Demo Impressions

[Gregoshi]

Regarding the red/orange rays that flash when a unit is hit by arrow fire, it may be an ATI graphics problem. I have an ATI 9700 TX with the 4.9 (beta) drivers and DirectX9c that I installed to (try to) address some issues with Doom 3. So far, only people with ATI cards have complained about those nasty rays.

About the music, it may well have ended half way through the battle, it just seemed to play on for a long time. Maybe I just didn't notice it had stopped. It was about 4am when I was playing it.

Whether for good or ill, I think it is too quick to make any kind of final judgement on the demo or the game. Give yourself a couple of days to get used to the changes before giving a or . There is quite a bit to take in with just a few plays of the demo.

[GFX707]

You said unit commander or general; I was replying to the general part (as in it can't be him so it'd have to be the unit's officer). Sorry for any confusion.

lol, don't worry about it! I was just trying to clear it up....

I also get those orange bursts of light (look like lots of stretchy polygons, exactly like in that screenshot you posted) Radeon 8500 here.

I think if we all frantically bitch at CA they will slow the speed down a little in time for release! You have no time to enjoy the battle because you have to constantly pause the game so your entire army doesn't disappear in the time it takes for you to order them!

If they could slow it down to just a tad above MTW I think we would all be happy....speed seems to be the number one complaint!

[ICantSpellDawg]

the best thing is that i never played battles in MTW, so i wont be dissapointed by battles in this game - i am wierd for the strategy map aspect

also - i just bought a new dell pc with the specs (i starred the importnat stuff) i was wondering how the game will run in an experts opinion:
---Dimension 8400
Pentium® 4 Processor 530 with HT Technology (3GHz, 800 FSB), Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition Qty: 1
Unit Price: $1,268.00
Dimension 8400 -----

***Pentium® 4 Processor 530 with HT Technology (3GHz, 800 FSB)

***Memory 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz (2x512M)


Keyboard Dell ® Quietkey ® Keyboard

Monitor 17 in (16 in viewable,.27dp) E773c CRT Monitor

***Video Card 128MB PCI Express™ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeon™ X300 SE


Hard Drive 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)

Floppy Drive and Additional Storage Devices 3.5 in Floppy Drive and 64MB Dell USB Memory Key

Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition

Mouse Dell® 2-button scroll mouse]

Network Interface Integrated Gigabit Ethernet

Modem 56K PCI Data/Fax Modem

CD ROM/DVD ROM Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+RW/+R w/ dbl layer write capable

Sound Card Sound Blaster® Live! 24-bit ADVANCED HD™ Audio

Speakers No Speaker Option

Productivity Software Productivity Pack including WordPerfect®

Security Software Norton Internet Security™, 90 day trial

Digital Music Dell Jukebox - easy-to-use music player and CD burning software

Digital Photography Paint Shop™ Pro® Trial plus Photo Album™ Starter Edition

Limited Warranty, Services and Support Options 1 Year Limited Warranty plus 1 Year At-Home Service

Dial-up Internet Access 6 Months of America Online Membership Included

Personal Finance Software Microsoft® Money 2004 Standard

Dell Media Experience Dell Media Experience

FREE Dell 720 Color Printer with 1 Yr Advanced Exchange Service Qty: 1
Unit Price: $0.00

[spacecadet]

Overall its ok, well it looks good at least. The important stuff for me is online and theres still no way to know if CA will program out the simple problems we have now in MTW.

3 points however:

- Is it so hard for CA to leave the basic controls the same/implement a choice to use the same basic Totalwar control options i.e use left mouse button, dragging out lines, swivelling the grouped units direction around???(Please fix this before this goes gold!)

- is there no rally button?? is this automatic now?

- selecting different grouped units - the old system of having a bar over the icons of the grouped units was intuitive. The new icons size and odd way of having 2 rows makes it irritating to select them in the middle of battle.

[Steppe Merc]

For those lost on the Rally button, it's the special ability of your General. You can only do it sometimes, though.

[A.Saturnus]

The charge is really awesome, that has to be said. I also liked how elephants are done. Not that we could really judge it by now, but they aren´t invincible. You still have to use them wisely.
Overall I really liked the fighting. People beat each other, some fall to the ground and stand up again, units celebrating when they win. Cool. At least when the soldiers were more than grey squares. On lowest setting, the graphic isn´t impressive at all. Though I have to say, I just have the minimum requirement and the game played smoothly.
Saying the unit´s name seems useless and annoying to me, however, repeating commands make sense. The unit commander has to address his men after all. In MTW you heard orders too.
The camera will simply be a matter of practice.
I found the battle to be extremely easy. I send in my elephants without any sense, practically wasting them and still won. Though general camera might be a challenge.

Over all, I liked the demo. I hope that RTW will be more polished than that, but it was definitely fun.

[The_Emperor]

Ok first up, the criticisms.

I didn't like the camera control or the interface... In my humble opinion CA have messed with a winning formula there and i do sincerely hope they have a "classic TW" option regarding all of this. it all seemed a bit unwieldy to me.

Secondly, it did move wayy too fast for my liking. You cannot marvel at the graphics and see your men grind the enemy down like you could in MTW... Constantly moving along the field to try to make sense of the mess was not good.

Thirdly, units repeating their names is not a very good touch... "I know what you bloody well are, just obey my orders!"

Then there's the skirmishing range for the javs, but I just took them off skirmish to counter that one.

Now for the good stuff.

Elephants are good, but as some have said they needs to be used carefully. The main reason my armoured elephants routed in a game was because they charged into some Hastasii... (the velites pelting them probably didn't help matters)

However when I played again I managed to draw out the poeni infantry in a much longer line and draw most of the Roman army into the middle, then my elephants came in and charged right through the Triarii!! It was carnage, Romans flew everywhere!

The graphics were superb and I loved them, the little cutscene when the enemy general died was great fun... Hannibal pinned him in combat when some war elephants came in on a flanking charge, it was a brutal way to die!

As for the units the Carthaginian cavalry and the Numidians did impress me. Their missiles were good when they came behind the enemy lines pelting them, then when the rout was udnerway they truly earned their keep mopping up.

But all in all it was fun.

[Plaxx]

TuffStuff,

I used to work at Dell, and I have built my last two computers. Based on the demo, your rig should be able to run the game with all the eye candy turned on, no problem. Just make sure you have all the newest drivers, especially for your Radeon card.

[Beirut]

Hmmm, kind of look like an RPG screen. And I'm not crazy about the green highlighting of the chosen units. Also, I don't like the button setup. I liked the old way better.

But... the graphics are pretty good and I can see some monumental battles happening once the controls are gotten used too.

Mind you, with the graphics turned up a notch, this thing slowed down my XP2000/512 RAM/9800 Pro quite a bit. Must be quite the CPU pig when things get really heavy.

Can't wait for the demo mods to really get the feel of it.

[historycaesar]

I turned all my graphic setting up and the demo is amazing, too short but amazing!

[mambaman]

yup IMHO a fab improvement on MTW-like a few b4 my only query: why the switch betw left and right mouse functions?

Music i thought was fab and actually helped me enjoy the game more

Camera controls i thought better than both MTW and RTW once u get used to them

Like others thought demo a little on the fast side

Units repeating orders-a bit strange-maybe they'll sort that b4 game release

all in all a massive improvement on MTW-really takes the game to new level as CA promised

one last thing guys....remem this is just a demo-games developers often will make final adjustments on the basis of the feedback they get from ppl playing the demos-have faith

[alioven]

For the people with ray glitches, have you tried disabling advanced shadowing?

For routing units: if you choose your general, its special function (F key iirc) is to rally troops nearby him. So... rallying will be so clumsy and hard to do now...

Cav charges are too powerful, you send a cav behind routing units and they die in... 1-2 seconds? Swiping was a joke compared with this. You back-charge cav against a unit of spears (specially if they are already engaged with another unit) and they simply get destroyed at once. I hope this has more to do with the obvious valour and energy differences btw the two armies (romans are clearly weaker in this demo).

[Longasc]

Hello!

I returned to the .org after quite some time, having played Civ3: Conquests in the meantime.

About the RTW demo:

I think the strategic map looks more promising than this. Now we see how great the graphics are in truth, plus how streamlined the gameplay became.

1.) The graphics: Not as impressive as the handpicked and well-animated graphics of .avis before. Even if you activate the option of the units not doing everything synchronous.

You either see the units from afar as tiny icons or up close where you have little control. They do not look much better than MTWs bitmaps from afar.

2.) Formations? Plz someone tell me, how can i spread out a line of Infantry in MTW-style, by dragging them into shape?

3.) Facing? What must I press to change the facing of my troops?

4.) I see some improvements, the rally feature of the General and some troops makes sense, the right click interface, too

5.) Camera controls are now horrible. Could not get use to any setting. :(

6.) AAAH!-Effect. Some people already complained, I do so, too, because...

7.) ... the battle in the demo was more arcady and showed little depth. Okay, it was a simple and biased demo battle, but besides the standard TW-series "elevation kills" it looked more like a streamlined MTW.


I still hope the campaign feature / strategy map turns out to be much better than MTW, but the battles are only mediocre.

They are not up to the standards they wanted us to believe through several videos before they released that demo. Especially graphically, this is not "gorgeous", you need to work hard to get such great graphics with the camera controls. The far away graphics are not impressive, not even with all options set to HIGH.


But well, may be it is like Joint Operations, I did not like the Final Demo while the Beta Demo was cool, the Full Version was again cool :)

[Steppe Merc]

Longasc, to change depth you right click and drag it out. So not alt, not control, just right click and drag. It took me a while to.

[Tamur]

...my only query: why the switch betw left and right mouse functions?

It makes the painful misordered unit problem a non-issue. Use left to select, right to direct, and everything is OK.

This was a big problem for most human beings playing MTW, who had a unit selected already, attempted to select a different unit, and ended up mistakenly ordering the unit already selected to march somewhere entirely different from where they ought to be.

Tamur

[GFX707]

After playing a few more times this is pretty amazing! Especially the animations, for instance when troops come to a halt after running and the flying guys tossed by charging elephants!

I think if the speed was fixed I would be pretty happy! The demo is pretty amazing when you get used to the differences. The only thing I still don't like are the flame arrows (where is the big pot of firey stuff they are lighting the arrows with as someone said? impossible) and on mine some of the grass is missing but on the whole I still can't wait!

[Longasc]

Longasc, to change depth you right click and drag it out. So not alt, not control, just right click and drag. It took me a while to.

Hey thanks, just found it out on my own - tried it again and voila. But I must agree with you, it is not mentioned in the tutorial and well, formations used to be a key element in MTW, so I really wondered what happened to them.

Well, at least *one* gripe less to worry about. :)

[Lord of the Isles]

I'll give it a few days before deciding for sure, but after a few hours I've mixed feelings about the demo.

On the good side, I was impressed how well my Geforce 4 MX 440 (64 Mb) performed, even with most settings turned up to medium or high. I agree with longasc's point about far away graphics not being much of an improvement but I can live with that.

On the other hand: the speed is a real pain (slow it down CA, please). And there's an arcade-game feel to it that's hard to describe exactly but it's there nonetheless. Maybe more familiarity with the new controls will ease the feeling but I worry that I might end up feeling as pessimistic as Darkmoor Dragon (on a .com thread) about the game. To paraphrase, he sees RTW as CA selling out to a wider C+C market and spoiling the great tradition of the TW series by putting eye candy before gameplay. Harsh but if the changes to the campaign map, diplomacy, seiges etc don't live up to my expectations I might start to agree with him.

We'll see.

[Hurin_Rules]

Just played the tutorial, here are my thoughts:

Interface takes a bit to get used too, but after a few minutes it was fine.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the way the cavalry rides down infantry. Far more realistic than MTW. In fact, it had me thinking I wish I could do a medieval mod for RTW-- I'd love to see some Teutonic Knights charge into some Ghazis with the new physics. Well done, CA.

Had a cool little moment when the barbarians were coming over the bridge: my Triarii spotted them and all turned their spears towards the enemy. Fantastic.

I'll try the Battle tonight. But first impressions are, pretty darn good. The gameplay is not really very different from MTW, but the graphics and sound are better, and everything is new. yaay.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

pretty good demo on the whole, way too easy of course but so was the medieval demo.

speed much too fast
camera jerks whenever you select a unit
annoying repeating name of unit
don't like the green arrows under the units

graphics were very good I thought, especially since my card is under minimum specs
loved the cavalry and elephant charge
unit flags turn white when routed, very nice
intro was really good as well
being able to zoom in underneath the trees and move along with my cavalry as they charged was awesome.

[andrewt]

The funniest thing in the demo was when the Gauls attacked my Triarii across the bridge. Some of them were actually facing in the wrong direction. They were facing away from my Triarii while throwing javelins in their direction.

Now, on to comments. The speed is way too fast. Walk/run speed is already fast and killing speed is even worse. Cavalry takes 2-3 seconds to kill an equal number of fleeing soldiers. Even one of my elephants started fleeing before I knew they were already engaged. Sound effects are almost nonexistent. I had sound effects cranked all the way up and could barely hear the arrows firing and traveling. I couldn't hear the weapons being used either. I suspect that this is just for the demo and the real game wwill have the proper sound effects. What I heard all the time is the units saying their name when they are clicked which really got annoying.

Also, does anybody knkow the button to make a unit face a certain way. It used to be Ctrl + Shift, IIRC.

[Husar]

Ok, some more answers and thoughts from me:

- the camera can be changed to the MTW-style one, please look into the options before you complain about that.

- I could bet that most graphic bugs are only on ATI-cards.... ~:p

- The sound is cool, I don´t know to who the units say their names, but with EAX 2 I get a hall-effect in the forests and I´m sure that the orders are not repeated to the player but given to the unit by the commander, try giving an order to a unit on the other side of the map, I don´t hear anything then and the closer I am, the louder I hear it.

- the unit speed is simply realistic in my oppinion

- only bad thing about the units is that sometimes they are very friendly, they just stand there and don´t attack, while their comrades are heavily engaged, I ´ve also seen my cavalry following routed enemies, but instead of killing them they ride besides them, like an escort, or as if they couldn´t see them.(maybe they have a V&V that they are drunk? )

- btw: if you don´t like flaming arrows, why don´t you just turn them off? they are a special ability of archers and you can turn them off in the lower right corner when you have the archers selected.

[MadKow]

Just played it twice so why not give my two cents (as unoriginal as they may be).

I also feel everything happens one bit too fast... This is, in my view, inconsistent with the obviously well achieved attention to graphic detail:
If you want to win your battles you are never going to take time to watch the nice animations and textures of your troops.

You freeze the game to look at things (no animations)
You zoom in the middle of battle (and the somewhat clutered interface makes you loose sight of the overall action, risking unnecessary losses)
Or you keep your birds eye view (and you couldnt care less for the animations and detail)

having the ability to go half normal speed, might have been a good idea.

Unit formation look looser than in MTW. Means when you are looking at the tightest unit be it a cohort or phalanx, you still see a lot of ground in between individual soldiers. This coupled with the richly detaild terrain creates a sort of visual noise that was not present in MTW.

These are factors that impacted directly my "situation awareness" something i have trouble with, by default , but i'm ready to agree that with time i can get used to the new Total War.

One reason why i wasnt really excited about this, is directly related with the reason i play campaigns and not MP or Historical Battles. I like to "grow" into my armies and vice versa. Call it silly but when i play a campaign i get an attachment to my units i just dont get in "quick action" sort of games.

Verdict: Will take some time to get used to, but looks good.

PS: THANK YOU THANK YOU!! To the person that discovered how to disable the green arrows.

[mambaman]

all good points by Husar-lets be positive guys-its a massive improvement on MTW-great graphics u just have to get used to the slightly diff controls-i for one am really looking fwd to finished product

[GFX707]

Sound effects are almost nonexistent. I had sound effects cranked all the way up and could barely hear the arrows firing and traveling. I couldn't hear the weapons being used either. I suspect that this is just for the demo and the real game wwill have the proper sound effects. What I heard all the time is the units saying their name when they are clicked which really got annoying.

No offense but I think you're alone there....

[afrit]

It makes the painful misordered unit problem a non-issue. Use left to select, right to direct, and everything is OK.

This was a big problem for most human beings playing MTW, who had a unit selected already, attempted to select a different unit, and ended up mistakenly ordering the unit already selected to march somewhere entirely different from where they ought to be.

Tamur

Hellelujah! They fixed that one. About time!

[fenir]

Ashantiwarrior
I don't think anyone is being negative about the game/demo.

What is happenning, like myself there is a lot of people here who have played the TW series from day one, and we feel we have an interest in the game and CA.
What we are trying to do, is give feed back, if not just between ourselves, but also CA if they are watching, and they usually are.

We are simply trying to desect the game in a way that we have come to enjoy the games, and from our collective experiances.
I know quite a few of the older members of this website, and from experiance they and myself would not 'bagout' CA or the series of games, we just want to see the best game produced that possibly can be.

And if our input can help in anyway, then we are helping produce what we all are going to buy.

Hurin_Rules
I think you have not only read the minds of most of us, but you have certianly read mine.
I have ever since they started giving us details of the game, I thought it would be good for MTW mod.
After i thrash the game for a month or so, i will be trying to get a MTW mod going, with out a shadow of doubt.
I even posted as such several months ago in the modders forum.

fenir

[wasaaabi]

One thing that seems to be missing that I'm NOT happy about - the casualty ratio bar thing from the STW and MTW minimap. I need that thing...

[Trousermonkey]

my turn,

The good:
I like the graphics both for the units and the map.
I like that they kept many of the customizable options - even though it supposedly alienates newbie players

the okay:
the right click/left click thing is odd but I think I could get used to it and it resolves some of the issues I had with STW and MTW.
I don't mind the green highlighting when selecting units but make it more indiscrete.

the bad:
I turned off the advisor and any other 'helpful' hints the game would try to give me so I didn't have a chance to be annoyed by this

Even so, I was annoyed by units shouting their names every time I clicked them. Also the accent of the generals and units is atrocious. It would be infinitely better to have them speak in their native tongue.

I couldn't get the game to recognize my audigy gamer X soundcard. Funny, it works fine in MTW and every other game I own.

Dragging a line of soldiers seems broken. Maybe I just don't know enough about the controls yet...?

Pressing space to show where your units are heading has changed to show little arrows instead of the actual units. I can see how this will get really confusing when lining up troops in the real game. "Was that front line of little pink triangles my infantry or my missile units? Wait...where were my calvary heading again?"

The unit hotkey assignment rules have changed. No, I'm not talking about the Ctrl+1 instead of Ctrl+Shift+1 change (this is a good thing) You can no longer have subsets. A single unit can no longer be a member of two different groups. This is lame.
Even worse, and this is a terrible thing, when a unit routs, it automatically loses it's hotkey designation. So if you have a unit of elephants that temporarily routes and then rallies a short time later, you'll have to pause the game and re-designate them. This is a killer for MP play and pausing to reassign numbers pretty much destroys any chance of immersion in SP.

I couldn't get the camera to work like I wanted. In MTW I start each battle by zooming up and then using the right mouse key to tilt the camera down. In RTW I could never zoom out far enough and tilting is bound to a key that I have to reach across the keyboard for. It's awkward.

Another thing with the camera movement is it now always rotates when I drag the mouse to the edge of the screen. I prefer MTW's method of only rotating when I drag near the top of the screen - otherwise strafe.

The HUD is way too big. It gives the sense of peering through a periscope. Please give me the option of hiding the overview map and the thoroughly useless 'little window with commands' with some keys...please!? Even better would be to do this and follow unreal tournament 2004's lead and give the option to make the hud partially transparent and scaled.

The fact that the camera can't zoom out enough or be controlled easily, the giant HUD hiding 1/4 of the battlefield, the speed of some of the units, and the de-hotkeying of routing units goes a long way towards reducing the immersion of the game.

Hopefully (though I should know better) these things will be addressed before the final release.

[Plaxx]

Great points, Fenir.

And an MTW mod will make the game stay on our hard drives just that much longer!