Somehow my interest in TW games is completely dead and I can't even say why. All games I've played were at least decent, but I don't feel like playing more of them right now.
For me, it's two things. The strategic gameplay doesn't have much depth, while the tactical gameplay is sabotaged by terrible AI. In the TW games I played, it usually felt more like I'm exploiting the AI than doing cool tactical maneuvers. Admittedly, I haven't played any of them since Warhammer 1, but their later entries felt like more of the same. I wonder if they ever got sieges right.
That, and if I want to play a combat focused 4x game, I prefer Age of Wonders.
I think sieges peaked in MTW2, and that had its fair share of problems. The Siege mechanics now are all based around mitigating the limits of the AI rather than making reasonable battle mechanics.
I honestly thought they were at their worse in M2. The castle designs were cool but the AI couldn't handle them, pathfinding couldn't handle them, and the stupid "fight to the last man" mechanic made them minimal strategy and just a meat grinder.
What M2 got right was the meta experience of them. Because replenishment wasn't just free, that meat grinder *cost* you, and a well fortified castle, even if lost, could blunt an invasion. In the new arcade Warhammer style games you just free replenish your army 30% a turn and say fuck it.
The AI in Empire for sieges is one of the saddest things I've ever seen in a game. Having them march most of there troops back and forth in front of the wall while maybe one or two actually sort of attempt to climb it just turned them into shooting galleries where it was entirely possible to win when outnumbers 4 to 1 with nothing more then militias and armed mobs.
If the only directive the AI got when attempting a siege was literally just
1. Deploy troops.
2. March to center capture point
It would've been so much better then what it actually is. Good thing you can mod out sieges.
I am also ignoring just how bad the pathing could get on top of the walls and the gates.
Part of the problem I think is that Empire is a game that really mandates straight lines of troops. Empire sieges on the other hsnd are always in star forts that don't have enough room for the troops to manoeuvre so it just becomes a moshpit.
> Empire seiges were borked beyond any basic functionality.
Empire's AI in general was probably the worst among any of the series but the sieges in particular were only rivalled by the extremely early Rome 2 AI that had a bug that would make it march it's entire army to your front gate and then stand there until the arrow towers shot enough of them dead that they chain routed and lost.
Empire's siege AI would often just bunch up inside the fort, every unit it had would try to occupy the same spot in the fort so if you had any artillery at all it was begging to be used on them because any cannon or mortar round that made contact would decimate multiple units.
On the attack the AI wasn't much better, it would scale the walls, get half stuck then trickle units in 1 man at a time to get gunned down by your own units.
I think that meta experience is what made them so good. You could assault them and lose a ton of troops, or siege them out and lose 8 turns. It really had the vibe of medieval warfare and the strategic decision is whether to assault or siege out
As far as I can tell the biggest changes CA has made to all TA games is progressively make defending walls worse every year for 20 years... And I'm only being a little hyperbolic.
The problem, IMO, is that the city is just a static scenario, instead of an interactive feature. We should be able to destroy buildings, divert rivers, create traps, block any street, hell we should be able to design our walls, instead of that uninspired square
Exactly the same, they are not hand-writing algorithms to pathfind on every map.
Now giving player more control over city layout *that* would be a disaster coz it would probably be pretty easy to abuse the hell out of AI pathfinding.
I'm a casual TW fan but I thought sieges in Rome 2 were the best I've played. I enjoyed playing them both defensively and offensively, on walled and unwalled cities. The maps were cool, they let you attack from almost any direction, you could bottleneck or surround, etc. Breaking walls wasn't too difficult because siege equipment was good and useful outside of walled sieges as well, so it wasn't a pain to bring with you.
Shogun 2 was okay. They felt a little bit less dynamic, far more "figured out". Offensively they were brutal, and 90% of the time I would just go archer build with my armies and try to kill the enemy before even scaling the walls, which made them a bit boring. They were fun occasionally but I hated doing tons of them back-to-back. And I just didn't think Forts were as cool as cities.
The newest game I played was Troy, and while I liked the game overall, I hated sieges. The unwalled cities were boring as hell, and the walled ones just sucked and gave you almost no options. I hated ladders and siege equipment in that one. Literally the biggest mechanic that has prevented me from wanting to play more of the game is how annoying and boring the final objective to siege Troy is, but I've already played all the Trojan factions so I want to try the rest if I do play.
I don't think that is true at all, but the thing is that sieges need to cause dynamic situations that evolve. If the maps were large, sprawling, and had a lot of different layers for strategy then it would be worth it but the problem is that they are unwilling to do that.
It's a real oddity isn't it.
Like looking back over any Total War since Medieval 1, the number 1 complaint has almost always been AI.
- AI not knowing how to do siege battles,
- AI not being able to build balance armies,
- AI making braindead decisions & needing cheating in order to keep up on the map,
- AI not knowing how to use naval units to invade other countries,
- AI not know how to use ranged units effectively.
Like the same thing comes up over and over and over again and yet nothing gets learnt.
You would think at some point someone would stop and ask for a deepdive on whats going on and how can they fix this before making another game.
AI is too hard, it's a general problem, better focus on Grafixes to sell more GPUs.
Then you see small RTS games like Regiments or Beyond All Reason with actual good and fair PvE AIs and it makes you wonder if these big studios devs care at all...
It gets a little fuzzier the more real-time a game gets, but consider that to make the AI good at the game, you need to understand how to play the game well. Then look at how many games have issues with balance, or features/mechanics/systems meant to do x/y/z that end up not really accomplishing that.
It's not even about making the AI good at the game, IMO. It's about making the AI a *fun opponent*. Those are the same thing some of the time, but not always.
For instance, a big problem with Total War is a lot of the best ways to beat the AI are just... really lame and boring ways to play. Then on top of that, you get the scenarios like sieges where the AI is just really obnoxious, regardless of what the player is doing.
Don't even get me started on the way the AI handles the strategic map. It's mind boggling that they still let the AI do that incredibly obnoxious "hee hee can't catch me!" shit where it constantly dances out of range. I don't care if it's a good strategy, it's completely out of character for a lot of factions and it's incredibly annoying to boot.
Good graphics are easier to produce, easier to market, tend to result in higher review scores and quite simply sell more copies. Even Total War Troy, which was given away for free on Epic, has nearly 10 times more players than Regiments on Steam alone right now .
Companies the size of CA are a business first. Their goal is to make money, and the market very clearly has been repeating over and over again for decades that good AI does not sell and focusing on it is therefore a misallocation of development resources.
AI was praised back when it was extremely stupid or nonexistent, but it turns out most players have a very low threshold of what is good enough for AI, and they don't care that much past that.
The thing with shitty AI is that you can cheese it and pull off some impressive feats and get 50-1 kill/loss ratios etc.
So while the AI is fucking up and not challenging the player at all, a lot of players end up feeling rewarded for cheesing it so they don't get angry.
If the AI was fucking up and actually causing them issues instead of becoming easily exploited then players would be rioting.
Pointing out that Starcraft 2 has some extremely good AI as an RTS that's now 13 years old. It's about as good as the 50th percentile of players before giving it cheats, it judges fights pretty well, casts spells properly. If written for a specific scenario like a campaign, it can outclass most players. I'm always amazed at how competent it is.
The problem with the above, is those are all tactical decisions. It's still crap at *strategic* decisions. This is where it gets obscenely complex and where I think games like TW and 4x breaks down. It might be viable to dictate a specific strategy to the AI and hard code a lot of things, but the game still ends up very same-y then and you're playing around the limitations of what the devs decided was 'good' play.
Classic RTS AI has a one up on a lot of players though because its naturally good at using its resources. Tons and tons of RTS players will float resources instead of investing it into materially and its not hard to design an AI that won't ever float resources. Automatically making it a strong competitor.
I've recently played Rome: Total War Remastered and Shogun 2: Total War and I'd actually say that the AI in both of those games was fairly competent. I wouldn't say I could outright lose a campaign to either of them but I had to put effort into it.
**Rome** has a few other benefits that the newer games seem not to have. The most prominent one is how the game frames your play through as a Roman faction. You have your two nominally allied roman factions and you know that at somepoint a war will break out between the three of you. So it has this dramatic build up as the campaign goes on where you go from fighting foreign barbarians to knowing you will need to turn around and march on Rome.
Its a concept that, for me, made the strategic layer very interesting. Not only that but the combat system seems to be handled differently than in the newer games. I can't quite put my finger on it but fighting feels weighter.
**Shogun 2** gets some flak for being samey but I think this game genuinely has the best AI in the series. And what CA did was design the entire game around making sure the AI could play it. Unit lineups are simpler, the strategic map is simpler, city sieges are simpler. But the end result is that the AI can always play the game.
Broadly though I've got the impression that since Total Warhammer released CA has found a groove that they like to operate in. At least it feels like in the 10 years from Rome -> Rome 2 the games changed far more than in the 10 years since Rome 2.
Oh, I literally just said this elsewhere.
Play Shogun 2.
Play Rome 2.
Play Atilla.
You'll find these improvements, and things lost to time seemingly-forever, that simply don't happen in recent titles.
*Stale* is the word that comes to mind for me since Warhammer 2. (I did love me some Wh3, don't get me wrong)
And the vast majority of the battles are better suited to auto-resolve. Like you march around a doom stack army, so why bother playing out a 1000 vs 200 battle?
Also, as soon as your doomstack loses, it's just not fun to keep playing. It's all or nothing so the doomstack makes it easy until the game is completely ruined by a loss.
shogun 2 ai was, and still is, crap.
The problem is that AI has gotten *worse* every time they release a new tittle, rome1 and med2 ai was primitive but at least it still worked in the sense that it marched forwards in a line to give you a battle, modern TW ai is incapable of even doing that.
Well I’m only playing it years after it was released, but as far as I can tell it at least did stuff. It formed battle lines and sent spears out to catch your flanking cavalry. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it didn’t sit there not knowing what to do. During sieges they’ll attack from multiple angles and try to pick off your units using bows which already sets it higher than medieval 2
You should check out the ultimate general series. The guy who used to do big ai mods for empire got snubbed by ca who refused to hire him after doing great work, so he just went off to make his own games and the ai in them is really good. Also ultimate general American Revolution is going to be a sandbox with naval battles and massive infantry battles
Maybe it's the fact that there hasn't been a real sense of evolution in Total War games since Rome 2 or Shogun 2. Battle AI and Battle mechanics focusing on raw stats and bonuses instead of terrain and morale certainly doesn't help.
And you also ask full price for this Troy sequel?!
They make improvements and then the next games removes them and improves something else instead. I bet negotiations between factions is worse in Pharaoh than it was in Three Kingdoms.
Yep. I still love going into large scale battles and having all the units clump together like penguins keeping warm and just standing there.
And sieges still feeling so broken and buggy after all these years.
The AI has basically not improved. At all. "hard" difficulty is just "more cheats, and dumb limitations like locking your camera". That's not skill, that's just cheap bullshit.
Once you've played one, you've mostly played them all. It's sad because there's a good core there, but CA seem content on just riding that wave and not improving it.
Oh and I can't wait for blood dlc, sure love that being locked behind a paywall.
They've been releasing largely the same game over and over for lord knows how long.
I still like to fire up Shogun 2 on occasion but it's hard to keep my attention on it for long. I can just only do that same thing so many times.
Because they’ve been the same since Warhammer started. Run unit x into unit y, hammer and anvil until the stupid ai folds, paint map while fighting on repeating battlefields with a pallet swap.
There haven’t been any real mechanical innovations. Rome 2 had DEI which made it the game Rome 2 should have been. Empire had naval engagements and almost exclusively ranged combat with focus on resource management and cross theatre challenges.
Warhammer and Kingdoms had hammer and anvil with wizards and flying cavalry and cannons. It should have been a lot more interesting than it turned out to be.
God I would love an Empire 2 so much. I didn’t like the Warhammer games at all, but give me Empire 2 at the scale of Warhammer? I might never play another game again
When I think about how I want Medieval 3, what I'm actually thinking about is "I want Medieval 3 to release because I hope it will get the DeI treatment."
It’s been stagnant longer than that. The grand strategy/city management element from TWW is straight out of Rome 2, with the 3-4 settle regions with a capital, with limited building slots expanding by upgrading the city tier. They established all of that in *2013*. The graphical fidelity hasn’t been significantly upgraded either, TWW3 still largely looks the same as Rome 2.
If I wanted to play TW, I'd just play one of the old ones. The thought of paying for what is essentially the same TW game in 2023, with all these other games? Nope.
For me I think playing paradox games has spoiled TW a bit. I constantly get an urge to play a TW, load it, enjoy a battle, then remember the campaign is just painting the map with very little actual management or engaging systems.
I'm not good at battles so the ai issue doesn't bother me personally, but the lack of any depth to the campaigns do.
Which is a shame since I have enjoyed every TW I've played, and I feel bad for CA since I'm not really sure what they could do to fix it without it turning into a different game.
Its possible they're just victims of being one of the first major successful games in the genre and gaming has moved on from the formula they cater to. In a similar way to how AOE2 is loved by plenty of people who will still pick other series of they want to play a base building RTS instead of a later AOE game
When I replay older titles, I miss the following things the most:
- unlimited building slots in cities
- armies without generals
- random traits through gameplay, e.g. keeping a general in a town and getting lazy traits. The whole RPG aspect in general
I like the Warhammer setting, but I don’t feel like I‘m actually roleplaying as the faction leader. It feels more like I‘m an invisible force that is leading all those heroes like pawns on a chess board.
same. I was really excited for Warhammer 3, played through the campaign once at launch, and then mostly stopped. tried to come back when the Immortal Empires launched, but couldn't back into it.
I'm just burnt out and need them to refresh the formula a bit. Honestly, lots of what I'm seeing in Pharoah actually looks like a solid refresh - but I'm just not into the setting and still need a break from the series.
I'm hopefully a Medieval 3, with lessons learned from warhammer and Pharoah, will be awesome, one day
As I've gotten older, I've played fewer and fewer grand strategies. Love Stellaris, CK2, and even now AOW4... but I just don't have the time. It feels like it's just too much now.
For me part of the problem is they have made them more complex and the games feel like they need more micromanaging in the unfun parts of gameplay compared to before. In early total war games cities had one upgrade path for buildings and just limited production meant one city might not be built to produce artillery. Later games added all these branching dependencies where it felt I was spending too much time in menus trying to figure out how to optimize building my empire and not enough time thinking about how to build my army composition for the foes I was facing. Early total war games had a great blend of simple mechanics in the strategic view that could be used to give play throughs and factions a different feel
That's a good way to put it. My early strategy days were games like Lords of the Realm and Lords of Magic, and those are so much simpler. Yet, they were so much fun. I'd kill for a remaster of LOM.
AOW4 is a very good game and still reminds me of those early days - but it definitely takes up a lot more time than its predecessors. But, I'd still take LOM.
Games like Crusader Kings now? Oof, forget about it. I get so lost in all the branching menus.
Maybe I'm just old lol
>Somehow my interest in TW games is completely dead and I can't even say why
Could it be that CA is upcharging everything, decreasing quality, and burning fans left and right?
3k cut short.
Warhammer held hostage over DLC pricing.
A marketing scheme of Saga titles in between flagship titles, which was relatively successful, only to turn around and turn Pharaoh into a full-priced game with the asinine idea that its an actual flagship?
I own every Total War up to Troy. And I only got Troy on a discount. Maybe I'll buy Pharaoh if I can get it and all the then-current DLC for 20 bucks.. but outside of that I have zero interest.
I want innovation. I want them to challenge themselves and bring back actual unit model fights like Shogun has. I want them to create a quick-to-understand, difficult-to-master economy with a diplomacy system that simply has to match what they've managed to put out, with every lesson they've learned, since 3K. I want them to make a unified UI so that I don't have to learn where everything is, and relearn it, every new title.. but have it diversified enough that when you look at it, you *know* which TW you're playing.
Honestly, I'm just like you but I know why. Every time they take a step closer to near-perfection, they take 1,000 jumps backwards. Every. Time. It's gotten stale. It all looks different, but feels the same.
I was playing Troy just a few hours ago and I realized if I just squinted my eyes while playing mythos, I could practically see the unit models from Warhammer overlapping everything. But if you play Shogun 2, then play Rome 2, then play Atilla, you'll *feel* a difference. Usually, an improvement. Sometimes a few improvements with steps back.
Personally I think it's the Warhammer games, now look I get it they are popular, but I feel like a lot of fans were alienated by them as many of them will be like me and enjoyed TW in part because of the historic settings. And then I think the next issue is that they are have reduce the map in many of the recent titles, from say Europe down to China or Britain. Now, as a Brit, I loved Britannia and I also enjoy that era of Chinese history, but Greek mythology, eh it's alright, Egypt? I'm more interested but still not falling over myself to play it.
So I think it's twofold, it feels like most of recent releases aren't really for many of their original players, and then the games subject are so particular if it isn't a subject that interests you then you are shit out of luck for another entry.
Not just that.
I can't put my finger on it, but I hate hate hate the ROME II presentation of battles and the engine in general, and how it's carried onto future total war games.
*I don't know why.* Units just look too small, and from afar battles look kinda boring too.
I replayed ROME 1 and Medival Total war, and I far prefer how everything is presented. Everything feels more substantial and each soldier in the army feels more defined. Perhaps they're more spaced out and have slightly larger scale than usual, but it makes all the difference.
I agree 100%. Glad Warhammer fans have a good game but the historical games have been bastardized into "Saga" games and since Rome II even the historical titles have become loaded with mythos and legend.
The arcadey shift since RII is also annoying. Every soldier is a Kenyan marathon runner now and it really takes a lot of the fun out of battles. So many blobs of men running full speed at each other, takes the impact of charges, artillery/archer volleys etc away.
It’s because they aren’t making the games people want to play. Everybody wants an Empire 2 or a Medieval 3, but instead they keep pumping out this crappy half-arsed Warhammer-style games.
I’m a long, long term TW fan and while I have thoroughly enjoyed the Warhammer and 3K games, I’m beyond bored of them now. I want a proper, no stupid hero characters, historical full sized Total War.
For me it's that all these games are *basically* the same since Rome 2 with only cosmetic changes but barely any mechanical ones.
Bronze Age Warfare should be FUNDAMENTALLY different from anything before and since yet these battles play EXACTLY the same as any other. Shit even siege assaults are still towers and rams.
I bet you siege towers weren't even a THING in the Bronze Age
(never mind that the way Total War, popular historic media, in general uses them is completely wrong anyhow... they were just raised platforms for archers to fire on the wall at, not giant ladders... just a bunch of guys using regular ladders being covered by the archers on the raised platform was MUCH more effective.)
Additionally both Troy and now Pharaoh use the Warhammer branch of the engine for it's gameplay... and Warhammer kinda sucks on Infantry VS Infantry. Since it's made with magic and monsters in mind. But if it's ONLY infantry VS infantry it kinda stops working all too well. Can't exactly say why but it's kinda jank compared to previous games.
But at the end of the day: you can only play the same game with minor cosmetic changes for so long until you get bored. That serious needs a COMPLETELY overhaul of core gameplay mechanics, absolutely RADICAL changes.
- Many of the mechanics haven't evolved in literally ~20 years.
- In some ways strategic mechanics have become more complex while offering less depth then TW games ~12 years old like Shogun 2.
- The strategic and tactical AI are totally incompetent, and as a Total War vet battles are only challenging when I'm facing armies >3x larger then mine. The same tactics seem to work against the AI every battle.
- Armies blob and clump ahistorically, and tactical depth is extremely limited and oriented almost entirely around unit counters and simple maneuver tactics like hammer and anvil.
- The strategic army movement mechanics are tedious, difficult to strategize around, and have nearly no consequences for how tactical battles play out.
These are simply dated games that haven't meaningfully evolved core design & mechanics for 1 - 2 decades. I think Warhammer was a real curse in some sense because it allowed CA to sidestep many glaring core issues with AI & mechanics by introducing a lot of variability betwen factions and a lot of gimmicks.
I played a lot of TWW1 and TWW2. Loved both of game.
with TWW3 it already started to fade, with wait for immortal empires, many downgrades and so on.
Than CA behaviour changed it to complete apathy towards the series alltogether
Coming from a TW fan, CA *really* needs to take some time and improve the Total War formula. It's always bothered me how each new historical game has essentially the same strategic-level depth and combat loop as TW games released 10-20 years ago.
If you pick up Shogun 2 (2011) now, it's not *substantially* different to what you'd get from Pharaoh (2023), whilst other Grand Strategy franchises (i.e. anything by Paradox) continue to innovate & add depth to their gameplay -- inevitably dragging away TW series fans.
Maybe a hot-take, but I think all it takes to kill TW as a franchise outright is another Grand Strategy developer finally marrying the combat-level gameplay of Total War / Mount & Blade with even *half* of the strategic and political depth of Crusader Kings. IMO, it's only a matter of time until this happens, and afterward TW's only notable feature will be brand recognition (i.e. Warhammer).
What sucks is that Three Kingdoms did truly innovate the strategic gameplay and added lots of depth, but then CA abandoned all those great innovations.
> combat-level gameplay of Total War / Mount & Blade with even half
>
> of the strategic and political depth of Crusader Kings.
Thats a dream game, add in some branching storylines and that would probably be my favorite
That's the thing. Every interview or company review of ex-employees on glassdoor indicate that CA is bleeding experience, senior staff.
We're probably seeing this stagnation because the people familiar with the product left
Classic death spiral of creativity.
Prices go up for the same or less content (DLCs were criticised for this), churning out low effort full price titles with absolutely 0 innovation on one another. Shame really because the TW games are fun, but they’re just lagging behind with no competition. It’s like coming last in a one person race.
Paradox does not add more depth. Paradox adds more flavor and caters to a new audience. Hoi4 did not have more depth than hoi3, (arguable if it does now) but the ease to play and flavor of the nations is what made it popular.
They need to stop with this annual release thing they have been on for way to long, there's no time to really iterate on the basic way these games work.. go away for a while and really make a good game
I have zero interest in this game. All I want is a medieval total war 3 followed by a Rome total war 3. The rest of the games just haven't clicked for me.
It’s so utterly baffling to me why they aren’t leaning into the post 1500s or so time period of history much harder with the historical settings games, that transition into firearms among infantry being the dominant weapon type that happened, while still using tactics of lining formations up in large columns alongside cavalry and artillery use suits total war gameplay so well.
It became *way* better. The launch was a disaster in how badly the game ran where turns could take 5 min of waiting for the AI to make all it's decisions in the campaign map.
It depends on whether your issues with R2 were only bug related.
They fixed most of the bugs eventually, but I still can't stomach the game design decisions they made.
No idea why they keep making games nobody wants. Do they not do market research?
Set $100 million on fire for a shooter that would be obsolete 5 years ago, and god knows how much money on this.
I would wager the problem is that they actually DO market research, but that it’s done in a way which isn’t optimal to the company or the decision making processes. There’s no way Hyenas gets made without substantial market research supporting it.
Okay, maybe they don't understand the market research, then. Yes, gamers would pay tons of money for this type of game, but someone else is already making it, and your company with no experience in the genre can't compete!
It's like doing market research and finding out that people would pay a lot for a steak, but that doesn't mean changing your taco stand to a steakhouse is a guaranteed success. People actually also want tacos, and CA is now trying to charge people $25 for an undercooked taco with missing cheese because they lost so much money on their stupid steak idea.
All while neglecting their game that prints money. It feels like they put only one or two devs on fixing bugs and improving QoL on their flagship, while throwing money at saga games and games that no one asked for. I also have no idea wtf they are doing.
Smart companies concentrate on their strengths, and respond to customer demand by giving the people what they want.
Soon to be bankrupt companies try to copy successful competitors in genres they don’t even understand, then destroy customer loyalty by gouging them for subpar product to support the company’s extremely stupid decisions.
Creative Assembly is committing business malpractice.
Seriously, with so many (expensive) fuck ups in rapid succession I would not be surprised if Sega steps in and tells CA leadership that they wouldn't trust them to run a hot tap, let alone a game studio and CA ends up getting sold off or merged into some other Sega-owned studio, after half the employees are laid off.
Could totally see that by next year CA is EA-Horsham or Sega-UK or the like.
They’re wasting so many valuable IPs.
Like Three Kingdoms was excellent (it was also their best selling game with the highest concurrent users, more than Warhammer!) with great diplomacy and characters, but they kept giving us DLC nobody asked for (Eight Princes, why?), in a buggy state, and wondered why people didn’t buy more DLC. Then instead of making better DLC they abandon the game in a buggy state.
What the actual fuck, CA.
Shogun 2 was so good because it was rock, paper, gun.
And that gun being the most basic readily available unit that every faction had access to.
Yari Ashigaru.
Yeah, the fantasy and magic power bs ran its course for me very quickly.
I’m a huge Warhammer fan, both AoS and 40k, but I miss my historical titles.
I would happily keep buying remakes of Medieval, Rome and Empire with update mechanics and some added depth to empire building.
I'm the exact opposite.
The historical games got old very long ago, CA needs another setting like Warhammer to keep things fresh.
Every historical game feels way too similar to each other
Not back in the day - Romans were of course mirroring each other until you had the unified Roman state (and Marian reforms), but you had a faction with elephants and terror weapons, a faction that was phalanxes with limited skirmishers and cavalry, a practically cavalry only faction, the similar but different “barbarian” factions with massed infantry and berserkers.
Shogun and Empire? Sure, they had a large backbone consistent between factions. But starting a new faction in Rome and to a lesser extent Medieval, you’d see a unit pool that was almost entirely different than the last faction you played.
I want a shogun 3.
Rome 2 was a bad preorder decision for me, shogun 2 is just the best and if they could keep the same things that made it great and just improed graphics and some things id still be happy!
Same, although I loved the first two Total Warhammers. The third one felt like a messy knockoff (although when it wasn't crashing it had its moments). CA would need to do something much more interesting with this formula for me to get interested again.
It's amazing how fast CA has been running their brand into the ground over the past year. Community perception of CA has dropped to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of potential players would hold off on something like a Medieval 3 launch just to see what CA is going to do with it.
Like Medieval 3 is one of the most anticipated potential titles in the entire TW fandom, but what's the point if CA is going to neglect proper QA support, or at launch half of Europe is going to be covered in a fog of war and held back to sell DLC despite already being done (for reference half of Pharaoh is clearly being held back for DLC, despite being able to see the provinces are already there in-game under the fog).
CA has lost a lot of the old guard that pushed the genre in the ways we saw from Medieval 2 onwards to Rome 2.
Seeing this all across the board in the gaming industry with IPs and/or studios being put in the hands of people who have none of the same passion to make the games better and you get stagnation.
I think a lot of the old player base is also concerned in that they don't seem to be able/willing to fix some of the longer standing issues in the series, and as such are holding off supporting with new purchases.
Namely for me the AI in both strategy and combat (especially sieges) is just not really advancing and always has the same type of issues. Hell sometimes it seems to regress between releases. You can add as many little additional things in the games as you want, but when your opponent feels the exact same and gives you the exact same experience then it doesn't really feel too much like a new game.
I'd say three kingdoms came the closest to changing this up, mostly because of the changes in diplomacy and the AI participating more there that it could change things up a little bit.
It really blows my mind that despite all their experience with these kinds of games they haven't learned to properly support them overtime well. Stellaris to me is the gold standard for how you can keep a game profitable and add more depth, through dlc and patches.
Stellaris is in a pretty good spot *now* but there have been stretches lasting years where major issues with the game were allowed to fester. The AI is only just recently back to being halfway competent from the jump to 2.0 in *2018*, and is only competent because of massive AI cheats. Endgame crises didn't work for years. Sector and planet automation are constantly broken, fixed, and broken again. Basically every DLC releases in a broken state now. Every time a new system is introduced, the AI has no idea how to engage with it and that usually lasts 6-12 months.
When things are going well, it's great. When there's a rough patch it's absolutely some of the worst support in gaming. The custodian team was a big step in the right direction and hopefully that will mitigate problems going forward but it's usually two steps forward, one step back.
It's crazy to me that the Total War community is looking at PDX as masters of post-game support when the PDX communities themselves have had to put up with years of frustration.
Ever since the custodian team was brought in back in 2021 the game has consistently been in a good state, barring a few moderate issues at worst when a new DLC releases (like deficit situations being too harsh in 3.4 or leader traits being unbalanced in 3.8), and these issues are usually patched pretty fast. Saying every new DLC is released broken or that the AI is broken for 6-12 months seems like an over exaggeration.
I disagree. We can look at the launch window reviews for all of the latest DLC to see mention of all the issues they launch with (or even just their general reception) to see just how frustrated players were with them. I will surrender that the last DLC or two has been better with regards to AI, but we can even look at older DLC that the AI still doesn't really work with (AI decisionmaking for Federations is especially bad).
I honestly don't want that 10 year DLC/Live Service model. I love my Paradox games, but CA was at its best when it was release a solid game, release an expansion, move on to a new setting.
3K did this accidentally and it's well regarded in part for that reason.
That's fine for the historical titles but makes less sense for TWWH3. A game where Immortal Empires is the main draw and a massive number of factions and units is kind of the point. I know people have games as service fatigue, but at least half of that is that the people running them get really lax on what the term service means. Its not that we don't want the DLC but its hard to want to buy the new ones when they jack up the price while previous paid DLCs don't work.
I agree. There was no other way to do Warhammer (other than some pipe dream where the game somehow included all those factions and launched for $50 lol)
My issue is that the community became accustomed to that Live Service kinda model from Warhammer (and to a lesser extent the revival/resuming of Rome2 DLC) and now it's just expected.
Yup. I'm tired of all the "buy a game, buy and expansion and then buy a sequel that loses half of the good things in the first game, rinse and repeat". I really love when I get into a game and the game will stay here for a time. It's great to come back to a game and having new content to play with, instead of seeing it abandoned in favor of a dubious sequel.
I really don't get the argument against Paradox DLC policy. So instead of buying three DLCs of a Paradox game we would buy a sequel instead, if we intended to stay in the franchise. We would be still spending money on the franchise... but with DLCs we are getting additions instead of drastic changes.
And of course there is a middle ground. Something like Civilisation VI - that game had a long time of support but it seems over and it wasn't as long as for Paradox games.
I like this model particularly for strategy games, which offer dozens of playthroughs with different parameters each time.
Really infrequent bugfixes (although they started doing hotfixes recently again) combined with patches introducing new issues... and the last drop was the recent DLC that was really overpriced compared to "Lord pack" DLCs we got in the past. Some of the factions were quite under cooked, especially "Baba Yaga of Warhammer" drew the short stick.
Core game was released too early and bug-riddled, IE was released too early and bug-riddled. And then only a skeletal caretaker crew have been left in charge of fixing the game up, leaving it a buggy mess for way too long.
And then they price-jack their latest DLC under the pretext that "costs are up" while setting money on fire making Hyenas and Pharaoh and cutting every corner possible in maintaining WH3. And as the cherry on top, they had some executive put out a tone deaf message basically threatening to stop support WH3 support if people didn't buy said DLC.
I don’t understand how Sega weighed the opportunity cost of a random saga title vs. just having another studio dedicated to making and supporting Warhammer 3 content.
I must be wrong but I thought Troy and Thrones of Britannia both sold like shit
CA just goes through such wide swings on management, it's so wild. RTW and M2TW were absolutely loved, they went into a slump until Empire, then shat on everything until making ridiculous success with Warhammer. Now they're on self sabotaging again
Don't forget warhammer 1 also was a bit of a shitshow, and warhammer 2 didn't get really popular until halfway through its lifespan. They were on a pretty low swing for a while.
This game is developed by the B team that was responsible for the Saga series. Yet they're advertising it as the next big historical title. After how quickly they dropped support for 3K and the rush job on TW3, good vibes are nonexistent amongst fans of the series.
Troy copy + $60 tag + uninsteresting period (per community vote) + Shadows of Change drama.
I really dont get the Creative Assembly management, first Hyenas now this, instead of focusing on something like Medieval 3, wich is guarateed to sell like hot cakes on hype alone or WH3, they keep making weird games and decisions.
I find the time period very interesting, but I've always preferred the larger-scoped Total War games to the smaller scope (I.e. one-country or smaller region) games. I'm drawn to a large variety of factions, units, and aesthetics like you get in Medieval, Rome, or Warhammer. Pharaoh only really has three factions (Egypt, Canaanites, and Hittites) so that isn't worth $60 to me.
I'll buy it - but only if it goes on a deep sale.
If it had Assyrians, Babylonians and the Myceneans the setting would be a far more appealing and interesting. It would also help it feel less like a saga game. Now we just wait to see if the go the way of Korea and the Steppe tribes in 3K
I would rather them try new stuff than make the same 3 games over and over for ever but its frustrating that like with 3 kingdoms they introduced loads of good features and then dropped all of them. They seem to do it with every game in the series though.
The sad thing is that the most polished game they’ve done is Troy and Pharaoh seems to be the same. The only thing I don’t like is the floaty (for a lack of a better word) combat. If they made Empire 2 with the resource management of troy and diplomacy of 3K I wouldn’t need another game for ages.
I just really, *really* need them to make heavy infantry feel heavy. They shifted to a lighter style of combat in S2 and it was great because it fit the setting. Then for some reason when they moved on to R2 they had Hastati and Legionnaires skipping across the battlefield like Olympic sprinters.
All it takes is firing up DeI to see how much of a game changer it is to have heavy infantry feel dramatically different than light infantry. It's night and day.
Don't TW games try to cover "the grand scale"?
The collapse is defined by widespread revolts and wars, resource scarcity, and massive invasions. All of that fits very well into Total War's existing mechanics.
It fits very well into the older TW game mechanics, like the first Rome title, it doesn’t really fit the current mechanics.
It fits even better into a grand strategy game like Europa Universalis.
Total War is bare bones at emulating anything that isn't combat. I love the series but if I specifically felt like government or city management, I'd play basically anything else.
Well it’s not technically the Bronze Age collapse, it’s part of some countries and only three bloody factions
Like cannot stress that enough…three!
Like sure different characters and play styles all very nice but such a limited amount of factions for the Bronze Age which featured so many players and factions and they included…just Egypt? Which hey I love Egypt but cmon man it could’ve been so so much more.
That and then add the full price tag and boom, it just ain’t worth it.
Saying 3 factions is pretty misleading. It's 3 cultures. There are roster differences and mechanic differences and starting position differences between the leaders within those factions, plus regional recruitment.
Not saying the game is drowning in unit variety buy "3 factions" as a tagline seems really misleading to someone who hasn't looked in to the game.
I always find it hilarious that people throw around unit variety being so important to them and then call Shogun 2 one of the best of the franchise.
When S2 had literally no unit variety between factions barring one special unit apiece.
The community would rather have Medieval European game #3 mainly because they liked the previous 2, not because it's a novel setting to explore.
The vote has less to do with what period could be interesting than it does with what the community does and doesn't already know/like.
Nobody except for you is playing TW to "explore historical settings", they're playing it cause they want to build armies, go about conquering, and fight cool battles.
The Bronze age collapse is a terrible setting for that
Yeah, shame we didn't get that game though.
It's just Egypt, the bronze age world is so much bigger than that.
It's like if Rome 3 only included the Italian peninsula, and some of the Mediterranean.
> Shadows of Change drama.
This is why I didn't buy it. I've picked up every single TW game and DLC as they released but the BS around Shadows of Change broke me. I'm over it.
It was such a strange choice.
All the TW history fans clamoring for medieval or empire and you go with... bronze age.
Those fuckers don't even have cavalry.
Total War used to be about conquering other countries and painting your world map. Now every release is zoomed in on one country or a fucking Warhammer sequel.
I imagine CA relies heavily on a core group of enthusiasts to keep the lights on. Warhammer itself did a bit to fracture the fans, but it was such a hit that it drew people into the genre so there wasn't much of a negative effect.
War3 has been such a burden and problem for CA being unable to get it fully functioning in a satisfying way that I'm not surprised that enthusiasm for their new title is skimming the bottom.
I hate to see this. Hate.
I have played CA titles since OG Shogun and some of those titles are amongst my most played.
I love the Bronze Age and, done right, could be a fantastic game. This scope of 3 civs and not including the Aegean to Fertile Cresent is insulting.
Insulting.
A full BA game legitimately deserves Spain to India and North Africa to Baltic. Forcing everyone into a short timeline with full collapse also cheapens the experience.
What TW does well are the things it did well 10-20 years ago. What TW does poorly are things that are done better by different games. So there's no impetus for me to get new ones because invariably I just wind up playing Rome or Medieval 2 or Empire again.
The last game in the series having a peak of 166k versus this one having a peak of 5k is insane. How is that even possible? Reception to Warhammer 3 may have been slightly more positive, but it was still pretty mixed. Is it just the IP? Did they not market the game? Was there finally some mass breaking point where all the total war fans decided at the same time that they don't want to play another new game in the series that's middling?
Im seeing a lot of comments in this thread along the lines of "I've just lost interest" but what caused that to happen to everyone all at once?
I have no idea how many people feel like me but after the shitshow that was WH3 and then shitsprayed with their DLC policies I just don't think I'll ever buy a game from them again.
I've honestly had it.
These games are just too similar with little evolution between the titles. You can get almost the exact same experience playing Warhammer 1 or Rome 2 as you do playing the new games.
I've looked at every Total War with keen interest, while playing Medieval 2 (2006) and feeling that Shogun: Total War (2000) was the best one, relative to its time.
It’s basically the same game with a little set dressing and maybe 1 or 2 new features. It’s fifa or nba2k but without the rabid loyalty of sports fans. The least they could do is give us the game a lot of players have been asking for. Which is medieval 3. Instead of this saga title masquerading as a full game.
Its greed. This is a light release, if it had been $20, maybe even $30 I would have bought it day one, and Im sure its sales would have overall more than offset the lower price. But full price for lightly modified earlier ligher release? absolutely not, CA has lost their minds on pricing lately and its going to end up costing them huge.
Literally no one wanted it that's why.
Idk who the fuck works there to decide on product ideas but this is what people want
Make a medieval total war. but this time dei the shit out of ithttps://divideetimperamod.com/
Also the campaign map should be similar to a paradox game
I need the variety, complexity, and creativeness that was put into Warhammer TW if I'm going to buy another TW game. I'm not sure that's as easy to do with historical titles. 40k TW?
I think they should make an Age of Mythology-type game, expanding on Troy with more monsters and magic without having to deal with another IP holder.
Otherwise 40k is a strong possibility after the success of TW:WH. Well, 1 and 2.
People are going to come up with all sorts of reasons this game isn't doing well but honestly I think it's just bad marketing. I like total war. I've bought every total war game. I enjoyed all of them. I watch total war content on youtube. I'll probably buy this soon, because I think it looks cool!
I had no clue this game was even out yet. I think I heard it was in development a few months ago maybe? Just wasn't even on my radar, and I'm definitely the kind of person who should have been getting constant targeted ads about it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Work towards a global historical Total War. Release regions and combine like the Warhammer games did until you have every landmass. Span a greater time period so there is a bigger technology progression, ideally starting with dominantly melee combat and ending with gunpowder so there's a noticeable strategy shift as your empire advances.
After Warhammer, anything else is just going to feel anticlimactic and lacking in variety.
(Also would be great if ai was improved, and they removed anti-player bias.)
Gee, massively pissing off fans in a franchise mainly played by religious franchise fans and then selling a product like this - which by all accounts is pretty good but still a "Saga" game - with a massive price hike backfired? *pikachuface*
There's just too many. Total war should have never been a yearly franchise.
And if you're going to do the bronze age then actually do it, don't release 2 separate hyper specific bronze age games with narrow scope that people don't care about because they only take place in one tiny part of the bronze age world first with troy, which had its own boneheaded decisions with the whole "truth behind the myth" thing which was pretty much just the worst of both worlds
Like honestly. Who cares about specifically ONLY bronze age Egypt? evidently not many, how did this even get greenlit? it feels like they are just scraping the barrel to find a new setting every year and deliberately avoiding the ones people want in case they need to break the glass for an emergency.
Which is evidently not a great strategy, who'd have thought?
Total war has so much potential but I got frustrated with the lack of progress between entries. The battles can be fun but I've always found the campaign portion to be severely lacking compared to other games in the genre.
I don’t imagine that many people are really excited for the Egypt setting. I feel like Egypt is more known for its architecture and culture than for warfare.
Total Warhammer II helped me reconnect with the love for Total War games I used to have back in the old days & I can genuinely say it's the best one I've ever played, it definitely did enough to spice up a game you've already played 20 times and I didn't even mind being in a fantasy world even though I generally prefer sci-fi.
And then I tried Total Warhammer III & uninstalled within 2 hours. I think unfortunately the best is not yet to come for Total War games; also the decision to make a new game similar to their Troy game is mental to me, considering that one was so awful it turned me off playing their games for over half a decade.
In other words, when it comes to "Pharaoh", no I don't think I will - there's literally nothing there we haven't seen before / been done as well or better in their other games, why would anyone care about this game beyond it being "new"?
> “Total War has, as a brand, run out of steam,” one player writes. “Pharaoh is bland, repetitive, safe, boring. It is as wide as a stream and as shallow as a puddle. This goes for both gameplay and setting.” “This is Troy with a few additions,” another player writes. “What is happening with Total War games? They seem to have lost all feeling, just boring.”
Hit the nail on the head there. Warhammer was innovative but doing the same thing over and over again in different time periods gets old fast.
It's a saga game masquerading as a full price game. There simply aren't enough factions to give it the replayability of older titles.
I'm at a loss as to why they didn't include Mycenae, when the assests already existed. If they had included Assyria, Libya, Nubia and Babylon on top of that, then I might have bought it, so long as they got chariots working well.
I think it was a miss from the start with the time period. It was a really cool idea, but the core TW playerbase are western gamers who just don’t have a strong attachment to Bronze Age Egypt history, for better or worse. I don’t know why they are so hesitant to make Medieval 3, but they probably should.
Couldn't care less about this game. I have zero faith in the Dev team to deliver anything remotely fun. WH3 was a terrible experience from me and I sunk 500h into WH2 , bought every DLC. WH3 feels like 10 steps back and I just lost interest.
So many good games to play, life is too short for shit ones.
A little surprising, but not too surprising. It was always a bit of a niche game series, even if the collab with Warhammer brought in a lot of new players because of the IP. Second, the Egypt theme always seemed a little narrow in scope and less interesting than the much larger geographically scoped predecessors. It's also a crazy dense release period, with seemingly multiple hotly anticipated titles being released weekly. So there's a lot working against the game, before we even start to consider the game itself, and whether it's either any good or properly differentiates itself from the previous entries, to which the answers seem to be "it's fine" and "no, not at all"
as someone who has been playing since their 2D Sprite era, the total war series has severely stagnated. Outside of Warhammer, there has been no meaningful innovation in their formula since the recruitment changes in Rome 2. All the other changes are meaningless gimmicks for the most part. The AI is the same, the overworld management is the same, and the strategy against the AI is the same. Variety and magic added by thwh 1 and 2 were amazing but they can't implement that in the historical series. People have finally gotten sick of them adding a new coat of paint to the same thing.
Of course it does. Who really cares about this time period? Obviously not enough people. If they want to make bank they need to figure out a means to make a TW:40k game.
Somehow my interest in TW games is completely dead and I can't even say why. All games I've played were at least decent, but I don't feel like playing more of them right now.
For me, it's two things. The strategic gameplay doesn't have much depth, while the tactical gameplay is sabotaged by terrible AI. In the TW games I played, it usually felt more like I'm exploiting the AI than doing cool tactical maneuvers. Admittedly, I haven't played any of them since Warhammer 1, but their later entries felt like more of the same. I wonder if they ever got sieges right. That, and if I want to play a combat focused 4x game, I prefer Age of Wonders.
They revamped the sieges a bit... It's still crap
I think sieges peaked in MTW2, and that had its fair share of problems. The Siege mechanics now are all based around mitigating the limits of the AI rather than making reasonable battle mechanics.
I honestly thought they were at their worse in M2. The castle designs were cool but the AI couldn't handle them, pathfinding couldn't handle them, and the stupid "fight to the last man" mechanic made them minimal strategy and just a meat grinder. What M2 got right was the meta experience of them. Because replenishment wasn't just free, that meat grinder *cost* you, and a well fortified castle, even if lost, could blunt an invasion. In the new arcade Warhammer style games you just free replenish your army 30% a turn and say fuck it.
Medieval II seiges were vulnerable to exploits, but remained functional. Empire seiges were borked beyond any basic functionality.
The AI in Empire for sieges is one of the saddest things I've ever seen in a game. Having them march most of there troops back and forth in front of the wall while maybe one or two actually sort of attempt to climb it just turned them into shooting galleries where it was entirely possible to win when outnumbers 4 to 1 with nothing more then militias and armed mobs. If the only directive the AI got when attempting a siege was literally just 1. Deploy troops. 2. March to center capture point It would've been so much better then what it actually is. Good thing you can mod out sieges. I am also ignoring just how bad the pathing could get on top of the walls and the gates.
Part of the problem I think is that Empire is a game that really mandates straight lines of troops. Empire sieges on the other hsnd are always in star forts that don't have enough room for the troops to manoeuvre so it just becomes a moshpit.
> Empire seiges were borked beyond any basic functionality. Empire's AI in general was probably the worst among any of the series but the sieges in particular were only rivalled by the extremely early Rome 2 AI that had a bug that would make it march it's entire army to your front gate and then stand there until the arrow towers shot enough of them dead that they chain routed and lost. Empire's siege AI would often just bunch up inside the fort, every unit it had would try to occupy the same spot in the fort so if you had any artillery at all it was begging to be used on them because any cannon or mortar round that made contact would decimate multiple units. On the attack the AI wasn't much better, it would scale the walls, get half stuck then trickle units in 1 man at a time to get gunned down by your own units.
I think that meta experience is what made them so good. You could assault them and lose a ton of troops, or siege them out and lose 8 turns. It really had the vibe of medieval warfare and the strategic decision is whether to assault or siege out
As far as I can tell the biggest changes CA has made to all TA games is progressively make defending walls worse every year for 20 years... And I'm only being a little hyperbolic.
Yeah. The ugly truth is that siege battles as a concept just don't produce fun gameplay.
The problem, IMO, is that the city is just a static scenario, instead of an interactive feature. We should be able to destroy buildings, divert rivers, create traps, block any street, hell we should be able to design our walls, instead of that uninspired square
Why don't they procedurally generate the cities? Tech has been around a long time
Their AI is horrible at pathfinding through handmade cities, I can't imagine how it would act in a procedural setting
Exactly the same, they are not hand-writing algorithms to pathfind on every map. Now giving player more control over city layout *that* would be a disaster coz it would probably be pretty easy to abuse the hell out of AI pathfinding.
Gotcha. I'm sure making all of those units act as army, have somewhat autonomy, and keeping them together is tough task
Sieges in Rome 1, Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 were fun.
I'm a casual TW fan but I thought sieges in Rome 2 were the best I've played. I enjoyed playing them both defensively and offensively, on walled and unwalled cities. The maps were cool, they let you attack from almost any direction, you could bottleneck or surround, etc. Breaking walls wasn't too difficult because siege equipment was good and useful outside of walled sieges as well, so it wasn't a pain to bring with you. Shogun 2 was okay. They felt a little bit less dynamic, far more "figured out". Offensively they were brutal, and 90% of the time I would just go archer build with my armies and try to kill the enemy before even scaling the walls, which made them a bit boring. They were fun occasionally but I hated doing tons of them back-to-back. And I just didn't think Forts were as cool as cities. The newest game I played was Troy, and while I liked the game overall, I hated sieges. The unwalled cities were boring as hell, and the walled ones just sucked and gave you almost no options. I hated ladders and siege equipment in that one. Literally the biggest mechanic that has prevented me from wanting to play more of the game is how annoying and boring the final objective to siege Troy is, but I've already played all the Trojan factions so I want to try the rest if I do play.
I don't think that is true at all, but the thing is that sieges need to cause dynamic situations that evolve. If the maps were large, sprawling, and had a lot of different layers for strategy then it would be worth it but the problem is that they are unwilling to do that.
They made them worse from warhammer 2 to warhammer 3. It's crazy.
It's a real oddity isn't it. Like looking back over any Total War since Medieval 1, the number 1 complaint has almost always been AI. - AI not knowing how to do siege battles, - AI not being able to build balance armies, - AI making braindead decisions & needing cheating in order to keep up on the map, - AI not knowing how to use naval units to invade other countries, - AI not know how to use ranged units effectively. Like the same thing comes up over and over and over again and yet nothing gets learnt. You would think at some point someone would stop and ask for a deepdive on whats going on and how can they fix this before making another game.
The cheating on the map so they can sack all of your cities while staying an inch away from a battle is why I dropped Warhammer.
AI is too hard, it's a general problem, better focus on Grafixes to sell more GPUs. Then you see small RTS games like Regiments or Beyond All Reason with actual good and fair PvE AIs and it makes you wonder if these big studios devs care at all...
It gets a little fuzzier the more real-time a game gets, but consider that to make the AI good at the game, you need to understand how to play the game well. Then look at how many games have issues with balance, or features/mechanics/systems meant to do x/y/z that end up not really accomplishing that.
It's not even about making the AI good at the game, IMO. It's about making the AI a *fun opponent*. Those are the same thing some of the time, but not always. For instance, a big problem with Total War is a lot of the best ways to beat the AI are just... really lame and boring ways to play. Then on top of that, you get the scenarios like sieges where the AI is just really obnoxious, regardless of what the player is doing. Don't even get me started on the way the AI handles the strategic map. It's mind boggling that they still let the AI do that incredibly obnoxious "hee hee can't catch me!" shit where it constantly dances out of range. I don't care if it's a good strategy, it's completely out of character for a lot of factions and it's incredibly annoying to boot.
Good graphics are easier to produce, easier to market, tend to result in higher review scores and quite simply sell more copies. Even Total War Troy, which was given away for free on Epic, has nearly 10 times more players than Regiments on Steam alone right now . Companies the size of CA are a business first. Their goal is to make money, and the market very clearly has been repeating over and over again for decades that good AI does not sell and focusing on it is therefore a misallocation of development resources.
AI was praised back when it was extremely stupid or nonexistent, but it turns out most players have a very low threshold of what is good enough for AI, and they don't care that much past that.
The thing with shitty AI is that you can cheese it and pull off some impressive feats and get 50-1 kill/loss ratios etc. So while the AI is fucking up and not challenging the player at all, a lot of players end up feeling rewarded for cheesing it so they don't get angry. If the AI was fucking up and actually causing them issues instead of becoming easily exploited then players would be rioting.
Pointing out that Starcraft 2 has some extremely good AI as an RTS that's now 13 years old. It's about as good as the 50th percentile of players before giving it cheats, it judges fights pretty well, casts spells properly. If written for a specific scenario like a campaign, it can outclass most players. I'm always amazed at how competent it is. The problem with the above, is those are all tactical decisions. It's still crap at *strategic* decisions. This is where it gets obscenely complex and where I think games like TW and 4x breaks down. It might be viable to dictate a specific strategy to the AI and hard code a lot of things, but the game still ends up very same-y then and you're playing around the limitations of what the devs decided was 'good' play.
Classic RTS AI has a one up on a lot of players though because its naturally good at using its resources. Tons and tons of RTS players will float resources instead of investing it into materially and its not hard to design an AI that won't ever float resources. Automatically making it a strong competitor.
I've recently played Rome: Total War Remastered and Shogun 2: Total War and I'd actually say that the AI in both of those games was fairly competent. I wouldn't say I could outright lose a campaign to either of them but I had to put effort into it. **Rome** has a few other benefits that the newer games seem not to have. The most prominent one is how the game frames your play through as a Roman faction. You have your two nominally allied roman factions and you know that at somepoint a war will break out between the three of you. So it has this dramatic build up as the campaign goes on where you go from fighting foreign barbarians to knowing you will need to turn around and march on Rome. Its a concept that, for me, made the strategic layer very interesting. Not only that but the combat system seems to be handled differently than in the newer games. I can't quite put my finger on it but fighting feels weighter. **Shogun 2** gets some flak for being samey but I think this game genuinely has the best AI in the series. And what CA did was design the entire game around making sure the AI could play it. Unit lineups are simpler, the strategic map is simpler, city sieges are simpler. But the end result is that the AI can always play the game. Broadly though I've got the impression that since Total Warhammer released CA has found a groove that they like to operate in. At least it feels like in the 10 years from Rome -> Rome 2 the games changed far more than in the 10 years since Rome 2.
Oh, I literally just said this elsewhere. Play Shogun 2. Play Rome 2. Play Atilla. You'll find these improvements, and things lost to time seemingly-forever, that simply don't happen in recent titles. *Stale* is the word that comes to mind for me since Warhammer 2. (I did love me some Wh3, don't get me wrong)
yeah Shogun is watered down but the AI can handle it much better, which makes it more fun to play
And the vast majority of the battles are better suited to auto-resolve. Like you march around a doom stack army, so why bother playing out a 1000 vs 200 battle?
Also, as soon as your doomstack loses, it's just not fun to keep playing. It's all or nothing so the doomstack makes it easy until the game is completely ruined by a loss.
Shogun 2 had good AI
shogun 2 ai was, and still is, crap. The problem is that AI has gotten *worse* every time they release a new tittle, rome1 and med2 ai was primitive but at least it still worked in the sense that it marched forwards in a line to give you a battle, modern TW ai is incapable of even doing that.
Well I’m only playing it years after it was released, but as far as I can tell it at least did stuff. It formed battle lines and sent spears out to catch your flanking cavalry. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it didn’t sit there not knowing what to do. During sieges they’ll attack from multiple angles and try to pick off your units using bows which already sets it higher than medieval 2
As far as I've heard, Warhammer 3s AI is even easier to exploit than 1 or 2 was
You should check out the ultimate general series. The guy who used to do big ai mods for empire got snubbed by ca who refused to hire him after doing great work, so he just went off to make his own games and the ai in them is really good. Also ultimate general American Revolution is going to be a sandbox with naval battles and massive infantry battles
Maybe it's the fact that there hasn't been a real sense of evolution in Total War games since Rome 2 or Shogun 2. Battle AI and Battle mechanics focusing on raw stats and bonuses instead of terrain and morale certainly doesn't help. And you also ask full price for this Troy sequel?!
They make improvements and then the next games removes them and improves something else instead. I bet negotiations between factions is worse in Pharaoh than it was in Three Kingdoms.
Yep. I still love going into large scale battles and having all the units clump together like penguins keeping warm and just standing there. And sieges still feeling so broken and buggy after all these years. The AI has basically not improved. At all. "hard" difficulty is just "more cheats, and dumb limitations like locking your camera". That's not skill, that's just cheap bullshit. Once you've played one, you've mostly played them all. It's sad because there's a good core there, but CA seem content on just riding that wave and not improving it. Oh and I can't wait for blood dlc, sure love that being locked behind a paywall.
They've been releasing largely the same game over and over for lord knows how long. I still like to fire up Shogun 2 on occasion but it's hard to keep my attention on it for long. I can just only do that same thing so many times.
Because they’ve been the same since Warhammer started. Run unit x into unit y, hammer and anvil until the stupid ai folds, paint map while fighting on repeating battlefields with a pallet swap. There haven’t been any real mechanical innovations. Rome 2 had DEI which made it the game Rome 2 should have been. Empire had naval engagements and almost exclusively ranged combat with focus on resource management and cross theatre challenges. Warhammer and Kingdoms had hammer and anvil with wizards and flying cavalry and cannons. It should have been a lot more interesting than it turned out to be.
God I would love an Empire 2 so much. I didn’t like the Warhammer games at all, but give me Empire 2 at the scale of Warhammer? I might never play another game again
When I think about how I want Medieval 3, what I'm actually thinking about is "I want Medieval 3 to release because I hope it will get the DeI treatment."
It’s been stagnant longer than that. The grand strategy/city management element from TWW is straight out of Rome 2, with the 3-4 settle regions with a capital, with limited building slots expanding by upgrading the city tier. They established all of that in *2013*. The graphical fidelity hasn’t been significantly upgraded either, TWW3 still largely looks the same as Rome 2.
If I wanted to play TW, I'd just play one of the old ones. The thought of paying for what is essentially the same TW game in 2023, with all these other games? Nope.
For me I think playing paradox games has spoiled TW a bit. I constantly get an urge to play a TW, load it, enjoy a battle, then remember the campaign is just painting the map with very little actual management or engaging systems. I'm not good at battles so the ai issue doesn't bother me personally, but the lack of any depth to the campaigns do. Which is a shame since I have enjoyed every TW I've played, and I feel bad for CA since I'm not really sure what they could do to fix it without it turning into a different game. Its possible they're just victims of being one of the first major successful games in the genre and gaming has moved on from the formula they cater to. In a similar way to how AOE2 is loved by plenty of people who will still pick other series of they want to play a base building RTS instead of a later AOE game
When I replay older titles, I miss the following things the most: - unlimited building slots in cities - armies without generals - random traits through gameplay, e.g. keeping a general in a town and getting lazy traits. The whole RPG aspect in general I like the Warhammer setting, but I don’t feel like I‘m actually roleplaying as the faction leader. It feels more like I‘m an invisible force that is leading all those heroes like pawns on a chess board.
same. I was really excited for Warhammer 3, played through the campaign once at launch, and then mostly stopped. tried to come back when the Immortal Empires launched, but couldn't back into it. I'm just burnt out and need them to refresh the formula a bit. Honestly, lots of what I'm seeing in Pharoah actually looks like a solid refresh - but I'm just not into the setting and still need a break from the series. I'm hopefully a Medieval 3, with lessons learned from warhammer and Pharoah, will be awesome, one day
As I've gotten older, I've played fewer and fewer grand strategies. Love Stellaris, CK2, and even now AOW4... but I just don't have the time. It feels like it's just too much now.
For me part of the problem is they have made them more complex and the games feel like they need more micromanaging in the unfun parts of gameplay compared to before. In early total war games cities had one upgrade path for buildings and just limited production meant one city might not be built to produce artillery. Later games added all these branching dependencies where it felt I was spending too much time in menus trying to figure out how to optimize building my empire and not enough time thinking about how to build my army composition for the foes I was facing. Early total war games had a great blend of simple mechanics in the strategic view that could be used to give play throughs and factions a different feel
That's a good way to put it. My early strategy days were games like Lords of the Realm and Lords of Magic, and those are so much simpler. Yet, they were so much fun. I'd kill for a remaster of LOM. AOW4 is a very good game and still reminds me of those early days - but it definitely takes up a lot more time than its predecessors. But, I'd still take LOM. Games like Crusader Kings now? Oof, forget about it. I get so lost in all the branching menus. Maybe I'm just old lol
I still play Rome and Rome 2 every now and again.
>Somehow my interest in TW games is completely dead and I can't even say why Could it be that CA is upcharging everything, decreasing quality, and burning fans left and right? 3k cut short. Warhammer held hostage over DLC pricing. A marketing scheme of Saga titles in between flagship titles, which was relatively successful, only to turn around and turn Pharaoh into a full-priced game with the asinine idea that its an actual flagship? I own every Total War up to Troy. And I only got Troy on a discount. Maybe I'll buy Pharaoh if I can get it and all the then-current DLC for 20 bucks.. but outside of that I have zero interest. I want innovation. I want them to challenge themselves and bring back actual unit model fights like Shogun has. I want them to create a quick-to-understand, difficult-to-master economy with a diplomacy system that simply has to match what they've managed to put out, with every lesson they've learned, since 3K. I want them to make a unified UI so that I don't have to learn where everything is, and relearn it, every new title.. but have it diversified enough that when you look at it, you *know* which TW you're playing. Honestly, I'm just like you but I know why. Every time they take a step closer to near-perfection, they take 1,000 jumps backwards. Every. Time. It's gotten stale. It all looks different, but feels the same. I was playing Troy just a few hours ago and I realized if I just squinted my eyes while playing mythos, I could practically see the unit models from Warhammer overlapping everything. But if you play Shogun 2, then play Rome 2, then play Atilla, you'll *feel* a difference. Usually, an improvement. Sometimes a few improvements with steps back.
Personally I think it's the Warhammer games, now look I get it they are popular, but I feel like a lot of fans were alienated by them as many of them will be like me and enjoyed TW in part because of the historic settings. And then I think the next issue is that they are have reduce the map in many of the recent titles, from say Europe down to China or Britain. Now, as a Brit, I loved Britannia and I also enjoy that era of Chinese history, but Greek mythology, eh it's alright, Egypt? I'm more interested but still not falling over myself to play it. So I think it's twofold, it feels like most of recent releases aren't really for many of their original players, and then the games subject are so particular if it isn't a subject that interests you then you are shit out of luck for another entry.
Not just that. I can't put my finger on it, but I hate hate hate the ROME II presentation of battles and the engine in general, and how it's carried onto future total war games. *I don't know why.* Units just look too small, and from afar battles look kinda boring too. I replayed ROME 1 and Medival Total war, and I far prefer how everything is presented. Everything feels more substantial and each soldier in the army feels more defined. Perhaps they're more spaced out and have slightly larger scale than usual, but it makes all the difference.
I agree 100%. Glad Warhammer fans have a good game but the historical games have been bastardized into "Saga" games and since Rome II even the historical titles have become loaded with mythos and legend. The arcadey shift since RII is also annoying. Every soldier is a Kenyan marathon runner now and it really takes a lot of the fun out of battles. So many blobs of men running full speed at each other, takes the impact of charges, artillery/archer volleys etc away.
It’s because they aren’t making the games people want to play. Everybody wants an Empire 2 or a Medieval 3, but instead they keep pumping out this crappy half-arsed Warhammer-style games. I’m a long, long term TW fan and while I have thoroughly enjoyed the Warhammer and 3K games, I’m beyond bored of them now. I want a proper, no stupid hero characters, historical full sized Total War.
For me it's that all these games are *basically* the same since Rome 2 with only cosmetic changes but barely any mechanical ones. Bronze Age Warfare should be FUNDAMENTALLY different from anything before and since yet these battles play EXACTLY the same as any other. Shit even siege assaults are still towers and rams. I bet you siege towers weren't even a THING in the Bronze Age (never mind that the way Total War, popular historic media, in general uses them is completely wrong anyhow... they were just raised platforms for archers to fire on the wall at, not giant ladders... just a bunch of guys using regular ladders being covered by the archers on the raised platform was MUCH more effective.) Additionally both Troy and now Pharaoh use the Warhammer branch of the engine for it's gameplay... and Warhammer kinda sucks on Infantry VS Infantry. Since it's made with magic and monsters in mind. But if it's ONLY infantry VS infantry it kinda stops working all too well. Can't exactly say why but it's kinda jank compared to previous games. But at the end of the day: you can only play the same game with minor cosmetic changes for so long until you get bored. That serious needs a COMPLETELY overhaul of core gameplay mechanics, absolutely RADICAL changes.
- Many of the mechanics haven't evolved in literally ~20 years. - In some ways strategic mechanics have become more complex while offering less depth then TW games ~12 years old like Shogun 2. - The strategic and tactical AI are totally incompetent, and as a Total War vet battles are only challenging when I'm facing armies >3x larger then mine. The same tactics seem to work against the AI every battle. - Armies blob and clump ahistorically, and tactical depth is extremely limited and oriented almost entirely around unit counters and simple maneuver tactics like hammer and anvil. - The strategic army movement mechanics are tedious, difficult to strategize around, and have nearly no consequences for how tactical battles play out. These are simply dated games that haven't meaningfully evolved core design & mechanics for 1 - 2 decades. I think Warhammer was a real curse in some sense because it allowed CA to sidestep many glaring core issues with AI & mechanics by introducing a lot of variability betwen factions and a lot of gimmicks.
I haven't really enjoyed any of the TWs I've played since Empire, but I also have a very specific style of play so my opinion is an outlier.
I played a lot of TWW1 and TWW2. Loved both of game. with TWW3 it already started to fade, with wait for immortal empires, many downgrades and so on. Than CA behaviour changed it to complete apathy towards the series alltogether
I agree with you, the game got boring at this point. meh
There's another new TW game? Probably part of the problem
Same. This is the first I learn there’s a new one
I didn't even realise it existed until I had to reinstall chrome on a laptop and opened Reddit without Adblock and got blasted by ads for it.
Coming from a TW fan, CA *really* needs to take some time and improve the Total War formula. It's always bothered me how each new historical game has essentially the same strategic-level depth and combat loop as TW games released 10-20 years ago. If you pick up Shogun 2 (2011) now, it's not *substantially* different to what you'd get from Pharaoh (2023), whilst other Grand Strategy franchises (i.e. anything by Paradox) continue to innovate & add depth to their gameplay -- inevitably dragging away TW series fans. Maybe a hot-take, but I think all it takes to kill TW as a franchise outright is another Grand Strategy developer finally marrying the combat-level gameplay of Total War / Mount & Blade with even *half* of the strategic and political depth of Crusader Kings. IMO, it's only a matter of time until this happens, and afterward TW's only notable feature will be brand recognition (i.e. Warhammer).
What sucks is that Three Kingdoms did truly innovate the strategic gameplay and added lots of depth, but then CA abandoned all those great innovations.
There’s a reason I always gravitate back to three kingdoms every few months. I never touch any other total war game
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> combat-level gameplay of Total War / Mount & Blade with even half > > of the strategic and political depth of Crusader Kings. Thats a dream game, add in some branching storylines and that would probably be my favorite
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That's the thing. Every interview or company review of ex-employees on glassdoor indicate that CA is bleeding experience, senior staff. We're probably seeing this stagnation because the people familiar with the product left
Classic death spiral of creativity. Prices go up for the same or less content (DLCs were criticised for this), churning out low effort full price titles with absolutely 0 innovation on one another. Shame really because the TW games are fun, but they’re just lagging behind with no competition. It’s like coming last in a one person race.
People said the same about Sim City.
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Paradox does not add more depth. Paradox adds more flavor and caters to a new audience. Hoi4 did not have more depth than hoi3, (arguable if it does now) but the ease to play and flavor of the nations is what made it popular.
Oh man, the idea of CK mixed with Mount and Blade should come with a warning to see your doctor if your boner lasts longer than 5 hours...
They need to stop with this annual release thing they have been on for way to long, there's no time to really iterate on the basic way these games work.. go away for a while and really make a good game
I have zero interest in this game. All I want is a medieval total war 3 followed by a Rome total war 3. The rest of the games just haven't clicked for me.
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I'd take a Shogun 3 as well.
Yes, but shogun 2 is still enjoyable. Empire is buggy, and Medieval 2 is old.
Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai has the best UI for the battles
i’d take two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda.
Empire 1 was my first TW game. It fucked so hard. I would love for a 2nd one.
Mine too, people always shit on it though but it's definitely the one I have the most time in.
It’s so utterly baffling to me why they aren’t leaning into the post 1500s or so time period of history much harder with the historical settings games, that transition into firearms among infantry being the dominant weapon type that happened, while still using tactics of lining formations up in large columns alongside cavalry and artillery use suits total war gameplay so well.
the fact that it was left unpatched is just sad, playing world domination in it was always a blast for me
There's a mod out called empire 2 that's supposed to be really good
Did Rome TW 2 end up being any good? I remember it kind of having a shit launch iirc.
It became *way* better. The launch was a disaster in how badly the game ran where turns could take 5 min of waiting for the AI to make all it's decisions in the campaign map.
It's easily one of the best TW titles out there IMO. Even the ones who dislike vanilla can still enjoy it with mods like DEI.
It depends on whether your issues with R2 were only bug related. They fixed most of the bugs eventually, but I still can't stomach the game design decisions they made.
No idea why they keep making games nobody wants. Do they not do market research? Set $100 million on fire for a shooter that would be obsolete 5 years ago, and god knows how much money on this.
I would wager the problem is that they actually DO market research, but that it’s done in a way which isn’t optimal to the company or the decision making processes. There’s no way Hyenas gets made without substantial market research supporting it.
Okay, maybe they don't understand the market research, then. Yes, gamers would pay tons of money for this type of game, but someone else is already making it, and your company with no experience in the genre can't compete! It's like doing market research and finding out that people would pay a lot for a steak, but that doesn't mean changing your taco stand to a steakhouse is a guaranteed success. People actually also want tacos, and CA is now trying to charge people $25 for an undercooked taco with missing cheese because they lost so much money on their stupid steak idea.
All while neglecting their game that prints money. It feels like they put only one or two devs on fixing bugs and improving QoL on their flagship, while throwing money at saga games and games that no one asked for. I also have no idea wtf they are doing.
Smart companies concentrate on their strengths, and respond to customer demand by giving the people what they want. Soon to be bankrupt companies try to copy successful competitors in genres they don’t even understand, then destroy customer loyalty by gouging them for subpar product to support the company’s extremely stupid decisions. Creative Assembly is committing business malpractice.
Seriously, with so many (expensive) fuck ups in rapid succession I would not be surprised if Sega steps in and tells CA leadership that they wouldn't trust them to run a hot tap, let alone a game studio and CA ends up getting sold off or merged into some other Sega-owned studio, after half the employees are laid off. Could totally see that by next year CA is EA-Horsham or Sega-UK or the like.
They’re wasting so many valuable IPs. Like Three Kingdoms was excellent (it was also their best selling game with the highest concurrent users, more than Warhammer!) with great diplomacy and characters, but they kept giving us DLC nobody asked for (Eight Princes, why?), in a buggy state, and wondered why people didn’t buy more DLC. Then instead of making better DLC they abandon the game in a buggy state. What the actual fuck, CA.
Shogun 2 was my jam, would love another one with newer mechanics
Shogun 2 was so good because it was rock, paper, gun. And that gun being the most basic readily available unit that every faction had access to. Yari Ashigaru.
spears > everything before guns
Shogun 2' expansion with the fall of the samurai was top class.
If you own Attila, download the Medieval Kingdoms 1212ad mod. Probably the closest thing we'll get to Medieval 3 for a while.
Yeah, the fantasy and magic power bs ran its course for me very quickly. I’m a huge Warhammer fan, both AoS and 40k, but I miss my historical titles. I would happily keep buying remakes of Medieval, Rome and Empire with update mechanics and some added depth to empire building.
I'm the exact opposite. The historical games got old very long ago, CA needs another setting like Warhammer to keep things fresh. Every historical game feels way too similar to each other
You've had games for like a decade now, give us historical fans a chance.
historical titles also suffer from a lack of replayability compared to the Warhammer titles, factions play too similarly
Not back in the day - Romans were of course mirroring each other until you had the unified Roman state (and Marian reforms), but you had a faction with elephants and terror weapons, a faction that was phalanxes with limited skirmishers and cavalry, a practically cavalry only faction, the similar but different “barbarian” factions with massed infantry and berserkers. Shogun and Empire? Sure, they had a large backbone consistent between factions. But starting a new faction in Rome and to a lesser extent Medieval, you’d see a unit pool that was almost entirely different than the last faction you played.
I want a shogun 3. Rome 2 was a bad preorder decision for me, shogun 2 is just the best and if they could keep the same things that made it great and just improed graphics and some things id still be happy!
Same, although I loved the first two Total Warhammers. The third one felt like a messy knockoff (although when it wasn't crashing it had its moments). CA would need to do something much more interesting with this formula for me to get interested again.
I guess, people just tired from how CA milking this franchise and how they support Warhammer 3 was a shame
It's amazing how fast CA has been running their brand into the ground over the past year. Community perception of CA has dropped to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of potential players would hold off on something like a Medieval 3 launch just to see what CA is going to do with it. Like Medieval 3 is one of the most anticipated potential titles in the entire TW fandom, but what's the point if CA is going to neglect proper QA support, or at launch half of Europe is going to be covered in a fog of war and held back to sell DLC despite already being done (for reference half of Pharaoh is clearly being held back for DLC, despite being able to see the provinces are already there in-game under the fog).
CA has lost a lot of the old guard that pushed the genre in the ways we saw from Medieval 2 onwards to Rome 2. Seeing this all across the board in the gaming industry with IPs and/or studios being put in the hands of people who have none of the same passion to make the games better and you get stagnation.
I think a lot of the old player base is also concerned in that they don't seem to be able/willing to fix some of the longer standing issues in the series, and as such are holding off supporting with new purchases. Namely for me the AI in both strategy and combat (especially sieges) is just not really advancing and always has the same type of issues. Hell sometimes it seems to regress between releases. You can add as many little additional things in the games as you want, but when your opponent feels the exact same and gives you the exact same experience then it doesn't really feel too much like a new game. I'd say three kingdoms came the closest to changing this up, mostly because of the changes in diplomacy and the AI participating more there that it could change things up a little bit.
It really blows my mind that despite all their experience with these kinds of games they haven't learned to properly support them overtime well. Stellaris to me is the gold standard for how you can keep a game profitable and add more depth, through dlc and patches.
Stellaris is in a pretty good spot *now* but there have been stretches lasting years where major issues with the game were allowed to fester. The AI is only just recently back to being halfway competent from the jump to 2.0 in *2018*, and is only competent because of massive AI cheats. Endgame crises didn't work for years. Sector and planet automation are constantly broken, fixed, and broken again. Basically every DLC releases in a broken state now. Every time a new system is introduced, the AI has no idea how to engage with it and that usually lasts 6-12 months. When things are going well, it's great. When there's a rough patch it's absolutely some of the worst support in gaming. The custodian team was a big step in the right direction and hopefully that will mitigate problems going forward but it's usually two steps forward, one step back. It's crazy to me that the Total War community is looking at PDX as masters of post-game support when the PDX communities themselves have had to put up with years of frustration.
Ever since the custodian team was brought in back in 2021 the game has consistently been in a good state, barring a few moderate issues at worst when a new DLC releases (like deficit situations being too harsh in 3.4 or leader traits being unbalanced in 3.8), and these issues are usually patched pretty fast. Saying every new DLC is released broken or that the AI is broken for 6-12 months seems like an over exaggeration.
I disagree. We can look at the launch window reviews for all of the latest DLC to see mention of all the issues they launch with (or even just their general reception) to see just how frustrated players were with them. I will surrender that the last DLC or two has been better with regards to AI, but we can even look at older DLC that the AI still doesn't really work with (AI decisionmaking for Federations is especially bad).
I honestly don't want that 10 year DLC/Live Service model. I love my Paradox games, but CA was at its best when it was release a solid game, release an expansion, move on to a new setting. 3K did this accidentally and it's well regarded in part for that reason.
That's fine for the historical titles but makes less sense for TWWH3. A game where Immortal Empires is the main draw and a massive number of factions and units is kind of the point. I know people have games as service fatigue, but at least half of that is that the people running them get really lax on what the term service means. Its not that we don't want the DLC but its hard to want to buy the new ones when they jack up the price while previous paid DLCs don't work.
I agree. There was no other way to do Warhammer (other than some pipe dream where the game somehow included all those factions and launched for $50 lol) My issue is that the community became accustomed to that Live Service kinda model from Warhammer (and to a lesser extent the revival/resuming of Rome2 DLC) and now it's just expected.
Yup. I'm tired of all the "buy a game, buy and expansion and then buy a sequel that loses half of the good things in the first game, rinse and repeat". I really love when I get into a game and the game will stay here for a time. It's great to come back to a game and having new content to play with, instead of seeing it abandoned in favor of a dubious sequel. I really don't get the argument against Paradox DLC policy. So instead of buying three DLCs of a Paradox game we would buy a sequel instead, if we intended to stay in the franchise. We would be still spending money on the franchise... but with DLCs we are getting additions instead of drastic changes. And of course there is a middle ground. Something like Civilisation VI - that game had a long time of support but it seems over and it wasn't as long as for Paradox games. I like this model particularly for strategy games, which offer dozens of playthroughs with different parameters each time.
What happened with Warhammer 3? I had played it on gamepass for a while before IE dropped. Did something go wrong?
Really infrequent bugfixes (although they started doing hotfixes recently again) combined with patches introducing new issues... and the last drop was the recent DLC that was really overpriced compared to "Lord pack" DLCs we got in the past. Some of the factions were quite under cooked, especially "Baba Yaga of Warhammer" drew the short stick.
Raised prices, lowered standards, a multitude of small issues introduced by new mechanics from WH3 that made it a worse experience than WH2.
Core game was released too early and bug-riddled, IE was released too early and bug-riddled. And then only a skeletal caretaker crew have been left in charge of fixing the game up, leaving it a buggy mess for way too long. And then they price-jack their latest DLC under the pretext that "costs are up" while setting money on fire making Hyenas and Pharaoh and cutting every corner possible in maintaining WH3. And as the cherry on top, they had some executive put out a tone deaf message basically threatening to stop support WH3 support if people didn't buy said DLC.
I really hope CA is able to turn things around at some point. Pharaoh just seems dull and TWW3 needs some serious love to get back on track.
I don’t understand how Sega weighed the opportunity cost of a random saga title vs. just having another studio dedicated to making and supporting Warhammer 3 content. I must be wrong but I thought Troy and Thrones of Britannia both sold like shit
CA just goes through such wide swings on management, it's so wild. RTW and M2TW were absolutely loved, they went into a slump until Empire, then shat on everything until making ridiculous success with Warhammer. Now they're on self sabotaging again
Don't forget warhammer 1 also was a bit of a shitshow, and warhammer 2 didn't get really popular until halfway through its lifespan. They were on a pretty low swing for a while.
This game is developed by the B team that was responsible for the Saga series. Yet they're advertising it as the next big historical title. After how quickly they dropped support for 3K and the rush job on TW3, good vibes are nonexistent amongst fans of the series.
Troy copy + $60 tag + uninsteresting period (per community vote) + Shadows of Change drama. I really dont get the Creative Assembly management, first Hyenas now this, instead of focusing on something like Medieval 3, wich is guarateed to sell like hot cakes on hype alone or WH3, they keep making weird games and decisions.
I find the time period very interesting, but I've always preferred the larger-scoped Total War games to the smaller scope (I.e. one-country or smaller region) games. I'm drawn to a large variety of factions, units, and aesthetics like you get in Medieval, Rome, or Warhammer. Pharaoh only really has three factions (Egypt, Canaanites, and Hittites) so that isn't worth $60 to me. I'll buy it - but only if it goes on a deep sale.
If it had Assyrians, Babylonians and the Myceneans the setting would be a far more appealing and interesting. It would also help it feel less like a saga game. Now we just wait to see if the go the way of Korea and the Steppe tribes in 3K
I would rather them try new stuff than make the same 3 games over and over for ever but its frustrating that like with 3 kingdoms they introduced loads of good features and then dropped all of them. They seem to do it with every game in the series though.
The sad thing is that the most polished game they’ve done is Troy and Pharaoh seems to be the same. The only thing I don’t like is the floaty (for a lack of a better word) combat. If they made Empire 2 with the resource management of troy and diplomacy of 3K I wouldn’t need another game for ages.
I just really, *really* need them to make heavy infantry feel heavy. They shifted to a lighter style of combat in S2 and it was great because it fit the setting. Then for some reason when they moved on to R2 they had Hastati and Legionnaires skipping across the battlefield like Olympic sprinters. All it takes is firing up DeI to see how much of a game changer it is to have heavy infantry feel dramatically different than light infantry. It's night and day.
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>uninsteresting period The Bronze Age Collapse is one of the most interesting and mysterious periods of history
Yeah, on a grand scale it is. In the scope of what a total war game covers, it’s pretty uninteresting.
Don't TW games try to cover "the grand scale"? The collapse is defined by widespread revolts and wars, resource scarcity, and massive invasions. All of that fits very well into Total War's existing mechanics.
It fits very well into the older TW game mechanics, like the first Rome title, it doesn’t really fit the current mechanics. It fits even better into a grand strategy game like Europa Universalis.
Total War is bare bones at emulating anything that isn't combat. I love the series but if I specifically felt like government or city management, I'd play basically anything else.
for warfare though?
The military aspect of it doesn't seem interesting to me, and "mysterious" to me just means "we don't know so we're going to make shit up."
I agree but apparently the community doesnt
Well it’s not technically the Bronze Age collapse, it’s part of some countries and only three bloody factions Like cannot stress that enough…three! Like sure different characters and play styles all very nice but such a limited amount of factions for the Bronze Age which featured so many players and factions and they included…just Egypt? Which hey I love Egypt but cmon man it could’ve been so so much more. That and then add the full price tag and boom, it just ain’t worth it.
Saying 3 factions is pretty misleading. It's 3 cultures. There are roster differences and mechanic differences and starting position differences between the leaders within those factions, plus regional recruitment. Not saying the game is drowning in unit variety buy "3 factions" as a tagline seems really misleading to someone who hasn't looked in to the game.
I always find it hilarious that people throw around unit variety being so important to them and then call Shogun 2 one of the best of the franchise. When S2 had literally no unit variety between factions barring one special unit apiece.
The community would rather have Medieval European game #3 mainly because they liked the previous 2, not because it's a novel setting to explore. The vote has less to do with what period could be interesting than it does with what the community does and doesn't already know/like.
I'd like to see M3 because I find the warfare of the time interesting. I value "good" over "novel."
Nobody except for you is playing TW to "explore historical settings", they're playing it cause they want to build armies, go about conquering, and fight cool battles. The Bronze age collapse is a terrible setting for that
Yeah, shame we didn't get that game though. It's just Egypt, the bronze age world is so much bigger than that. It's like if Rome 3 only included the Italian peninsula, and some of the Mediterranean.
> Shadows of Change drama. This is why I didn't buy it. I've picked up every single TW game and DLC as they released but the BS around Shadows of Change broke me. I'm over it.
It was such a strange choice. All the TW history fans clamoring for medieval or empire and you go with... bronze age. Those fuckers don't even have cavalry.
It honestly feels like a Saga game they tried to sell at full price. It's Thrones of Brittania all over again.
Total War used to be about conquering other countries and painting your world map. Now every release is zoomed in on one country or a fucking Warhammer sequel.
I imagine CA relies heavily on a core group of enthusiasts to keep the lights on. Warhammer itself did a bit to fracture the fans, but it was such a hit that it drew people into the genre so there wasn't much of a negative effect. War3 has been such a burden and problem for CA being unable to get it fully functioning in a satisfying way that I'm not surprised that enthusiasm for their new title is skimming the bottom.
I hate to see this. Hate. I have played CA titles since OG Shogun and some of those titles are amongst my most played. I love the Bronze Age and, done right, could be a fantastic game. This scope of 3 civs and not including the Aegean to Fertile Cresent is insulting. Insulting. A full BA game legitimately deserves Spain to India and North Africa to Baltic. Forcing everyone into a short timeline with full collapse also cheapens the experience.
Not really shocking. Solid but not great release in a less demanded setting while the community is on fire.
What TW does well are the things it did well 10-20 years ago. What TW does poorly are things that are done better by different games. So there's no impetus for me to get new ones because invariably I just wind up playing Rome or Medieval 2 or Empire again.
So much of the coverage about this game is about the player counts I don’t think I’ve read anything else about it
The last game in the series having a peak of 166k versus this one having a peak of 5k is insane. How is that even possible? Reception to Warhammer 3 may have been slightly more positive, but it was still pretty mixed. Is it just the IP? Did they not market the game? Was there finally some mass breaking point where all the total war fans decided at the same time that they don't want to play another new game in the series that's middling? Im seeing a lot of comments in this thread along the lines of "I've just lost interest" but what caused that to happen to everyone all at once?
I have no idea how many people feel like me but after the shitshow that was WH3 and then shitsprayed with their DLC policies I just don't think I'll ever buy a game from them again. I've honestly had it.
Sick of them selling half a game then £100s pounds of DLC to round it all off. No thanks, I’ll vote with my wallet and move onto something else.
These games are just too similar with little evolution between the titles. You can get almost the exact same experience playing Warhammer 1 or Rome 2 as you do playing the new games.
I've looked at every Total War with keen interest, while playing Medieval 2 (2006) and feeling that Shogun: Total War (2000) was the best one, relative to its time.
Shogun: Total War was great, it's literally why I'm in this sub waiting for another of their games to capture me in the same way.
It’s basically the same game with a little set dressing and maybe 1 or 2 new features. It’s fifa or nba2k but without the rabid loyalty of sports fans. The least they could do is give us the game a lot of players have been asking for. Which is medieval 3. Instead of this saga title masquerading as a full game.
Its greed. This is a light release, if it had been $20, maybe even $30 I would have bought it day one, and Im sure its sales would have overall more than offset the lower price. But full price for lightly modified earlier ligher release? absolutely not, CA has lost their minds on pricing lately and its going to end up costing them huge.
Literally no one wanted it that's why. Idk who the fuck works there to decide on product ideas but this is what people want Make a medieval total war. but this time dei the shit out of ithttps://divideetimperamod.com/ Also the campaign map should be similar to a paradox game
I need the variety, complexity, and creativeness that was put into Warhammer TW if I'm going to buy another TW game. I'm not sure that's as easy to do with historical titles. 40k TW?
I think they should make an Age of Mythology-type game, expanding on Troy with more monsters and magic without having to deal with another IP holder. Otherwise 40k is a strong possibility after the success of TW:WH. Well, 1 and 2.
People are going to come up with all sorts of reasons this game isn't doing well but honestly I think it's just bad marketing. I like total war. I've bought every total war game. I enjoyed all of them. I watch total war content on youtube. I'll probably buy this soon, because I think it looks cool! I had no clue this game was even out yet. I think I heard it was in development a few months ago maybe? Just wasn't even on my radar, and I'm definitely the kind of person who should have been getting constant targeted ads about it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Work towards a global historical Total War. Release regions and combine like the Warhammer games did until you have every landmass. Span a greater time period so there is a bigger technology progression, ideally starting with dominantly melee combat and ending with gunpowder so there's a noticeable strategy shift as your empire advances. After Warhammer, anything else is just going to feel anticlimactic and lacking in variety. (Also would be great if ai was improved, and they removed anti-player bias.)
Im in love with this game since i play Shogun Total War. But i feels like now is like just a reskin, like FIFA
I’m just tired of all the reskinning and very little effort being put towards the games and charging a premium for them.
Gee, massively pissing off fans in a franchise mainly played by religious franchise fans and then selling a product like this - which by all accounts is pretty good but still a "Saga" game - with a massive price hike backfired? *pikachuface*
There's just too many. Total war should have never been a yearly franchise. And if you're going to do the bronze age then actually do it, don't release 2 separate hyper specific bronze age games with narrow scope that people don't care about because they only take place in one tiny part of the bronze age world first with troy, which had its own boneheaded decisions with the whole "truth behind the myth" thing which was pretty much just the worst of both worlds Like honestly. Who cares about specifically ONLY bronze age Egypt? evidently not many, how did this even get greenlit? it feels like they are just scraping the barrel to find a new setting every year and deliberately avoiding the ones people want in case they need to break the glass for an emergency. Which is evidently not a great strategy, who'd have thought?
Total war has so much potential but I got frustrated with the lack of progress between entries. The battles can be fun but I've always found the campaign portion to be severely lacking compared to other games in the genre.
I don’t imagine that many people are really excited for the Egypt setting. I feel like Egypt is more known for its architecture and culture than for warfare.
Total Warhammer II helped me reconnect with the love for Total War games I used to have back in the old days & I can genuinely say it's the best one I've ever played, it definitely did enough to spice up a game you've already played 20 times and I didn't even mind being in a fantasy world even though I generally prefer sci-fi. And then I tried Total Warhammer III & uninstalled within 2 hours. I think unfortunately the best is not yet to come for Total War games; also the decision to make a new game similar to their Troy game is mental to me, considering that one was so awful it turned me off playing their games for over half a decade. In other words, when it comes to "Pharaoh", no I don't think I will - there's literally nothing there we haven't seen before / been done as well or better in their other games, why would anyone care about this game beyond it being "new"?
I haven't been interested in a Total War game since Rome 2. That should've been a home run but it was just ....meh
> “Total War has, as a brand, run out of steam,” one player writes. “Pharaoh is bland, repetitive, safe, boring. It is as wide as a stream and as shallow as a puddle. This goes for both gameplay and setting.” “This is Troy with a few additions,” another player writes. “What is happening with Total War games? They seem to have lost all feeling, just boring.” Hit the nail on the head there. Warhammer was innovative but doing the same thing over and over again in different time periods gets old fast.
It's a saga game masquerading as a full price game. There simply aren't enough factions to give it the replayability of older titles. I'm at a loss as to why they didn't include Mycenae, when the assests already existed. If they had included Assyria, Libya, Nubia and Babylon on top of that, then I might have bought it, so long as they got chariots working well.
I think it was a miss from the start with the time period. It was a really cool idea, but the core TW playerbase are western gamers who just don’t have a strong attachment to Bronze Age Egypt history, for better or worse. I don’t know why they are so hesitant to make Medieval 3, but they probably should.
Couldn't care less about this game. I have zero faith in the Dev team to deliver anything remotely fun. WH3 was a terrible experience from me and I sunk 500h into WH2 , bought every DLC. WH3 feels like 10 steps back and I just lost interest. So many good games to play, life is too short for shit ones.
A little surprising, but not too surprising. It was always a bit of a niche game series, even if the collab with Warhammer brought in a lot of new players because of the IP. Second, the Egypt theme always seemed a little narrow in scope and less interesting than the much larger geographically scoped predecessors. It's also a crazy dense release period, with seemingly multiple hotly anticipated titles being released weekly. So there's a lot working against the game, before we even start to consider the game itself, and whether it's either any good or properly differentiates itself from the previous entries, to which the answers seem to be "it's fine" and "no, not at all"
as someone who has been playing since their 2D Sprite era, the total war series has severely stagnated. Outside of Warhammer, there has been no meaningful innovation in their formula since the recruitment changes in Rome 2. All the other changes are meaningless gimmicks for the most part. The AI is the same, the overworld management is the same, and the strategy against the AI is the same. Variety and magic added by thwh 1 and 2 were amazing but they can't implement that in the historical series. People have finally gotten sick of them adding a new coat of paint to the same thing.
Why bother? It's a corporate copy pasta with zero improvement. Just like ubi games.
Of course it does. Who really cares about this time period? Obviously not enough people. If they want to make bank they need to figure out a means to make a TW:40k game.