24 reasons why I won't buy the next Total War release...

It's pretty funny now there is much more dissent here than you'll find at the other sites. The very real possibility of irate customers banding together and boycotting the expansion pack seemed to draw all the fire to TWC. I'm not one to give up easily, but it is pretty obvious that our complaints and analysis are for nothing. CA doesn't care about us few real strategy gamers when they can make literally millions off of pre teen players with a FPS mentality. I won't buy the expansion. I think anyone who does is a closet masochist. CA has proven that you can treat your customers like dirt, and the herd mentality will just keep them running back for more. I wish I lived in England or Australia, I'd stop by in person and have a chat.

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Originally Posted by Old Celt

I wish I lived in England or Australia, I'd stop by in person and have a chat.

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Man, I love Australia. ~D

They should make RTW:Aussie invasion and 100 australian surfers would appear somewhere on the map and teach everybody the culture of not to worry and be laid back and go surfing and all the wars would end and they would all live in an utopian society.

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when they can make literally millions off of pre teen players with a FPS mentality

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w00t, now that someone has mentioned this particular piece of the gaming market, i have an excuse to start bitching!! Thos particular section of gaming, which makes up the large majority, is what is sending games more and more downhill. Games are less oriented to being a fun, entertaining and slightly puzzling experience, to being horrible, kill-fest pieces of crap, full of eye-candy, and made as quick as possible to make more money. Heck, most of these idiots who want games like this, they play them for 15 hours a day for two weeks claiming that the game is 'da f*ckin' bomb!!1111!!!', before getting bored of their new toy, throwing it out the cot and moving onto the next piece of dull crap, because it has slightly better graphics and comes with one of those novelty bird things that keep bending over and sipping water out of a cup.

Those are the people who are ruining the games industry, and those are the people who will one day make Strategy Games and all games that require thinking extinct.

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Originally Posted by Mikeus Caesar

w00t, now that someone has mentioned this particular piece of the gaming market, i have an excuse to start bitching!! Thos particular section of gaming, which makes up the large majority, is what is sending games more and more downhill. Games are less oriented to being a fun, entertaining and slightly puzzling experience, to being horrible, kill-fest pieces of crap, full of eye-candy, and made as quick as possible to make more money. Heck, most of these idiots who want games like this, they play them for 15 hours a day for two weeks claiming that the game is 'da f*ckin' bomb!!1111!!!', before getting bored of their new toy, throwing it out the cot and moving onto the next piece of dull crap, because it has slightly better graphics and comes with one of those novelty bird things that keep bending over and sipping water out of a cup.

Those are the people who are ruining the games industry, and those are the people who will one day make Strategy Games and all games that require thinking extinct.

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Hilarious post Mikeus. The world belongs to the young, don't you know... time for our 6'0 clock soup and pills... ~;)

Old Celt, I have been reading the thread at TWC as well and I agree that most old timers are starting to or have already given up. I am glad you are still carrying on the torch. Unfortunately, I am in UK, and I don't think going over to CA headquarters for a chat would change anything, unless I have a big cheque book. In that case, i would go to Sega, buy CA shares (50%+), take over CA management... and fire everyone... asset strip the company, selling the TW brand to nintendo, just to make sure the next one will me a Mario: TW...

Just kidding ofcourse... If I had that much money (and owned CA), I wouldn't care about all you loosers (like all the current publishers ~;) ).

~D

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Originally Posted by Old Celt

CA doesn't care about us few real strategy gamers when they can make literally millions off of pre teen players with a FPS mentality.

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Cheers to capitalism!!!!! ~:cheers:

They say the gaming industry is bigger than hollywood.

How big would hollywood be if they only made Disney films.
Yet this is exactly what the majority of game developers are doing.

Back in 1998 i was spending at least $200 per month on software.
Now i don't spend that much in a year.

But i am only "1 in 5000 gamers", I think not.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

1) Lack of multiplayer campaign mode. Whether or not this new game has multiplayer campaign mode, I can't help but think it will have major problems, if it even exists.

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Yes, I fail to understand why they won't do an MP campaign. Not that I'm personally interested in such, but it's clear a lot of people are.

It really isn't CA's decision to make to decide that such a campaign would be no fun. Gamers can make that decision for themselves. But they can't do it if CA won't give them the means.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Lack of a remedially competent AI

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Absolutely.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Growth rate and rebellion rate of Alexandria, Memphis. When I take over a city that has 6000 people, and has a 4% growth rate, ten years later will have 9000 or so people. Those little ten year olds are quite rebellious, aren't they?

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IMO, this is a nitpick. If you think of the population number as being representative of the total number of men available for recruitment rather than the total population, you won't have this problem.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

The fact that it takes over a year to cross Italy. Hannibal marched from (what was it?) Sagunto to Rome in 14 months? Without roads? Let's try a bit of realism. While I understand that 4 turns per year would cause some problems, such as 4 turn recruiting times etc....Something's intrinsically wrong with 2 turns per year, no matter how you cut the cake.

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Totally agree, and I've argued numerous times that the game needs some sort of strategic movement option, say whereby you can move a unit up to six provinces per turn provided they are all friendly provinces and the unit does not leave or enter an enemy contested province at any time. That would solve the movement problem - and make for a much more dynamic game experience IMO.

As for seasonal turns, with strategic movement as described above they would not be necessary, but I agree that seasonal turns would seem to be more natural and aesthetic.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

The fact that even on the fastest ship, it takes over two years to sail from Syria to Spain. It's roughly 1200 miles, and I find it hard to believe that these ships travel less than ONE MILE PER HOUR.

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Again, totally agree. I've argued that ships should be able to move an unlimited distance every turn, but are subject to the possibility of immediate interception if they move into any enemy occupied sea zone.

The only restriction on sea movement that I think would be necessary then would be to make it that a ground unit which wants to move by sea has to start the turn in a ship.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Utterly INCOMPETENT movement resolution on the campaign map. I see the path that my armies will take. I see that it will take multiple turns to get there. No, there's no need to dead end on a neutral city, and stop your moves, especially since your path didn't show that route.

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I'm not sure what mechanism exactly you're referring to here, but I agree that the mechanism for moving units on the campaign map is incredibly clumsy and annoying. I get very tired of not being able to tell whether a stack of mine can actually reach an enemy stack to give battle this turn or not, only to take the risk and move the stack to find it runs out of mp's one square short of the desired attack location, thus ruining my entire strategy. And the tendency of the pathfinding to "jump" just as you release the mouse and send your troops in a totally different direction is almost as infuriating.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Yes, Ambassador Moron, I know your path is blocked by ONE tiny unit, go around him...and continue on your assigned path, I know it's difficult, but you can do it. You're a winner. Do you have ZERO capacity to calculate conflict resolution? Given what else I see in this list, I have to conclude that you do not have ANY capacity to resolve conflicts

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I don't object to the idea of a unit stopping when it hits an unseen object, because after all you might want to interact with said object. It's just that in some cases, such as with diplomats, you should be able to continue moving after such a collision if you choose.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Utterly incompetent unit movement calculations on combat map. Grouped identical units sometimes move exactly the opposite of the commands issued to them. Yes, I know I can use PAUSE and assign commands individually... Isn't the whole concept of COMPUTER games vs TABLE TOP games to get RID of these stupid levels of micromanagement and laborious resolutions of mechanics?

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Yeah, it's a bad bug, and needs to be fixed.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Fighting uphill on the combat map means I have to LOWER my camera to look up the hill. This and the ridiculous "OK click on another unit so you can move the camera farther the other direction" Sure I can cheat and unlock the camera...should I HAVE to do this? Should it be this hard to look UPHILL?

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I haven't looked much into the camera controls but I've found the inability to look up a hill to be an annoying feature of all the TW games, not just RTW.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Neutral units cockblocking movement (Example: Blocking movement out of ports such as Tarentum and Appolonia) by simply parking themselves near my port. The fact that there's no way to tell them to MOVE out of the way, nor to warn them of infringing on our territory (while the computer does have that luxury)

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Yes, really stupid game mechanic. Neutral units should not have a ZOC which stops your units at all. In my last campaign there were a couple of neutral ships that sat there and blocked the Byzantine straits for practically the entire game, as a result of which I could not move ships into or out of the Black Sea.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Pathing. I see no need to walk straight out 25 paces before entering a fort or city's walls. I see that it is further counterproductive when there are enemy spear troops in that area, and you blindly impale yourselves on it. Go around. Oh, I wish I could.

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Again, couldn't agree more. It's a really clumsy mechanic.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

If my units survive (barely) a combat, I expect to see them on the campaign map. Why do they disappear?

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This used to really annoy me too, but in the context of the game design it probably makes sense, otherwise you'd have tiny little armies blocking movement all over the place. This wasn't a problem in earlier games because the movement was province-to-province.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

My soldiers can't walk up to an enemy diplomat sitting at my capital and slaughter him. A spy, I can understand, a diplomat? Said diplomat can further sit and try to bribe outside my capital city, and we tolerate this.

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Okay, but if you do that, it should be tantamount to a declaration of war on that faction. There should also probably be diplomatic penalties with other factions if you start publicly knocking off diplomats.

IMO, your list missed the one overriding problem the game has, which is lack of challenge. The AI is so bad, particularly the battle AI, that the game is a total pushover, even at the supposed hardest levels.

The other problems I would have mentioned are the absurdly fast kill rates and rout times in battles. While I agree that it didn't hurt to shorten battle times from the earlier games, which were rather too long, CA went much too far. And unfortunately it sounds like they're not about to remedy this problem.

I personally don't play RTW any more, there's no challenge at all and I'm afraid the series is moving strongly toward the kiddie gamer market. I'm asking myself whether I want to spend any more money on this franchise, BI would have to be a substantially better product than RTW and I have my doubts that it will be.

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Originally Posted by Old Celt

CA doesn't care about us few real strategy gamers when they can make literally millions off of pre teen players with a FPS mentality

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Yup, I'm afraid that we strategy gamers have been by and large left behind. CA want to maximize their returns and that seems to mean appealing to the lowest common denominator, ie the kiddie market. Well, they are running a business after all.

What I think is sad is that they could have designed a game that appealed to both kiddie gamers and strategy fans alike, just by adding options for the more sophisticated features. But they wouldn't even do that, apparently out of fear that too many options might confuse the kiddies. So we're left largely out in the cold.

Looking back at RTW, having not played it for some time, I have to wonder what all the fuss was about. It's not really a good game at all. There isn't much to be impressed with, as I suggested in my previous post there are so many poorly designed mechanics in RTW, one wonders whether the current team is capable of designing to an acceptable standard at all.

RTW's only genuinely innovative feature was to move from 2D sprites to 3D objects, and even that hasn't been done too smartly, given the specs required to run the game at a decent clip. The rest of the game, really, is thoroughly mediocre. I don't have great hopes for the future of the Total War series. Perhaps they'll suprise me, I hope they do but the signs are not promising.

im getting the game the second it comes out since i wanna see the fall of rome

Couldn't you make that happen in the original game? ~;)

I was reading on how #1 on your list

Multiplayer Campaigns

would be hard to do. NO IT WON"T. Even if you have to auto calc the battles instead of fighting them out in the combat screen and you only can play on one computer(NO INTERNET CAMPAIGN SUPPORTED), that alone would be sweet. I would love to play with a friend on the campaign map taking turns on MY ONE COMPUTER to smite the CPU out of existance and then taking him on - even with simulated battles. I could always play combat in the current online mode.

Please send this to Totalwar so they can get a clue, it can't be that hard to program in.

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Maybe you cant afford your agents and need to get rid of them. Perhaps one of your generals is mad or has a really bad vice and you dont want to send him on a suicide mission.

The primary reason though is for training your own assassins and make them über-assassins

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In my own humble opinion, I think that if faction members are so incompitant and stupid, you should be able to disown them and have them kicked out... or instead of having an assassin out to get them, why not simply do the killing yourself?

Think about it. You decide to invite that said individual for a hunting trip, and insist that you two go alone, and then venture into an area where some mercinaries or (hired) barbarians ambush you and kill the bugger that you want bumped off, then simply make up some bullshit about having 'barely escaped' or something to that effect.

Or just invite them to dinner and put poison in their wine...

That being said, the whole idea of being able to assassinate your own faction members in a fashion like this has some major redeeming features... you can create a whole big deal of political intrigue and in-fighting for who gets to be the next heir, or the current heir so impatient to take command that he tries to get rid of the guy at the top quickly.

So much potential wasted. But that's life, I guess.

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Originally Posted by Cheater

1: The 'arab' voice. While I am a Middle Easterner myself, I can testify that having all Eastern/Carthagian factions have the same annoying voice is plain ridicules. I've seen many Egyptians who would have a voice remotely like that... but never Iraqis, Iranians (check out the Seleucid and Parthian factions for that) and definately not the Armenian or Pontus factions at all. But they all have the same irritating voice that is the PRIMARY reason why I rarely play them!

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I agree. I tend to turn off the sound when I know the voices will come when playing those factions in mp or sp.

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Originally Posted by Cheater

2: Towers and gatehouses having their own, perminant archers is very annoying. There should be people who are at least deduced from your total troops to man all those towers during combat, and vice versa for your enemies.

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Yes, the towers suck. Yesterday in my Numidia campaign I was attacking Carthage, and had just cleared the wall breach and wanted to send one unit of javelinmen and one of slingers up in the towers on each side to get rid of that ridiculous firing. For some reason the towers started firing faster than usual in combination with my units forming up outside the towers for at least a minute before going up in them, resulting in me losing 90 percent of the men in both units :furious3: . I think firing towers should be removed, and if they want civilians helping defense against the attacker they should put VISIBLE civilians on rooftops and in windows throwing stones at the attackers.

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Originally Posted by Cheater

3: Your spies can open the gate for you, but for some reason can't keep the enemy from pouring boiling oil over your troops when you try to pass through... anything more needed?

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~:confused: Really strange actually. Also, that they can open ALL the gates from start of the battle, and no enemy closes it again. You should have an ability to signal to the spy to open a gate, and he would only get one chance at it.

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Originally Posted by Cheater

4: You can have your own spies, diplomats, faction members, and other assassins murdered by your assassins... any explaination needed for this madness?

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Not to mention there's no "disband" function at all for agents... So you have to murder them if you want to get rid of them ~:confused: :furious3:

the game industry sold out like a cheap whore

it was once young, vibrant and full of life - intelligent and creative; bursting at the seams with new ideas and controversial procurations

now?

same old same old:

kill w00t kill sex kill glamour stupid sex kill glamour stupid stipid arg glitz sex stare time meh /nextgame

probably the reason I play WoW - one of the only genres which take more than a FPS attitude to play

I have like with all games accepted there will be stupid bugs or glitches or general annoyances that taint a games enjoyment, but by far THE King the Emperor the greatest of all the RTW annoyances is without doubt the utter gayness that is the autoresolve.

I have lost count of the amount of hours ive wasted fighting battles I shouldnt have to fight, because I know the AI is so dumb that ill lose 10 times more men doing auto resolve than I will personally taking command.

My 12 unit army against an enemy 3 unit army should be a formality, but oh no if I auto Resolve my 12 units could easily be reduced by a 1/3 or even a 1/2 of that number and to add insult to injury if I do win the enemy army survives anyway!

The amount of times ive auto resolved and lost battles that even if I personally had faced my men backwards told them to fight with only their left hand the other being tied behind there back, id still of won the damn battle, but instead im forced to either Auto resolve thus saving time but losing 10 times more men than is necessary or I can spend most of the gaming session fighting pointless little battles to compensate for the AI's stupidity.

RTW is by far the biggest letdown in recent gaming history, how on earth they created a timeless classic like MTW then made this total waste of space is beyond me. I sure as hell hope the so called game tester who happened to miss the glaring stupidity of this game got fired, I know nothing about making games but even I can spot the uselessness of auto resolve, the more than questionable AI, the fact despite having an economy of 0 denarii the AI still seems to be able to train armies no matter how many you destroy.

One last thing about RTW is no battle however big is EVER decisive, whereas on MTW one battle could mean victory or defeat for your campaign or respective empires, on RTW 3 4 5 6 7 massive battles have to be fought in quick succession to gain anything at all. Its not like you can really follow up your success either, it takes so long to travel that by the time you get to the heart of your enemies empire they have replaced many of the losses youve inflicted upon them, therefore wasting your time and making carrying on not seem worth while. If an enemy has a standing all round army of 100,000 men what the heck is killing 2500 men going to achieve? since reinforcements hardly ever arrive in time its impossible to kill massive numbers of the enemy in a couple of battles therefore dragging things on for decades.

Yes I am moaning and ranting like a big girl, but the horrifying truth is all the above things are true.

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Originally Posted by Zakor

Unless it gets great reviews six months after its release...



22) If my units survive (barely) a combat, I expect to see them on the campaign map. Why do they disappear?

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If there are less than 6 men left you lose the unit. This is one of the hard coded bulls**t things that they did. I agree with must of the thread

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Originally Posted by Budwise

multiplayer...Even if you have to auto calc the battles instead of fighting them out in the combat screen and you only can play on one computer(NO INTERNET CAMPAIGN SUPPORTED), that alone would be sweet. I would love to play with a friend on the campaign map taking turns on MY ONE COMPUTER to smite the CPU out of existance and then taking him on - even with simulated battles.

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I totally agree. However for reasons best known to themselves CA have ruled out even this type of "hotseat" multiplayer. They are just adamant that there won't be any kind of multiplayer campaign, in spite of the very obvious demand for such in the RTW community.

Go figure.

Zakor,
Superb rant with constructive critisism although some of your problems are actually moddable.
My main problem is the battlefield-AI, or lack of it. I´ve been playing TW since STW first came out and maybee my memory doesn´t serve me right but I didn´t feel this frustrated when I played STW, or even MTW. IMHO the TW-game is getting sweeter to look at but worse in gameplay. So if this downward spiral of "evolution" continues I won´t even buy a TW4 game. I do plan to buy BI and mod the shit out of it.

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One last thing about RTW is no battle however big is EVER decisive, whereas on MTW one battle could mean victory or defeat for your campaign or respective empires, on RTW 3 4 5 6 7 massive battles have to be fought in quick succession to gain anything at all. Its not like you can really follow up your success either, it takes so long to travel that by the time you get to the heart of your enemies empire they have replaced many of the losses youve inflicted upon them, therefore wasting your time and making carrying on not seem worth while. If an enemy has a standing all round army of 100,000 men what the heck is killing 2500 men going to achieve? since reinforcements hardly ever arrive in time its impossible to kill massive numbers of the enemy in a couple of battles therefore dragging things on for decades.

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Indeed.

In MTW, many a time i have had huge battles which have decided the fate of my empire, and some of these times i have lost them.
In RTW, many a time i have had huge battles which have no meaning at all for my empire, and none of the time have i lost them.

i agree about egypt grrrrrrrr, rite now i'm modding my game so egyp can only build nubian spear men....in the final tear and thts it....oh yer and theyre starting off with 10 denarii......i'm gonna buy the expansion, cos beleive it or not somebody likes the look of the units and doesnt care what the hell the camapign map looks like

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Originally Posted by Orda Khan

All these " I won't buy " threads are tiresome and boring. If you don't like the game, don't buy it

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Don`t post in the Colosseum either.

All of those who keep on bashing RTW always complain on how much better MTW was. That`s unserious, please go to the Main Hall if that`s true.

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Originally Posted by Budwise

I was reading on how #1 on your list

Multiplayer Campaigns would be hard to do. NO IT WON"T.

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You're soooo right...

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...ofthenewworld/

Conquest of the New World

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Minimum:
IBM PC 486/66 MHz, 8 MB RAM, DOS 5.0 or Windows 95, 512 kB SVGA video card, and 2x CD-ROM drive

Recommended:
Pentium 50 MHz, 16 MB RAM, and Sound Blaster-compatible sound card

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And...

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Game Info

Developer Quicksilver
Publisher Interplay
Genre Strategy
Release Date March 15, 1995
ESRB Everyone
GameSpy Score N/A
Multiplayer Up to 6 players over LAN or the Internet

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Up to six players in multiplayer campaign mode.

Master of Orion 2

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Game Information

* Number of Players: 1-8 Players
* Difficulty: Hard
* Learning Curve: About 2 and a half hours

Minimum System Requirements

* System: 486/100 or equivalent
* RAM:8 MB RAM
* CD-ROM: 2X CD-ROM
* Hard Drive Space: 75 MB
* Mouse: Yes
* Sound Board: Yes

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Not possible for multiplayer campaign mode? That's just LAUGHABLE




Here's something of note...

http://www.strategyinformer.com/foru...php/t-687.html

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Centurion
03-02-2004, 12:09 AM
Just saw this on TWC:

RTW Multiplayer Campaign has been announced!
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In April's 2004 edition of the Gamestar magazine, it has been announced that RTW will indeed have a multiplayer campaign. This is a quote from the magazine:

"At the top of the wish list for all veteran fans of the Total War seris is the ability to play campaigns in multiplay-and that wish has been granted"

This is a very exciting day for TWC.

It'll be good if its 100% confirmed and true!! :) :)

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Neither of those games are graphics-intensive like RTW. A MP campaign would require an amazing connection - probably LAN only. And all battles would have to be autocalced, which is a poor way to play a game that is about 55% battles.

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Don`t post in the Colosseum either.

All of those who keep on bashing RTW always complain on how much better MTW was. That`s unserious, please go to the Main Hall if that`s true.

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So we aren't allowed to discuss a game in its own forum? What?

I didn`t say that. If you prefer MTW over RTW then you surely would have a better time there ~:cheers:

But if you hope that CA will tap the full potential of RTW, then you post here, praying that CA will read a rant thread and fix the problems of Rome.

GAH!!! You wouldn't have to autocalc battles at all. Some games have a campaign multiplayer where one player always takes over for the computer in battle. Conquest of the New World also had a one-machine multiplayer where people at home could play against eachother on the same machine. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms series has had an up-to-eight multiplayer campaign for over ten years. All this "multiplayer wouldn't work" business is rubbish, it's been done before and it'll be done again.

if (BI fixes broken features != just add some new ones)
" many happy fan atics.\n " ;

else
" Total bloody riot.\n " ;

if you dont like the game keep it to yourself these forums annoy me

If you don't like these forums then don't read them. We don't all have to be fanboys, there's planty of room for objective discussion, and people who haven't bought the game can learn about it if we discuss issues related to it.

The simple fact that player1's bugfixer is something that should have been done by CA, the simple fact that they spent all their time adding ideas/options, instead of making sure it all worked and played together like 1 organic feeling game, the simple fact that heavy modding is needed to create a bit of a challenge... reloading re-assessment every time... no night battles that were promised...

i could go on but won't. As a veteran TW player i understand why RomeTW is the way it is, i dont enjoy Medieval TW that much either... in fact what am i still doing here....

ps.: CA are not alone in releasing buggy games though, it's a market trend: less and less time for development, quick bucks.. console games market draining Pc games market...

ps2.: Goes to show that wonderful, creative, dreaming programmers with CA should not be given deadlines unless by themselves... making a good game simply takes time... and i fear they spent to much on promotion/interviews/previews, etc.