f13.net

Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOEd_do4ikY)

I haven't played the most recent total war games, but I had a lot of fun with Rome. How much did they improve/wreck the gameplay in the intervening period?

I actually just reinstalled Rome, having a lot of fun with it. I can't say I've played any newer ones much (Medieval 2 a little, Empire a little ... haven't got around to Napoleon yet) ...

Shogun was great, I was always hoping they'd re-vamp it.

The game got more complicated, the AI didn't keep up. (when I say more complicated, really they just layered on more 'stuff')

I've enjoyed them all. I haven't been able to play Napoleon enough to be sure, but it definitely seems like the AI got tougher.

Rome was great and imo the best in terms of factions and period. Medieval 2 was good, but it's a slave to the period and how much the church really messes with you. If you play as a non-Catholic nation it's total EZ-mode. Empire was horrible and the AI was non-existant they said they fixed it, but tbh I hated the battles with all guns. It's just not TW if i'm not sending in asskicking infantry to hack you to bits. They focused all on shiney and none on game. I didn't play Napolean.

I loved Rome, picked up Medieval 2 on sale right after Christmas and still haven't installed it.

I liked M2 better than Rome, but I like being giving the pontiff the finger and getting excommunicated, followed by long and bloody wars of conquest to show him who's boss, at least here on earth.

There is some really cool shit in M2, the religious, plague, espionage, and princess mechanics in particular. The AI won't use any of them properly  of course. Or boats.

I gather you can mod a lot of the AI problems away if you are so inclined.

Empire was a bit garbage, mainly due to AI issues.

Playing Napoleon now (picked it up during the steam sale), and its pretty nice.  It runs a lot better, and battle AI seems to be pretty good.  The campaigns themselves are more focused, with your goal to rampage across the map and conquer shit, so AI doesn't really have time to do poor empire building like it did in empire.

The last one I played was Empire. It's pretty much the perfect wargame, except for the AI. It literally ruins the whole game and I'm not buying S2 unless it's finally been fixed.

I liked Rome a great deal.  Played the shit out of it.  There's nothing like two squads of elite Roman soldiers holding a fort against an entire barbarian horde.

M2 and Empire annoyed the hell out of me.  With M2 I just felt like the entire religion system was rather bothersome (which I guess it was supposed to be).  Empire is where the AI issues starting bugging me.  Plus, with both of them I started having performance/crash issues.  That shouldn't be a problem for me now and I might load up / mod one of them. 

Of course, I could just wait for Shogun instead and pray they didn't foul it up too bad.

Shogun at least goes back to a period like Rome where you have soldiers hacking at each other. I'm sure they will find a way to have the religion thing just piss everyone off.

The dynamics of Japanese religion doesn't lend itself towards anything like the pope game play of ME.  However, they might come up with some cool factional stuff that could give you extra troops or something if you cozy up to various local Buddhist/Shinto sects (since many of them maintained their own armies of warrior monks).  Or they could just be extra factions to fight against in and of itself.  Either way, it shouldn't play out like religion in the ME games.

Also I agree on Rome, best of the franchise so far.  For Setting, game play, and AI.  I remember one game where I fought en epic campaign to conquer Greece.  Took decades, and dozens of major battles over the years.  Felt very real and historical.  Very tense as well as the first half was mainly me fighting to maintain my foothold in Greece and expand outward, as the AI kept throwing endless huge armies at me from all the cities to try and drive me out.  Seems like the AI forgot how the fuck to do that by Empire.

Empire and Napoleon basically killed the franchise for me. I wanted to love Empire desperately but I couldn't ignore the AI problems despite some of the overall improvements. And limited units. Ugh. Then Napoleon comes out which is a very playable, solid Empire spinoff but it's basically just a straight wargame. They fixed the AI empire building problems by removing the empire building. Straight wargames don't generally appeal to me so that was about it. I'm not getting suckered in this time.

Never buying another Total War game.  Bought them all until Empire.

I never understood why they didn't patch the Napoleon crash fixes back into Empire at the very least.

Not only was Empire's AI completely broken, the new policy of releasing DLC packs of units and whatnot seems to have made CA intentionally limit the modability of the game. Last I checked the game map, for instance, was completely locked down and no one had any success with editing it. I just wanted to add a swedish naval base to Karlskrona for some historical authenticity but no luck there. And no hope of any map-altering total conversions either.

This really is a major sticking point with me because I got an insane amount of play out of Rome thanks to the effort of the mod community, and Medieval 2 looks to continue on that same path. The Total War series isn't half as interesting if that is no longer the case.

In the original, the only real effect religion had was how early you managed to get ahold of firearms. If you cozied up to the Portuguese (Catholic), you'd get firearms sooner, but you'd have to convert and end up dealing with Buddhist/Christian issues and probably restrict your access to Warrior Monks (been too long, I can't remember). If you wait and deal with the Dutch (Protestant), you don't have to convert, but it takes much longer to get firearms.



Totally agree. It's an epic setting, and I like the two-part "conquer the foreigners, then later, win the civil war" feel of it.

I also enjoy the "noble family" aspect of it; being able to choose your heir, the various character traits both earned and randomly assigned. I really hope Shogun 2 adds that back in, as it fits very well in the feudal Japanese setting too.

Why are they doing a second Shogun in the exact same goddamn time period?

Uh, because the warring states period is the only real period you could get away with doing this in?

Also, its the only period in Japanese history anybody gives a rats ass about (including the Japanese).

They could always go back to the classical periods and deal with the battles against the spread of chinese culture and emerging imperialism.

But yeah, people just want Samurai.

If they did it in another time period they couldn't very well call it Shogun.  :oh_i_see:

Oh, they can come up with another name.   Samurai Swords, perhaps.   :grin:

Samurai: Total War

Not true!  Shogun is just the rank, basically military dictator of Japan.  There were several Shogunates before the final Tokogawa shogunate formed after his victory in the warring states period.

So I guess I should have said they could technically do another period, like when the Kamakura shogunate was formed, but that just consisted of two big factions fighting over who got to be in charge.  Warring states period is when everything fell apart and you had a shit load of different kingdoms going at it.

And again, its also the period that pretty much all feudal Japanese Samurai/ninja pop culture is derived from.  Thats what people want.

Edit:  Also, good reference proudft, heh.

Fair enough, I wasn't thinking of time periods quite so granularly - I was thinking more "the medieval period" than "Second Crusade" sort of detail.

That said I think clearly they should set it in the Heian period and we can all work on looking more fragile and delicate than each other.

Ah, well, I was taking it from the view of Sheepherder's original comment about the "exact same goddamn time period", which I took to mean specifically the Sengoku period.  Since yes, as you mentioned, if your talking about any period outside of the feudal era it would pretty much be "Flower Arranging: Total War".

<obscure japanese history reference here>

Same, I been playing TW series since SHogun but I bought Empire on release, played a few times then haven't touched TW since, so much fail. The AI couldn't even load troops onto ships.

Looks like they are simplifying the game, trying to give it more atmospheric and roleplay character, which is a good move, but they have also cut out all modding (more people still play MTW2 than the new ones cuz of primo mods) so they can sell more DLC. They have added what I understand to be a multiplayer campaign and some multiplayer character persistance & customization elements, I guess so if their AI is once again total fail, maybe people will stick around to play vs humans. Personally I am not so sure, TW always has very limited multiplayer scene, it's always had poor MP balance (lots of cheese tactics), suddenly it will be a main draw of the series?

If they dont get the AI right it will blow like Empire, and they have never gotten the AI right. There will be no modders to bail them out.

There won't be any naval warfare to speak of in this one I expect, so that removes the core issue the last one had, no?

I think they fixed the "AI will never launch an assault on islands" bug at some point, but the AI was still pretty terrible at putting armies together and doing much other than stacking stupid numbers of troops in home cities.

From the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogun_2:_Total_War):

I wonder if after you unify Japan, they'll let you try to invade Korea and squander it all.   :awesome_for_real:

I reinstalled Rome, lots of fun.

But how the fuck to I stop the autogoverned cities from producing fucking wardogs non-stop?

The campaign AI in Napoleon certainly fixed the amphibious assault thing. The AI will invade your ass by sea if they have the chance.

Let the player choose a starting point between the late Heian period and the end of the Sengoku period, with the option to fast forward through dry periods.  Or just not do fucking Japan again.  Or widen the scope to include mainland Asia.


Dude, the AI in this one is totally inspired by Sun Tzu, therefore it will be great!

Set your spend to save bar towards save.

This is my stance, too.

I don't think they've ever really fixed the issues with their engine (dating back to R:TW). They take a long time to fix even basic problems (that modders end up fixing first, without access to the code at all), or even acknowledging some problems exist.

For a LONG time, shields in M2:TW actually decreased your defence. Shit like that annoys me (along with unit orders and animations being fucked up in general).

After the mess that was Empire going back to Shogun is the only thing that managed to get my attention and the possibility I'd spend a dime on the game in play. I loved the original Shogun, even with the limited factions and such; but I'm a sucker for the time period. Rome was the last decent Total War game and given how bad Empire was, especially at launch, means this one will necessitate a definitely "try before buy".

But if they had gone to anything other than Shogun? I'd probably not even do that.

I think they had to go backwards because Empire really showed them how their games fall apart when everyone has guns.

Naw, their games fall apart when the AI musketeers only use melee and its cavalry never charges into melee. Bonus points for artillery units deployed behind obstacles.

This reeks of a "Hey, you know why Empire sucked?  Because it didn't have samurai!" mentality.

Pretty much everyone explained why empire sucked and didn't say that. What are you talking about?

I don't give two shits about samurai

The developer making the game.  You know, the important people.

When their promo movie devotes more time to the lineage of their game series than to the fact that their AI is totally not retarded anymore, I'd hazard the guess that their AI is probably still totally retarded.

Seriously? You think 'WE FIXED OUR AI' is something that anyone is ever going to put in their trailer?

It's nominally a wargame, AI normally at least gets honorable mention when you're trying to sell one.  For fuck's sake, marketing people try to sell the AI in shooters.

Ok, serious question time:

Are you fucking retarded?

Give me a second while I find some box art or some shit of the original Shogun with them totally hyping how awesome their Sun Tzu inspired AI is.

Short answer: yes.

EDIT:

EDIT2: I think it's fair to assume that the single greatest consideration of everyone watching this game who has had experience with it's predecessors is whether the AI was dropped on it's head at birth.  Yes, I am aware that they have a video up of a battle, no it's not reassuring.

You actually are retarded. This is gibberish.

Isn't he basically just saying Shogun 2 will suck balls like the last 2 games? 

If you do not like the Total War series for whatever reason you don't like the series, you will not like Shogun 2. If you do, you probably WILL like Shogun 2 unless you don't like Samurai fights.

This thread is full of people who like TW series but have been burn when it turned into a pile of shit with Empire and are pretty skeptical CA can reverse the spiral with STW2.

Actually the launches of Rome & MTW2 were probably just as bad as Empire, the difference was that modders were able to make them playable while CA got around to patching, so you had a playable game + new content in mods around the time an expansion came out, at which point they really began to age finely. Now CA has cut out the modders so they don't compete with their DLC sales, and the game will sink or swim solely on CA's execution & competence, which as any veteren TW player will tell you, is not good news.

Um, I'm not sure what you're looking at, but Empire got modded to hell and back, with lots of AI mods available. I played a few of them myself. Napoleon is the same way. If CA tried to lock out the mods to enable their DLC sales, they failed spectacularly.

Fuck mods, if a game can't function without fan cpr, it's not one I'm gonna buy. Not anymore.

Pretty much.  I'd throw in that TCA seems to think the same, because their marketing pitch is pretty goddamn lame considering it doesn't address anyone's concerns unless those concerns are "does it have samurai, ninjas, and geisha?", even for a game that will only have been in development for ~3/4 of a year if it releases on schedule.

Seriously, anyone holding out hope for this should wear a helmet.

Not sure, I think he might be saying that empire would have been a better game with samurai, and that CA have recreated all the bugs within the previous game, because prior problems are inexplicably not mentioned in the publicity cinematic.

But it is hard to be sure.

Seriously, how many pairs of pants would a marketer have to be wearing on their head to not only draw attention to problems in the last game but poison the expectations for the next by putting them in the marketing?

Not sure, but you'd think if CA was going to go the EA sports franchise of yearly graphical updates/roster updates then the core gameplay would at least slowly and inexorably improve.  But no.

Ingmar: How many pairs are you wearing right now? (http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/20/creative-assembly-say-shogun-2-wont-ship-until-the-ai-is-perfect/)

Not that "We totally have great AI this time, honest." is a particularly strong sell.  Since they haven't told you what, if anything, is better.  Or really done much to demo any of it.  That being said, comparing modern work to antecedent work to the detriment of the latter (product lineup 2011, now with improved feature!) happens all the goddamn time.  Very occasionally if a product is hated enough they'll burn it in effigy, because the job of marketing is to convince the audience that you're on the same page and delivering the straight goods, which means if they hated last year's model, you should too.


3/4 of a year between Napoleon and Shogun II.  I don't really know why people want to put faith in this, that alone does it for me.

I really don't get how yall are jumping on Sheepherder for saying that the devs and marketing need to address the AI. Of course they have to address the AI. The mistake was so blatant that they have no other options but to address it and reassure the populace.

What CA was doing 5-7 years ago was fairly unique, barely any knock offs for these massive scale RTS games were around, they were all age of empire/warcraft clones. Now I will not shed any tears if TW suffocates to death under the massive pile of crap that has piled up ontop of it because it has competition in this style of RTS game. Small eastern european studios like Neocore are making TW clones, gas powered games is making a medieval fantasy version of supreme commander, when TW sucks there are many more people able and willing now to pick up the slack and release TW style larger unit scale RTS games.

In a trailer? You want big flashing text or movie-voice guy to tell you everything's going to be OK this time?  

There's lots of avenues to get that sort of infomation out.  Your "sell this game to the diipshit masses" video showing cutscenes and gameplay probably isn't the best one.

Maybe not in the trailer, or as anything but a blurb point when you're scrolling text across the battle scenes: "Epic Battles! Cutting Edge Graphics! Improved Tactical AI!"

It does have to be referenced in articles, discussions, and blogs though. All of those fall under the marketing of the game. People in the know are going to drive the sales of the game via word of mouth, or they will kill it dead if they believe it's the same old story with different graphics.

Well Napoleon was a big sales flop after Empire clocked huge sales #s even though Napoleon was a much superior game. A lot of people checked out of the TW series (or went back to RTW/MTW2 mods for their fix) after Empire, so a marketing campaign that begged fans to come back because they fixed everything wouldn't be a bad idea. 

One of the reasons the TW community was hyped up for Empire was that CA talked up how they fixed  the campaign AI issues that bogged MTW2, completely overhauled the engine, integrated tactical & strategic shells, etc. When that turned out to be a load of garbage and the AI was possibly the worst yet, a lot of people felt pretty burned.

I think you are underestimated how important the community following is for this game series. They are already very peeved by the lack of modding ability, and won't get fooled by slick marketing lines.

If you go to CA's website you'll find a battle trailer narrated by their AI lead.  Who then proceeds to talk mostly about everything that isn't AI to the backdrop of the hilarious antics of cavalry charging up the slope of a wooded hill to attack archers and winning.

EDIT: From everything I've seen Speedy modding is still in.

oh yeah? I haven't looked into it too closely, but then why are modders complaining so much on twcenter.net?

Geeks like to complain when companies don't treat their pet needs as the most important thing ever?  :why_so_serious:

There are probably lots of complaints in the modding community. Doesn't change the fact that there are still lots of mods out there for both Empire and Napoleon.

I'm thinking about trying one of these games. For someone who never played one, how would you all describe the game? (It sounds like Civ, but with cooler/real time combat).

You have a good grasp of it. CIV with real-time combat.

You can let the AI auto-resolve the combats, in which case it's..CIV.

Pick up the Rome: Total War pack and go to town. You can get it dirt cheap, it's the best of the lot (in my opinion, but I haven't tried M:TW2 yet), and there's not a lot of overlap with anything else.

There's a derth of Roman military games out there.

I feel like Civ isn't a very good comparison, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a better one.

Axis & Allies?

Yeah, I quite enjoyed M:TW2 but Rome is the best of them. I never got into Empire and I feel like I should give it another go at some point but one of the things I always disliked about TW series is the amount of mini-management you can do with your empire as the game progresses and Empire's inclusion of more settlements in provinces increased that greatly so within a few turns I'm already starting to get bored with checking all my settlements and keeping an eye on where my troops are and making sure everywhere is sufficiently defended vs. having a reasonable army and so on.

In previous games I hit that point mid-game and was invested enough to slog through while I had enough stuff to feel I could get away with letting the AI handle some stuff and I could just ignore a load of provinces until I had the money to build stuff. Empire left me feeling like that pretty quickly and I can't take playing it for more than an hour or two before I'm just seriously bored. That and I don't think the battles were awesome enough to make up for it, possibly because it was so early on (I don't think I even made it out of the tutorial).

For anyone planning to preorder, Gamersgate has a decent deal going. Order through them and you get 30% of the price back in their "blue coin" store currency, plus Rome Gold Edition.

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-TWS2/total-war-shogun-2

I would recommend against pre-ordering this game. CA has a long track record of craptastic releases that require 6 months of patching and modding for serious bugs and balance issues to be fixed.

I agree. There's absolutely no way in hell I would ever pre-order another TW game after Empire until they show me a launch success.

 This is the main reason I havent bought one of their games since Medieval 2. That game as far as I know is still broken... Its pretty sad that the modders did more work fixing their crappy game than the company that made it did. I refuse to support developers that work that way. This is pretty much why I  wont buy anything from UBISoft. There are a couple of their games that are still bugged beyond belief.

The demo is supposed to be out today. Anyone tried it? I'm stuck at work...

Demo just went up on Steam.  Gawd... between this and DA2 this is gonna take a while.

So far I'm liking this more than any other TW 'cept Rome...  and I'm only going that far because obviously this is just a demo.  Given the feature set though (the online capabilities seem pretty robust), it's likely this may even surpass Rome's greatness. 
The game is just very fluid (maybe too fluid), unclunky, and gushes theme more than the others I've played.  I REALLY love the unit card artwork and music.    The whole vibe just takes you back to ancient Japan and the decision to shirk many of the bloated 3d animations for well-penned 2d art was a smart one.

I dunno, I also just really think Total War works best with pre-gunpowder warfare.  It feels so much more visceral and raw.  And you feel as if you've got way more control.  Games like Empire, Napoleon, etc. feel like you just sit and wait for a mortar or musket reload.  With Rome or Shogun you're really concentrating on your formations, strengths, abilities, and generally paying more attention to even singular units (especially in Shogun, when wicked samurai swordfights are the norm).  Doesnt get more visceral than that.

If they nail the persistent online element it'll be the best of the series by far.  Upgradeable avatars, leaderboards, coop/pvp campaigns, fuckin CLAN PLAY!  Yes.  Clan Play.  In a Total War game.  Shogun nonetheless, how apropos.

Last time I've ever wanted to start a strat. game clan was Rome and I'm thinking I may take the plunge again with this title.  It could be just that good.  PCGamer's 92%+editor's choice may be correct on this one as it's looking like Shogun2 is pretty much all we liked in Rome plus all that we thought it still needed to make it untouchable.

A must buy UNLESS they drop the ball like they have in the past and:
a)  the game needs serious patching
b)  they dont release with everything they promised
c)  all of the above

Yeah, mostly in agreement. So far this is better than all the 3D Total Wars, mostly because shit moves where and when you tell it to. It's thematic, smooth, and runs much better than Empire: TW. Also, it might just be the demo, but enemy turns were lightning fast.

I still miss the shortcuts and control of Shogun and Medieval, but this game doesn't make me want to kill something. The fast forward isn't fast enough, the sudden lack of sound when you change gamespeed and the still somewhat clunky fine unit control are annoying, but overall the game seems really good.


I have a feeling that Hero Units weren't a good path to walk down, though - the extra abilities involved with your General and Hero Units increase in-battle micromanagement in a game that's supposed to be more about broader battle strategy. It feels wrong.

The demo seems fun, though I need to get used to the building interface. I'm stoked.

Downloaded the demo overnight, so I'm going to play it tonight. I am looking forward to seeing the differences.

Some things to consider.

Empire was getting 90+ pre-release and release day reviews.

Also demo is heavily scripted, not like a real campaign/battles.

That said, I am a very big TW series fan (playing since Shogun 1), but I won't get burned again by CA's crummy releases. Don't trust scripted demos and rigged review sites, check out what the cynical fans at twcenter.net and totalwar.org are saying.

Oh yah, w/o a doubt you'd be a fool to plop down preorder money on this thing.  I'm with you there.
The problem with that thinking though is since they're pushing clan play, leaderboards, persistence, etc.  the longer you wait the further you fall in the rankings.  If you dont care about those things though, waiting would be smart.


I liked the hero units and the micro involved actually.  BUT, since the gameplay is so quick in this version it can indeed feel 'wrong' mainly because there's not enough time to change a tactic if you've made a bad move... you just get wasted in .5 seconds.  No hero ability can save you if you charge your cav into a wall of spears... it's just instadeath.  Fights only get slightly prolongued if there's a stalemate.

How about performance? I have an aging Core2Duo 6750 that I've been waiting to upgrade till the new Intel processors come out, but I also want to play Shogun. I've found that the Total War series can be pretty taxing on your CPU, so I worry about this element.

I have an E8400 and it runs fine. MUCH better than Empire: TW.

Empire didn't run well on anything.

LOL this game could show up at my house with Baby Jesus, Strippers, Drugs, Santa Claus, and the Pope and I still would not give those crooks at CA a dime. I hate a developer that pushes out a new product all the while promising to continue to fix their current buggy piece of crap only to forget all mention of those fixes once you have bought the new product. Lets not even being to go into how buggy the new product is as well.

I played the demo. I can't really say it changed my opinion about waiting past release for a purchase. It's seemingly solid, but the entire experience was so on rails I have a hard time estimating whether they fixed their glaring AI problems of the past or not.

Yeah, fuckstupid AI is the big killer for me.  Again, one of the MANY reasons Rome was the height of the series is that it still maintained good AI.  Trying to conquer Greece was a fucking challenge.  Conquering all of Europe in Empire, on the other hand, was a god damn joke.

No the goddamn joke was watching a group of guys equipped with siege ladders walk up to a wall and then STAND there forever wondering what the hell that tall thing with people on it killing them is. Or the guys with battering rams that couldnt find a gate with both hands nailed to said gate.

Nah, that's all balanced, because if they fixed that, they would also have to fix the idiot defending troops not using the cannons built into the walls.

My favorite Rome bug was when guys would push a siege tower to within 10 feet of the wall, stop, get in the thing, drop the top bridge, and proceed to fall to their deaths over and over like lemmings in the two foot space between the bridge and the wall.

 I am pretty sure this one was still a bug in Medieval 2 as well. Sieges have sucked in all their games... If its not retarded defenders its retarded attackers or BOTH at the same time... Better off to autoresolve if it wasnt for the fact that tends to screw you unless you have super overwhelming forces....

My favorite part about it was my reactions upon realizing what went wrong. I'm elsewhere on the map setting up archer volleys, moving cavalry for an approach:

Huh, my siege units are losing numbers. Must be arrows.
Man, they are dropping fast, better check on that. <mouse to point>
OH NO! FUCK NO STOP YOU IDIOTS! <mad clicking to run away from the falling pit of doom>

I finally got around to actually playing the demo. The immediate reaction was a mix of nostalgia and fuck yeah this shit is the best. However, as a testament to CA's ability to fuck games up, I was able to snap out of it and get back to fearing the worst and not intending to buy it before early adopters do the testing for me.

I admit, it's pull is heavy on me to buy this game early. I have to stare at my copy of Empire on Steam with $49.99 next to it before I can move on without giving them my credit card.

It's not like there's some silly pre-order bonus if you buy it early, and I'm sure you guys have plenty of other games to keep you occupied in the meantime.

Sadly, I really don't. There's a derth of crap out there I'm willing to play. This and DA2 are the only ones on my March radar, and if they suck, I'll be sad.  :ye_gods:

DoW2 Retribution ftw. Also I found Dead Space 2 for 20 moneys so that's cool too.

FYI they just put up Medieval 2 on Steam for $2.50 in connection with the TW complete pack going on sale.

I own it already, but I picked it up to de-disc at that price.

Did they ever fix widescreen in that game? I think that was the one I tried to play and got sick of the distorted map screen before I finished conquering Europe.

Data on that issue was spotty at best, but I didn't really delve far into the tech forums to see that far back.

Screen issues outside of standard seemed to be an issue for people is all I know.

Uhm, I think it may be patched. I've played lots and lots of M:TW and I haven't used a standard screen forever. Not very helpful, I know, but I'm pretty confident. $2.50 confident, by any rate.

Sooo, which one of you crackheads broke down and bought the game?  Report!
I want a buy/no-buy for the weekend.
 :eat:

I havent really browsed it yet, but this would be a good place to start:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1556

Player review sub-forum.

The reviews of the AI seem generally favorable but not perfect. My reservations still exist until we're a month into the gameplay.

This is already out? I thought it was months away still! Good news, I guess. I am not interested in buying it right now, so I can get the skinny on how bad it is, as well as giving them time to unfuck it before I think about buying.

For all those on the fence who haven't played a Total War game in awhile, keep in mind that after Rome and Medieval 1, the series stopped improving and regressed in almost every facet except visually.  Thus, if you have fond memories of an older game and are eager to wade in again and bask in myriad improvements, it is quite possible you may end up bitterly disappointed.

That's why I'd read the reviews I linked on twcenter.net. A good % of the people there are just as aware of CA's decline and approach there new offerings with a very skeptical eye (before STW2 was released, you would find about 3x as many people browsing the RTW/MTW2 forums than the newer ETW/NTW ones).

Nobody tried this?

You remember Empire right? We're all sitting across the river with our binoculars.

Speaking of rivers, has anyone tested what happens if you defend on a river crossing map?

I really want this game to be good.

The reviews are pretty mind-bogglingly good.  And with the overlying RPG elements (especially the clan play) I'm really starting to kick myself for not buying this on day 1.

That being said, there are apparently some pretty glaring bugs especially in MP play.  And the MP play is touted as the highlight.
Once the next patch hits I'll probably pony up and buy the game.

I bought it but haven't played it yet.  Because I love buying games for early purchase prices and then playing them a year later (if that).   :ye_gods:

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

I've bought it, but so far have only played half a game on normal difficulty.

So far it has felt much better than Empire, which I gave up on immediatly due to the AI. This time they have bothered to include an AI, and at least so far it seems reasonably competent. The tech tree and trading mechanism also seems to work, and the leveling up of generals is quite cool.

In short, the first impression is positive, but it is a first impression based on probably six hours of play time so grain of salt and all that.

Tom Chick, who has a good head on his shoulders, begins his review with:


http://www.1up.com/reviews/shogun-2-total-war-review

A deft analogy. I remain unconvinced.

But playing medieval 2 has me jonesing.

Must...be...strong!  :ye_gods:

If this doesnt convince you, I dunno what will! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5PIIOY2KS4)   :awesome_for_real:

I'm fairly certain I can find xyz number of reviews about their previous games which say exactly the same things. I'm in fact almost certain I've read that fucking horseshit about "oh the ai uses it's troops intelligently in THIS version", in those exact words, before.

So sure, you go ahead and buy it. Tell us how that goes.

Total War:Empire Review at IGN "Creative Assembly offers the best yet in its superlative strategy series!" (http://pc.ign.com/articles/957/957883p1.html)


Empire review at Eurogamer "It's a Tolstoy-esque War and Peace of a game" (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/empire-total-war-review)

Lol, owned.

Here is a review from a well known modder:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=434483


There is a long list of likes & dislikes in the link. I think I'm gonna pass on this one for about a year and see if modders and xpacs can smooth out the dislikes he listed. It seems more than anything, CA has done a good job of releasing a game that doesn't have any crippling flaws (like they usually do), and has done a good job of covering up AI flaws and other bugs with a lot of gimmicks and simplicity (super aggressive campaign AI, very fast paced battle speeds). I guess that's fine for someone newish to total war games, but I've played 100s of hours of them since shogun 1 and I'm not very impressed.

I've not played it enough to give any sort of detailed review, but I have learned that I'm way overdue to upgrade my video card ...  :ye_gods:

After I get my friend's BootCamp issues squared away tonight, we'll see how a brand-new 27" iMac runs it ...

I hope the backlash kicks in before I break down and head to Amazon.

I am in real danger as well, since I just canceled my WoW and Rift subs about an hour ago. Of course, I have spent 30 hours playing Wizard's Crown the past week, so I can probably find other ways to occupy my time until the other shoe falls.

I'm still playing Medieval 2 to stave off the urges.

Speaking of which, why is Portugal attacking me when I'm playing England? WTF PORTUGAL??? Are the Moors and Spain not keeping you occupied? Why did you have to sail up the coast to attack me? France is closer and bigger dickheads anyway. They appointed a shitty Pope!

Ok, I bought it.

Will report back if I get time to work it over on the weekend.

Any updates?

I trolled a friend of mine into buying it. Now he's upgrading his computer because it wasn't powerful enough. Heh.

I'm still concerned, although I'm weakening. A change in price point to the $39.99 range will push my willpower to the breaking point.

Right now in my Medieval 2 play, I've managed to take my English armies fully into Western Europe, but the French Pope refuses to let me finish off France. Also, HRE thought I was getting too close and attacked me feebly. I own Paris now. To keep the Pope from completely disowning me, I've run a supremely successful campaign through Egypt, based on quick moving crusader armies, but I'm always beaten to the punch by another nation. Inevitably I just sack a close by town and then take over two others in the surrounding area. As a consquence I own Gaza, Cairo, Alexandria, and for some reason Smryna. I had to decimate Smyrna to the ground to get it to STFU though before I could rechurch their asses. It will be a long time before I can get out of that quagmire.

Is the map any smaller than Medieval 2?  That's what kills me in that game - I'll start a campaign and at some point it becomes apparent you can crush anyone you fight but there are, like, 50 more areas to conquer in an unending slogfest.   

The Short Campaigns never helped much, either, since I still had to send people all over the place to talk to the pope and trade and take Jerusalem to make the church happy and whatnot.

Report soon. Got distracted by DA2 over the weekend, only had a chance to install and dick around a bit. I want to make sure to see how the AI etc. works.

I broke down and bought this last Friday.  Played a few hours on Saturday and I already like it better than Empire.  Everything seems to work as advertised and the map is large enough to be a challenge but small enough that you don't feel like its going to take forevedr to conquer the island.  And the AI seems to have figured out how to use its navy.  I had one clan I was at war with drop troops back into my home territory with their ships and I had to rush my armies back to defend it.  A promising start so far but I don't know how much time I'll be able to put into it now since I'm playing Crisis 2, DA2 and Rift right now, as well. :ye_gods:

Got it Friday too. Played it through the tutorial and started a single player campaign. First impressions is that its just not that different. Its like all the other games, only 'fixed'. To an extent. Still finding some odd AI behavior.

For example, when your castle/fort/whatever is getting attacked, if you 'man the ramparts' your men die from arrow fire a lot more quickly than if you stand them around in the center courtyard. Once the individual units of the enemy, be they samurai, spear or dismounted cavalry start to get into the courtyard, I swarm them in a mass in a sort of whack-a-mole gameplay mode and I win, easily, despite 2:1 odds. This is broken behavior.

That sounds more like combat-mechanics-broken than AI-broken issues.

True, but I'm not sure if its purely mechanics. It may have been a fluke, but I thought I saw the archery animations go full tilt the moment I put men on the raparts. If I moved them away towards the center, the enemy archers seemed to not shoot as often. Hence me saying its AI behavior. I will do a bit more testing later this week and see if I can reproduce the effect.

I played through one campaign.

It was fun for about two hours, and then immense bordom.

Only one way to win... military force. Forget winning through diplomacy, assassination of the enemy ruling faction (they will pop out an infinite amount of heirs to the daiymo), or anything else besides marching your troop stack on the enemy troop stacks.

Economy boils down to... forget the fucking economy and just rape as much as you can as fast as you can. The units you can build at the start of the game almost match the most elite units when you look at effectiveness per upkeep/gold cost.

All clans use the same units... battles quickly devolve into basically using the same strategies over and over again. No, this is not chess.

Maybe some will praise the game for finally fixing the AI and creating much faster paced battles, but I simply found myself quickly bored. Also, there is not much hope for good mods to come out, as, similar to E:TW, most deep mod support has been blocked off so that they can sell more shogun 2 DLC. Screw them and their money grubbing hands.

To be fair, when could you ever win a TW game by not conquering the countryside?

I'd like more detail on the unit similarities and the economy.

SOOOOOOOON.

Where's my update!  :awesome_for_real:

"Just one more round, and I'll get to your update."

would be the perfect update. :drill:

Well I broke down and bought the damn thing.  The presentation is miles better than any previous Total War game.  Like head and shoulders better.  You can tell CA were always huge japanophiles at heart, the love of Japanese culture just seeps through your monitor.  The battles seem a little more in-depth and micromanagy.  Most units have special abilities, the correctly timed deployment of which can easily turn a fight.  Your generals level up with a MMO like talent tree, makes you feel a lot more invested in them.

As a Total War vet who swore I'd never buy another iteration after Empire, I'm in love.  We'll see if it's just the new shiny speaking in time but at least I'm not instantly disappointed like it's Empire all over again.

In conclusion:

(http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/1659/33879170.jpg)

I was PERILOUSLY close to buying this, but then found out that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 came out early this year (usually hits in the summer), and it had Augusta on it, so yeah. If you need me, I will be looking for my ball in Rae's Creek.

You know, so far so good. It's certainly beautifully presented. It's definitely challenging my fairly new machine to keep up at times, though. AI so far makes fairly good decisions, more on the model of Rome:TW, though I've seen some slight weirdness in one case with AI naval units (sailed off in the wrong direction). If it's broken in any respect, the brokenness is much more hidden than in Empire.

This might seem petty, but my biggest problem has been the small number of maps.

It feels like I'm sieging the same 2 or 3 castles and defending/attack the same 2 or 3 pieces of land over and over.

You mean the textual name of the land and location on the map wasnt enough to make it different?  pfft

Don't forget the general's speeches!

I kind of find it annoyingly difficult at times to move around the map. Probably there's an interface trick I'm missing out of being too reluctant to RTFM or do all the tutorial stuff.

Has the patch broken any one else's game?  My son's copy now crashes after battles are over and going back to the campaign map.

Bumping this to garner some info about MII :TW mods. Anyone have suggestions? I think I tried Stainless Steel last time around but could never get it to play right with the Steam version.

I got it working through steam version. You don't launch it with steam, have to launch it through an executable that should be somewhere in the mod directory.

Stainless steel is the best modded version of the regular game. Comprehensive tweaks to AI, unit rosters, balance, etc that adds lots of layers to vanilla game.

Basically go here and look over the list:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=556

All the ones with showing people viewing forum, and a lot of posts are good bets.

I would just like to point out right now that Stainless Steel is a retarded name for a mod of a game about medieval warfare.  That is all.

OK, I will dig around and give it a try. Thanks!

Edit- looking at the FAQ, I think I remember what my original problem was- I couldn't get Kingdoms to run correctly (I loaned out my original DVD, and re-purchased through Steam, but have the physical Kingdoms disks). I will have to dick around and see if I can get it working. Or buy Kingdoms from Steam like a good American.

I just had the whole damn thing start to redownload itself overnight the other night. Way to eat up my monthly downloads. Turned ff steam's auto-patching for this game. Still haven't had the time/inclination to boot it up yet.

So this went on sale on Steam for 33% off this weekend. I'm still not sure what to think?

Are people willing to take the plunge at that price point?

Yeah, would be nice to get some reviews of this while its on sale.

The hilarious part is we've all been burned so bad by Empire, I doubt anyone is willing to take the plunge.

Not gonna bother, from what I've read it's the same old TW. Gets decent reviews because it's more polished than ETW/NTW, but same old AI issues. I wouldn't get it unless you are some otaku nerd who wants to play TW with ninja units and geisha cut scenes. You'll get better gameplay with MTW2 mods.

If you've never played an TW game, this is a good one to get. If you have already slogged through all the others, this one holds few surprises.

That's all I needed to know. Thanks. Plus I'm not a fan of the Japanese period so, meh.

Hurry up and do Rome II, bitches!

I think that's about right. They solved the problem with Empire by just doing TW in pre-Empire style. I've found it moderately engaging but I have wondered at times why I don't just boot up Medieval 2 or Rome instead.

I demoed this an its kind of interesting but the pace was a bit too slow for me.  I haven't played a total war game before but I figured I'd give it a shot.  I understand why the series is popular though, after playing it, it just isn't my cup of tea.

How's the multiplayer? I hear good things about it.

havent played STW but multiplayer in total war has always been kind of bad, lots of cheese tactics and unbalanced units.

Anyone have any tips for speeding up the load times? They're the only thing really keeping me from enjoying this game.

Bit of a necro here, but the stand alone expansion Fall of the Samurai is now out and has been getting pretty good reviews.  I'm tempted to get this after hearing about all the additions (most modern setting of any TW game, naval bombardment of land including towns AND during battles, 3rd person operation of gatling guns) but I still have too many games I haven't even installed yet.  Has anyone tried this yet and wants to convince me to buy it before it goes on sale sometime with Steam?

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/total-war-shogun-2---fall-of-the-samurai

I just purchased STW2 + first xpac on steam sale last week, most say I am really impressed by vanilla campaign. By far the best non-modded CA game I've ever played.

I don't think I'll buy the xpac though, naval bombardment seems really unhistorical and gimmicky. I play TW to see infantry crashing together also, not for automatic weapons...

That said I can't wait to see CA take this engine back to a more meaty setting. Rome 2 or Medieval 3 anyone??? Would be great.

The realm divide killed it for me.  What a bullshit mechanic.

Bombarding towns is one thing (tho ships rarely did that, since they are generally on the losing side of an engagement with shore batteries), but who the hell would camp their army within cannon range of a ship?

Dead guys.

Everyone ever in the entire history of war?  Might as well fly a flag with the motto "Put marines here to win!" while you're at it.

Shogun lacks a "Fortify" button.