Years to turns....

[Mooks]

Can someone explain to me why CA is changing years to turns. Iv never got this concept...why change it if its not broken. Im sure im not alone when this is going to confuse the hell out of me.

[Peasant Phill]

I'm not 100% sure that I'm right, but this is what I think is behind the whole turn idea.

Well CA says that it's to eliminate those 'boring years' when nothing happens. So if your armies aren't engaged in any kind of battle and your agents are idle the game will continue automatically until you need to do something. This could be instructing your army to fight, an agent that arrived at its destination or a building slot that's empty.

I'm not really convinced that this is a good move by CA as I find the preparations before a a military or agent action as enjoyable as the action it self. It's just another new feature to make the game attractive for kids.

[econ21]

Have CA ever given a reason? I don't recall one.

I suspect that what lies behind it is a desire to have a campaign that covers the whole of a long period of history, running right through from the MTW "early-" to the "late+" period. CA want people to see their armies develop from basic spears etc to gunpowder units; and to see their operations expand from Europe to America. Basically, I think they want to get a little closer to the kind of rapid coverage of history you see in Civilization games for example. I think they are calculating that the greater variety introduced by this will appeal to the mass market.

Given the above, they want to accelerate the strategic gameplay. The mass market gamer won't want to commit months to a campaign. But if it proceeded at MTWs pace, then that is what would be required. I don't know about anyone else, but my MTW campaigns started in early and tended to peter out by the early high period, just about the time when I got feudal knights and high period units. I either became too dominant for it to be challenging or I got too bored (usually both). That pacing is contrary to idea I've suggested of trying to get a panoramic historical campaign. The implication is that CA are going to need fewer turns per year.

The problem then arises that with the RTW engine, they actually have more turns per year than in MTW. Raising the number of turns per year to more than MTW will make it apparent that armies are moving across the map far too slowly to be plausible. By any reasonable standards, they will crawl, as early armies do in Civ, for example.

So to fudge that problem, CA decided to end the fixed relation between years and turns.

That's my interpretation of why CA switched from years to turns.

[Temujin]

econ21 is right.

The underlying problem is the same as in the Civilization games: warfare is tactical while the rest of the game is strategic. Those aspects function on different timescales, but the games can only handle one scale: turns.

That's why completing Magellan's Journey in Civ takes centuries, and moving an army from Rome to Constantinople in RTW takes years, when the real timescale for these actions were weeks or months.

The developers have approached this issue in different ways, but the results are always less than stellar from a realism standpoint; simplicity always win out.

The real solution to the issue is to divorce the two disparate aspects into their own scales. Let gameturns be years, but allow for "sub-turns" where warfare or other tactical movements are carried out.

The implications of this solution are complex, however, and in a game such as Civ with strategic MP it's downright unworkable. It would suck to be a peaceful builder if every other player needed 30 sub-turns every year to resolve their warfare, while you rack up three more buildings in your queues and twiddle your thumbs. I think it might work for *TW though, if the designers put in some realistic limitations to prevent warfare every single game-year (like real costs, need for casus belli etc. as in other strategy games). This would give the game a more realistic feel with short, dramatic campaigns interspersed with longer periods of peace, rather than the all-out WW2 style europe-in-flames kind of game we're used to.

[Mooks]

Sooo basically its another move by CA to dumb down the game?? Preparation for a battle is one of the funnest and key factors of the game.

MTW2 might very well be the last TW game I ever play

Or am I reading that last post wrong...

[sunsmountain]

I know for a fact that very few Rome:TW campaigns make it past 200 BC, let alone 100 BC. I've never seen anyone play it till August (the emperor, not the month - i've seen plenty who do that :))

So if you could just start in the Early, High or Late age as before, and still have the rapid turn transition (ie, not too many turns, i find myself hardly ever needing more than 100 in both MTW and RTW).

And whats wrong with finishing MTW within the Early period (ie before 1205)? Or in the Late period? The only crappy thing i can think of is that you won't be able to complete the tech tree in all of your cities, so some will be stuck at level 3 or 4 and the game is over. Is that better or worse than having everything at level 5, which gives a strange sensation of perfection and power though it is illusional.

MTW was good: 100 turns per period, more or less.
Rome lasted too long: 500 turns for 1 period, which nobody ever completed. I find myself clicking the end turn button just to progress the game and get some more content/events/retinue members from history.

The winter battles are nice though.

[econ21]

The real solution to the issue is to divorce the two disparate aspects into their own scales. Let gameturns be years, but allow for "sub-turns" where warfare or other tactical movements are carried out.

I agree with that. At the moment, TW has two time scales - the campaign turns and then the real time battles. What we are suggesting is a third time scale - you could call it "operational".

So the strategic level would be for peacetime - for building/economic stuff etc, you would have turns that last a year or whatever.

The operational level would be for wartime manouvring your army around a RTW style map. I don't know what the appropriate time scale would be - it could be just a month equals a turn (given the rate the Romans or other decent armies could march).

The battlefield time scale would be unaltered.

I don't see a problem with the above, except it is shifting TW into a being a historical wargame, when in fact it is more of a hybrid (I think the battles stand up to those in most historical wargames, but the strategic layer has more in common with Civ type games).

[magnum]

Sooo basically its another move by CA to dumb down the game?? Preparation for a battle is one of the funnest and key factors of the game.

MTW2 might very well be the last TW game I ever play

Actually, I believe that if you enjoy/enjoyed RTW/BI you'll most likely enjoy MTW2. That game pacing and style of play seems to be what they are shooting for.

That's not a shot at CA though. Since CA never planned on re-writting the engine but only improve the existing one, what they are doing might be the best solution. Basically they had no way of logically spreading new units and new events (i.e. Golden Horde) over 900 turns when most if not all players would complete the game in under 250 turns. Thus abstracting years into turns ends up being perhaps the best solution... at least for now.

[sunsmountain]

I don't expect to ever get to the Aztecs, given the way i play with Rome:TW. I like to keep close tabs on my governors, sometimes reloading when they're turning corrupt for some random reason. I hope they add a summary of gained/lost traits, so I can check that part faster. For 20 or 30 family members that list would be at most 60 entries long, but everything is better than having to check them each individually.

A similar table for settlements, listing choice (ie, not all of them) buildings would also prove useful i think.

Kind of goes against my idea not to ask any new ideas from CA before they finish polishing the old ones, but oh well.

[Mooks]

Why dont they go to the old system and do low age, high age, and late age??

[Lord Ovaat]

Well, this debate has been going on for some time, so I guess I should throw my two-cents in. I do NOT want to play a strict, historical game, and I believe most who purchase the series would agree. It wouldn't be a game. Turns are really the only way to go. I would like to see the option of starting in a more advanced era, as Holybandit just mentioned, but that's about all. One of the few things that peeved me with MTW was the EXPECTED and always PUNCTUAL arrival of the Horde at half-past noon. Even the AI didn't want to occupy the emergence provinces.

I do not want to be restricted with hard-set historical dates. The objective of the game is to re-write history, isn't it? I mean, I've won MTW on the hardest settings playing with all the factions (some took more than one try ). What that means, in essence, is that Denmark has conquered the entire Western World. Really? Seems to me, no faction has ever accomplished that feat. Here we are in the year (turn) 2006, and England is still England, France is still France. Go figure.

A truely historical game would be exquisetly boring, and probably playable only once without the need of medication. I relish the increases in tech, weaponry, etc. It enhances the game. But I do NOT want to know that I will be forced to fight Hastings in 1066. What would be the point in the game? Historically accurate weapons and such are great, and one of the reasons I play the games, but does anyone honestly think there was that diversity of "organized", "uniformed" units in the Dark Ages? That concept wasn't re-introduced until after the common use of firearms--for obvious reasons.

Gee, I even applaud CA for expanding into the Americas. Why? Because Europe, Africa, Asia Minor, etc. has remained physically unchanged for millions of years. One of the great adventures and lures of any new game is the discovery of all the new features like techs, units, etc. But the map is the map. Months before MTW2 is even released, I know exactly what Europe is going to be like, where the "provinces" will be, etc. So, without the additon of the Americas, what will we have to experience? Oh, gee, look at that. Those little trees are much more life-like.

I truely prefer "historical" strategy, but while waiting for MTW2, I've found myself playing a space opera for the first time. Galactic Civ II. Simply because the strategy is pretty good, but more importantly, there is a huge amount of gameplay available. EVERY map is different and presents new challenges, experiences, etc. Yeah, OK, so you're playing against intelligent alien species, though they are all humanoid and have human reactions and such. So, is that really much different than Western European Christians "playing" against Middle-Eastern Muslims? Could aliens be culturaly more different from each other?

One last point, and this has been mentioned many times in our forums. There are several thousands of folks who have joined and participated in the forums at the Org, Com, and TWC. Pretty impressive. But how many belong to all three? Lots. And of the vast numbers who purchase the game--which, of course, keeps CA in business--how many are ever even aware of the rest of us? There are very few multiplayers in these games when compared to the overall community, but they are probably the most frequent visitors. Maybe because they need other folks to play with, but maybe because they're more computer literate, lol. The vast majority of purchasers, myself included, never have any intention of playing online. We play strictly for our own enjoyment--when we have the time. Well, the point to all of this is that I believe we mislead ourselves into thinking the entire community sees things the way we do. Not true. After all, most of those folks actually have a life, lol. None of this is meant to offend anyone, for I am as guilty at nit-picking as the rest. If CA listened to everything we say, they would have gone belly-up shortly after Shogun. But we have also given them a horde of valuable first-hand experience and ideas, many of which they have incorporated. I personally can't think of many franchises who can say that.

So, it's just a game. The single player strategy will be the deciding factor in just how good the game is; not the graphics, not the battles, not the MP. And, I honestly feel we should give the game a playing chance before we tear it apart. One of the first threads concerning the new game dealt with modding. Mod what? We haven't even seen the game. Come on, guys, lighten-up a little. Remember, if we help put CA out of business, we will be left with only AOEIII or such. Anyone really want to go back to click-fests?

[doc_bean]

On a side note to all this: I hope they don't actually display the turns somewhere, that would totally kill the immersion, they can store the amount of turns somewhere for after campaign evaluation, but i don't want to see turn 5, turn 50 etc on the screen. It wouldn't mean a thing anyway since the game has no set number of turns (or so we are lead to believe).

[BDC]

Seems sensible to me. In MTW you could conquer France in a few turns, something England failed to do properly in hundreds of years. Equally it would never take a crusade 20+ years to transverse Europe. Everyone would have died before they ever got there.

[GFX707]

It's probably just an easy fix for all those RTW campaigns that you could complete FAR too early compared to history.

[A.Saturnus]

Turns instead of years may be a very useful concept. It solves -or seems to solve - several design issues such as the movement time across land and see, sieges, the opportunity to include seasonal changes without having too much turns in a campaign and it may even add to immersion. Though it may very well become a broken feature adding nothing but absurdity to the game.
We will see when the game comes out whether this was a good turn (no pun intended) or a bad one. But my fear is that programmers may be blinded by the opportunity and not see its dangers. Only a beta-test can reveal whether this is well received by the average player. If that is the case, will it be possible to turn back (again no pun intended) to the old system?

[econ21]

Only a beta-test can reveal whether this is well received by the average player. If that is the case, will it be possible to turn back (again no pun intended) to the old system?

Alexander: Total War may be in part a beta. I noticed a sign "100 turns" on a screenshot. In this case, I assume CA switched from half-years to turns because Alexander did so much so quickly, it would not be possible under RTWs time scaling. I guess players probably won't object too much in this case though as you won't have individual generals living through implausibly large changes in technology etc.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Call me conservative, call me a stickler, call me a jerk, but I think eliminating years won't be very good. I'll wait and see what CA comes up with, but I'm not optimistic.

First of all, it will hurt immersion. How couldn't it? What sounds more medieval:

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the year of our Lord, 1105"

-or-

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the turn number 116"



Plus, it removes one more tie of history from the game. I don't know why they bother to give the game starting and end dates; why not just give staring "eras." "OK, MTW2 will start, you know, around the first crusade and stuff. It'll end about, like, the discovery and conquest of the New World."

Lord Ovat - you were never restricted to historical dates in MTW. "Historical" events like gunpowder happened around a certain year, but never at an exact time. You don't even have to be restricted to certain historical dates if you left years in versus turns!

There is no conflict between having a fun, playable game and having "turns" marked as clearly defined periods of time!

Yes, there are issues with distances, but CA could actually, you know, fix them. Instead, I think they're taking the lazy way out. They certainly have to do less thinking by removing years.

[Servius]

The other solution to long boring games is to improve the AI so that the long games are not boring. Reintroducting different starting periods would also fix the problem of people with short attention spans.

But of course it's easier to go the Rise of Nations route and just burn through time, constantly in a race to upgrade buildings and units, just hoping that when your army finally meets another, you've upgraded faster than the other guy...

That's also why I don't play Rise of Nations...

[Sensei Warrior]

First of all, it will hurt immersion. How couldn't it? What sounds more medieval:

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the year of our Lord, 1105"

-or-

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the turn number 116"

Plus, it removes one more tie of history from the game. I don't know why they bother to give the game starting and end dates; why not just give staring "eras." "OK, MTW2 will start, you know, around the first crusade and stuff. It'll end about, like, the discovery and conquest of the New World."

There is no conflict between having a fun, playable game and having "turns" marked as clearly defined periods of time!

I agree wholeheartedly about the immersion thing. I like to know I vanquished the Saracens in 1105 as well. It's more aesthetically pleasing then TURN 116.

It seems to me that TURN 116 could be just as easily Spring 1202, or whatever ceative solution CA could come up with.

[A.Saturnus]

First of all, it will hurt immersion. How couldn't it? What sounds more medieval:

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the year of our Lord, 1105"

I believe that is a minor issue.

It's enough to say "Your lordship we have just vanquished the Saracens." I find it certainly more detriemental to immersion when moving from France to German takes you several years. Also, sieges that streched over years were rare. But if a turn was, say 3 months no campaign could cover even 100 years.
I agree that there probably are better solutions, but I also aknowledge the problem.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

I think it's a problem, too. But to me, CA is taking the easy route. Something they seem to do with other things, like the AI.

Temujin posted a bang-up idea - essentially, more realistic gameplay that would cure some of the time problems CA has while offering a deeper, and possibly more satisfying game. CA won't do it, because such a thing won't appeal to the twitch crowd, and will take, you know, effort.

[Encaitar]

If characters still age at a rate of 1 year per x turns (most likely x=2), then any claimed benefits from using turns instead of years (e.g. 'it no longer looks like it's taking 3 years to move a tiny distance in Europe') are void.

[doc_bean]

You're really nitpicking then...

[Afro Thunder]

No, I would describe that as thinking, something that CA does not want us to do apparently.

[Wandarah]

CA have engaged thier cognitive disruptor! Flee for the hills, the Great Zorg commands us!

[Ignoramus]

I do not want to be restricted with hard-set historical dates. The objective of the game is to re-write history, isn't it?

Exactly. But how can you rewrite history without years? With years, instead of: The Battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415 between the English and the French, the English won, and as a result conquered much of northern France. It could be: The Battle of Milan was fought in 1365 between the Germans and the Turks, the Turks won, and as a result subdued the whole of North Italy.

That isn't being historical, but it is still a history. It's just not actual history, but your history.

Now replace it with turns: instead of: The Battle of Agincourt was fought in turn 134 between the English and the French, the English won, and as a result conquered much of northern France. It could be: The Battle of Milan was fought in turn 120 between the Germans and the Turks, the Turks won, and as a result subdued the whole of North Italy.

Which of the two sounds and looks better?

[A.Saturnus]

It seems that years are at least somehow in the game.

[doc_bean]

It seems that years are at least somehow in the game.

Based on screenshots from an alpha version ?

[maxpriest]

Even with better AI, total historical accuracy there will still be a majority of people that won't finish the campaign completely due to sheer human boredom. CA's main concern is probably that everyone will be able to finish the campaign, especially the newer players that haven't played shogun/mtw/rtw like the rest of us.

[A.Saturnus]

Based on screenshots from an alpha version ?

Well, it's not a reliable source of course, but at least it has been in the game at some point. Maybe they changed it later, maybe they didn't.