Quote Originally Posted by gollum View Post
So which is it Mr Simpson? Hardcore strategy gamers or people who only buy a strategy game a year or maybe have never bought one before (and like the action)? Please help me understand who is who because the two cannot be one and the same. Nor can their needs and the gameplay/gamedesign to accomodate them (be the same).
I don't think there is a contradiction between making the game you want to make and also wanting it to appeal to as many people as you can. As Mike says, the former comes first, but given that you are doing want you want to do, you also try to get other people to like it. As the blog states, the key is quality and accessibility. A lot of "hardcore" artistic material (paintings, music, literature, film etc) can also appeal to a wider audience. For example, suppose RTW was not marketed as vanilla but as say RTR or EB. I am not convinced it would have sold any less, but if it was the EB variant it would no doubt have had to ditch the inaccessible native language unit names and the difficulty levels might have had to be tweaked a little (EB in particular, again, e.g. to avoid player factions going bankrupt right off the bat).

With other commercial games, again I don't see a contradiction. I regard Civ4 as a pretty hardcore strategy game, but I suspect it does well enough more widely. For example, I know that some of my young son's friends play RTW or Civ, but they probably play on different difficulty levels and use different strategies. For example, I might have fun trying to simulate historical army composition and tactics whereas in RTW whereas they might prefer more "fun" approaches and even autoresolve if they want to conquer the world. In another genre, World of Warcraft might be another game that accommodates both hardcore and casual players. And yes, both sides of fans do grumble at each other, but they keep paying their subscriptions.

I also echo the point made by another poster in the thread on the earlier blogs - it is not clear to me that ETW (or RTW) are particularly casual. The strategy layers are much richer than STW and MTW, and slow the game down considerably. The naval combat in ETW has a similar effect. I've been put off getting deeply into ETW at the moment because I just can't commit the time. I think STW and MTW with their Risk type strategy layer allowed one to get more quickly into the action (the battles) and would appeal more to the casual player.

PS: The most funny bit of that interview though is Tim Ansel @ 5:58: "Its not intended as an educational device...but on the other hand its fairly accurate as well".
Well, it's relative. Relative to most historically flavoured strategy games - say Civ4 or Age of Empires - RTW is very accurate. I learnt a lot about ancient history from RTW. Just seeing the map and the factions was an education for me (something you could not get from a Civ or AoE type game). I was surprised playing RTR and EB how much RTW got right. For example, I knew little about the pre-Marian Roman army, but RTW depicted it fairly well. Most of the stuff in your list of grumbles about with RTW is pretty minor IMO (incinerating or flying men, pigs, arcani, dogs, screeching women etc don't impinge on my game experience much). You didn't mention the Egyptians though, who I admit were an abomination.

The TW niche seems to be strategy games with a historical flavour that provide rather thrilling action. I don't think more historically accurate games so far can compete with the "sound and fury" action experience of a TW battle. Of rival games, the EU series seems to be the most commonly mentioned rival on the historically accurate side of the spectrum and Civ the benchmark for a historically flavoured games, but neither provides anything similar to the experience of TWs battles. I suspect this is partly because modelling a TW battle is very expensive and requires commercial success, as the blog points out.