I have maybe 3 requests for more “realism” in the games I play and 2 involve TW games, 1 is fo multiplayer FPS.
I don’t care about the level of realism that exactly mimics historical battles. What I don’t want is intense, repetitive stupidity. For example, I can break any siege in M2TW by moving out with my army and a siege weapon, preferably a ballista or cannon. Just move it so that it lines up down the enemy army’s line and start firing. Slaughter. Isn’t there some way to contigency code the game so that it knows to protect its lines?
On that note, random stupidity from my units might be fun. Sometimes in TW the cavalry units will become unmanageable. That’s fun to suddenly wonder what the fuck they are doing. But it shoul dbe an intended part of the game. The stupidity should not come from bad game design/coding.
Alliances should mean something to the AI. TW is the only series of games where I have a lot of experience with this, but every alliance is dead as soon as the slightest chance to attack me occurs. Almost every games devolves into the entire planet on my case. Doesn’t somebody see the value of brown-nosing the most powerful guy?
Jumping in FPS. This should not be allowed. Shooting while doing any kind of moving should also be so inaccurate that nobody would ever do it. It really takes me out of the game when I die to a bunny hopping marine or smooth-footed dancing terrorist. I like it in games like Gears of War where you can’t jump, but can still be quick with finding cover.
I believe it was 32k Love that game, I still have it somewhere
It was a lot of fun to equip every class of my ships with the Neutron something destabilizer and the Ion version. About 5 or 6 shots later, a whole battlegroup of 32k ships would have their hulls reduced to 0 and die instantly. Best way to kill a swarm of small ships. Trying to fit enough Death Rays onto your ships just didn’t do enough damage.
Anyways, I want a game that’s as real enough as it can be to still be fun. That’s my only criteria. As fun goes up, I expect realism will go down because, let’s face it, real life sucks
Dead Rising let you save the game at any save point (the mall bathrooms), but it only keeps the most recent save. You can’t go back to a previous save point if you play yourself into a corner and derail from the storyline.
Gosh, have I? I certainly didn’t intend that at all.
That said, if I were so rich that I had money to burn after irrigating the Sahara, I would commission exactly this game. And precede it with a massive marketing campaign emphasising that this will be the most realistic combat simever. Whip people into a state of drooling frenzy at the prospect of graphics and gameplay they’ve never seen before. Then watch them die in training accidents, 2 minutes in. Or even better, after any mission in which they lose health even a little bit, they’ll be treated to short cut scene showing their character dying of septicaemia. And when the complaints start up, refer them to the USP.
Or the value in not attacking the most powerful guy in the first place?
I mean, if you’re playing as Britain or Spain or the Ottoman Empire or whoever and you’ve conquered huge swathes of the world map but have achieved your victory conditions and really are just having a breather trying to build your infrastructure up, then it makes no sense for a one-province Nation like Venice or Hungary to declare war on you when you’ve never had any dealings with them whatsoever and the only outcome is going to be your armies marching in and thoroughly smiting their token military and adding the province to your already vast collection.
To be fair, that also happens in the Civilisation games, too- people declare war on you for no reason at all (I’ve had several games where I’ve been in a perpetual state of warfare with Civs that I’ve never had any direct unit-to-unit contact with and who aren’t anywhere near me).
It’d be nice if the AI in these games could perform a cost/benefit analysis of wars with the player, with “Likelihood of Getting Utterly Annihilated” featuring prominently on the “Cost” side…
xtisme, I think what you’re seeing is a variation of the old “I can buy fantastic, but not unlikely” meme. The problem is not that armies don’t sometimes act stupidly, but that you have games where they seem to act in defiance of any sort of logic or motivation.
For instance, there used to be a series of games for the PC called Close Combat which simulated squad-level combat, and in those games your little units would, by design, sometimes not follow orders, either due to stupidity, poor leadership, lack of experience, or simple frightr. An infantry unit faced with a flamethrower tank might simple run away or freeze in terror or surrender even if sitting in an advantageous position. It drove you crazy, but I don’t remember anyone complaining that it was unrealistic. It was, in fact, part of the challenge.
Conversely, around the same time there was a WWII-in-Europe strategy game called High Command. It was a great game except for the fact that the AI simply would not do anything right. If you were the Allies and started in 1939, you could have France and Britain conquer Germany in a year. The Germans wouldn’t invade, and couldn’t mount anything resembling a coherent defense. If you were Germany you could conquer all of Europe in a year and Russia in a year more and take out the UK whenever you felt like it. You could alter the game’s parameters to make it more challenging, like giving the Axis Spain and Turkey as allies to start the game, but the computer would still not act with anything resembling “Artificial intelligence.”
“Realism” in games is not faithfulness to perfect simulation of the real world. “Realism” means creating **a game experience that immerses the player into thinking about his decisions and how they affect the outcome of the game, **rather than thinking about the fact that he’s playing a game. Part of that is ensuring that the game is hard enough to present a challenge, so you can’t steamroll over idiotic PC AIs - as is the case with, say, Rome: Total War - but not so absurdly hard that playing seems pointless or frustrating.
The problem with bad AI is exacerbated by the fact that, in an effort to cover up awful AI, so many games simply account for the problem by having the computer players play by different rules. Civilization is infamous for this - the computer players are bone stupid, but can beat you by virtue of being able to construct absurdly huge hordes of military units. And it’s not even that bad a game, relative to, say, the original Age of Empires, where the computer players cheated so egregiously that a human victory was nigh on impossible. And I hate to pile on it, but in at least some of the Total War games, the computer is too stupid to believe.
As with any form of entertainment the central issue is how well the illusion of reality is presented and maintained, how the audience is drawn into the world. There’s nothing realistic about “Knights of the Old Republic” but through storytelling and pacing the gamer is drawn into the experience and forgets the lack of “Realism.”
I think you’re referring to the Canadian counter-invasion of Michigan, where Detroit was surrendered - I am not making this up - in part because the Indian army, knowing they could be observed from a distance using a short stretch of road, would march past it, then run back through the woods on the other side, march past the open road again, run back… eventually convincing the U.S. general, William Hull, who had already screwed up the campaign fifty ways from Sunday, to surrender Detroit without a shot. (Given the way Detroit looks today, one wonders if perhaps the USA did not err in conceding its ownership in the peace talks.)
Hull was court martialed and sentenced to be executed but was reprieved by President Madison, since in fairness the fuckup was not entirely his fault. Rarely in human history have two countries gone to war who were so ill-prepared for it.
It could also be the battle of Brownstown, where about 200 American militiamen were fording a creek when they were surprised by about two dozen Shawnee. The American commander ordered a retreat, which turned into a rout, and he ended up losing about 100 men at the cost of one Shawnee. It really was pitiful.
Love that game, I still have it somewhere