Can It Get any Worse? Yes It Can.

[caravel]

The series may indeed be doomed, indeed everything has it's day, but instead of declining, TW seems to be gaining a larger fanbase and selling more than ever. I'm pretty sure every title has outsold it's predecessor to date?

The main thing to accept is that the fanbase for these games has radically altered. Back in around 2000-2002 the first two games attracted those whose focus was on commanding the, impressive for the time, tactical real time battles. The risk map was there only to string these battles together and give them some significance - it worked.

In the original Shogun the risk map was not really a "game" in itself - it was used to position your armies, train units/agents and contruct building. The only economics were setting the tax rate, upgrading farms and building trading posts and ports, while balancing this off against your troop support costs, etc. MTW expanded on this concept by introducing fleet and goods based trading and per province taxation. MTW was also the first time we saw v&vs (later called "traits") and the generals' loyalty, acumen, piety and dread stats, but all in all MTW was the same game as Shogun with a bit more scope for "roleplay" and increased campaign micromanagement.

STW's type of game attracted a certain type of player, MTW diluted that somewhat and also attracted a wider fanbase due to the period/setting and increase in features at the campaign level. At the same time it upset many STW players because unit rosters were imbalanced and bloated.

I think RTW was the final tipping of the scales towards a more campaign map oriented TW franchise. Despite the obvious effort put into the unit models in RTW, the battles were poor in comparison to those in the first two titles for too many reasons to list. Rosters were also bloated and unbalanced as in MTW.

Players that were used to the risk campaign map were put off by the new movement points style map. Speaking for myself - I don't want to micromanage a campaign map, I want a simple non labour intensive campaign map that organises itself. An army stack that looks like a chess piece and can be dropped into a province in one move, suits me better than an animated giant that has to be walked over terrain from province A to province B - that's not "the game", for me the battles are the game and I don't have the time to spend micromanaging every aspect. RTW and M2TW also had a lot of pointless battles and never-ending sieges, rather than the decisive battles of STW/MTW. This is the direction the series has been heading in since RTW, which is why I passed on that last two games and will probably pass on S2TW as well.

Players clearly want different things out of TW games - and this is what sets them apart from other games. Some focus on the campaign map and want a high level of historical accuracy, others prefer highly tactical battles and just basic historical representation. I doubt there are many other game franchises where such a conflict of interests between the fans, old and new, exists.

For example I think it's hard for some of the historian types to understand why us non historian types want our Yari Cavalry faster than our Cavalry Archers, with no historical basis. It's these same people that also bring up the old "well it was all sieges back then" argument when someone complains about the excessive number of sieges in the newer games.