Okay, just did the prologue and about twenty turns of the Roman campaign (finished off the Etruscans, Syracuse, and Veneti).
Everything about the game seems weightless and floaty and inconsequential. Others have mentioned this in connection with battles (speed, units melting, etc.). For me, it extends to every part of the experience:
- The strangely sterile UI. The minimalistic black panels oddly incongruous with the archaic pottery icons, which are especially bad for buildings. Where previously, there was always some attempt to represent what the building looked like, now it feels like just clicking on icons to make numbers go up. Even if I understand intellectually the implications of what I'm building, it still feels intuitively like groping in the dark.
- The campaign map does not zoom out enough. You can barely see two provinces at once. There is of course the strategic view, but that is another layer of abstraction that doesn't connect viscerally with anything else. It's just another screen added on because the main system does not do the job.
- The tech tree. Someone mentioned getting to Marian reforms in 10 turns. A large part of the problem is how all the branches of the tech tree seem completely independent from each other. Again, systems which aren't interconnected but piled haphazardly one upon another, free to float past each other without interaction. In MTW, tech and economy were inextricably intertwined. FOTS does a decent job of this as well, with the clan development levels. Here, it's like there was no one sat down and thought about the game as a whole rather than as a checklist.
- The representation of armies. I'm talking very basically about the figures representing armies. They change from a dude to a horse to a ship without so much as a frame of animation between them. When Civ V did this (armies can simply embark without the need for transports), there was a very specific effect as the unit changed to a ship. Granted, it was a bit cheesy, but it showed awareness that the representation of a unit needs to have a certain weight. The sudden change from dude to horse and back again whenever you moved an army is the worst offender here. I know (I heard somewhere) that it's supposed to get rid of the silly fast-walking animation, but the effect now is not of an army but a few numbers being changed in the simulation. The way armies simply float past cities does not help.
- The lack of seasons. Everything feels the same from one turn to the next. In a game that represents history and the long passage of time, it's inexcusable to leave the player feeling like the only thing that changes is the turn counter ticking over.
Hm, is there more? I could complain about how early ranged units are basically useless. My Roman armies are mostly hastati, and slinger projectiles and javelins just bounce off them. Same with hoplites. There was a distinct moment, while I was drawing out hoplites with skirmishers, when I asked myself what the point was when the Roman heavy infantry (i.e., 90% of the units in the army) would just chew through everything anyway with no trouble at all.
I never managed to get very excited about this, for some reason, but I thought that would go away when I'm actually playing it. I guess it's still vaguely enjoyable, in an automatic kind of way, but it feels like the TW experience distilled to its most repetitive and inconsequential elements.
Bookmarks