Total Warhammer?

[TinCow]

Edit 2 - I wouldnt be surprised if this game sets a new standard for paid-DLC abuse. In fact I wouldnt be surprised if they charge a full-game-sized fee for each race. GW are nice like that.

I think that's likely. TWS2 already had some DLC craziness going on, and THQ's Dawn of War 2 was even worse.

Well, let me put it short and clear.

SP is one thing, mostly the battle-balance is less important.

In MP you only have the battles, balance means a lot here. Till today CA never managed it to bring a good well balanced game out. We got early betas in most cases.
The magic part, which will be a big number in the game, will make it a lot harder to balance it.

The trend over the last 13 years of CA gaming was, that the balance got less attention with each new TW version.
Seeing all the new attributes which will come along with Warhammer, I have a hard time to believe, that CA will bring us a good MP part with good balanced battles.

Maybe they should take the Blizzard route and have MP include a restricted list of units and abilities, keeping the most unbalanced ones in SP but not letting them be used in MP.

[Ituralde]

I honestly can not wait for a Warhammer Fantasy: Total War to become reality. Total War games and the Warhammer franchise are a perfect match.

Ever since painting my little wood elf army I wished for a game to capture the massive scale and epicness of Warhammer Fantasy. While I played the demos of previous RTS Warhammer games, none came close to the true feeling. With CA at the helm, I'm really hopeful they can make a good game out of this. I wouldn't even need a Campaign Map. Just give me the raw vicious battles and as many factions as possible!

[fret]

If they remain faithful to the power of some units, they will have to take up more than one unit card slot, and/or they also need to restrict numbers of unit-types. This is achieved in table-top by having a rigid army structure with maximum number of unit-types allowed, given a specific army points total, but if they dont implement something similar on SP it would be plainly ridiculous.

On SP having a general and 19 TW cannons is one thing, but an army of 20 x Steam Tanks or 20 x Lizardmen Stegadons would be silly and a simple case of charge > win.

[Kocmoc]

I think that's likely. TWS2 already had some DLC craziness going on, and THQ's Dawn of War 2 was even worse.



Maybe they should take the Blizzard route and have MP include a restricted list of units and abilities, keeping the most unbalanced ones in SP but not letting them be used in MP.

Well, the basic game design dont really allow that. WC3 is an arcade game, blizz dont come along and tell that "you can see 50.000 mens fighting".
You can ask every good player with enough knowledge and each of them will tell you, that a few handful units are able to balance.

To be fair, the amount of stats a TW game has is immense and a lot more than you can find in WC3. Thats pretty hard to balance.


To your other point. Back in 2001 or 2002 we already had a conversation about 2 different statversions. One for SP and one for MP.
The problem is, that in a campaign you build houses and invest money to gain new, better units, these new units have to be better, else it wouldnt made any sense.
In most cases these new units have hude advances.


The MP part of the TW games has a huge problem and its obvious, if you look at the number of players. I wouldnt call the "focus on MP" a success.

Lets get that straight:

1. Blizz has a much better betatesting group (actual there are real good gamer in, some of the best).
2. Blizz and the telia-server are real successful, there are still playing 50-70k player in the peaks
3. The focus is really on MP.

4. CA. wants too much. An avatar-tree, units with abilities, a learningcurve with lvl ups, same time you can play "classic", you get the MM ( I asked for it and Im still in favor of the basic idea),
you can set up games… too much. keep it simple is a basic rule of online gaming.

5. What we did learn from previous version?!? Arty is a killer, defensive camping slots is bad… Each new version of a TW game allowed arty in MP battles, while everyone with brain ended with going without arty.

6. Clancampaign. Now that was the worst thing I ever saw! To set the power to the mass. Clever. Someone who is in charge for these kind of decisions has to get kicked, instantly.


I dont ask for a game I personal love in every aspect, I just see the different TW version, the progress the game took. Many good ideas… wasted in many ways.
We will see the same once again, for sure. Nice graphics, hundreds of units, almost unlimited mens on the field. You can see how it works.

Look what happened. People come online, they played some days or weeks and as soon they (unless they did disappear earlier) reached lvl 10 they was gone.
I mentioned it from days one, that new player who meet and play lvl 10 or 9 or 8 will get doomed. I brought a good gun and just made them run… Whats that?
Is this a smart way to let new player enjoy the game?

The balance and the abilities ruined the game. It is what it is. A SP game with some MP aspects, which never will attract many multiplayer.


Thatswhy I said initially, the SP part will be fine. I like the Warhammer idea a lot, after 13 years its really something new.

[Sigurd]

I had an acquaintance back in '94 who played Warhammer. I played a few matches as Orcs against his High Elf army - and visited the games workshop near every time I passed it when visiting Glasgow that year.
From my knowledge (which is quite rusty), the classical multiplayer in totalwar is very similar to the Warhammer setup, with fielding an army based on a point system. ... you get some time to order your army and consider a strategy - one figurine in Warhammer represents an army class, not unlike a unit in totalwar.

I think it was this warhammer background that made me instantly recognize the upcoming game Shogun Totalwar back in '99 (I saw a poster of it in a PC game shop).
It is not unthinkable that the CA developers were Warhammer players. IIRC the campaign map was added to the realtime battles - not the other way around. Which means they developed a Warhammer kind of game as a starting point.
This could be full circle back to their roots.

[drone]

It is not unthinkable that the CA developers were Warhammer players. IIRC the campaign map was added to the realtime battles - not the other way around. Which means they developed a Warhammer kind of game as a starting point.
This could be full circle back to their roots.

Captain Fishpants has stated that he worked on the Rogue Trader 40K rulebook for GW back in the day, and he probably wasn't the only one with Warhammer experience. SotHR ('96) and Dark Omen ('98) had smaller battles and linear SP campaigns, but still very much precursors to TW.

[TinCow]

Captain Fishpants has stated that he worked on the Rogue Trader 40K rulebook for GW back in the day, and he probably wasn't the only one with Warhammer experience. SotHR ('96) and Dark Omen ('98) had smaller battles and linear SP campaigns, but still very much precursors to TW.

That's great. I'm getting pretty excited about this idea. I just hope they actually stick with a TW-style game even if they don't have TW in the title. Warhammer needs large-scale combat of that style. I was really bummed when Dawn of War 2 turned into a squad-based tactical game.

[fret]

The zoning is similar to TW, in respect of there is an restricted area of the table that each army can place its units.

Once it is decided who will go first during set-up(a disadvantage), the players then take it in turns to place 1 unit at a time. Once the unit is placed, it can't be moved again during set-up.

Warhammer armies are split like...

Lords - named character, your general, usually only 1 on the field unless its a high point battle. Can either be solo or part of a unit.
Heroes - named characters, can either be solo or part of a unit
Core - rank and file
Special - specialist units like mounted gunpowder, heavy cavelry, beefy rank and file.
Rare - war machines and very powerful or unusual beserker style units


A typical 2500 point army set up would be...

1 x Lord
2 or 3 x Heroes
5 or 6 x Core
2 or 3 x Special
1 or 2 x Rare

The numbers of units allowed for each type are restricted, except for Core which is unlimited.

Within Rare, some units are limited to only 1 on the battlefield, even if the points total of the army you are fielding would allow for 2 x Rare units in total.

[Papewaio]

Warhammer armies are split like...

Lords - named character, your general, usually only 1 on the field unless its a high point battle. Can either be solo or part of a unit.
Heroes - named characters, can either be solo or part of a unit
Core - rank and file
Special - specialist units like mounted gunpowder, heavy cavelry, beefy rank and file.
Rare - war machines and very powerful or unusual beserker style units


A typical 2500 point army set up would be...

1 x Lord
2 or 3 x Heroes
5 or 6 x Core
2 or 3 x Special
1 or 2 x Rare

The numbers of units allowed for each type are restricted, except for Core which is unlimited.

Within Rare, some units are limited to only 1 on the battlefield, even if the points total of the army you are fielding would allow for 2 x Rare units in total.

The unit restrictions were done to make balanced armies more in line with the fluff and somewhat restrict the more Beardy players .

As Warhammer tabletop is by definition multiplayer, a PC version that inherits similar restrictions should be much more MP friendly... Much like Bloodbowl.

[HopAlongBunny]

This is great.

Like MTW I no longer need 'x' numbers of ppl who are willing to spend oodles of dough on figures and spend copious amounts of time painting them. The need to co-ordinate everyones time and energy to fight the battles (which is really difficult now) is also gone. I am hoping CA does this well.

[Kocmoc]

Playing vs. other people in real give you a lot more, than playing on a PC on your own.
My friends and me still meet once a month and have a pretty long evening (night) to play warhammer, we also play other games.

To paint your figures is, at least for me it was this way, interesting and a very personal thing. Im a member of a tin-club here in Leipzig,
i created the figures on my own, not plastic, tin. After that they got painted.

Shogun is also a tabletop, it was out years before STW came as PC game.
here is a link: http://www.google.de/imgres?q=tablet...9,r:1,s:0,i:86

CA pretty much copied that game, its more or less the same.


Anyway, for me the trend goes away from the PC-solo-gaming, back to meeting with friends, playing face to face, talk have fun.