Quote I would just think they would have done well to leave it more in line with Shogun's seasonal style of turns instead of one turn per year which is sort of silly considering you're moving an army only once a year and it can only one province a year. [/QUOTE]
And it can only .... one province a year?
Isnt there a word or two missing there jrock?
morsus mihi
I posted a message earlier that didn't come up, so I'm paraphrasing. Basically I talked about how CA has apparently provided lots of modding capability for the tactical map, and this is involved with the fact that hardcore players are likely to head straight for MP, and there is no MP strategy map. Unless the AI has come on in leaps and bounds (snicker) most modders in our community are going to be thinking of MP applications. Perhaps understandably CA didn't want to bother with all the work of making the strategy map severely moddable when the very people who'll use those tools will likely be playing MP more than anything. I personally play SP only and mod things but I'm a minority.
134
Never laugh at the old when they offer counsel,
Often their words are wise:
From shriveled skin, from scraggy things
That hand among the hides
And move amid the guts,
Clear words often come.
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I agree with making it years, but i liked the seasons in STW.
They could make a timer which, lets say, every 5 mins, changed season. So during your year it would cycle through the seasons.
Summer --> Spring --> Winter --> Autumn --> Summer etc...
And the weather would change accordingly
MJDoré
1300 mhz Duron, 512 DDR3200, 128mb GeForce4mx 440
Darkmoor: You seem to think that we can only have one choice! NONE of us are arguing that we should make it seasons only, but rather that it should be an option. Major undertaking or not, if the people on forums, which represent the more dedicated fans of the series, are going to be less willing to purchase it because of this, and I've seen quite a few folks say this has negatively impacted their opinion of the game to a serious extent, then it would make good business sense to integrate an option for seasonal turns even if game balance is a little off and it delays release by a month or two. All you have to say is that the game is designed to be played in a yearly mode and seasons are a 'beta' addition not supported by EA Support, much like the toolsets in modern games like Warcraft III.
If all else fails they could release the game without it and create an patch that put the option in. The people who wanted it would wait to purchase, but at least they would purchase.
Quote Originally posted by Darkmoor_Dragon:
And it can only .... one province a year?
Isnt there a word or two missing there jrock?[/QUOTE]
MOVE.
It can only MOVE one province a year.
From what I have read I think We should be able to "control" better the weather we are going to fight our battles in.
And although I understand the reasons supporting the move from "seasons" to "years" I wonder if in effect the game will allow to move only 1 sector (province) away per turn (year)
Mighty absurd if we need a whole year to move an unit from England to France.
Anyway, perhaps I am misreading and that is not the case. I would appreciatte some more info abouth how far or long we can move our units in one turn (year)
I agree, we should play the game before passing judgement. But I do also champion having two seasonal turns a year; summer and winter. Summer is the campaigning season with battles fought and troops moved, buildings built etc. while winter is the planning,recuperating, possibly beseiging time of year where tasks like building occur more slowly. Oh nad BTW, I never played shogun, so I don't really know exactly how it was done there.
darkmoor,
thanks for your reply.
i think i understand. if i'm reading you correctly, then all that's really happened here is a change in relative scale, but like you say 'a turn is still a turn', so that in fact, they could have just made a turn not even designated as to how much time had passed; that it just really isnt an importance. ok. i can see that. turns are always arbitrary anyways, a day, a week, a month, a season, a year....really doesnt matter for game PLAY. the only significance here is the one in our own minds on how long or short we believe things would take or not, but that as far as game PLAY, it really doesnt matter.
so, when that army is moving from spain to france across the border we just dub in that it has to hunt, tend the sick, refresh horses, do laundry, etc, but that the time isnt really '1 year', the true time is really '1 turn', and that any given length of time assigned per turn is going to be off somewhere, somehow and is, for the purposes of game play, irrelevant.
ok. fair enough. i think, now that i look at it, that the only way that 'time' would ever work out for each event, action, occurrence, would be if the campaign game were in real time, not that it shld be or shldnt be, but i look at how europa universalis is done and i wonder.
ok, one last thing before i drop this. if there are 3 relative eras in this game why not make 3 separate games; maybe 1 original and 2 expansion packs as separate games? in fact, let me go a bit further on this. i'm going to buck some of the stuff i said above here, but hear me out, this is just brainstorming here...something maybe for the future. let's twist this thing around a bit. let's put the campaign mode in real time and make the time scale adjustable as a slider. actually, it wouldnt be 'real' time, it would be ongoing time scaled how you wanted it. you could adjust this to say, 1 minute = 1 day or slide it up and 2 minutes is 1 day, 3 minutes is 1 day, and so on. that scale might not be workable as is, but you get the idea. your ships, armies, envoys, messengers, traders, raiders, and so on would ALL be moving slightly based on their base speed and the time scale, if they'd been given orders, of course. since this is single player it really doesnt matter if one slides the time slider backwards and forwards to speed things up at times and slow them down at others or even pause and handle a rash of things needing handling at a given time. battles automatically sort of freeze time on the campaign map (maybe) and get played out in true real time, like they are now. battle over, the campaign resumes. every unit would have a base speed based on reality. the time slider simply speeds all these up or slows them down. you could even add 'stops' for when an event occurs that slows time way down or stops it so that you could handle things. since they've added in auto-handlers to auto-manage certains aspects and given that you could slow time down or even stop it and zoom time forwards during boring periods, i think this might be a workable solution for everyone. the table toppers get what they want and the arcade folks get what they want and the builders get what they want.
at any rate, that aint gonna happen in mtw but maybe for the future. i just hate posing a problem without also posing a possible solution.
ok, enough of that. i do thank you, darkmoor, for taking up the gauntlet on CA's behalf and sitting in here and answering our questions. make sure CA is paying you more than we are; they need a good PR man ;) and remind the guys at CA that all this whining is a good sign they've got a hit. folks never talk this long about games they dont like ;)
K.
------------------
The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.
What's the point of turn-based? I want real time.
Here's a simple solution tho.
Administration = 1 per year
Battle = 4 per year (1 per season)
And here's a proposal.
Still perhaps a better simulation is 1 month per turn where day passes constantly. When 30 days have run out, your time of management will end and you have to press enter and take actions. Well, it does not have to be in real time but that will solve the problem of overloading the player by limiting the time spent each turn.
In addition, every unit/ action will be opeartional again after a given period in the scale of month. So you can have a phrase difference and hence more and better strategy.
When you are running, you cannot outrun yourself.
Konnichiwa,
England seems famous for rain throughout the year. But Europe isn't England alone. While The Netherlands also have a lot of rain, we also seem to have some not rainy days. Temperature fluctuates from -10 degrees celcius to 30 degrees celcius. Climate is changing (I'm not crediting that to the greenhouse effect, I also don't), but in the past we had some 'good' winters, starting as early as november.
Germany, also a European country, is quite different again. Bloody hot in summer, starving cold in winter.
In your eyes a turn is a turn. It just isn't.
I do not entirely agree with Kraellin, a turn isn't a turn. Each season has clearly distinct properties (that's a bit flattened in our current era), I challenge you to name me countries that aren't affected by seasons. Therefore a turn isn't a turn. Yes, a turn is a turn when you use years, always the same change to get this or that, you just can't plan to attack in cold or heat.
Also do note the training time of units: 1 year for peasants, and also 1 year for feudal Knights. It would more be like 3 months for peasants and 4 years for a knight (I skip the squire phase here). Note: production times in crusaders_unit_prod11.txt are listed in seasons.
As weather is clearly different in the 4 seasons, each turn can have a specific role: defensive or offensive. A year turn always offers the same thing (the only difference is randomnes) and thus it takes away the strategic depth.
It doesn't take a year to march an army from the Netherlands to Germany and it certainly doesn't take a year to cross The Canal. You like year/turn, I don't and I never will. Solution: optional seasons or year.
Kraellin did also say something wise (he nearly always does), players expect something in a game. As MTW is an attempt to reflect European warfare in medieval time (note that I don't use simulation here!), skipping such a significant aspect of it (seasons) is a huge drawback.
I do understand that there are people who don't care about this, but others do.
I remember Ceasar II, it had some accelerated real time. You could see a day pass in some 2 minutes. I'm not completely sure about whether I'ld like that for TW, as the concept of a divided turn based strategy and real time tactical battles is the most appealing thing (I remember now that this is not a new concept, Lords of the Realms II, but STW did this much better).
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Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi
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Darkmoor
If you have dozens of spies/agents/armies etc to manage then why can't we see them on any of the screenshots of the campaign game - seems to be roughly the same as for a faction in Shogun as far as I can make out - obviously you get more as you conquer more (as in Shogun) but I can't really see that it looks so different.
Can you confirm that you do move just one province a turn by land as well - this for me is the worst part of it - at least they should give your armies the ability to move more provinces if they are doing the time this way.
"A short story is the best way to waste ten minutes"
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No spies in screenshots? hmph - don't worry that'l soon be resolved....
As i said on another thread its difficult to isolate individual game aspects and judge the game singularly by them - this whole "movement" issue is one of them:
The utilisation of fleets and sea routes is a new key factor in the game over STW - if you want to move stuff rapidly the best way is by sea. If you look at the map you'll notice that there are very few provinces that are far from the sea, maybe one or two moves away.
The "theme" of marching armies across vast landscapes wouldn't really be the best way of moving troops about both for a normalised army and because if you want to capture a distant province crusading is probably a better way to do it.
"I can only move one province at a time by land" doesn't translate into any form of a problem in MTW - no more than "I can only move one province at a time in STW", a move is a move is a move... and i still struggle to see how any change in this basic setup would improve the gameplay.
Neither is the comparison of troop construction times a default means for comparison now - varying support costs and construction of required buildings vastly changes the situation from that of "but i can build both X and Y in 1 turn" - you can't compartmentalise in that fashion because it isnt the full picture.
Now some folks think a breakdown of seasons is good for a "campaigning and a planning" set of moves - again its not a "bad" idea per-se but aren't we straying from the point again? Do we now want a game with periods of doing nothing because of the weather? Realistic or not again it comes back to gameplay... choices of seasonal weather for battles is a good thing - a fixation with seasonal or monthly turns for longevity or scale is another matter entirely.
Why not make 3 separate games? Ask CA - i don't know. I would imagine, as stated previously, its because they wanted the scope and variation that the 3 eras give in terms of diversity of units and the tech tree - is it so easily forgotten that a major criticism of STW was the "sameness of units and the paucity of the tech tree"?
Apparently it is...
morsus mihi
Kraellin,
The move to 400 years is significant. They wanted 400 years because you get a lot of technology change over a long period. You get a big tech tree and can incorporate 100 unit types into the game. More is better right? Aren't 100 unit types better than 14 unit types? It doesn't matter if the combat system can't actually significantly differentiate 100 unit types does it? It doesn't if you think more is better.
The seasonal turns were in there in the beginning as can be seen in an early screen shot. However, the game became bigger than what they had in mind with 400 years, 100 units, 12 factions and larger map all combining together. So, they axed the seasons. They also axed some of the planned units because I think they are down to 60 unit types.
To me, retaining the seasons and shortening the timespan covered would have been a better solution because it would have been an evolution of the STW strategic gameplay. What we have in the turn based part of MTW is a move in the direction of a game like Civilization. Unfortunately, by doing that they have lost an important strategic element of STW.
I was hoping to be able to send a crusade to the holy land with this game, but you clearly can't do that. You can't put troops in friendly territories. As Darkmoor says, you can't march across the map. So, the movement on the strategy map is still basically like Risk.
From the demo, it does look like the 3D battles are an evolution of STW battles. I'm glad they didn't decide to remove some tactical effects, and then start making statements that battles were better because there were more troops on the field. This is where the game excels and is unique. They definitely have very nice 3D battle engine.
_________Designed to match Original STW gameplay.
Beta 8 + Beta 8.1 patch + New Maps + Sound add-on + Castles 2
*cough cough*
As stated on numerous occaisions Crusades work differently - you CAN put them in friendly, neutral even enemy provinces and you can walk them across the map...but it doesnt take 20 moves (although doing so may be advantageous [or not] - see CRUSADES thread for info)
morsus mihi
Konnichiwa,
Sameness of units in STW? Never heard about that. Who said it? If you read it here, then it was in an entirely different context. The problem in STW was the sameness of stats, you don't solve that by throwing in more stuff, but by improving the mechanics.
Fair is fair, CA did improve the mechanics, there are still things in it that caused a lot of problems, but it might be possible that the new 'tools' are capable to offset that. It's also still to be seen which other 'tools' become available.
It's shocking to see that CA also removed part of the original STW mechanics, ones that worked very well and no one, literally no one, has ever complained about.
It fills my heart with joy that you're so happy with MTW. But what makes you think that I should play MTW to judge it? Why should I see the whole thing to judge about details? Aren't there screenshots (ever heard about 1 picture says more than 1,000 words?) aren't there objective journalists who uncover details to us? Do you think that MTW will be going to be the first thing we'll ever see in our lives?
Why are you so desperately trying to force your viewpoints on us?
------------------
Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi
http://www.takiyama.cjb.net
Ja mata
TosaInu
Darkmoor,
Quote, "sameness of units and the paucity of the tech tree"
That's what makes the battles comprehensible and elegant. Too many different unit types causes confusion. I don't see the 60+ units in MTW as a good thing for the online game. Creative Assembly is never going to spend the time needed to balance all those units for online play. It's a huge undertaking.
_________Designed to match Original STW gameplay.
Beta 8 + Beta 8.1 patch + New Maps + Sound add-on + Castles 2
quote Darkmoor,
"There's also the point that "why would you be marching an army across europe?" (and, yes, im serious) - you cant march armies through friendly, neutral or enemy lands without fighting - so its not that"
I checked out the Crusade thread, and that does sound interesting. Thx.
[This message has been edited by Puzz3D (edited 07-14-2002).]
_________Designed to match Original STW gameplay.
Beta 8 + Beta 8.1 patch + New Maps + Sound add-on + Castles 2
Darkmoor,
The number one major criticism of Shogun was "no multiplayer campaign". You can see how Creative Assembly responded to that by looking at MTW.
BTW, Creative Assembly has an official policy not to answer questions about anything still under developement. So, we can ask them all we want, but we won't ever get a response. Of course, that doesn't apply to Michael DePlatter because he's the boss.
[This message has been edited by Puzz3D (edited 07-14-2002).]
_________Designed to match Original STW gameplay.
Beta 8 + Beta 8.1 patch + New Maps + Sound add-on + Castles 2
I reckon the year thing must be quite a recent intro - just read a post on .com from Tarrak that says:
"I just found this in the ToolTip file in the demo.
["baggage_train_tooltip"]
{"Amount of gold this army must take to sustain it for one season if it is sent on an invasion mission. "}"
Season!! So perhaps the designers only introduced the year thing fairly last minute (the baggage train thing is a cool idea) and would rather have done it this way. Looks like the game is being watered down for the mass market - but the mass market isn't interested in wargames so why bother??
If you're going to add all this extra detail then why take out such a fundamental area of sophistication and make people have to buy boats and boatyards (or what ever they will be called) if you want to conquer Europe at any speed. No wonder there aren't Mongols as a playable faction - they'd be completely stuffed! In reality purchasing boats and sending armies overseas by boat was incredibly difficult and expensive - one of England's main problems was getting enough boats together to get men into France quick enough.
If I'm an English king - how do I launch my chevauchee (spelt wrong probably - the medieval term for a raid in strength) through France? Surely the 1 province per year move makes a mockery of a fundamental fact of medieval warfare?
"A short story is the best way to waste ten minutes"
For the very best in alternate history and historical fiction visit Alt Hist, https://althistfiction.com
For medieval musings and a dash of historical fantasy visit Mark Lord's blog Praeter Naturam at https://marklord.info
Black Prince,
The movement is like the strategy game Risk. That's all STW was as well.
_________Designed to match Original STW gameplay.
Beta 8 + Beta 8.1 patch + New Maps + Sound add-on + Castles 2
A Chevauchee was an expedition that set out deliberately to waste the enemy countryside, essentially economic warfare. Something emminently achieveable in MTW.
morsus mihi
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