The psychology of Total War gamming.

[gollum]

I never knew what to make of your optimism Tommi (or how to be that way myself). Its such a great blessing:)

TW in mp is a different game altogether. Especially team games as Tommi says, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 are amazing. The transition from SP, is certainly not easy for most, especially if you decide to just "drop in" all by yourself. That's because you need to learn the ropes, and to do that you need someone that can teach them to you. This requires time, patience from both sides, commitment and friendliness, otherwise it just won't work. Most people never cross this stage, and this is profoundly related to psychology; you need to be able to accept losing face in front of your online friends in order to learn to play the game. This however prevents you, for a while at least, from posting in the forums (say) with your usual elan, as now everyone knows "how good" you are. The key here is perseverance and an active, serious but friendly clan community that will take up new players and integrate them. However once you start getting it, and your play improve, there is lots more fun than in sp involved, especially with good company. 6 to 9 hours of straight online play at that stage are not uncommon, and an hour of mp is far more intense than an hour of sp in which your minds "coasts" while on the campaign map.

Although all TW games have their quirks and characteristics (due to the different engines and periods/settings/gameplay explored), they have enough in common to say that a competent mper in one game will probably do a succesful transition to another. Its however in the cooking and coordination of the engine parameters from an MP perspective that things are decided for mpers. CA carries a lot of responsibility for that; bugs are relatively harmless for SPers, but for mpers an +1 or +0 stat in a unit due to a bug can make all the difference in the world between a balanced game and an unbalanced one.

"Balance" it self is a tricky word; some people will bring up concepts like "rock,paper,scissors" with great intent while others will mock with equally great contempt, and these players are usually SPers to the core. They will argue from a "historical" and "realistic" perspective, but these mean little to an mper; the setting is a little more than a stage for them to play out their struggles in a way, but for many (not all) SPers the stage is just as, if not much more important than the acting of the interpreters.

Needless to say that from a commercial perspective SPers are far easier to satisfy, as it requires less rigor and playtesting - besically the developers can get away with putting many things under the rug - and many companies, including i would say CA go for that, hence all the "bad blood" between the two communities.

A good and certain measure for balance is the variety of units and gameplay styles the gameplay will allow for. In an mp context this manifests very easily, and there are waves of "styles", that is at one point everyone discovers that spear units (say) are too strong and build their tactics/strategy and armies around that. At some point, either the company changes the stats or someone finds (through skill or luck or combo of both) a way to beat the prevalent style; then everyone else slowly finds that out and the armies (of players in general) shift to the new style etc. Now, if there is a relatively quick succession and decent number of such styles (that perhaps recyslce), then the game most certainly is balanced. If however playstyles go down the same route and there is no coming out of there, then, the game is badly balanced and gameplay is poor, This property - more or less - of the gameplay is what mpers refer to as "depth". It is a very important property indeed, and an absolute preerquisite for a strong community. If the gameplay is shallow, ie its all the same and rush on rush with the same army, people will not commit to the game, and the community will either stagnate or worse still be filled with shallow people, that aren't interested in good play so much, but more in bragging.

SP stats and MP stats have very different criteria for correct balance. Price of a unit in the camp map is determined also by the historicity, building dependencies etc, while the one in MP strictly in battle performance relative to the other units avialable in that era. The two clearly cannot be the same, and it is a major mistake that for many years - perhaps even still? - CA did not institute a different set of stats for SP and MP that would have gone a long way towards solving the issue.