Demo Impressions

[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...

[Papewaio]

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...

Its there on the bottom left box near the speed/pause buttons. Hover your cursor over it and it will give % for yourself, allies and enemies...

[LordKhaine]

The main problem I had with this demo, is that it was a demo and not a full game.

I want to take over europe

[Kommodus]

Ok, some of my impressions...

1. The graphics are definitely better, but when viewing the action from a distance, it doesn't make much of a difference. I'll be upgrading my hardware soon, so I'll then be able to perceive the full impact of this improvement.

2. For some reason, it seems a bit harder to keep track of what's going on. This is probably just because I'm just not used to the changes.

3. I happen to like the musical score. The voice acting is average in quality and out of place at times. For example, selecting a unit causes that unit to announce its type, and soldiers scream "we're under attack!" when attacked. These features seem like attempts to mimic other strategy games, and are out of place in the Total War series.

4. The Battle of Trebia is quite easy; I won a "heroic victory" the first time. As has been noted, skirmishers run away too soon when on skirmish mode and the Poeni infantry are missing their spears.

5. The green triangles beneath selected troops really are too intrusive. Banners turning white for routed units also look rather silly; such measures weren't necessary in prior TW games.

6. I agree that the fights seemed rushed. I had hoped for longer melees, rather than shorter ones. When combined with the inherent difficulty in keeping track of everything that's going on, this is less than ideal.

That's about it for now. I enjoyed the demo overall, but wish some things were different. Oh well.

[Gregoshi]

I know what you all are talking about with regards to the speed of the game, BUT could it be "rushed" only when the units are running? At the beginning of Trebia, when the Romans are just walking towards you, the movement seems almost painfully slow. Same with giving your units (even the cavalry) movement orders - they take their good old time about it. Give them running orders and the afterburners kick in. After playing Trebia a couple of more times, I'm beginning to think that the speed issue is that the speed between walking and running is greater than it was in STW/MTW. When you are playing the battle, it seems very fast, but when you look at the scale of things and then the speed at which the units are running (fast!), it doesn't really look unnatural - at least to me. Maybe STW & MTW coddled us too much with a reduced running speed. Well, that is my impressions on the speed issue.

I don't believe I've read any comments here about the Numedian Cavalry's special "circle" attack. I gave that a try and it is a very neat attack to watch. I don't know how effective it is, but visually it is impressive. I wonder what other cool special attacks this game has in store for us.

About the music, the piece that I really fell in love with today was the one that plays over the menu. There is a part where the music has a sweeping and almost majestic feel to it - but in a very subdued way. That isn't a very good way to describe it, but there it is.

I messed some more with the camera controls. I do believe there is a bug in there. The "rotate" controls don't rotate, they strafe. So we have two ways to strafe with keys and none to rotate. Unfortunately, I'm more comfortable rotating with the left/right keys rather than using the mouse, so changing my view is a bit awkward for me.

Does anyone else notice the odd behaviour of some of the units, the light barbarian infantry (sorry to those of you who cringe at that name). At the beginning of the battle, more often than not, some of the barbarians (maybe 8-10) start walking towards the rear, like they are leaving the unit. This is as the Romans are still approaching and I haven't given the barbarians any orders yet. Could CA have added deserters or something like that?

[Papewaio]

The Barbs walking towards the rear... I would say that is a discipline rank thing... something that has been toyed with in the TW series but not fully fleshed out... would be far more important to a Phalanx if people decide to open up the ranks...

[Ser Clegane]

I know what you all are talking about with regards to the speed of the game, BUT could it be "rushed" only when the units are running? At the beginning of Trebia, when the Romans are just walking towards you, the movement seems almost painfully slow.

That's a very good point, Gregoshi. At first the speed was also my major gripe about the demo - at the first try things evolved so quickly that the battle was over before I even fully realized what was going on (and funny enough I was victorious without even doing much ) - but when I player the tutorial afterwards it seemed to be slower.

Overall I was very happy with how things looked and felt in the demo. Graphics and overall "feeling of reality" were very good.
The cavalry charges sometimes seemed indeed overpowered but I think it's hard to really judge this without having played more balanced units.

The green arrows and the unit replies after giving orders were quite annoying (but at least the units did not give annoyed comments or started burping or something like that when you clicked them several times) but these are very minor things that (as well as the speed setiings) can hopefully be easily changed or made optional in the final version - so I'm quite optimistic that these things will turn out well.

I also experienced the "arrow-flare" but luckily it stopped after the archers shot their first two volleys.

I am eagerly awaiting the final version.

[GFX707]

About the music, the piece that I really fell in love with today was the one that plays over the menu. There is a part where the music has a sweeping and almost majestic feel to it - but in a very subdued way. That isn't a very good way to describe it, but there it is.

I couldn't agree more!

I messed some more with the camera controls. I do believe there is a bug in there. The "rotate" controls don't rotate, they strafe. So we have two ways to strafe with keys and none to rotate. Unfortunately, I'm more comfortable rotating with the left/right keys rather than using the mouse, so changing my view is a bit awkward for me.

The camera controls in the tutorial are set to the new ones and you can't change them but during trebia you can press escape and look through the menus, find the part that says "RTS mode" and change it to "Total War" and you have your old MTW camera back....

[GFX707]

Ok, some of my impressions...

3. I happen to like the musical score. The voice acting is average in quality and out of place at times. For example, selecting a unit causes that unit to announce its type, and soldiers scream "we're under attack!" when attacked. These features seem like attempts to mimic other strategy games, and are out of place in the Total War series.

Particularly a few horn type noises that seem to have come directly from Warrior Kings!

6. I agree that the fights seemed rushed. I had hoped for longer melees, rather than shorter ones. When combined with the inherent difficulty in keeping track of everything that's going on, this is less than ideal.

See my petition thread....

[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!