Why does noone compete with totalwar

[gollum]

You are most certainly and absolutely right. The two first engines were solid for mp gameplay and STW in particular had the best playbalance imo and by v2.01 MTW the best engine.

The Samurai Wars guys tried to build a community using the best engine and the best playbalance the series had to offer from an mp perspective as far as i am concerned. Can you explain why people did not flood to that effort? If it was succesful, CA could have considered making a move in its multiplayer efforts in that direction.

A lot of factors played out - personal loyalties and sympathies/antipathies no doubt, why to play with another person's idea of balance and also as TosaInu said recently in a post, its difficult to even get all people have the same stats at the lobby at the same time - which causes drops and loss of interest. But fundamentally speaking there was no reason why it shouldn't have worked. But, sadly, it didn't - in a mass scale at least.

There were other such efforts, like the MP mod for M2 by the Celtiberos, which, although accepted to a certain extent, it wasn't universally popular either as far as i understand.

So balance mods seem not the way to go for mp - CA has to make the vanilla game solid and balanced for it. But CA won't do it, be it because it focuses on the SP/history buffs fans that seem to be the core for TW customers these days or because they have technical anti-reasons for it or both.

From an SP perspective, catering to mpers needs is suicide and vice versa in terms of allocating team resources as far as i understand. Once CA got in the trip to put more emphasis on the campaign map with more units, more ancillaries, more roleplaying of characters etc it was all downhill for battlefield playbalance. The TW engine can't support meaningfully more than 14-max20 unit types wih clearly defined gameplay roles, which is the ideal for good playbalance. You can give out special abilities and different units to different factions etc but all this fades out quickly in an mp sense - its hard already to balance the game anaway, and that sort of thing makes it nearly impossible to get the balance right that means playstyles and armies quickly converge instead of recycling continuously without artificial rules and restrictions as they do when balance is about right.

You can make a game like Empire that can sell lots, with it being basically very very average if not outright bad. But Spers and history buffs will by default buy it - even if the TW format did not really reflect well the era of line infantry/artillery/cavalry in the battles historically speaking - TW battles have too few units available in battle and men for that.

If CA wanted to make a good mp game, it should have sticked in the original format ie few unit types and well balanced. From an SP perspective there were unlimited contexts for that; 100years war, the Crusades, Reconquista, Napoleon's campaigns (as it happened) etc. Few opposing factions with few playstyles to balance; it was possible. But if you want to represent 4-5 centuries of medieval warfare, and with the same unit stats for SP and MP, inevitably the game will end up with bad balance.

On the other hand, the more large and inclusive the map the better from an SP commercial perspective; you have people's countries in - that's a major one, everyone wants to play their nation's time of glory or danger etc and also you make it more civilisation like that its a boon for SPers.