That was thrown out the window in RTW. You didn't need combined arms. Cavalry ruled and the RPS is the weakest of all the games in the series.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
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That was thrown out the window in RTW. You didn't need combined arms. Cavalry ruled and the RPS is the weakest of all the games in the series.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
But CA have said about the new game that they are working hard to make MP a much better experience. They've even hired an MP veteran to help them with playtesting. Surely you must be pleased about that?Quote:
Originally Posted by Puzz3D
They've had a team of players helping them for years, and now they discard that and go to one guy. How is that better?Quote:
Originally Posted by screwtype
Each version of Total War (STW, MTW, RTW) has provided a worse multiplayer environment. General statements that things are being improved are apparently meaningless. Even 1.5 years after release, the state of RTW MP is an embarrassment. I played RTW online a couple of months ago and could only get 2 battles played in 3 hours, and each battle was very short. In STW, you could get 2 or 3 battles per hour, and the gameplay was better.
Heh, possibly different magazines cater tod ifferent demographics. There might also be a difference between the US and Europe.Quote:
Originally Posted by Duke John
When I'm overworked I prefer blowing stuff up to grand strategy.I just want to release some steam and get instant gratification. Different people have different desires...Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraxis
I think the 'hardcore' market has shifted towards MMORPGs which demand enormous amounts of time. Leaves little time for other games indeed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rufus
Civ is highly abstracted, to me it feels like a boardgame rather than a 'normal PC game' (I'm not sure if it's based on the boardgame by the same name, but it was probably a big inspiration). It certainly isn't a simulation of history, like TW games are/used to be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Puzz3D
Sure, same for me. But we tend to look with more loving caring eyes on the game that is stimulating. Simple games are great for relaxing/unwinding and I have played enough of them to call myself a connaisseur of those. But people of that group tend to be more impressed with things that stimulate their minds.Quote:
Originally Posted by doc_bean
Yes, but the point is Total War is moving in that direction. You are now going to have unit types spanning many hundreds of years on the battlefield at the same time, and, with Total War's upgrade and combat bonus system, earlier units may well be able to beat units that came hundreds of years later.Quote:
Originally Posted by doc_bean
for the record: it's the boardgame that was based on civ (civ3 iirc)Quote:
Originally Posted by doc_bean
OT: i would be very happy if they stuck more to mtw and stw gameplay than the direction now taken, but alas, that's not going to happen as it seems CA have a completely different vision for the future of the Total War series.
Please oh please go back to your roots. Don't fix it if it's not broken!
Well. I am grateful that Wikiman popped his head in here. Seems he got out of dodge rather quickly.
His first post was the most telling.
Guys, we ain't gonna hear nothin'.
I was talking about the originalCivilization, notQuote:
Originally Posted by Brighdaasa
Sid Meier's Civilization which is a recent boardgame.
For the record I've never played either, but the description of the original Civilization boardgame makes it look very similar to the videogame.
I'm not sure about early units beating late ones, we'll have to wait and see. But I agree TW is moving towards a more 'gamey' approach. I find it odd, considering STW was first intended to be a rather standard RTS game to cash in on the craze. They might have been serious when they said Rome was the game they had always intended to make, kill speeds and all :dizzy2:Quote:
Originally Posted by Puzz3D
When all is speculation, how do any of us know which way MTW II is headed? The most we can do is guess
......Orda
Civ has more than 225 turns. That is what really is worrying me. I like to play slowly, and 225 will NOT be enough for me. Even if you can mod it, the game will have been balanced for 225 turns, so all the stuff will happen before then.Quote:
Originally Posted by doc_bean
This smells like Sega telling CA to dilute their strategy game down for the mass market. (Sega: "10 year olds want to finish a game in 1 day" CA: "our campaigns can take weeks to finish" Sega: "too long, make it shorter. Oh, and get rid of those bows as well, replace thm with elephants, elephants with cannons. Failing that, give the people nukes" CA: "oh, ok")
I use a slower pace as well. For instance, there is no way I could win an RTW campaign in 225 turns. I do this hoping that a few of the AI factions will emerge as a challenging opponent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Delenda est Carthago
I remember a post by Jerome right after RTW was released, and he was very pleased that he had been able to satisfy all the design requirements. As I recall, he said that had been a difficult task.Quote:
Originally Posted by Delenda est Carthago
Back during MTW/VI, Eat Cold Steel posted that Activision wanted aging of generals removed from the game. He tried to satisfy that demand and keep his original aging of generals feature by introducing the green_generals command line option. Unfortunately, that introduced the "all kings die at 56 years old" bug. The CA programmers made another patch afterhours on their own time to fix it. We were really fortunate that LongJohn also fixed the "infinite charge" bug, battlefield upgrades were removed from MP and we got some cost adjustments on units, but unfortunately the spears weren't adjusted.
But Civ turns are at least 3 time quicker due to lack of RTS battles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Delenda est Carthago
Still, Civ4 does have slower modes of the game like epic and marathon.
It's been a while since VI so I guess it's no harm to tell you guys a little story. That green general thing didn't exactly happened as described. I knew Activision didn't want to test any new features at the last minute so I added the aging thing without telling anyone. It was my fault for introducing the 56 years old bug in the first place and no one was looking out for age related bugs because no one knew I fiddled with it :oops: (it was left over debug code. What a noob :shame:)
As for making the patch in our own time that really wasn't much of a big deal for me personally, while no time was scheduled for a patch, it was easy enough to squeeze it in my regular hours, the hard thing was getting Activision to release it. I was told they cannot released anything under the Activision name without QA'ing it themselves, which was the sticking point. There were talks of unofficial patch release but in the end Activision did QA it and gave it the all clear for release. I don't know what happened exactly but I am guessing my boss had a few chats with various Activision people and managed to get an spare hour out of their QA team in the end.
Anyway it was highly embarrassing for me and I was really glad that other programmers also had fixes they wanted to added otherwise the VI patch would have became a patch to fix my personal bug, or rather, it wouldn't have been released at all.:sweatdrop:
ECSQuote:
Originally Posted by eat cold steel
An interesting story indeed...
Since I guess that youre not part of the Oz/TotalWarrior team, I suspect that the UK team is making the revolutionary 3rd Total War engine that will use the 5th game.
Its very early but I feel obliged to ask this question:
Will Multiplayer get a focus increase?
So youll not have to resort to invasive rootkits made by hackers (like Starforce)?
So the CD Key actually is worth the ink its printed in?
It hurts me to know that the scum that downloaded RTW off emule enjoys the game same as a legitimate customer (as myself) that paid for it.
Hellenes
I am on the total warrior team, I am in no position to answer any of your questions.
EDIT: or questions about TWr for that matter, however I am aways up for a friendy chit chat.
It was a good patch, and brought MTW/VI to a higher level of gameplay than I though was going to be achieved. I know aging had to be adjusted more than once because I was the one feeding back test results of the distribution of deaths. Attrition rate for sieging armies was also finetuned in that patch. I also feel it provides the best multiplayer engine in the series, and you can achieve excellent gameplay in MP with modded unit stats. Most people say MTW/VI gives the most challenging campaign of all the Total War games. You did an outstanding job on that Eat Cold Steel, and I'm really happy to see your still there at CA.Quote:
Originally Posted by eat cold steel
Aging is an important feature of the strategic game, and I was glad to see someone sticking their neck out to make the game better. That episode with the green generals and the programming team's willingness to give it one more pass made it clear to me that the programming team at CA wants to make great and innovative games. Intrepid sidekick and Jerome were also around here a lot getting input for RTW v1.3, and the final RTW v1.5 brought the RTW campaign to a state where I play and enjoy it without any mods.
Being an engineer myself, what gets me upset is if it appears that the programming team is being hamstrung by the publisher, management or PR people or overloaded with too many demands given the time and materials available. The consumer suffers because he/she doesn't get the best game possible. A game with 50 working features is better than a game with 100 features where 50 of them don't work right.
I'm not going to ask you any question about what you're doing because I don't want you to get into any trouble. Thanks for your post.
Wow, thanks ECS. That was interesting, and brave to admit to that. Nice one!Quote:
Originally Posted by eat cold steel
Brave indeed... I remember how many of us were outraged about this age issue. Luckily I take it that we aren't anymore.:sweatdrop:
In any case I'm happy to see that there are still developers who will do stuff, secretly and under the table, if they believe it will be better for their product. For that alone you would have gotten my respect ECS.:bow: Not that I didn't respect you already.~;)
I hope there are more like you in CA...
And agreed with Puzz3D, it was indeed a good patch. It fixed a lot of stuff.
As a veteran of the GalCiv2 forums, it is interesting to see similar issues appear here. What we learned from that game, where each turn represents 1week in an environment of galactic conquest, was that decisions which seem to hide "fuzzy math" under the hood and which randomly decrease immersion for seemingly no good reason are the mark of a decision-making process by developers centering on AI improvements.
To be plain, I believe (and any CA guys correct or confirm this if you are legally able) that CA is currently working on a massive AI upgrade to move towards a "non-cheating" AI similar to what Stardock developed for GC2. However, what GC2 proved was that while this was possible, it required many gameplay and game immersion sacrifices, the game becomes more generic, etc. There is a lot of debate at SD's official forums on this issue (of course, as an independent developer they are working with far fewer constraints on player feedback than CA, and can afford to be responsive now that they have a hit on their hands).
The real question is whether this kind of advanced AI is a good fit for a historical game. To me, the atmosphere was always the selling point of TW gaming for me. This trumped even realism. Note, for those who remember, that Shogun was consciously modeled after, not necessarily Japanese history textbooks, but Kurosawa! M:TW took a step away from that with no cinematic analogues (Chimes at Midnight? Braveheart even?), and Rome was the final step away from cinematic representation to some sort of fantasy world, with some civ elements, a Frankenstein really. Now they want to graft on another element, good campaign AI, under all the other pressures, and only time will tell if it breaks the series for good until the introduction of a brand new engine.
Stardock made their gameplay sacrifices with their eyes open, and are being rewarded for their achievement of a one-of-a-kind strategic AI. The players have grumbled about details, but at the end of the day the experience is unique. The TW unique experience was always the immersion of the tactical battles, the feeling that you were fighting a battle not of actual history, but of an exciting movie based on that history. This movie feel, IMO, is the gameplay logic to which CA should owe it's first allegience, and the element on which it made its fortunes so many years ago.
Hope you are right about the strategic AI, but I disagree about RTW not being cinematic. It's hard not to see the echoes of the opening scene of the film Gladiator in the look and feel of RTW battles. The vastly better graphics are a big boost in raising the immersion. I guess I'm spoilt, but after the visual splendours of RTW (perfected in RTR and EB), it's hard to go back to the stick men of STW and MTW.Quote:
Originally Posted by Perec_Dojo
And I really don't buy the argument that RTW is more of a fantasy world than STW and MTW. Take out Egypt and one or two whacky units, and you have the potential for much more historical armies than STW or MTW. You have very distinct army styles - Roman, horse archer, phalanx, barbarian and hybrid. It's the STW and MTW faction armies that look generic by contrast.
I know that many will disagree with me, but although on the merits (better graphics, more units, complexity, etc.) it would be easy to argue that there is a clear progression towards more immersion from Shogun to Rome, I can't shake the feeling that it is just the opposite. Maybe it's the music, or maybe I just prefer Feudal Japan, but somehow th more strategic and tactical options I had and the more graphical eye candy they put on this concept, the less I believed the scenario. It's too big, somehow. I think the story of the strife in Japan of that period is a much more focused one, as opposed to the sprawl of later games. The reasons for war amongst these factions was clear, as they were all rivals to the same seat of power. In Europe this was not so, and the city-state model meant that the things that states competed for were far different (and difficult to model). I would prefer (and I think somebody mentioned this elsewhere) a game that only modeled a smaller part of history, which would allow for fewer tech tree problems, and turn length modeling issues, and allow for a better and more focused AI.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
CA is trying to do so much that they are losing the "flavor of history" that they captured so well in the first game (even if they never got all the historical details right in any game). I don't want complete accuracy, dammit, I want the game to have "truthiness"!
Well, I suspect most of the old timers here would agree with you that Shogun was more immersive. And you might be onto something with the "too big" point. The immersiveness of Shogun seemed to come from small features that remind me a little of those very short Oriental poems. In fact some of those features were Oriental poems (the sad lines you hear when a faction line dies out). There was also the evocative music, the excellent voice acting by Burt Kwok, the ninja movies, the throne room etc. Seen objectively and in isolation, they are all relatively minor but somehow collectively they allowed your imagination to take off. I suppose you could do something similar with games of the scope of MTW and RTW, but it would be a much bigger effort (that of Shogun multiplied by at least the number of different cultures in the later games).Quote:
Originally Posted by Perec_Dojo
Did I hear old timer.............I resemble that.
I agree STW was the most immersive Tw game to date. I used to shout out loud at the monitor, mimmicking the games japanese accent, when a foolish clan declared war on me. I miss the throne room where I could drool over my empire map, and yearned for more characters/advisors to interact with.
STW had harvests, 4 turns per year, one era, throne room orders for diplomats, drop on target and forget agents on the strat map. I was not concerned what date it was. I just played, and wished it had more regions and clans so the game did'nt end so quick.
I also agree that RTW is too big, not in size but micro-management, just too many pieces on the board. If the AI could concentrate it's forces similar to how it did with the old style maps. To make battles less frequent but way more epic. Or perhaps having super sized stacks similar to MTW's crusader stacks with the extra units drip fed and pre-ordered onto the battlefield. Coming over the hill old style. I think having em all lined up on the sidelines and the sideline itself reduces the immersion just a tad.
STW battles didn't play like a movie. The battles in STW were based on Sun Tzu not Kurosawa. The problem with the battles in RTW is that CA tried to make them play like a movie. Ian Roxburgh even said in an interview that's what they were doing. Now we have exploding rocks, stuff moving around at unrealistically fast speeds, arrows that have the velocity of small rockets, men and horses leaping way up into the air, elephants throwing men 50 meters or more, fire arrows that incinerate man and horse in 5 seconds, skirmishers that run nearly as fast as horses, units that have the acceleration characteristics of a school of fish, cantabrian circle that's invulnerable to arrows, cavalry that can circle so fast that an infantry unit can't even rotate in place fast enough to maintain facing and battles that last about as long as a battle does in a movie such as that battle at the beginning of the movie Gladiator.Quote:
Originally Posted by Perec_Dojo
I agree with your point of view there, but I think that people don't give movies enough credit for immersive feel. Even Gladiator and Braveheart are not as ridiculous and overdone as the battles in RTW. The elements you describe are less immersive, because they seem so crazy and artificial. I guess here we're talking about the difference between a movie that attempts to portray a somewhat realistic battle, and and one that that is purely action or style oriented or which has fantasy elements. The RTW battles feel like the latter to me due to the lack of control over units, the crazy school of fish cavalry, etc, whereas STW had well ordered soldiers facing each other in battle (never mind that this picture of Japanese battle was not strictly realistic, it did feel like a kurosawa film, and that was a stated goal for the devs on that project). A lot might have to do with the sound, which I unreservedly say was best in STW. Battlefield sound and voice in RTW was pretty corny.Quote:
Originally Posted by Puzz3D
I think that CA always wanted that movie feel on all their projects, but as with most VG designers, the less they had to work with technologically, the better their results. To give an example, The original Wing Commander was extremely cinematic IMO even though the technology didn't allow elaborate cut scenes, etc. Simple branching missions and anonymous "Blue Hair" character was enough. By WC2 you had cut-scenes and corny story, and by the time you had a real Wing Commander movie it was the worst piece of crap ever! VG designers are not movie directors, and the more they try to be the worse their results. I would consider the Metal Gear/Metal Gear Solid games to be another example of this.
Each chapter of this STW Game Guide http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/gui...gun/index.html is based on a principle of Sun Tzu not Kurosawa. The information comes from Creative Assembly. I also have the Official Strategy Guide and again it's Sun Tzu on which the game is based. STW even has variable length of daylight depending on the season which just goes to show how much the game was based on principles of war.
For me, the fact that the battles followed principles helped create the feeling that they were real. The weather helped as well. Ironically, RTW with its better graphics seems less real. Now in MTW2 we will have combo moves and finishing moves. Apparently, everyone who falls will have a finishing move applied to him. You wouldn't have any wounded men left on the battlefield if that was the case. It's a clear departure from believability. They even recommend zooming in to see this unrealistic stuff close up. How do they expect you to control your army if you're zoomed in? Do they care if you can control the army anymore? It seems that this game is headed for a gameplay where you draw a box around all of your units, click on the enemy general and then sit back and watch.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Puzz3D
Agreed that the tactics of the game are based on Sun Tzu.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but the look and feel of the game was always intended to be based on Kurosawa, and this was stated many times by developers in these forums and elsewhere. Anybody familiar with Kurosawa's films can see this. These are not mutually exclusive terms anyway. Sun Tzu was an ancient warrior who wrote a book about strategy, Kurosawa was a modern film maker who made many movies about fuedal japan. It would of course be ridiculous of me to assert that the game is based on the war theories of Kurosawa any more than I would say that Medal of Honor was based on the military strategy of Steven Spielberg.
Similarly it would be equally ridiculous to say that the look and feel of the game is based on the aesthetic sensibilities of Sun Tzu, which would be like attributing the immersive feel of Medal of Honor to George Patton or Dwight Eisenhower!
Unfortunately, even with new films, special effects are the selling points. There is a constant striving to go one better each time. I saw the latest King Kong and to be honest, I thought the film and storyline suffered because of stupid special effects. There is no room for imagination, you do not need blood and gore to realise there would have been blood and gore but it is what sells these days and PC games are another example of this
........Orda
Agreed, although not all films are like this. This dynamic in films (and video games, for that matter) where special effects overwhelm other film elements is a byproduct of the immense growth in technical resources available to filmmakers and game developers over a relatively short period of time. Since the professionals that work in these media are extremely aware of their technical limitations, the easy availability of technical solutions generally trumps other considerations (like story/gameplay) in the development process, at least during time periods where the rate of technical innovation is high. In periods where that rate plateaus, developers and filmmakers are forced to rely on other aspects of the creative process, typically resulting in a better rate of enduring artistic success, since story or gameplay is what people remember after the splendor has faded.Quote:
Originally Posted by Orda Khan
For examples of a plateau period that produced great PC games, I would say that the time from about 1987-1994 are without peer. In the era before widespread availability of accelerated graphics cards the level of innovation in game design was very high, and many classic games with exceptional gameplay come from that period.
Similarly, the time period from about 1975-1989 was a great time for special effects films, as as this was the time when analog special effects reached their peak, and just before the huge growth in digital effects in the 90's.