Fog

[Forward Observer]

What bothers me more is that this is the first total war game that no longer gives one an option to try to wait out bad weather. I know that the developers want to show off their fancy weather effects by having it snow in Morocco, but let's face it, this is the age of black gun powder, and armies of the period tended to avoid battle if there was any precipitation what so ever.

Rain, sleet, mist, and snow effectively turned musket carrying missile troops in to mêlée only spearmen and artillery into big useless bronze paperweights. They modeled this correctly in Shogun when arquebus bearing troops simply became useless in the rain, and if I remember correctly they made a big point of this facet of early warfare. Until breech loading weapons firing metallic cartridges became the norm toward the latter part of the 19th century, black powder army strategies were were pretty well ruled by the weather. Remember Napoleon was defeated by the Russian winter and not the Russians.

The same is true about naval warfare also. It was enough of a problem keeping black powder dry given the moisture ridden ocean environment that ships fought in, without adding pouring and blowing rain to the mix. That's why I find the opening CGI movie of two ships of the line duking it out in a rainstorm so bothersome. Ships of this period simply could not function well as gunpowder based combat platforms in rainstorms, and if they did at all, it was certainly not the norm.


--and yes, I agree that the fog effects in Shogun seemed better than in Empire, which is odd considering it pre-dates Empire by over 9 years.

Don't get me wrong, I still like game, and love the visuals for the most part----it's just that there are a lot of odd design choices made for this game that I think are not improvements from previous TW games.

In other words they seemed to have tried to fixed some things that were not broken in the first place.

Cheers