The problem with the system is that there wasn’t a decent pool of players. I tried it a handful of times and 3 times out of 5 I had to wait 5+ minutes for a player to show up. Not fun.
Did you know you can push the space bar to set all units to fast-walk? Movement becomes practically instantaneous this way.
But you’re right–especially in Medieval, all the stupid little map-only units were really harshing my buzz.
I hate merchants!
Ha ! Knew it. I called Shogun 2 when Empire came out. Feeling smug right now 
I have to kind of agree with **Moidalize **though : the quality of CA’s games has gone downhill over the iterations, although while the patches do take their sweet time, the final result tends to be sort of okay. Rome and Medieval 2 on release day were absolutely unplayable, but now they’re both fine (esp. with mods). Empire went the same way, and even though I feel it’s still not quite finished it still is night and day now vs. day one.
So, I probably won’t pick Shogun 2 on release day… but I don’t doubt I’ll eventually make the jump. And that is because hi, my name is Kob and I’m a total war addict.
Going over the feature list from the article :
- smaller scope : expected, not a problem in my book. Huge, 40+ provinces empire become micromanagement hell anyway.
- return of family dynasties and general speeches : yay !
- choosing general upgrades : oh, *fuck *yes. Adds a whole RPG-ish layer to it (not to mention helps getting attached to them), and besides nothing was more annoying than trying to spawn the general/administrator you wanted despite knowing the trait system in and out.
- hero units : oh no. Please god no… The sword saints were bad enough in the original, and the various “heroic abilities” for named generals in M2TW and Napoleon were annoying, micromanagy and unbalanced as all hell. I guess that’s CA trying to take a page from Warcraft III’s book but no, just… no. Hopefully they can be modded right out.
- better sieges : meh, I’ll believe that when I see it, since no TW game has ever done them right (with Empire being especially disastrous… although M1’s not too far behind. Remember when the archers inside the castle couldn’t fire on the attackers because the fricking *walls *got in the way ? Good times…)
- naval battles : expected since taking away features is never appreciated (where are my speeches in Empire ?!) but I do wonder how they’re going to make what amounts to galley fighting interesting. Ram, board, cross fingers that the fighting math is less insane than Empire’s, repeat ?
- Sun Tzu AI : ha ! Pull the other one, it’s got bells on ! Although to be fair, I remember the original Shogun’s AI to be quite devious. Perhaps it was due to working with a much smaller bunch of unit types and few (if any) dual-purpose ones ? Definitely not sold on words alone, though.
- New agents : meh again. Each time they try adding new ones besides the basic assassins and spies, they turn out to be 1) micro heavy and 2) ultimately not worth bothering.
So, lots of meh, few whoopees… but it’s still feudal Japan, and it’s still TW. So there’s that guaranteed sale right there
I really, really, really want ninja movies back. So much.
I can’t wait. Hopefully they learned from the disaster of ETW and even NTW. Hopefully.
I was talking about their painfully small movement allowance.
I think they’ve at least learned that static battles are incredibly boring. What remains to be seen is if they can:
- Make sieges fun.
- Streamline the micromanagement.
- Make strategic AI, well, good. (Not “realistic”, because, well, we saw how history played out.)
- Improve the battle AI; remove “stupidity” (placing artillery behind hills, for instance.)
- Make naval battles interesting.
One other thing which might be very nice.
Diplomacy should matter. The Rome/M2 system (don’t know about Empire) was awful. It set your enemies based on trade routes, and it was pretty darn silly, extremely unhistorical, and way too predictable.
The map shouldn’t be half-hidden. That’s kind of silly. Your own territory should be open to you (except possibly for a few small strategic sections like thick forests or the center of mountain ranges). Outside of that, you should know all the settlements and fortresses.
Going to war should be a much bigger deal. People should want only one war at a time. I’d like it if you spent peacetime building your forces and cash reserves, then wartime using them at a high cost. You also shouldn’t need special buildings to make any basic units (tired of having to build stupid ranges to make basic archers).
This, at least, was pretty well resolved in Empire and Napoleon. Your map is entirely open to you, that is, the territories you control. Enemy territories are covered by fog of war, but spies have very good LOS and there aren’t anything else to use them for, so I usually send them off to nearby enemy or dubious allies’ cities.
Also, there aren’t any merchants or diplomats. Diplomacy is handled automatically, so you can contact whomever, whenever, instantly. Merchandise is handled in sub-settlements - that is to say, if you have the Iron resource in a district, it’s possible to build a structure on it. In towns you can choose whether you want to research (schools), build for the clergy (churches), etc, etc.
I’ll be interested to see how they work Shogun II, although I am looking forward to it. I do hope the Ninja movies are back, and that they find some way of making the agents useful again, since generally I’ve noticed they by the time you get them from where the spawn to where the target is, the target is experienced enough that the assassination/duelling attempt almost always fails.
I’d still have preferred a Victoria: Total War game set during the 19th and early 20th centuries, though- covering, say, 1800 to 1914.
Frankly, I’m not bothered by the crappy AI in the TW games. I play strategy games to conquer the world and unleash my vast armies on nations which have displeased me, not to get pwned by ultra-smart AI which knows where my “hidden” troops are and has unerringly accurate super-cannon which can hit any target on the map with pinpoint accuracy.
My gripe has been the pacing of the game itself. You make bunches of money and friends until someone decides they don’t want to be your friend anymore, and it’s almost always some country you’ve just met, and, therefore, has no reason to immediately hate you after you signed a treaty (I’m looking at you, Venice). Then, when Venice attacks, others jump into the fray that have no business (read: are tiny countries that could benefit from growing, but have such a tiny chance of doing so or long time allies) doing so. Of course, after that happens, all your trade pretty much halts, no substantial cash comes in, and you have to start spamming cheap units to field an army. The last one that sucks is as the game progresses and you’re on the path to victory, the rest of the world pretty much unites against you or, you get what happens in Medieval 1, where factions magically come back with massive armies as you’re on the path to winning the game.
Absolutely agree.
For battle-AI, MTW+VI was the peak. If they could have made the enemy reinforcements gather in force instead of attacking unit-by-unit, I don’t think I ever would have beat expert.
IMHO, The switch to the Rome-style campaign map + siege-battles opened up an AI challenge that would take Google to solve. That, and the game becomes micro-management hell mid-game.
Yeah. The risk-style maps were much easier for the strategic AI to be competitive in, if somewhat more static (the AI always tried to mach forces with those of neighbouring provinces, so moving an army from one spot to the next immediately resulted in a big power imbalance in the origin province. Cue invasion).
The Great Achievements system was also fantastic, and I really wish they’d bring something like that back. Empire *kinda *did with the Prestige vic, but since maxing Prestige usually means roflpwning every other nation and conquering half the world anyway… By comparison, you could very much win a GA game while hunkering down within your strict historical area of influence, depending on the nation (some goals were wackier, such as cornering the wool market, and some nations just didn’t have much in the way of goals)
MTW did have its flaws, though. The endless yet useless waves crashing on your defenses for once - if you killed the AI general at the start of the battle, as you were wont to do what with suicidal generals and all, then the trickle of exhausted reinforcement would just come up, get mowed down, again and again and again for hours. Fucking peasant Jihads… The strat AI also had quite a bit of trouble making competitive armies rather than just massing whatever’s most expensive. Hurray for all Ballista armies 
And of course, the re-emergence of factions, complete with über forces from 200 years in the future was nothing short of complete bullshit.
I’ve come back from that gripe, especially after poring through Medieval II’s diplomatic code. Now that I realize that “alliance” only means “we’ll deal with you as soon as our plate’s empty” rather than “we’re blood brothers, back to back, till the end !”, I’m much more careful about my “friends” - I know that at the first sign of weakness, they’ll just turn on me, so the borders remain firmly guarded, and I’ll try and drag them into any war I can. Keep them busy, divide and conquer, that sort of thing. As long as they’re at each other’s throats, they’re not messing with my precious, precious trade lanes.
Of course, that’s a bit more complicated in Empire, what with the huge convoluted mess of alliances, and the frickin’ succession wars you get absolutely no warning for because you can’t see your own succession line :smack::mad:
I never really played the first Shogun much. . . I didn’t really get into the series until Medieval, but what I seem to remember is that the other factions would always die out fairly quickly, leaving me with an empty map and endless rebel peasant armies to fight.
Ninja movies are back. There is a God.
So that was it? It was the relative weakness of borders that made me look so delectable?
Heh, in the “Games with worse sequels” thread a while back I said MTW2 wasn’t nearly as good as MTW and caught crap for it. Glad to see I’m not insane in my beliefs.
I am still waiting for someone to remake the old Nintendo “Shingen, the Ruler”. It had many different leaders fighting each other, but every land had its own unique terrain and castle to take over. It also allowed you to ambush from a hidden spot and chase away stronger forces. The leaders had various strengths and abilities. It was a great game in the dust bin of video games forever.
It sounds a lot like an 8-bit version of Shogun: Total War…
Kinda. KOEI made a few of those kinds of games, like Nobunaga’s Ambition, Genghis Khan, Shingen: the Ruler, and what not.