f13.net

http://www.vg247.com/2013/04/02/total-war-arena-isnt-a-dota-clone/ (http://www.vg247.com/2013/04/02/total-war-arena-isnt-a-dota-clone/)
Total War: Arena is a free-to-play effort announced at GDC. It gives players just three units to play with, as opposed to the 20 a core Total War game might front, but aims to provide a similar on-the-field commander experience.


Sounds great. I still think WiC was best multiplayer RTS I ever played, and a TW version of this could really be fantastic. Nice fast paced gameplay, no dumb basebuilding, micro management of such a small group units doesn't require korean cat-like reflexes, so more time to just think about your tactical movements, reactions to enemy and coordination with teammates who also had a similar group of units.

What is this... I don't even...

I'd rather they fix the bugs in Shogun 2, Napoleon or Empire instead of this... whatever this is.

So it's TW Dota, basically.

What? Not DOTA

Am I the only one here who played world in conflict?

I played it. You controlled a lot more units than 3 in WiC.

In MP? Just 4-5 vehicles (tanks, choppers, artillery), maybe 6-7 cheaper infantry units max. Usually less since you were often waiting on reinforcements.

Also in the article is says you will probably be able to split units up in TW:A so if you really want to micro more you can divide those 3 units of 40 into 6 units of 20.

Best thread title.

I'm a TW whore, but this doesn't grab me at all. Release Rome 2, dammit. RELEASE IT!

After the buggy mess that was Shogun 2, I find myself unable to care about Rome 2.

Huh, I never noticed any bugs in Shogun 2 in particular, but I guess I didn't play it a huge amount. Just abysmally slow load times.

Wah?  I played a lot of Shogun 2, and never noticed any bugs at all.  What are you having problems with?

For me, the only thing that hurt the game badly was the load times, as Ingmar said.  Other than that, I thought it was probably the best in the Franchise after Rome.

The load times weren't bad at first, but got worse the longer the campaign wore on. Then about 14 hours in, I'd start having campaign map freezeups where the game just sits there thinking about it when I do things like select a city or a particularly sizeable stack of troops. Then it just started hard locking on me at about hour 15. I gave up after that. The campaign map changes from the previous iterations were good - the 3d combat felt WAY too rushed, way too frenetic and was over way too quickly. It felt like they'd caffeined up the 3d combat to appease the deathmatch crowd and that the campaign map's bugs were just going to get worse and worse.

Yeah I think they are trying to clean that up. The problem is too many stacks running around. The AI just spammed them out and tried to wear you down. They said in RTW2 they want less battles/stacks, but more significant ones. 3D battles too hopefully they slow them down more so it's less about overwhelming morale for insta-routes.

Hopefully TW:A will encourage this since this gives them an outlet for RTS MP deathmatch play. World in conflict was fantastic for this, you could join an ongoing battle map,  no lobby matchmaking crap, just drop in/out, spawn your 4 tanks or gunships and join the 7v7 fight in progress. They will be able to distinguish their flagship series 3D battles as slower paced setpiece strategy battles (and campaign) while TW:A can have the micro tactic easy play deathmatch battles.

Shogun's overland map was poorly designed, and that brought the whole thing down in my mind. The economy didn't make a lot of sense, and the AI was made up by a bunch of cheating assholes.

When has any AI not been a cheating asshole?   :oh_i_see:

Rome and Medieval 2 didn't have it. They had pretty well designed AI's that would attack you if they saw you verging on their territory, or if you had been trying to play peaceful nice guy for too long while building up your forces.

The realm divide in Shogun 2 is one of the worst game mechanics I have ever seen.  Some douchebag who everyone hates attacks you, you burn his town: suddenly you are at war will all of Japan.

Eh?  I never had that problem in Shogun 2.  I mean, if I attack some large player in a large alliance maybe, but you shouldn't do that unless you feel you can take them all on or have formed your own large alliance.

AI cheated in those games. It had gang up on player mechanisms and couldn't go bankrupt. Also it was pretty terrible and didn't even garrison holdings properly.

Towards endgame it's possible to trigger the doomsday clock by defending yourself too hard, at which point if you're not prepared to invade Kyoto you're basically fucked; GG.

Ah, got it, didn't realize you were talking about he actual 'Realm Divided' event, sorry.

I don't know, it was never really a problem for me.  I watched that bar closely the entire game, and once it started getting near the end, would stop expanding and just start building up my cities and armies, then trigger the event on demand.

I didn't mind that realm divide, it was cheesy but it threw a new challenge at the player at the point when the player normally gets strong enough to roll the map easily. It was like Mongol event in MTW2 for certain eastern factions. RTW2 will prolly have something similar if you are Roman faction where if  you get strong enough you trigger civil war.

The first Rome had the civil war event, but it was poorly handled since you couldn't stab your allies until after a significant number of provinces. By that point, it was so late in the game, many people didn't give a shit about finishing.

Maybe.  Kind of hope they keep the mechanic where it begins when one side decides fuck it, and invades Rome.

Oh they copied the ai from civ 3? I think it was 3 where I'd be hated for defending myself against some nothing country.
Or was it 2?

Finally in an invite-only Alpha state: http://www.totalwar.com/arena

They are streaming live games right now on Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/totalwarofficial

Reminds me of Shattered Galaxy in terms of the setup (each player controls a small number of units).


Edit: live stream over, don't know if they'll have a archived broadcast for this stream yet

Edit 2: Stream archive: http://www.twitch.tv/totalwarofficial/b/661972447

I tried it. Like it a lot but I am not good enough at strategy games to say if it's good beyond the first impression. Also, it's in alpha so no one should expect it to be balanced or polished, but it seems pretty awesome to me so far. It's clearly influenced by Wargaming.net games even in terms of UI so it really seems (again, at first) as a combination of World of Tanks and Total War. World of Total Wars? Matches are 8 v 8 armies/players so far if I am not mistaken. I wasn't expecting that many people (and so much strategy) and that left a positive feeling.

It's 10 v 10.

Videos look good, as I expected it resembles World in Conflict which was sort of an underrated RTS, with a format of just controlling a single squad of units (4-5 tanks, or AA, Howitzers, gunships, etc.) on a map with 10-20 players, instead of the traditional whole army. That format had a lot of potential but kind of was lost in the explosion of the MOBA craze.

I like the format because micro obviously is important with a half dozen units but you don't need to have professional level clicks-per-minute ability to micro a whole army of 30 units spread all across the map, or like in a MOBA have a single unit microing perfectly in sync with teammates, comboing super abilities, etc. You also still need to pay attention to the battle flow across the whole map, but you don't need to be at max zoom the whole time, watching icons.

The larger 10 v 10 format means it can function like a FPS team death match in terms of matchmaking, where a player can drop and be immediately replaced midgame, without throwing things off. Further even if you team is being stomped, at least you can spawn with your squad and still have a decent game working with a couple of other competent players holding a map sector down with complementary units.

I really think this will do great things for TW multiplayer which I always thought was bad. None of the units were balanced properly for it so you had all kinds of cheese stack tactics (cav, arty, archers, etc.), too intense but only because it was annoying to constantly be adjusting so many units facing, battles were also pretty long, but came down to too many quick all or nothing moments (light cav sneaks around and smashes flank of an inf unit you didn't face it with, causes moral chain collapse along line).

Warld is the hardest to read "word" I've ever seen.

I'm in beta for this and it's decent. Basically 10v10 RTS where each player controls 3 units of troops of either single or mixed types. The maps are pretty good, nice variety of terrains which have impact. Elevation & fog of war are significant too. Before battle you choose a commander who specializes in something, like assault, defensive, or support, and usually in a certain type of a troop. Then you go with 3 units of troops, either 3 of one type or a mix. Generally a mix is better because even if your commander specializes in say heavy infantry it's good to bring along one unit of skirmishers or cav to cover them, it's too much to  depend on teammates to completely cover your tactical weaknesses, although there is a decent amount of it on a good team.

So overall pretty solid, and I think a much better multiplayer experience (which I never really liked) than the normal TW games. The things I like more are the only 3 units instead of 10. It shifts the game away from so much heavy mico when you have 16 units, gives you time to react instead of being hosed if attacked broadly and just can't click fast enough to turn units all over. Thus in turn you have time to focus more on the overall strategic going-ons of the battle, which is important since with 10v10 there's a lot of things happening. Reacting to new map situations along with communication to the team helps a lot.

The closed beta is about to wrap up in 2 weeks (end of October). Open beta to start shortly thereafter with no more progress resets after it starts.
Certainly looks fun but you'll still be at the mercy of the average mouth breather. https://youtu.be/x8j7X01QYbo

.....

This still exists?

I didn't sign up for the current closed round but they licensed it out to the World of Tanks guys to run. Doesn't look like many changes, maybe they cleaned up the performance which was a problem.

I got a closed beta key to this and played a lot last weekend. It was a lot of fun. That said it also has a lot of problems. Many being the same as World of Tanks.

Arty is an issue just like WoT. It takes the least amount of skill to play but can often do the most damage. When not a very high mobile class is little you can do about it. My current feeling is even a mid level mobile unit has less options than WoT because of less places to hide. I read a developer post from a month ago that they have all the same concerns and are working on solutions but they also like the positives it brings to battles. I think it will remain an issue.

From what I have read level 9 and 10 are money sinks. Possibly worse than WoT because I have seen screen shots of people who had double the kills of anyone else on the team, won the game, and still lost silver at tier 10. Apparently the differences in power have been increased between levels from the steam alpha game. Likely to force people into thinking they have to play high levels to have any chance. This results in them needing to pay more money to play.

Unit balance and friendly fire are also big hot topics likely to always cause complaints. Gold ammo is not exactly a thing but consumables bought with either silver or gold are. So when you are beaten by someone else you never know if it is because their units are an OP class, they out spent you on consumables, or are just better skilled. No one ever wants to admit to the last. I have read currently the premium units that you can buy are not considered OP but WoT started that way with premium tanks until they wanted to drive up income.

The two biggest issues for me are not issues I generally had with WoT. The first is the interface outside the game battle play is terrible in my opinion. The second is Tuesday's patch added having to install easyanticheat to play the game. I have not decided if is worth allowing a key logger to be installed even if supposedly only runs when playing the game. Already reports of people that have beta graphic drivers (to be able to play another game) not able to play.

I think what will help with balance compared to WoT is the fixed rock-scissors-paper nature of this kind of historical game. Unlike tanks which are all kind of the same, here there's rules about how generally it's spears beating cav, swords beating spears (unless deployed phalanx frontal), 2h weapons beat 1h but are punished by archers, etc. It becomes such a blindingly obvious issue when some unit is breaking through these limitation expectations (because of balance problems or pay2win bonuses) that it cannot be ignored.

The balance problem comes from too many categories and combinations. You have swords with and without shields, cavalry light and heavy, archers, spears/pikes in and out of phalanx, ballista, catapults, and light infantry with dogs. Apparently the last one causing most problems before Tuesday's patch (unknown after) because dogs were not in the previous steam alpha. Then on top of that you have commander and troops skills. For example, just because a troop has a shield does not mean it has a skill to block arrows. Dogs after Tuesday's patch can be counter charged to hurt them or use shield swipe but many don't have a charge or shield swipe skill even though others of same class do. Then there are things that are likely just bugs like spears with phalanx should be countered from behind but if charged from behind they can instantly turn around and instead decimate the charger.