Demo coming out later today, via Steam.
Let me know how you feel about it, please. I’m intrigued.
I haven’t seen it pop up yet. I pre-ordered the game on Steam last week.
-XT
It’s downloading for me as we speak, but I won’t be able to get back to you until tomorrow evening. I hope it’s better than the Dragon Age 2 demo, which funnily enough made me reconsider buying the game - that I’d already pre-ordered.
NM…I figured it out.
-XT
OK well, the graphics aren’t final. Some settings aren’t really set to ultra in the demo, and there is no AA. But even so, it looks pretty cool.
I’m playing through the included campaign demo which takes you through the eventual conquest of the small island your clan inhabits. The campaign demo allows you to play through 3 tutorial battles which are interwoven into the campaign (kind of, they don’t reflect the army and terrain of the battles in the campaign) and there is also 1 historical battle, which I haven’t tried yet.
The art and music are probably the most immersive in the series. It just fits the setting perfectly. The combat is fantastic. Tweaks to the graphics and camera really bring out the epic scope of the field engagements. The animations are also improved a lot!
Gotta go play some more!
The first time I launched the demo, my computer crashed hard, but then it ran fine.
The demo apparently consists of the tutorial and one historical battle. I just finished the tutorial (takes a few hours). A few first impressions:
-The game is very pretty; my machine can handle the high graphics settings as well as it could for Napoleon.
-Gameplay-wise, it feels like a direct refinement of Napoleon. The game seems smarter about resizing entire formations of units. Combat feels very lethal; at least as much as in Napoleon (much more so than in Medieval II).
-A nice touch is that siege weapons, when used to target units, have a circular targeting reticle whose size increases with distance.
-Battles sometimes have strategic buildings that give bonuses when controlled (stamina boost, replenish ammunition of nearby ranged units, etc.). I’m not sure whether I’ll like these.
-Instead of outlying towns in provinces that you can choose how to develop, each province (at least in the tutorial) has an upgradeable settlement with a particular claim to fame (sawmill, smiths, quarry, etc.). You can upgrade the outlying towns, farms, etc. directly from the province capital.
-Each agent has an experience bar, and as he levels up you can choose how to develop his skills and which retainers he acquires.
Time will tell how good gameplay is when you don’t have tutorial mode massively restricting what you can do. I suppose that if the AI sucks this time around we’ll have to blame Sun Tzu.
I played through some of the demo last night. Mostly it’s just like the previous TW games. A couple new twists on the strategic map, but nothing that can’t be picked up pretty quickly, especially if you played Napoleon TW. I was totally out of my depth in the castle assault though. Couldn’t figure out what the tactical buildings were supposed to do (or even how to take them), couldn’t figure out how to get my Ninja’s to take the gate (I told them to go there but they sort of just milled around outside until they were wiped out), couldn’t figure out how to get the siege cannon to blast the walls down (I directed it to fire, but it didn’t seem to do anything and couldn’t be moved), and resorted to basically just having my guys climb the walls, which lead to my army getting essentially slaughtered. I took the castle, but the cost was ruinous, so I’m obviously going to need to work on this aspect if I expect to win some games. I would have been better off auto-resolving the combat for all the blunders I made.
There is a lot of new stuff in this. The tech tree, for instance, breaks down to either a combat tree or a commerce and civilian advancement branches. It seemed pretty complex. There are a lot of units and the generals now have some RPG elements in them where you can actually decide what path they go down (they can be combat generals, administrators, trade, and some other stuff I don’t remember now). Loyalty is also important, and you can bind them to you by modifying their place in the hierarchy (I didn’t get into that much but it seemed interesting). I haven’t seen naval combat yet either, but I doubt it’s going to be much fun…in that period it was about grappling with the other ship to fight hand to hand or tossing rocks or flaming stuff at the other guy in the hope you hit them.
Overall I’m still pretty excited about the game. The timing should be perfect, with DoWII expansion coming out on March 1st and this game coming out on the 15th. I just have to figure out how to squeeze in the NV Fallout expansion at some point and Dragon Age II…
-XT
On thing I very muchn enjoyed about Shogun was the sheer simplicity of the map. Every starting location had its own logic, and none of them were totally cut out.
In M-TW, I got so bloody annoyed at how loose the battle map was. Anybody could and would invade you from almost anywhere, anmd huge disatnces went by like a snap. I did like the more complex map in Rome, though the relatively puny lengths you could travel in peaceful, owned provinces got annoying.
But the one thing which annoyed me was the campaign AI in newer games. They seem to get angry at you based on trade routes. This created some very odd and insane situations, such as the Eastern Roman Empire deciding to go to war against me and driving us both into bankrupcty while ignoring the horde of barbarians attacking our frontiers, etc.
Dunno if this is true in Empire. I HATED Empire. I started up, played for a few hours, and then quit in disgust.
Well, different strokes I guess. I’ve probably put in a hundred hours on Empire and Napoleon, and wouldn’t be surprised if I put in another hundred, especially if a good Empire Total Realism like mod ever comes out. Not sure how you are going to like Shogun II, assuming you get it SB, since the game play is very similar. The strategic map especially is a straight line progression from Empire, and while we are back to hand to hand combat for the most part, the look and feel on the tactical map is also Empire like (well, more like the Napoleon expansion actually).
So far, the strategic map seems pretty varied and large, considering we are only talking about Japan here. There does seem to be a lot of choke points, at least in the demo (you start off on one of the smaller southern islands with only 4 provinces on it).
-XT
Wel, the campaign map itself wasn’t the problem in Empire, so much as the way it was presented. I haven’t seen a game that ugly in years. I mean, Rome:TW was way better-looking! The zoom was off-kilter somehow.
But for me, the battles were just boring. I mean, tediousness incarnate.
I know battles of the era were hardly pulse-pounding, but they took forever, the AI has a terrible habit of forcing you to constantly stop and fight small engagements (which I didn’t want to just leave to the AI lest I lose too many troops in pissant fights). Also, the AI was god-awful. I saw some people praise it, but I literally never lost a fight unless I was vastly outnumbered. Sure, I did very well in Rome and Medieveal1/2 - but I sometimes did lose badly when the AI caught me off-guard. I would have to carefully consider moves and arrange my units for maximum flexibility and mutual support. I would hide units sometimes, and mroe foten use multiple attacks to confuse and divert the enemy. Or I would trick them into attacking me and grind them to dust. There was just no thoguht in fighting in Empire.
It wasn’t ultiamtely that the game was bad, but that it put hundreds of little nitpicks and nuisances in for no good reason. It was a giant, giant pain to do anything. As a result, I usually quit a game after I accomplished the big task of becoming effectively invincible, because from there on out it was mere tedium.
Note that I loved all the other games in the series. And while M:TW was better than M:2, I still enjoyed 2 a great deal, along with Rome and Shogun. And now that I think about it, aklmost every problem I ever had with the series was that Creative Workship felt the need to generously ladle a heaping helping of nitpicks and nuisances into every game.
QFT.
Fucking merchants how do they work
The problem with Empire/Nappy is that the TW AI has always had trouble managing hybrid units, that is to say units that can both shoot and fight well in melee. There were none of those in STW, they were rare in MTW (only the Mongols had them IIRC, and they came at you in such hordes that it didn’t really matter that the AI used them badly - either you killed the generals and they routed, or they rolled you), in RTW most were javelin throwers who’d have to get close anyway. No problem there. In MTW2 they were again not that common, although more so than in MTW and it that particular weakness was becoming really apparent when fighting certain factions.
And then there’s Empire, where every damn line unit is a hybrid one. No surprise, the AI goes bonkers and does stupid things like charging in, then deciding to switch to shooting halfway through once they’ve taken casualties, or vice versa deciding to shoot it out with your depleted units which are harder to wipe out than they would be to just rout and exterminate. It’s really noticeable when you’re fighting Indian, Native American or Turkish factions who have clearly defined shooty and melee units: suddenly the AI becomes half-smart.
Since Shogun 2 goes back to an era with clearly defined roles, I would assume the AI will go back to being playable as a result.
Jerusalem, 70AD:
Zealot 1: “You know what’s wrong with this siege?”
Zealot 2: “Um… the complete encirclement? Starvation? Thirst? Plague? Cannibalism? People who tried to escape strung up on crucifixes for us to watch die? Those siege towers slowly and implacably being brought up to the Antonia Fortress?”
Zealot 1: “No, you silly, it’s that this siege isn’t enough fun.”
It’s a game, not a historical reenactment, and even those are pretty fun for the participants. Anyway, I’ve never finished a Total War game, not Shogun, not Medieval, and not Rome. I usually forget my strategic objectives once I finish an hour-long battle. I get dropped back into the big map and I have to wonder what it was I was trying to do again. I think the furthest I’ve ever gotten is halfway to complete conquest.
I found sieges fun… but there were way, way too many. Sieges weren’t usualy that common, and most were over quickly because one side or another realized it just wasn’t practical. Rarely did they turn into battles, and they didn’t usually last that long (certainly not five years or some other nonsense).
M2 went in the right direction by making . I’d like to see standing armies be really expensive (at least excepting a royal guard or other standard military), but raising new units fairly easy, at least the lower-level cheaper ones.
I like defending in a siege (regardless of the TW game)…I don’t enjoy trying to assault, as generally what happened to me in the demo for Shogun II is what happens. I have a hard time coordinating an attack and I end up having my troops get slaughtered. I’m just more of a defensive person than an offensive (well, in military matters at least) one.
Usually with sieges, if I’m the attacker I’ll either auto-resolve the combat (if I have a huge advantage) or I’ll just siege the place until the defender has to come out and fight…when I can fight on the defensive.
-XT
There’s a demo on Steam - anyone had a hands-on play with it? How’s it look? I’m expecting Empire minus the muskets.
That’s pretty much what the real besiegers did - assault was an option of last resort. Which might have had to do with the fact that the odds were disproportionately stacked in the defender’s favour in a siege - as was the entire point of building a castle in the first place.
As for TW, the only way I don’t get comprehensively slaughtered when assaulting cities/castles is when I bring a gazillion siege engines and level half the place before my footmen even move an inch. No towers, no automated arrow murder. No wall, no wall bonus. No wallS, no bottleneck ! That’s how Holy Germany rolls, bitches.
Of course, then I have to pay through the nose for the repairs… or god forbid some asshole seizes the opportunity to attack before the walls are patched up. Then I look dumb with all those siege engines cluttering the streets. :o
Actually, I love when there are holes in the walls and the computer is attacking. It’s like a magnet to them and I can concentrate my defensive force there, knowing they will march in to slaughter.
I generally move all of the cav and siege engines out as soon as I take a city and just leave a few good defenders. Better to have your field army free to move than penned up in a city.
It is very similar to Empire in the look and feel. The strategic map is very much like Napoleon TW. There are a few new wrinkles in game play, but if you played Empire/Napoleon you’ll have about 70% of the game mechanics down already.
I can’t wait for the game to go live. I’m thinking I feel a really bad cold coming on…
-XT