Why has the total war series never grabbed me? Am I doing something wrong?
I've tried it but get bored early in on every campaign. Boring and repetitive. Controlling armies is clunky and slow
Why has the total war series never grabbed me? Am I doing something wrong?
Because you're a boring person.
>Am I doing something wrong?
No. All the games have 1 or 2 difficult battles in the first 20 turns where you have to abuse braindead AI and then a mindless chore afterwards. S2 Short Campaign with its Realm Divide is the only one that attempts to do something about it, but it's not enough.
Nothing is more boring than building a huge empire then finding out that you have to micromanage the monster you've created. It's beaurocratic work. Might as well get a job in an office and get paid for it eh? Maybe there'll be a lot of hot chinese sexretaries there that have the hots for white men. If you've never experienced this I recommend you try it. Try Blue Cross kek.
The most fun I've had is doing armies that change up the fights or playing underdog lords like Belegar or Skarsnik. That being said no matter what you do after you beat the initial challenge of your starting location the game gets progressively worse until it becomes a slog. I have no idea how anyone plays straight forward races like elves or bretonnia/empire without getting bored out of their mind. The only lord out of any of those that looks interesting out of all 5 of those races is the colonist guy but I can't play him because he crashes my game after every fight.
this
unironically only reason to play warhammer 2 is to play dogshit factions like norsca or chaos or underdogs heroes who have difficult initial positions like anon has mentioned or annoying mechanics like wulfhart
anything else is a fricking cakewalk, easy mode even on legendary, you spam one unit across all armies, and pretty much steamroll the map but it takes like half a week and is boring as frick nonetheless because none of the AI armies will ever come close to challenging you
tbh though at least bretonnia is kinda fun in the beginning when you still don't have access to knights and you kinda have to make due with shitty peasants
>shitty peasants
peasant archers are one of the most broken units in the game, 120 fairly accurate missile units with a bunch of the tankiest lords and heroes AND access to life magic early on is absurd.
Spamming the shittiest weakest unit that is dirt cheap is actually the most meta way to play the game. This is true even in tabletop.
Funny he mentioned the dread saurian, just saw this the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndri-FXu30s&t=6194s
this is why I can't play without Table Top caps mod
He's just full of shit
Good high tier units are used a lot in total warhammer 2, CA just needs to balance these shit units and nerf the ultra cost-effective low tier stuff.
Only reason to play warhammer is for multiplayer custom battles. No other reason.
I find it's the opposite for me
if I play shitty factions I'm forced to ambush or cheese every battle
"straight forward" factions means I can just play the game, which on vh/h is challenging enough for me.
Desides if you really like unfavorable odds you can just overexpand and make your position shitty by choice
>is the colonist guy
absolutely dogshit campaign mechanic and tough as frick armies of dinos, sarurus warriors and savage orcs to fight early on, but super fun as a challenge and colonizing lizermen is kino
>Desides if you really like unfavorable odds you can just overexpand and make your position shitty by choice
You basically did that by turning the difficulty up. Turning it down and playing underdogs does the same thing. Every faction is so boring and mundane at least this way gives variety.
some games are a power trip and others are a tower defence game against the hardest ai
It's best when it's slow. Lining up your forces and executing a maneuvre just right is so incredibly satisfying.
Then the engine change ruined it with weightless dogshit units, and warhammer made it even worse with asiaticclick.
>Lining up your forces and executing a maneuvre just right is so incredibly satisfying.
>It's just the same hammer and anvil every time against an AI that doesn't know how to keep reserves
Such engaging gameplay. So thrilling.
Yes.
>one unit is mandatory to have fun aganist braindead AI with bloated stats
>running around the map and stomping wienerroaches busywork
>any gimmick is bad
>constant balancing issues
>diplomacy faction that at mercy of moronic AI
>diplomacy that is at mercy of moronic AI
>>any gimmick is bad
So? It's more fun when the difficulty comes from a gimmick being non-viable than it is to crank the difficulty up and play against a cheating moron.
>So?
It's not rewarding enough to use it. Outside of few cases. And I did a lot of "unit bad" runs. Even with difficulty above normal. Pain was my reward. And yeah it was fun sometimes.
I guess it depends on the unit. I got bored of Necrofex spamming on VC so I decided to spam bombers with syreen frontliners to mitigate the friendly fire damage. Had a ton of fun until I ran into Skaven.
Necrofex spam is absurdly strong. But so is Vcoast roster, most fun I had with them is full mele with 0 range outside of Necrofex RoR but I mostly run him in mele. Fighting aganist HE and LM was painful. It's depends on unit. But problem comes when unit is mediocre and has 0 support from skills. Sometimes even with skills.
VC roster is kinda a mixed bag between really really strong and really really bad. The bombers are bad because they have mediocre damage, horrible range and do a ton of friendly fire. Which is why I mixed them with Syreens and played the Drowned. Honestly just running an entire army of Syreens would've been better because they had 90% physical resist and did armor piercing damage but the bombers are funny.
Achually, anon. Bombers will destroy almost any infantry and morale. Combined with powder bonus. They kinda like depth guards, but actually good.
Yeah but deck gunners would work out way better or just more syreens. Deck gunners have more range, more ammo and less friendly fire. Possibly more damage too as I've seen them melt lords, infantry and monsters way faster than bombers do. Also my syreens dish out more damage than bombers even with their AOEs. I've been checking the stats of my fights and it's clear syreens are pulling more weight than the bombers even if the bombers use up all their ammo.
just built different
They are bad games. They have spectacle but no depth.
Why do modern gamers believe that they have to enjoy literally every game ever made, and if they don't it's immediately a problem (with the game or with themselves)? The sooner you kids learn that not everything in life is meant to cater to you, the happier you'll be.
They're depressed, so they actually find that no game at all is enjoyable for them
Sure old fart, now let me help brush all that dust from your mummified husk.
TW fans are just hopelessly autistic about which games they like and which they don't.
I like total war
You like the ones I like and dislike the ones I dislike, right??
Yeah
I now unironically play only custom battles
>Am I doing something wrong?
No, you just need to make 2/3 armies and go foward in the campain, the maps are always boring, and non-diversified... you just need to defend your position that is always some boring point that isn't tactical, the mechanics are boring and obsolete, when you attack some giant city the battle is settled away from the city or in some little village (ETW,NTW,SH2), the AI is moronic. You can go everywhere with your fleet without taking care about the provision (and also most of the time you don't need a fleet).
The only good tactic game is Men of war (only multi), with the robz mod. For a good strategic i don't know...
Because you didn't get too experience the joy of buying Rome 1 in the box off the store shelf after watching that ancient battles show on the history channel wanting too play the game for a long time before you finally had a chance to go too bestbuy. Being awed by the raw experience of seeing so many 3D units in a game, you will never experience the joy and wonder like we did.
So it's a shit game that was only held up by the novelty?
>So it's a shit game that was only held up by the novelty?
No it was a technological marvel that provided thousands of hours of intense amusement.
I played Rome for the first time around three years ago and loved it.
God I love Shogun 2 so fricking much bros. Specifically the multiplayer. I love painting my units, I love leveling them up and tweaking them, I love playing dress-up with my general.
If CA had any fricking brains, they'd make a F2P strategy game and have a *moronic* amount of cosmetic DLC for your general and your units. Imagine being able to fully customize your army - uniforms, pants, shirts, what weapons they carry, horses, cannons, colors, patterns, etc. People still play Shogun 2 MP to this day. Throw in a generic battle pass and they'd make gorillions of dollars. Hire me CA.
This is such a better idea than the combat card game they cooked up.
Was Total War Arena similar?
>Play Khatep
>Lizards start shit immediately
>Elves declare war while I'm fighting the Lizards
>Wipe out Lizards
>As soon as I do Elves start attacking my docks all over my massive boarder
>They also have way better doomstacks then me
This game can be a real headache sometimes.
Apparently if you grow too fast the AI starts declaring war on you even if you're on good terms. I had guys all the way in Africa with a single province and no way to get to me declaring war on me. What a fun mechanic. I guess the best way to play is to just capture 2 provinces and turtle.
Seems like the problem with CIV games, for me it least.
I only play them for some turns, or I waste a whole day.
No in between.
I stoped playing this freeware game UnCiv, when I thought how I wasn't really accomplishing any worthwhile goal in the end, or how neither the combat or building were fun to me.
Still busted and fun religion mechanic.
To be more on topic, Total War should be about the battles, and if they are not fun or take to long to get to, I would understand not wanting to play those game either.
not enough 'tism
I like some of them, not others
Like-list:
>Rome
>Medieval 1 & 2
>Shogun 2 + expansions
>That smaller one that came after Empire where you play as either Napoleon or the other guys
Don't like-list
>Empire (buggy mess)
>Shogun (too primitive these days in comparison to what came after)
>Warhammer 1 (just feels like a weird arcade action strategy game without tactical or strategic depth)
Haven't played-list
>the rest
Also, to add, Shogun 2 is my favourite of the bunch
I will say one of the things that truly intoxicated me about the TW series was its music. Shogun TW Mongol Invasion and Medieval 1 & 2 had sublime music that would put me into a near trance especially after some big battle and I got returned to the campaign map.
I liked it when the background of some quiet music had wind blowing in the background and I'd feel how empty and quiet the low population Medieval world must have been. I got that same feeling walking out to the Arsenal in Venice in late September.
I like Arab Strat Summer and Euro STrat Summer 2 for example.
Beyond the mechanics of the games themeselves however I came to another conclusion analyzing TW. Its fundamental premise is that war is entertaining. Now imagine you had a game engine with a human level AI that was a perfect model of reality. Now you simulate the current war in Ukraine. Is it fun? is it entertaining? Well no it is a slog and the units are moronic and the AI does do ridiculously stupid thing with all you lovely tank forces you've assiduously built up for conquest falling off bridges, running out of fuel getting stuck on concrete bollards etc. You curse the game makers for creating such a stupid simulation but face it the shit they've simulated is unbeleivably disgusting and stupid and moronic anyway with shit pathfinding, you know just like Arma 2 and Arma 3.
War isn't entertaining for the most part. Despite loving gaming and S&T I came to the conclusion that it was actually more entertaining, uplifting and ultimately perhaps profitable to study mathematics and C++ than to be a gamer.
That's just me though.
>he posts, on a video game imageboard
>he posts, on a video game imageboard
homie plz.
>an historical simulation game
>War isn't entertaining for the most part. Despite loving gaming and S&T I came to the conclusion that it was actually more entertaining, uplifting and ultimately perhaps profitable to study mathematics and C++ than to be a gamer.
It would be more fun if they actually fixed the issues with the AI but they still keep piling on more content and use janky cheating workarounds to bandaid all their problems. This is why everyone says the nips make better games.
With the current non photonic computers lacking in artificial neural node networks is it even possible to create a computer AI for desktop that's much more intelligent than a wienerroach?
https://lightmatter.co/
I'm not even asking for a super genius AI that would be cancer to play against. Just that they put in the bare minimum amount of effort to improve it each patch and stop falling back on giving it cheats. Why does everyone keep thinking the only 2 options are a super intellegent AI and a moron with tons of cheats?
I'm not talking about super intelligent. That Lightmatter Quantum Computer is probably capable of being as intelligent as a rodent ultimately. Your PC might be able to get to the level of a wienerroach or a wasp.
None of this is relevant. I feel like you just wanted to talk about DNNs because they're the cool thing now.
No what I'm saying is actually sort of a repetition of what I was hearing 10 or 15 years ago. There is no "artificial intelligence". It's corporate bullshit, a fantasy. It's not happening.
You're completely wrong though. There is no monetary incentive to patch the same exploits people abuse over and over again because slapping more DLC ontop will always make more money. So developers never even bother. There has been 0 effort to improve AI and it's actually regressed. You're too hung up on AI matching humans in literally every way so you're much too narrow minded to even have this discussion.
>Why has the total war series never grabbed me?
Because tastes are subjective? What are you, five? Does someone actually have to explain you that you can have different taste than another person?
just like all strategy games, total war campaigns are only fun in multiplayer
Too bad multiplayer didn't work until Atilla/Warhammer and those are the slowest most boring campaigns of them all.
after playing a bit of atilla campaign some days i go i think i figured out total war campaigns were never meant to be played. they are very tedious and im tired of pretending they are fun. battles is were the fun is and how total war should be played exclusively
campaign map:
>train units build buildings
>end turn
>do same over and over
>end turn
In warhammer the campaign map is so much better than the battle gameplay. I autoresolve almost every battle.
I hate the campaign map lategame when you take 5 turns just to move to where you want to be, but I also spam auto-resolve because there's no point fighting a battle where my army is a gigantic doomstack and their army is 5 stacks of infantry.
tw3k is super fun give it another try and play someone like he yi or huang shao
Disagree that factions with less 'interesting' mechanics are boring. To each their own but I prefer the factions with less magic and monsters.
I've played two, full Bretonnia campaigns and enjoyed the hell out of them both times.
There were plenty of challenging battles and variance in the campaign map.
Cavalry charges will never not be satisfying to watch
Rome: Total War was the only game to have satisfying and effective cavalry charges
>Disagree that factions with less 'interesting' mechanics are boring. To each their own but I prefer the factions with less magic and monsters.
That is the exact opposite of what was being said though.
It was to play underdogs who can't steamroll the map easily. Like how Belegar has a gigantic +50% upkeep penalty making it so you can't spam lords to defend a massive expansionist boarder, can't spam expensive units because you have no money and have to fall back on diplomacy and sacking/raiding constantly unless you want to just gun it for 8 peaks, or like how Skarsnik specializes in the shittiest goblin units but starts next to Dwarves who hate him and also have armor that goblins are weak against.
You need to play multiplayer campaigns, the bad side about the games is brain dead AI in battles, just play head to head campaigns with friends, really the ultimate way to experience the games.
I really really like Troy
I don't understand how it is possible to not like Total War. All generic rts like aoe are small scale and arcadey as frick and with unrealistic gamey concepts like basebuilding. Total War is the only series with more believable battle sizes, building sensibly separated to campaign layer, units acting more naturally and responding with delay to orders and deserting while at low morale etc. Even the worst Total Wars are superior to the so called the best rts games.