f13.net

Accidentally/purposely leaked. (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-01-14-total-war-warhammer-revealed)  

Like an abused wife I'll be buying this on day one.  Creative Assembly keeps hurting me, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW THEM LIKE I DO.  I anticipate a festival of DLC where every minor (ie, interesting) faction will be locked behind a paywall.

I will most likely also buy this... then let it sit uninstalled for weeks while I work up the courage.  If they make a 40k version I may not be seen for months.

I'm assuming an RTS?

Ha, I give 50/50 chances that GW will have gone under before that thing sees the light of day.

They've flubbed every game after Medieval 2. They keep thinking their fans want more streamlining, or they at least say they do. The least fun part of a TW game is playing the battle maps over and over. I loved the large scale battle management, economics, towns, and agents on the big map. I could choose to influence certain battles with my intervention but let the regular ones play out as expected.

Rome took that out back and shot it. There's almost nothing you can do to influence battles anymore unless they are close. You are very unlikely to have heroic moments with the new system. It all comes down to a numbers game, and you're better off letting the CPU play out all the battles than getting involved unless it's 50-50. But most of the time it's completely outnumbered fights you don't want to play.

They killed off doing family lines. They killed off doing town windows and cool buildings. They killed up meaningful upgrades. They made it mostly about battles except the battles aren't that fun. Go figure. Basically they've taken the parts that differentiate them from any other battle simulator, and they murdered it with a gleeful smile.

Fuck them. I'm not going to be fooled anymore. They are now on the same basis as Ubisoft. Prove it well after release, because I'm never buying anything they do at release again.

Stop being such a hipster elitist.  Rome 2 is perfect for some people!   :why_so_serious:


Seriously though, I thought Shogun 2 was the best game they did since the original Rome.  Everything about that was gravy.  Which is why Rome 2 turning out the way it did hurt so much.

Are these games mod friendly at all?  Seems like it actually wouldn't be too hard to make a turn based approximation of the table top game using the battle engine.  Take out the RTS, and a lot of the mechanics are pretty similar already.

Rome 2 is allegedly good now after all the patching, or so I read.

I have heard that even after all the patches it's still a pile of shit.

I've played it. I love these games. It's playable but not fun. I wouldn't say it's good. About 5 hours into a game you realize you're not even playing most of the battles, and city sieges boil down to you stomping garrisons unless an army just happens to be in the neighborhood or making their last stand. And even then it's still mostly a numbers game.

I gave up.

That was pretty much my experience too. I thought it would be awesome and then realised after I'd got a little way into it that I was basically playing it like a Civ mod and I'd be having more fun if I just set up a Civ game with some very specific parameters.

I gave up after the shitshow that was Shogun 2. The battles, which to me were the best part of the game, had turned into hyper-fast twitchy fests that were over after 1 clash of the lines. They seemed to lack any of the tactical finesse of the other games, even Empire. And it was crashy and filled with a memory leak, and this was a year after the game's release. I didn't even bother with Rome and it seems like I made a good choice with that. Wahammer? Had this come after Medieval Total War 2, I'd have been all over it. Fuck Creative Assembly now. They got a lot of making up to do.

Better than Cyanide?

In the same way that herpes might be better than AIDS but really only slightly.

If they would go back and just do a graphical update to Medieval 2 with some new factions, and basically nothing else? It would sell better than anything new they've done.

Previously they have bounced back a bit after a serious flop... So I wonder if TW Attila will be polished?

I would concur that the studio has really gone downhill since Sega bought it.

I'm assuming you mean Shogun 2 after empire? While I agree it was a bounce back, I still hated Shogun 2 for the same reasons. They stripped out the management parts of the game I liked, and the game refused to run after a few hours of play due to memory leaks.

I kind of liked the simplification direction which was started in Napoleon, and then Shogun 2. For the Medieval 2 style of the older games, by late game the micromanagement of all the unit recruiting/replenishment, then buildings , agents, cities got tedious.

Running an empire isn't supposed to be easy.  :why_so_serious:

The problem I have with their direction is it puts too much emphasis on battles, which with the way AI fucks up constantly has been the weakest part of the game since Medieval 2.

Yeah that's when Shogun 2 started getting tedious, especially on legendary difficulty, just an endless wave of AI stacks coming at you. It was satisfying to overcome that with a weaker starting clan, but not something you would want to do over an over. The naval battles were especially boring and tedious.

Exactly, there needs to be balance, and there just wasn't. My idea of empire building is that you focus early on battles as a growing general, but as you expand over time your duties gear towards more administation. This is how it would work in real life. I want the game experience to match that. Not to say you can't as an emperor go out and influence battles, but not all of them.

However, you absolutely can dictate city growth and management. That's much more my speed. The current system doesn't allow that gameplay anymore. Buildings are so streamlined as to be totally useless, and corruption/fatigue or whatever they call it is crippling. Gone are the days you could build up your way to glory. It's all about micromanaging pissed off people.

Well, I think the Total War series has always been meant to be more of a wargame than a 4X empire builder - I mean, it's right there in the name. I don't think the games were ever really great at doing the builder side of it, myself, and the main novelty of the series is the 'realistic' take on RTS battles.

The battles in Medieval 2 are fun. You siege cities and storm castles. You can defend a castle with 300 men against a force of 1500, and win through strategy.

I agree that I don't want TW to be a 4x empire game like we know of. But it is a 4x game still. It needs to polish those elements. It's supposed to be a blending of the 4x games with the RTS battles. I feel it's unbalanced right now.

I remember before RTW2 release what you're describing is how they were talking about the design direction. Generals more important, you can only directly control where you have a general, but less overall stacks all over map, less, but more decisive battles (expanding on army zone of controls). On the administration side they were trying to make it more interesting with regional centres, and divided provinces.

Anyway, they talked a good game, but in the end, the whole thing flopped because the execution was dismal. I haven't really been paying attention to if anything is going to be different in this upcoming Attila game.

I thought Shogun 2 was great fun personally.

I remember that. They tried to make Generals more important, but ended up making them faceless assholes you couldn't care less about with no family line. The politics aspect of the game is laughable. It's like it got tacked on really late in the process because they remembered they fucked up family trees, but you don't even actually try to make your faction successful. If you do that you risk war! I mean, it's completely counter intuitive compared to the last game.

Ditto (as I mentioned before).  I felt Shogun 2 was one of their best releases.  I also had zero technical issues with it, so maybe that helps me out over some of the people here.

Long loading times aside, Shogun 2 was (mostly) fantastic.

The "realistic" battles were what drew me to the series. They were great in Medieval 2 and I even liked Empire (but I have a soft spot for that time period). From Napoleon on, the battles have been shortened, combat is now insanely deadly so that battles are over in less than 10-15 minutes and often way shorter than that. There seems no real ebb and flow to battles anymore, it's just crash into each other once then watch one side evaporate.

Hmm, thats a fair criticism.  Units do seem to break way to fast now.  I still loved the game as I mentioned, but I will grant that I'd have preferred if the combat pace was a bit slower.

Rome Total War 2 after a years worth of patches is pretty good I found.

Please change the thread title to Total War: Hammer.

Please change the thread title to War: Totally Hammered.

I think one of the problems Rome 2 had was that they tried to really overhaul the Campaign Map in a way that doesn't really fit with traditional 4x thinking without really making that very clear. They removed the obvious branches for buildings, so which building line you pick doesn't make an enormous impact or if it does is a choice made very early on so that there's no late game deliberation about what to do with a city. They tried to replace that with choosing regional capitals and managing development levels over provinces (so that higher level buildings have negative effects so you're actively penalised for trying to tech up everything).

Now I'm not sure if this mechanic is a great idea or not but the implementation was terrible, primarily because it requires a pretty huge mindset change in a large aspect of gameplay that isn't really communicated to the player beyond the punishment of constant rebellions. Now it's possible that a player will respond to this by going, 'Damn this really isn't working. All that corruption, etc. is really upping unrest I better demolish some of my awesome buildings and take the tech hit to solve that,' but it's far, far more likely they're going to want to protect their shiny tech that a lifetime of gaming has taught them they should want and instead keep battering their head against that wall until they go 'fuck this game, it's bullshit'. This never gets explained to the player because there's no real guidance post tutorial and the tutorial doesn't cover any of the later game ideas or issues. And in the meantime they've removed the more obvious areas of strategic choice.

Also the general mechanic was crap, they totally removed the family management side of things. Hell in Rome it was pretty meaningless but at least the family tree and similar things let the players tell their own stories regarding the generals. This one could have worked better if there was some way of showing a general's relation to the faction and maybe involving them more in the politics side of things (getting them into elections that takes them out of the field for a bit but brings them back with better administrative traits). Of course that couldn't happen because they're focused on battles not governing.

Generals in Rome had retinues, families, traits, positions of power. They were openly explained and readily apparent. Events would happen around them.

In Rome 2 you get a dumbed down version of that. You literally don't give a shit about any of your generals. When one dies, he's immediately replaced by one of three other robots. You probably can't even figure out where he died or who cares. It's a huge miss on their part. In Rome 1, losing your best general to battle or old age was enormous. Entire cities could rebel because of his death. Holds on areas could be lost. Armies could desert. In Rome 2? NEXT MAN UP!

The city management penalties were too big and stupid. You have to know that players love to improve and improve. And yet, in this game they have to plan way in advance exactly how they want to set up their province and likely destroy buildings and reset those goals as they go. That's not fun. That's not even how cities worked. It's ridiculous to think that having a larger fishing yard would be good, but a huge fishing yard would suddenly cause a gigantic penalty to your popular support in a region you entirely own.

The combined QA powers of games workshop and creative assembly will be something to behold.

Maybe they can get Cyanide in to do UI design and really produce a complete turd.

I've found all the TW games lacklustre since Medieval One. The first.

That was the last game where battles were fun, tactical, and always fought over an actual province.

Total war games have all been good if the titles include the word "Shogun" and I've found them at least playable with the word "Medieval". Beyond that, not so much.

No love for the original rome?

I've always thought Rome was the height of the series.  It never got any better than that for me.

Yeah that was the only one I played a lot of.

It was in my mind too. I want the to debug and update it, and I'd play it like I play M&B

Lot of people liked it, but I never took to it. I think it was the sieges in particular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i4d3ignBNQ

Just "coming soon" so I'm rather interested whether this or Mount&Blade: Bannerlords will get released first (hopefully both will get released though it's been really quiet on m&b's part for a while).

Taleworlds is always super quiet, but they have been working on M&B2 for like 4-5 years, and one would assume at whatever pace they need given no shortage of funds because of previous success. So it can't be THAT far off...right?

Not seeing very good reviews to TW Attila, pretty doubtful that this Warhammer game will be anything more than another shitshow unless they have gone back to the drawing board (again) on the engine. I mean they should, but they have been pretty awful at everything post MTW2/Sega buyout.

Slightly off topic, Total War: Arena so far is surprisingly good even though it's just alpha stage. Multiplayer Only, 10v10, it's Total War meet World of Tanks.

My mostly uninformed take is that if the game is just a Total War game re-skinned with Warhammer stuff, then it will probably not grab me.  If, on the other hand, the Total War folks are using their "expertise" to build Warhammer rules into their engine it might be really neat.

It is one of the mysteries of the universe why a good Warhammer tabletop sim has never been built.  I get that it is probably a GW thing... but their strategy is not forcing me to spend my money on their physical game, it just causes me to not spend money at all and complain about it on the internet.

Yeah, GW's entire approach to PC games is retarded.  Let's ignore the fact hey could probably make a ton of money just making a Warhammer game that puts the rules straight to PC for a reasonable price.  If they want to be dicks, charge a subscritpion to play online (with access to all armies).

They could even go the F2P route.  Charge people to buy access to each army (it's codex basically), as well as special color schemes and other vanity shit.  Hell, even if they want to be real dicks they could charge people for individual units just like you were building your own at home (basically the MTGO approach).  And it would still be very profitable because at the end of the day, there are a lot of us who would like to get into table top gaming, but building, painting, and going out to some stink infested comic books store to play the same group of teens every weekend is not appealing to.  Or we just don't have the time.  The Internet fixes all that.  Including speeding up the games because all the rules are automated.

They have a ton of options, limited only by exactly how big of assholes they want to be, and yet they don't take any of them.

I'm one of those guys who fell off the Total War bandwagon in large part because of the accelerated pace of the battles. It just stopped feeling natural to the era setting.

But Warhammer might actually feel *more* natural with such speeds, given the high tech mobility and firepower...

Going to have to watch this one.

Don't buy in. TW games have gone off the rails. Even reskins will go wrong until 14 patches deep.

The fun part is that on the tabletop side the Warhammer world  in the latest expansion. Naturally, GW does not release any information about any upcoming Warhammer releases.

Yeah... I could see this as something along the lines of Marvel Heroes... F2P, but you buy various Army starter kits.  After that, you could buy with in-game or real currency additional units, options for units, different uniforms and different dyes.  Customizing and optimizing your army would be half the fun (maybe more).  The whole points-based-army-building would be a huge meta-game in itself.  Content could be PvE with a points cap and achievements for completing with fewer points... PvP a given... fixed maps, random maps, map creator... I mean, the chargeable events are almost limitless.  And, it's not like there's any doubt over whether people will spend lots of money on customization in a video game.  Baffling.

Obviously I don't have access to their accounting books and business plan, but it just seems unfathomable that there isn't more money in pixelating their IP and making their game way more accessible than anything else they could possibly imagine with their current approach.  I won't say that it would make their Tabletop grow, it might, but it would more likely take some of that business; take some of that business and plant it as a seed for the Money Tree that would grow out of it.

It's a variant of the Innovator's Dilemma. GW is too afraid of digital miniatures cannibilizing their physical miniature sales. WotC has the same issue with digital MtG.

They'd have to go the Magic Online route and essentially charge the same amount for things and just do a digital full conversion.  It would probably do fairly well if it was well made. 

GW is and always has been fucking idiots when it comes to digital properties. I was amazed at how well they did their digital codexes on this last edition of 40k. The iPad version of the Chaos Codex was a really well done, searchable type of experience. I think they went back and fucked it up in later codexes.

They've always restricted their licensees in what could be done to restrict potential cannibalization of their physical market, because they do not understand digital and its potential for endless gouging. It was until they started losing money on their physical product gouging that they started to allow digital any sort of leeway. I'm still amazed that Blood Bowl is as faithful a translation as it is (despite Cyanide's shitty shit shit UI). It appears that they are going the way of "gouge for multiple DLC teams" in the new Blood Bowl 2.

Blood Bowl was their most popular side game, so they discontinued it. Which is why it can exist as a digital game.

Yeah, I'm curious to see what happens there. I keep hearing rumors that they're squatting Lizardmen, and they're my second largest army.

GW is basically following the WotC model.  Concentrate on your physical product line, turn story-line related stuff into profit centers through novelizations, licensing, etc. and only go forward with digital products when it doesn't risk cannibalizing your core line at all.

If they did a Warhammer version of MODO, where everything costs the same as physical product and you could redeem a whole army or set for actual physical miniatures the same as what MODO does with card/redeeming sets, it actually helps to support your core physical product line. 



Going all digital seems like a really terrible long-term idea when your physical product line is doing well over a long period of time.  What is the half life for a successful digital franchise?  Five years?  So beating a dead horse by year ten, if you are successful at launch?  Just think back 20 years to what the big video game franchises were, and where are they now.  Outside of Warcraft and a couple of Nintendo franchises that are kept around to bolster the sale of new systems, where are they?

You are also completely dependent on switching your entire core competency into software development, which no one in your company has experience with?  And if you hire it out you are liable to all the problems of software development plus getting fucked by publishers/distributors, who you now have no history with?

One bad title, or one mediocre selling big budget title, is enough to sink even venerated and successful game companies.  It makes so much more sense to keep your core going as long as it works and collect money when you can from licensing.  A bad digital product is too bad, but you got paid already and it doesn't hurt your overall brand too much.

Also, there is a huge difference in the physical model, where the game developer is the big dog dealing with small dogs (shops, distributors) versus being a software developer, where you are a fucking minnow in danger of one of the large behemoths randomly swatting you or swallowing you whole. 

The only straight digital path that might make sense to me is if GW got into a partnership with someone like Valve, who takes care of the heavy lifting on the digital end, and GW keeps going with the game design/lore end to keep the sweet merchandise, books, etc. money rolling in...  basically like Dota 2.  Anything else sounds like in five years EA would be buying the company for scrap and IP to give to a third rate studio to crank out some shitty quick selling games to make a quick buck before the IP goes dormant and someone starts a Kickstarter for the spiritual successor to Warhammer.  :oh_i_see:

If your physical product line is disappearing or looks to be obsolete?  Shit yah, make the jump...  or sell out to a big studio/publisher and walk away.  If your physical line is still going strong?  Ughhh, no.

GW's physical sales and stock price has been in a steady decline for the last year.

Their stuff has always been at the high end of the price curve for miniatures, but the last couple of years have jaw-dropping. It's to the point now that even adults with plenty of disposable income are balking at the prices.  Guys at the local game shop who've dropped $500 a month for a decade are spending that money on other systems. For some of this stuff it's just below the cost of Forge World equivalents. $25.00 for a single plastic man-sized miniature?  I could swallow that for metal since the earlier you buy a metal model at release the better a casting you're likely to get, but with plastic it doesn't matter. They're still using the same mold for Falcon Grav tanks that they used when they released them.

Not to mention chinese recasters are producing knockoffs that are atually better quality than the originals for a fraction of the price. GW is the Marvel of gaming. If they're smart they'll start farming out their IP to competent people and make most of their money that way.  

It's like a newspaper thinking they'll save their business by staying print only.

Pretty much.  I'm not convinced going digital will canibalize their physical sales very much at all.  The nature of the game makes it a very small crowd that actually spends much money on their physical shit, on top of the fact it's prohibitively expensive.  A digital version (with more sensible pricing) would open up the game to a much much broader base of people who aren't playing it now for a reason.  I have a feeling the people doing the physical stuff will continue to do so.  It would only expand their profit base, not shrink it (imo).

That's an apt analogy. And just like the newspapers, they will get slowly beaten to death for their efforts, while the early adopters of the new way will grab market share they can't obtain later.

You guys realise you're talking about a company whose digital publishing arm puts out audio books for the same price as hardback novels and digital novellas for near the same price as a regular paperback right? If they did digital versions you'd be able to put together your online spacemans army for roughly the same price as the current physical offerings because otherwise you'd be threatening their physical sales.

Also they would issue super special, one-off never to be remade models for $35 that they'd sneak into a regular $10 army pack a year later.

Don't even get me started on the length's they'll go to "protect" themselves. You'd think the moderate backfire from their lawsuit against Chapterhouse would have taught them something, but it doesn't appear so.

But their digital pricing policy means it would make even more sense to them to produce online versions. Once the generic marine/ork/eldar models and skin variants for all the different chapters/clans/craftworlds/etc are done it's 100% profit. That's most of the reason they've been trying to kill online retailers for years, to force people online to buy direct from them and keep the middleman's profit.

The thing is, I would pay retail-physical-model price for a digital army in a perfect replication of tabletop Warhammer and I'm probably not alone. Assembling and painting models is incredibly tedious, and having to drive a half hour or more just to get a game in with some random who hasn't shower in a week isn't a great experience. It's the same reason I got into Hex instead of ever taking the plunge back into paper MtG.

It's been going on longer than that. When I quit playing 15 odd years ago they had started putting out army lists of 1500 points rather than the 6-8000 points that they had before. And the rumour mill was rife about how their sales were collapsing as people were looking at the prices back then and balking. I remember when a tenner could get you a couple of boxes of mixed grunt minitures so you and your mates could club together for a couple of boxes and then split the minis up. I'm terrified to look at what the miniture prices are now.

And GW were well known for creating codexs and then fucking the balance up by releasing new stuff in white Dwarf that was THE MINIATURE of the month that was so OP that you had to buy Next Months mini to get back in the game. And the rules changes in the mag as well...

There were a few good GW inspired games that came out though. SSI had a few, and there was at least one total war style game that was actually damn good, Warhammer Dark Omen. I played the hell out of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_Workshop_video_games

Yeah, I played that a lot too.  17 years ago. 

A Rhino is $40
a vanilla 10 marine tactical squad is $40

So $80 for one of the two mandatory troop choices. You can try skipping the Rhino and footslogging it, but anyplace with even a moderately competitive environment and they'll never make it to an objective.

So, about $100 for one HQ and two troop choices.

I'm gobsmacked.

I'm sure the $40 models are all powerful plastic too. This reminds me of when they went to "white metal!", a tin alloy rather than their lead based alloy, and told everyone that They had to raise their prices because tin was more expensive than lead, and then shut up when people pointed out that Tin was in in fact cheaper than lead...

Stop buying things from these assholes.

Warhammer 40000: Space Marine was a damn fun game. It's a shame THQ died, because I'd play the shit out of a sequel to that. Or maybe they should sell the rights to From. I'd be willing to bet that Blood Angel Marine Bourne or Dark Space Marine Souls would be about the most amazing game I'd ever have played.

Romping around splatting hordes of orcs into a thin red mist in a bunch of remarkably well done environments was just too much fun.

I also think WH40K is one of the strongest possible IPs that could be made into a MOBA, if it weren't for a fact that making a MOBA is to 2015 what "making an MMO out of our IP" was to 2009.

I did many years ago. It doesn't seem to have stopped them.

More or less.

........WTF?

I just went and read the current lore.  Wow.  I mean, I guess it's kind of hilarious they just went and actually advanced the plot, and killed off the franchise.  But damn, I was actually rather fond of the lore.  Are they killing off the franchise?  Have they stated what direction they are planning to take things?

Oh well, maybe that means (if they are killing it off) WFB will become available for an actual PC translation, like other stuff they discontinued.

No they are just clearing the deck for a new edition of WFB.

Video  (https://youtu.be/ZKPw86ivR7A) of a scripted battle between Empire and Greenskins with first-person Doom Diver control.

Man, I would be so excited right now if they hadn't shot gunned me in the face with disappointment over Rome 2.

I will buy this even if/when all of F13 says it is pure shite.

It just makes me want to load up Medieval 2. With a mod.

You know, I loaded up Medieval 2 recently. It's also shit.

Heretic!

The AI's inability to path properly in sieges makes it kind of bad.

I play the campaign map far more than the battles, but I prefer Rome 1 in terms of tactical battles. But it doesn't work well any more so medieval it is

See, that was the thing - once they moved to the 3d map, the series died, I think. The ai has always been questionable, but iirc at least in Medieval is was relatively straight forward for it to prioritise provinces and move stacks onto them. Once they switched to the "better" version, the pathing died. Plus, watching a billion micro-management nightmares scuttling around my screen, doing inconsequential bullshit just killed it for me. At this point, CK2 does everything I want from the game, and more.  :sad:

Once they took away the city management screen the game died for me. I loved city management. That was my favorite part along with creating powerful armies run by world class generals. None of the newer games do that. The RPG part of the game is mostly gone, and the cities are essentially meaningless other than a few upgrade choices. If I just wanted a tactical battle simulator I'd play a bunch of RTS games.

Plus what made it worse, they PENALIZED you for building in cities. Like it's somehow a bad thing to have a bigger port, or a bigger temple, or a better barracks. It's ridiculous.

Pretty much agree with Paelos. Makes me glad they're doing Warhammer (an IP I don't give a shit about), as it guarantees I won't even be tempted to buy another one of their games. Not that there was a big risk of that after the mess that was Rome 2 (it took serious skill to fuck that up, given how good Rome was).

GUYZ YOU KNOW WHAT WAS REALLY HOLDING ROME 1 BACK? ALL THOSE PESKY GENERALS AND THEIR FAMILIES. WE'LL JUST STREAMLINE THAT AND MAKE THEM ALL INTERCHANGABLE AND FACELESS AND BLAND! <high fives>

I want to be in some of those design meeting just so I could roundly mock their complete lack of understanding of their playerbase.

This (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWshPH_jsjQ) is the proper way to conduct yourself in that meeting.

Always thought that scene would have been more appropriate/funny if he'd shot the girl at the end also.


Sigh, I don't know, this looks really tempting.  I like Warhammer, and it looks like this could really spice up the combat game play a lot.  Guess I'm the opposite of Paelos.  The 3D strategy battles were always way more cool and fun for me than most any other RTS game.  The strategy map has always been half ass'ed and shallow from the first game forward.  If I want grand strategy and empire building, I'll play Europa Universals.

But man.  Rome 2 was a near unforgivable bullshit turn around fuck up of epic proportions.  Will wait and see.

Why yes, I am never giving that up.

I liked the balance of TW games because it took elements from EU (which I find to be horrible slow and tedious with a learning curve that's entirely too high for me to want to play it a lot) and RTS games which I find too twitchy and crack addled.

The point was to meld those two ideas together and make civilization that lets you fight on a battlefield. It worked well for year until they apparently thought all people wanted was battles and they focused on facial textures of troops. Honestly, the graphics whore level in that building is through the roof and it's killing them.

PS I patched and loaded up Rome 1 again. It's stable for now.

Get ready Gauls...

I think you could see the evolution in design focus from Medieval 2 to Shogun 2, and it really seemed to have started around Napoleon. The RTS battles (always my favorite part) went from slow and methodical to over in less than 15 minutes. It felt like there was such a focus on making multiplayer battles quick and pretty that it turned the tactical level of the game into a fucking clickfest. Shogun 2 was just fucking HORRIBLE about that and really turned me off of that game to the point that when the bugs and performance/memory leak issues started cropping up, rather than suffer through them I just said "Fuck it." I think Medieval 2 was the best of the series (I didn't play much Rome 1) and Empire is still my favorite because of the time period.

This particular type of RTS design philosophy is actually just about perfect for Warhammer. I just don't have any confidence in this group producing a game that isn't full of face-stabbing bugs to be able to spend money on this.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the the strategy part of the game also.  It was just never really that deep, and without the great combat, could never stand on its own.  Most of what they terribly fucked up in Rome 2 was everything outside the battles, and it has me raging.  The quick combat IS annoying, but is still a livable defect for me.  Which is probably why I liked Shogun 2 a lot (even if several of you don't).  Still had good town/province/empire building, a (shallow compared to Rome) Dynasty system, and lots of other out of combat options.  The combat itself I thought was a ton of fun, and looked great (which frankly is a big selling point.  Watching an entire army of individual soldiers go at it never gets old), even with the speed up of combat.

Also, I never had any bugs or issues with it other than loading times.

I think I've literally posted this about 5 times now though.

So hmm.  Anyways, we all agree that Rome 2 was digital Aids, and these people are not to be trusted.

Even if the video looked really awesome.


Fuck it, I'm reinstalling Rome 1 to play right now.

Pre-Alpha Let's Play: Dwarfs vs Greenskins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK0BMkKmwB4

I want to go to there.

Even though I already know I'll throw money at this whether its good or bad, I hope there is some sort of Army building and customizing Meta game... if there's not, then I'm pretty sure the tired old Total War battle sim will wear out its welcome within a week or two.

The DLCs are already in.

http://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-warhammer-release-date-set-first-dlc-adds-chaos-warriors/

.........................



Only 4 races at launch. 

Day 0 DLC for a fifth.

Holy god do I hate this company now.  Just....arg.  How can they keep fucking up so bad?!

I'll wait and see how reviews are (I'm not very hopeful now).  If people say its robot Jesus, then I'll maybe wait for a steam sale that includes DLC discounts.

So its Orks, Dwarfs, Empire, & Undead for those without the tactical vision to spend more money.  :grin:

The Day 0 DLC doesn't really surprise me, but it is super shitty, IMO. I wasn't going to buy this at launch no matter what because fuck Creative Assembly and their buggy ass games. If I hear it's really good after the fact, I may pick it up on sale but I haven't even bothered to get Rome 2 on deep discount because of how buggy it's supposed to have been even after shittons of patches.

If anybody else missed this:

Video (https://youtu.be/vJUWImJUZrU) of what the (Greenskin) campaign map and mechanics will look like.  :heart:

And the Empire walkthrough is out (https://youtu.be/M3Uf53_Y6nk).

Oh, hey, looks like this released.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/364360/ (http://store.steampowered.com/app/364360/)

Welcome to Altdorf, boys, I'm going in.

Huh, the Steam reviews are pretty positive.

I played through the Dwarf campaign once and found it enjoyable.  Crashed once or twice, but nothing like some people have been crying about.  Definitely MUCH more stable than Rome II was at launch.

Buggy and not really that interesting. I miss the original Warhammer Dawn of War games too much to like this.

I've been playing this non stop since it launched, game of the year so far.

Yeah, I definitely lost most of Sunday trying to finish my Dwarf campaign.  There was one grudge I just couldn't strike out.  Took me kind of by surprise when I finally got the victory screen.  I'm going to try Vampire Counts next, though the gameplay for Chaos looks very interesting as well.  I love the idea of not having to run around defending territory.

Kinda glad I'm swamped with Stellaris, but I'll definitely pick this up on sale.

I'm enjoying this, and fantasy is definitely a better setting for what CA seem to be trying to do.

Certainly not perfect. One man leader units are really fiddly, and the tactical combat doesn't seem as polished as the best total war stuff.

One man leader units are fantastic when it's your dwarf king slaughtering hundreds of greenskins single-handedly.

That sounds exactly like Warhammer.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah that sounds like "Herohammer" aka Warhammer Fantasy Battles 4th and 5th Editions.

Basically this. Loads of fun. Armies and tactics are varied. Campaign map is pretty streamlined so you only have to do actual important shit.

There is no Warhammer but 3rd Edition, and I won't have any of you kids tell me otherwise.

 :geezer:

Yeah, 4th/5th edition are what I grew up with.  Long live super powered hero's riding super powered monstrous mounts! 

Loving vanilla so far, which hasn't usually been the case with TW. Playing Dwarfs. Fits my turtle playstyle.

About to install the Radious mod.

I tried it for like an hour, it changed way too much and completely threw the balance of the game out of whack just for the hell of it.  The only part i liked was reducing the cost of armies so you could have more out there, but even that changes the balance of things in unexpected ways.

I've never been a big fan of the Radious mods for that reason.  I tried it the most in Shogun, but it turned into a huge slog when every enemy was putting out massive stacks.  One comment for the Warhammer mod mentions that they're getting swarmed by enemy agents that keep assassinating their guys, too.

There are very very few issues with the base game that need such a massive amount of changes to be honest.  Maybe agent spam can be toned down, but instead of completely turning it off like some mods maybe just slightly raise your own hero limit and make sure every faction has an "assassin" type agent.

Agents are kind of excessive. You can simply acquire too many of them and so using and developing them becomes a hassle rather than a boon.

Like when playing VC you can get one banshee per settlement. That is just too many regardless of anything else. It's too much management per turn regardless of how strong it is.

1 hero type per faction seems most reasonable. Might make it a thing later.

Beastmen being added next week.

They get a grand campaign and a shorter story campaign - whatever that is.

The mechanics look similar to chaos warriors.

Enjoying Beastmen. Fewer agents for one thing, the horde mechanic and waaagh mechanic seem to fit together and thematically match the race better than previous implementations.

Lots of fast units is fun on the tactical map. Makes me look forward to Bretonnians and Skaven.

Word is Wood Elves will be the next race expansion.  No idea when they'll actually flesh out Bretonnia, but there are mods that let you use them as they are.

Haha this game is getting slaughtered in reviews because of their the nickel and diming the player for updates.

This series which I used to love has really gone downhill since Sega took over. I have completely given up on it and have not bought any on release since Empire. Picked up Shogun 2 a long time after, nothing since then. The pricing scheme is ridiculous, the quality is dubious (although it seems they've improved it a bit with Atila & Warhammer).

What? It's at metacritic 86, so idkwtf what you are talking about.


The only two DLC so far cost £6 and £13, and if you want to wait for a sale nothing is stopping you. Given how long it takes to play through a campaign I don't particularly give a shit if other people think that is expensive.

Game is better than any Total War I've played in a long time.

steam reviews

OK then, an internet comment thread on a webstore... obviously many fucks will be given.

he said, engaging with a known troll. :why_so_serious:

Well, they're not entirely wrong, but people should have seen this coming.  Games Workshop have been getting this sort of criticism for years, so I'm not surprised at all to see them doling out overly priced expansion packs every couple of weeks.  Still, Beastmen are pretty awesome.

Finished the long campaign with beastmen. Was surprised that it has the same basic chaos invasion structure, only instead of defending you are, in effect, playing a guerilla campaign to knock out key factions and soften up others before the chaos warriors arrive to murder everyone.

I'm near the end of a Greenskin campaign and it looks like the AI Beastmen did the exact same thing.  I'm sweeping west and it's already a wasteland with Mousillon holding on city and Brettonia having two or three.  The Western Dwarves are all gone already and the Empire only had two Provinces left when I wiped them out a turn or two after I finished off Chaos and the Vampire Counts.  I'm starting to get concerned that adding more races will break the campaign map entirely, especially if there are any more horde factions.

Afaik the only races that make sense to add from here are wood elves, who will presumably shift the balance to civilisation as well as adding forest territories to support themselves,  and then rats, who don't make obvious sense in any current campaign mechanics so who knows.

Also Halflings I suppose.

After that, I'd assume they have to expand the map or make a new one. Tomb kings, Lizards, High Elfs, Dark Elfs, Hat Dwarfs, Ogres don't have a home on this map iirc.

Wood Elves!

https://youtu.be/hoiks2rQa9o

The wood elf black library fiction was all quite different to anything else in the warhammer world as their lands and lore were so otherworldly. Everything else takes place in somewhere you can pinpoint on a map and is much more physical, but the Orion and Ariel stuff its all a bit blurred. Warhammer was never really that subtle either, the WE stuff was a nice touch.

I gave them more $$ for the Wood Elves, and thoroughly enjoyed the play style... Elven skirmishers in skirmish mode are a delight to behold.  Well done.  But at this point in my Total War career it is purely money for the visual spectacle of the thing... not as a reward for making a good game.

I appreciate the (aging) Total War engine for the two or three battles per game where it is fun... unfortunately the campaign part of the game is not the game I'm looking for.  Total War makes Total War game is not really very interesting... but there it is; Total War games suck at the strategic level.  But then that's always been my impression of Total War games... a million dollar tactical engineering project desperately in search of a reason to exist.

Its funny, but I find myself thinking that a good Mobile gaming company should be able to show them how to do this right. 

I've been having a ton of technical issues with the game since the Wood Elves patch went live, so I've only been able to spend a few minutes with them but I'm looking forward to digging in deeper once a few crucial mods (extra skill points, in particular) are updated.

Total War has never really been about the strategy but the highpoint was probably Rome/Medieval II. They've kind of been chasing a Strategy-RPG hybrid idea which only really works when you feel invested in the commanders and weirdly I felt that putting more RPG type elements made me feel less connected than I had with generals in R:TW. Might just be me.

You might be right though that chasing a kind of faux 4X strategy style hasn't really worked and the strategy element has never really meshed with the tactical game so well. They might actually do better looking to mobile gaming and just totally restructuring strategy element with the focus of making a fun game that opens up the tactical battles. Although you're right back to the issue of people playing for one game or the other and anyone who really enjoys the tactical stuff can't really have the option of skipping the strategy game.

A bunch of TW games have had a 'historical battles' section, and pvp is all tactical all the time FWIW.

Yeah, I don't want to neckbeard the thing to death, but a regimental level card collection model with upgrades and full unit customization interspersed with a simple points-based mission game and points-based asynchronous "pvp" would probably make them think that they were printing figurines of gold.

All I want to do is click on a map - if I click to the West, I fight Empire, to the South, Vampires - see that I have 750 pts to take down these 4 units... build your army and go.  Win battle, collect upgrade thingy, apply upgrade thingy... fight new battle. A little bit of meta, a little bit of lore, a little bit of customization... people would spend more on digital units than they've ever spent on physical ones... probably in the first year.

Bought this as my first total war game because I cannot resist cheesy Warhammer stuff, and so far not been hugely grabbed by it. the real time battles seem more like massive brawls than anything - does more stuff unlock later on that turns it into something more complicated than just ploughing vast armies into each other head on?

(I'm playing Vampire counts, so don't yet have archers / artillery / cavalry...)

VS have some of the best cavalry in the game (Blood Knights!), but otherwise they play exactly as you described.  For more skirmishing and tactics with the default races, you'll want to try the Empire next.  Greenskins are an interesting challenge, too, since you have to play more aggressively with your armies to avoid infighting and attrition losses.

If you picked up the King and the Warlord DLC, that includes a Greenskin subfaction that can only recruit goblins until you accomplish a difficult strategic objective, which is a great twist on the campaign.

i went by a GW store today and grabbed a handful of extra grombrindal/20% off codes - send me a pm and i'll send you one while i've got spares.  should stack with the sale (i think?)

edit: all gone, alas!

They just announced Grombrimdal will be available to everyone from 19th jan.

I've been waiting for a sale to pick this up, this month it's part of humble monthly (https://www.humblebundle.com/monthly) so $10.80 for new customers. There's no DLC included though, unless any is announced later in the month.

Bretonnia free for everyone from 28th feb.

Cavalry are a lot more fun than things that aren't cavalry so should be good.

The Bretonnians are already in the game. Is this new Bret stuff?

They aren't playable in the grand campaign yet, so that will be added as well as new units and probably a fair amount of balancing.  They should also be tweaking the AI for the Wood Elves so they aren't so aggressive anymore.

Most of the DLC unlocks other races as player factions so you don't really need it to start with. Or at most you only need the one for the race you want to play first.

sequel trailer dropped this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXxe897bW-A

So not really so much as a sequel as it is a new campaign with 4 completely different races (High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen and a 4th mystery race) sold as a completely new game as opposed to DLC for TWWH 1.

Every time CA does something right, they do something like that which really pisses me off. Though now that I read further, apparently owners of both 1 and 2 will get a combined massive campaign map that encompasses both maps from both games (the 2nd one is a new map). And they plan a trilogy of games like this.

K.

Not sure how that sounds bad in any way.  That's pretty much my dream scenario.

Well, you're basically paying another $60 for a game in the same engine/expansion pack.

Sooooo, pretty much how the first four iterations of Blood Bowl worked?

Touche.

I was kind of hoping that barring a new engine or significant improvement, they'd just keep releasing expansions as DLC for the thing, maybe in $30 pairs (which would end up being the same amount of money just dragged out over time) with a custom campaign. A straight up sequel seems overkill.

Of course, as much as I like the Warhammer game, I'd really love to see them redo Medieval Total War now that they learned how to not fuck up game development again.

Uh, it's much better than four separate DLC.

You are paying 60 bucks for 4 different DLC that go for 20 bucks each.

They asked $60 for a map and four playable races with Total Warhammer.

They're asking $60 for a map and four playable races with Total Warhammer 2.

If you thought the first game was worth the price they asked I don't see how you could consider the sequel to not be worth the same price.

Hint: I didn't pay $60 for the first game and I bought all the DLC on sale. I am a cheap bastard.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, it's not that bad. I overreacted a little bit.

I've also read some speculation that they'll be adding actual naval battles to the second game, so that's a pretty big overhaul.

They came out and said they won't be.

Good, they are boring in TW.

Oh, that's a shame.  The boat icons when moving armies by sea were great, I was looking forward to seeing the models in battle.

Lizardmen "in-engine" trailer.

https://youtu.be/KfO-pdyNWvg

Looks good.

Been playing this again since they added more minor faction as playable in the campaign

If you haven't played this much this year - it is now better.

Balance has been tweaked a fair bit and various factions now have alternate more interesting campaign starts. For example you can start as exiled dwarfs at the wrong end of the map or as goblins rather than Orcs.

Also they just announced you get Norse as a playable race if you buy total warhammer 2 as a preorder. Which is cool because chaos are a godawful faction to play and I'm rather hoping Norse will fix that.

Edit: I guess beastmen already did fix shit chaos. But it can be fixed twice if I say so.

Edit2: Norse game footage trailer

https://youtu.be/q8jFCMB-eHU

Yeah, it's a pretty great game now, especially with the steel faith overhaul mod activated.

And you are right that Norscan needs some love, as they feel a wee bit like chaos light and not distinct enough. I have heard that they will also expand Norsca from 2 subfactions to maybe as much as 8. I don't know if it is true, but it would liven up the north. Could be interesting if Norsca factions had to compete for the favor of the chaos gods more directly.