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.
Years to turns....
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.
Originally Posted by Furunculus
Re: Years to turns....
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.
Re: Years to turns....
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.
Re: Years to turns....
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.
"Experts eliminate the simpler mistakes, in favor of more complex ones, thereby achieving a higher degree of stupidity"
-attr. unknown
Re: Years to turns....
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...
Last edited by Mooks; 06-09-2006 at 12:51.
Re: Years to turns....
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.
Last edited by sunsmountain; 06-09-2006 at 15:25.
in montem soli non loquitur
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becoming is for people who do not will to be
Re: Years to turns....
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.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
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.
Magnum
Re: Years to turns....
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).
Re: Years to turns....
It's probably just an easy fix for all those RTW campaigns that you could complete FAR too early compared to history.
Re: Years to turns....
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?
Re: Years to turns....
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.
Re: Years to turns....
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.
Re: Years to turns....
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...
Fac et Spera
Re: Years to turns....
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.
Every weapon has evolved from the same basic design, either a rock or a sharp pointy stick.
Re: Years to turns....
hi guys i konw that this tha i will tell has no sence with the topic ~years to turn~ but when i try to make a new topic in the forum look what i see
iraklaras, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:
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why is this happening?i havent do something bad and i can post a reply.plz someone tells me
Re: Years to turns....
Off-topc: Hi, I think the problem is that junior members can't start threads in this forum but can reply to them. The Guild FAQ in the Entrance Hall explains it all. I realise it may be frustrating but we operate a kind of "probation" policy at the Org to stop spammers and nutters (e.g. KKK or AQ supporters) messing up the forums.
Last edited by econ21; 06-21-2006 at 22:45.
Re: Years to turns....
I love making good and constructive threads...
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