Demo Impressions

[nightcrawlerblue]

Wow I just found a really cool thing.

Zoom in on one of your units or on any enemy unit as they charge into battle and follow them. It sorta looks like you're looking over their shoulder as they charge into battle. Looks really awesome with horses because of the awesome charge effect.

I have come to the conclusion that I want a pet elephant... with armor...

My only problem with elephants is that they must have super-low morale. After the initial charge into a battalion of infantry my elephants immediately rout. then again that might be realistic (I've never seen an elephant attacking people before...).

[Steppe Merc]

I'm pretty sure that's real Nightcrawler. You'd be pretty ticked off if a bunch of little guys were stabbing you and shooting you. Besides, they can't be invincible, than that would be no good (for obvious reasons, I'd think).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.