The stupid AI and the map

[Yukon Cornelius]

"Using campaign difficulty for auto-resolve does make sense if you consider that auto-resolve is part of the campaign game, not the battle engine."

I hadn't read that entry in the FAQ. Interesting.

The programmers let their programming show through. They construct the battle engine as a separate unit from the campaign game and try to keep such things as difficulty settings separate. To the designers, auto-calculated battles are considered part of the campaign and thus completely unrelated to the battle engine.

However, from the perspective of an end user who knows nothing about the game's code base and only cares about how it plays, it doesn't necessarily make sense for battle difficulty not to apply in auto-calculated battles. The player is more inclined to view battle, auto-calculated or not, as one thing: battle. So, from that point of view, the player expects battle difficulty to apply to, as the name implies, battle (and thus auto-calculated battles as well as manual ones).

Ultimately, part of the game doesn't work the way many players intuitively think it should. However, the designers think it makes more sense for campaign difficulty to affect auto-resolved battles based on the way they structured the code. In my opinion (and presumably the opinions of most players), features like this should be made intuitive for the player, not the designer. After all, the player is the target audience, not the designer (in the case of commercially developed games, anyway).



It took me about eight times as long to write this as it should have. I think that's my cue to get some sleep.

[Papewaio]

I have used autoresolve in the past for an entire game to get to grips with the strategic side when going from one TW title to another as the strat side makes the biggest changes. As the battles are relatively easy as they don't really change as much as the campaign side.

The original purpose of the campaign game in all TW titles was to generate battles for the player to fight - the fact that the campaign games also turned out to be good games in their own right is a bonus!

If they actually listened to fans who want a MP campaign game they might actually have figured out that the RTS side of TW is not as important to the long term strat players as the campaign side.

MP fails in my opinion because the battles do not have a campaign context. They are once off and have no impact apart from the actual game. In which case there are many RTS out there such as Dawn of War which can be more engaging. Particulary as the amount of fantasy units has increased to the point that fantasty RTS games are not that different anymore.

Campaigns are the key to why people play TW, it is the bit that keeps SP engaging. Which if you consider the ratio of SP to MP kind of clearly indicates the import of campaigns.

[Puzz3D]

MP fails in my opinion because the battles do not have a campaign context.

I played chess for 40 years, and there is no campaign context. I played Total War multiplayer for 4 years, and there is no campaign context. Changing the battles into RTS is just what I don't want to see, but you are right that the battles are so bad right now that there is no reason to play the battles in the campaign and there is no reason to play RTW multiplayer. Just as Total War battles don't top standard RTS games, Total War campaigns don't top standard strategy games like Civilization.