to harass my lines. They stupidly tried to match my horse archers in melee, though, when I surrounded them and charged in. Their knights were well played, they did quite a bit of damage to the Qapakulu on my left flank, though that was mostly because I wasn't paying attention. My right flank did much, much better since I kept close attention on them after my near-disaster on the left. Later, when attacking the Papal States, their cavalry kept trying to flank my cavalry and infantry.

They tried to beat me with some creative tactics, but they ultimately killed themselves off with a good-in-theory-but-badly-executed attack. Their maneuvering of their knights was quite well done, though.

Now, my allies did some really freakin' wierd stuff, but it was kinda cool. I highly recommend reading this, because it was cool to see:

First, the Papal states sent some cavalry to come attack me, but broke off and retreated them back to their main force. Then, the russians sent their Dvor Cavalry (horse archers) to harass the pope very intelligently. But here's where it got wierd - after sending their Dvors off to keep the pope busy, they sent their ENTIRE army minus the archers over to my position to attack Sicily. So we double teamed and killed them. The, I lined up a neat battle line to prepare for the pope's approaching forces. To my infinite surprise, Russia lined up a battle line of infantry and cavalry that DIRECTLY supplemented mine; they set up a line of infantry right in front of mine. Their cavalry was screening the flanks of their army, sitting near mine. It was pretty cool. I have a screenshot, albeit not a very clear one:
https://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c358/inky5/0005.jpg
Nice and neatly assembled. A couple minutes later, though, they disassembled their line and retreated it directly _behind_ mine and did not help whatsoever in the main battle, leaving me to deal with the Pope on my own. It was rather confusing. When the pope finally reached us, he moved his units in mostly one-by-one in a sort of completely unorganized wannabe-quasi-column and got massacred. I lost very few guys in the fight.

It got quite hectic, but at no point did I feel it was out of control or I was going to lose.

5. Cavalry are extremely weak - don't believe anyone who tells you differently. Even the charges weren't that powerful. My Qapakulu did real well when facing light units that stood no chance against them, but ended up getting mostly killed off when it came to the decisive action. By the end, I had very little heavy cavalry left - only 2 of my 4 units survived, each with less than half of the unit left. Heavy cavalry usually lose 5 or more guys in the initial charge, and if you forget about them and leave them in the melee, then forget it - they're dead.

Against heavy infantry, heavy cavalry charges are pretty weak. Cavalry require tons of micromanagement now - I had to withdraw and charge my Qapakulu at least 4 times into the rear of a unit of Dismounted Feudal Knights - while the knights were being engaged from the front by Janissary Heavy Infantry. By the time they routed, my Qapakulu had lost half their unit, and the knights only routed because I killed the Papal general elsewhere on the field.

My initial reaction to cavalry is not very positive. It's pretty much the same as the demo. They struggle even against ranged units. I had to retreat a unit of Qappakulu when they charged into 3 units of crossbowmen, or else I would have lost them all.

The end result is that there is an infuriating degree of micromanagement required to use cavalry properly now. Eventually, some time after the 7th time of withdrawing and re-charging them, you'll start to ask yourself, "is this even freakin' worth it? Gimme a Monster bombard!" It's always annoying to tell your cavalry to charge, look away for 37 seconds, and come back to see half of them died fighting off crossbowmen. Sigh.

6. Archer firing rates aren't that bad. I didn't really get the sense that archers were underpowered or overpowered. They aren't war-winning units, although for the Turks, they probably should be. I got a very satisfying feeling when pounding them with my archers. I didn't kill off any units, but I did quite a bit of damage to some of the lighter infantry and even put a dent in their knights, and then killed off their cannons when the main force advanced. I would have been able to do much more damage with them, though, if they didn't run out of ammo, which by the way doesn't last very long. They made maybe 15 or so volleys before they ran out.

7. The sound is amazing. Every sound in the game feels just right. Everything from the scary muskets to the booming cannons to the melee sounds of swords, shields, and halberds all colliding. Watching and hearing a bunch of heavy cavalry crash into a unit's rear is quite satisfying.

The music is perfect. There are a lot more music tracks than in the demo. 22 tracks in all. The music doesn't seem to be faction-specific anymore, it seems more region specific; for example when playing Arsuf as the English (fighting in the holy land as a crusader army), eastern/muslim style music played.

8. The units look fantastic, but the cavalry are repetitive. The infantry look just great, I love the look of their armor and weapons. The cavalry look excellent as well, but get a but repetitive since it seems like CA used only ONE model to represent all eastern heavy cavalry in the game. All Russian, byzantine, turkish, and egyptian heavy cavalry have identical models for the horses, though the riders are a bit different. The Russian cavalry looks by far the nicest - heavy armored horses plus riders with those scary "woman crying" masks we saw on the Berdiche Axemen in the trailer. I spent quite a few minutes creepily staring at my janissary heavies and musketeers, muttering quietly to myself on how imposing they look. I'm pretty sure my roommate thinks I'm a wee bit unstable in the head after that. The voices are telling me the janissaries are purty..

9. The civilizations have a much more C&C Generals/Company of Heroes/Starcraft sort of balancing to them - which is good. Before I get ripped on for the comparison to starcraft, let me explain. In MTW, factions were mostly indistinguishable from each other, except a few. For the most part, the Muslims, Russians, and Catholics all shared the same core unit roster with one or two unique units along the way (Or none in France's case.) In M2TW, however, each faction has a mostly unique unit roster with very few crossovers. It's very nice to see - the factions are much more fleshed out this time around, as fewer shared units and more unique units helps to balance things out and make fights much more interesting. Each faction now has clearly distinguishable weaknesses and strengths, unlike previous TW games where it was mostly each culture had a specific strength + a few units to help a particular faction along. This means each *faction*, not each *culture*, is suited to a particular playing style.

The game is fantastic so far. It has its flaws from what I've seen, but they don't seriously kill the game. I also didn't encounter many problems with unit cohesion, which was a welcome change from the demo where I told my guys to charge and they'd run into a big ball of men and then run off in every direction as if playing flashlight tag. My janissaries functioned quite well, but my Qappakulu had some problems with unit cohesion when told to attack while running. Unit also don't seem to follow your attack orders if they are chasing routers, you have to tell them to break off first or else they'll just keep chasing what they're chasing.

Going to start a campaign sometime tomorrow or the next day, but my initial reaction is quite positive. I took a bunch more screenshots if anyone wants them posted.

Oh please do post those screenshots, along with your wonderful commentaries if you would please :2thumbsup: . Loved the read.

More and more positive things about the game, and as some of you may have seen at the TWC, the devs appreciate it and are more willing to help out the community because of it. Concerning the first patch, they said they'd be including an unpacker because they "want to give back" for all the support. I like!

-edit-
Here's that post about the patch btw. Didn't see anything about this here at the Org. My mistake if there is.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showp...68&postcount=1

That was great review... but ? what happened to the rest of the screens ?

About cavalry, they are still overpowered but are quite buggy in their behavior. My biggest problem with charges is the formed charge seems to work only on the location of the unit when you ordered the charge. If the opponent moves out of that location, cavalry does the weaker charge or stops where the opponent used to be and half-heartedly chases.

This makes for weird gameplay. I found that cavalry is at their best when charging directly against a massed infantry formation, even against spears. They're not that effective charging against the rear or back or against disorganized formations. Because ranged units skirmish, cavalry formed charges never work and it's actually harder to kill archers with cavalry compared to killing spearmen and even other heavy infantry.

Bump... screenage ? :P