You're all right of course. The name is "Total War". I guess I was hoping for more in this incarnation, hoping that there was more to the strategic mode than an excuse to throw a bunch of battles at you. There's so much suggestion in the game, in the media, in the reviews, in the talks with the CA folks to imply that there's the *option* of playing in a way that isn't just battle after battle after battle. Heck, I keep reading about how the diplomacy is so much better in this game. Yet the same old "declare war on my longtime ally and trading partner for no obvious reason" thing happens just like in STW, MTW, RTW, MTWII, etc. The Civ series has shown that it is possible to have a fun varied gameplay, where you can choose different ways to play, *and* have a diplomancy model that makes sense and you can work with (and not just be at the mercy of).

Incidentally, if you're going to do something that a player might not like, make it *obvious* why it happened. Working in the videogame-making industry for 12 years has taught me that doing stuff that makes the player scratch their head w/o any explanation is a bad idea. Doing something like a random "declare war" from a friendly nation who's traded with you for a long time and you've been nice to is bad enough. Not providing you with a) a darned good reason, b) the opportunity to learn why so that you can adjust and learn for next time, is simply bad game design.

Plus, it boggles my mind that if the intent is to have you in non-stop all-out "total" war, why do they bother with an in-depth long-term tech tree? Why to they bother with techs and buildings and units that you will never reach? It seems the only way to reach those levels is to trash everyone in the world, conquer most of the territories, then turn turtle once the AI is impotent. That's the only way to get the 50-100 or so unmolested turns necessary to reach those levels. But that's no good because you'll have these shiny kick-butt units and the AI will have nothing (because you had to trash them to keep them off your back). Much better to try those fancy units out in the battle mode outside the campaign, which leads me right back to the question of why they bothered with a big tech tree and so many units you never get to really use in the campaign. Their recent "downloadable content" of high-level custom per-faction units also makes me scratch my head, why try to sell those if you can't use them in-game because of the diplomacy model?

Again, it's the videogame-maker in me that puzzles over this. There's obviously a lot of work done to make all those pretty units, to work out all those buildings, get the tech-tree right and varied for all the different factions, animate the units, de-bug the movements and behaviors, etc. They could have shaved a year off their dev cycle had they not done all those high-end units and buildings, since most players will never get to them in a regular campaign.

I guess my big beef is that I was led to believe that the game had more depth than "play-for-20-turns-then-everyone-attacks-you-with-no-explanation" type gameplay that's been done over and over again. I guess I'll just have to wait for Civ5 to play a game that lets me play via trade or tech or something other than the beaten-to-death "go for a while, oh someone small declares war, oh that snowballs in 5-20 turns into all-out war".

Anyway, I seem to have gone back into rant mode. I'm turning that off and going to do something else!