20:20 Exactly the problem with the "morale/leadership" roles in this game, it no longer rewards you at all for out maneveuring the AI. Because CA knows it can't cook up a decent enough AI to challenge the player they've now switched gears to make it a stat-based game. The primary focus's are no longer revolved around positioning and tactics, they're revolved around matching units stat for stat and META-crafting up spells. So, trying to recreate a battle of cannae is now impossible. You can't put mid/low tier troops in the centre to hold ground while enveloping a larger force, your front line will shatter at breakneck speeds before your horses can even move 100 yards and the entire battle plan goes to shit. And even if they somehow manage to hold out, the morale shock of a flank does neglible effect. To where people now are having to APM spam cycle charges. This has completely ruined well layed out plans and executions, because chain routing is no longer a thing either. They have supposedly streamlined it to be the battle loss penalty (another stat, oh boy) where if you kill a significant amount of units the entire army shatters, context be damned. So what this means is if you rally 3 or 4 units at 70% strength at a crucial choke point, like a bridge crossing or gatehouse, and the enemy wipes the other last stray unit 600m away, the entire force at the bridge just instantly shatters because it crossed that army loss penalty threshold. It doesn't matter that the men would have obviously won the day against a tired and depleted enemy. You lost x% more than the enemy so you lose. It also has gutted chainrouting, a long battle line will no longer collapse and break at a devestating charge on the left flank causing unit after unit to break at the sight of it's fellow units running...nope! Only that ONE specific unit breaks and the others hold out because the army loss penalty hasn't kicked in! Yeah nah m8, don't care that you out manoveured me, you're in the grind fest now, hope you brought better units than mine! It really is a fancy card game in all intents and purpose at this point. Also first.
Sadly this might be a consequence or limitation of the RTS/4X mechanics these games inherited from the start. In an RTS what's important is the player's ability to organize and direct their units to achieve a very predictable and consistent result. Positioning is only important in how the player likes to group their troops together when moving them, but unless they're doing quirky micro like using a light tank to circle a heavier one, coordinated movement isn't a big deal. So morale, as one of the only new mechanics TW innovated from outside the RTS genre, is also one of the mechanics that's withered away since it only got in the way of traditional RTS gameplay. The average player (and the AI) just wasn't incentivized nor trained to play these games as a grand puzzle where one side has to break the other. They're instead guided towards throwing things with bigger numbers at each other, with the players being rewarded during game progression with better and better units while the AI can only calculate based on numbers and math, and where it falls short it gets cheats to buff those numbers. I think this is what made Shogun 2 so good, yet also catch so much flak from the fan base for the sameness of its armies. You got all the tools for your army from the first 20 or so turns onwards, yari ashigaru and samurai specialists, meaning you were partly incentivized to play smarter against equally capable enemy troops. But CA and most fans I guess preferred the number buffing game with heroes, upgrade buildings, and faction bonuses. This makes sense if the game you've been playing is throwing better and better units at each other, rewarding those with better build orders or spending the right amount on strong counters to units (rather than tactics). It makes sense if gameplay ultimately boils down to box selection and clicking on a target, and expecting immediate results so you can do it again. It's no wonder really why CA can't design an AI to challenge players. What players who focus on chain routing style mechanics are doing is emergent gameplay not easily quantifiable by some number CA can tweak. So instead, like what happens with MMOs, the devs focus on serving the player base with gameplay tweaks that boil down to "big number go up" + spectacle.
Morale should be more important, units should die much much slower in frontal fights. Also mass should be way more important or there should be a mechanic where unit losing combat is giving ground slowly and getting pushed back.
Yeah I agree, and the problems get worse with higher combat difficulty since all it seems to do is jack up the stats even higher. So now you can either stack so many number bonuses until your units have the better stats, or you cheese the AI with I win buttons (range blob, SEM blob, etc). The garbage AI is truly the original sin of total war games in my opinion. Stat-based rather than tactics based gameplay, gutted systems of province management, joining units to the commanders at the hip, unit blobbing, god awful sieges (especially the ones in warhammer 2 and 3) and more. So many issues stem from CA trying to put band-aids around the problem of having terrible AI (both in campaign and in battles) rather than having to spend the not insignificant time and resources that would be needed to actually make the AI challenging/interesting.
@@filipzietek5146 Didn't older games like rome 1 have something like that? It's a pity since it'd be another way to emphasize the 'elite' units over weaker ones.
😳 SERIOUSLY!?!? I've got something like 200 to 300 hours in TWW2 AND TWW3 and I've NEVER understood the stupid fucking battle loses mechanic! Remember when game mechanics in TW were intuitive!? 🙄 But now that you've explained it some of the bizarre shit I've seen in battles def makes more sense 😒
I'm glad you talked about units fighting to the death when surrounded in the older games. When I was just starting to play Rome as a kid that mechanic was what got me to start thinking about unit positioning instead of just throwing blobs of legionaries at my problems.
Yes, it's one of those "aha" moments that being a gamer really is about. I had the same feeling when I first started playing these games and found out that units suffer morale debuffs when their friends are routing; it got me thinking about deliberately forcing the enemy to rout in a certain direction to incite fear into units further down the line.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 ive enocuntered firelock armed citizenry in empire fighting to the last man against guards,line infantry and even grenadiers just because there are a few walls standing
I loved putting one or two Praetorians against the weakest barbarian units and watching them fight to the death, killing hundreds or thousands as they slowly fell one by one.
My favorite old morale based status was "charges without orders". What I find ironic is that TW moved to health bars and used that for Warhammer when the tabletop version of Warhammer played more like the older TW.
@@AnalyticalReckoner They did kinda sorta have that in warhammer trilogy too, it's called rampage. It's basically a worse far more frustrating version of charge without orders The health thing from table top being like old total war is soo ironic 😅
HP introduction was supposed to granulate the ability of two units fighting to kill each other. It was purely designed to stretch out battle times. At some point they must have realized this wasn't enough, so they gave units far too much leadership(morale). A basic unit of swordsmen in warhammer 2 has 69hp/model and 60 morale. It is intended by design that the unit will remain in combat until at least 50% casualties. The accumulated morale penalty from entity losses is much higher than taking a rear charge or from facing a stronger opponent or being flanked. While it is possible to quickly rout any given unit, you're typically required to cause such a massive Ld debuff including via damage taken within 8 seconds that its almost impossible. Only monstrous cavalry like great stag knights, appropriately buffed have the charge damage and splash damage required to rout or outright shatter a basic infantry unit on the charge. As units don't get any consideration to their weapon type in melee, for example, there is no phalanx in WH3, there is no scenario where the sheer density of weapons is repelling enemy models and preserving the wielder. When a unit is charging, it doesn't matter if it is a halberd unit, axeman, sword or spearman, who each would have completely different engagement openers, there is only impact and then an attack animation to provide any impetus to the charge. The arms race we see in these games comes from stat-stacking where you are constantly chasing units that have better armour, more hp and more MA. MD is an important stat too but I would argue having 200MA and killing the enemy in a few seconds is more valuable than having 200MD and taking 30 minutes to die in a protracted and very stagnant melee. If you don't chase these stat boosts then you need to have another strategy to reinforce it, such as crapstacking archers or some other gimmick unit that is either extremely easy to replace or has a nuanced ability that offsets their trailing effectiveness relative to the opponents continuous army composition improvements. Nasty skulkers are a good example of a crappy melee unit that can punch above its weight, they do a lot of AP damage and can remain hidden for a long time. They're also very small models so you can pack more attacks in over a given physical area. I'm not really sure I would ever want to see CA do 20th century era game, not because I don't think they want to (and I am sure prototypes of the games were made many years ago to test viability) but rather because I doubt their competence at making a compelling game that doesn't degenerate in to tank spam. I don't think they can make the game people want and why would I? They can't make games that attract universal praise today, why would I expect them to do a great job in the future? I believe in judging a person by the merits of their actions and ever since Empire they have released more duds than successes. They have a filthy habit of dropping games early leaving them broken or to chase an expansion/DLC model that has also proven to generate animosity against them. I wish CA the best but I am not going to hold my breath lest I die while waiting.
Oh yes, I don't have any confidence in them making any good Total War game, whatever the setting is. My point is that it has nothing to do with the setting or the technical limitations; modern hardware is so, so much more powerful than the games we have and I just hate it when people on forums start making up 1000 different excuses for why "x" couldn't possibly work, rather than just focusing on the human explanation: the people behind the game either don't care or don't know how.
Tldr: even the WFB tabletop game had a lot of focus on morale and allowed you to chase units off the map or kill them entirely if you rolled good after breaking them. To add to your argument against "meaningless morale is accurate in warhammer!" Point, morale is even heavily featured in the tabletop game as well. In warhammer fantasy battle every time you had a round of combat between units you would add up points based on certain factors to decide who "won" that round of combat. There's a myriad of modifiers to it, whether or not the unit's leader or banner bearer was still alive, whether or not you charged/got charged, who killed the most, who has more ranks of men, etc. Every time you lost, you would have to roll for whether or not your men would route. There was a leadership Stat that also had modifiers for things like being close to your leader or a terrifying unit/monster, if you routed you rolled to see how far and where you run, and the enemy could choose to pursue and roll their own distance. If they could remain in contact with the routing unit, or it routed off the game board, that was it. The whole thing is gone.
If I remember correctly, the tabletop also had chain routing, forcing units within a certain distance of a routing one to make a test. Routing units could also come back if they hadn't left the table and you rolled well
The absolute worst experience I have had with the health system was when my artillery had taken more than half the health of a Chosen unit, but it had lost zero entities when they hit my front line. Nobody has any fun experiencing that.
One aspect you haven't really delved into is tabletop Warhammer. I say this because, despite the fact CA took inspiration from a tabletop game, they completely omitted following in its logical ruleset. Like, first of all, banners and officers were always a staple of Total War units before, and they play a significant rule in tabletop as well. In Total War Warhammer though? Totally neglected. Armour, damage, health, morale... Everything made so much more sense, there was a system around dealing with single entities, there were costs and tradeoffs and weaknesses etc., so for a Total War game, it is simply ridiculous that the tabletop game offers a better combat simulation. Basically Total War Warhammer is a slap in the face to everyone except the newcomers who just want a new shinier Warcraft game.
It's crazy how a lot of issues *could* be alleviated greatly if they just went and changed some numbers for morale for example. It's all in there and because of modding tools it's very easy to find these values. So for the devs to just neglect the potential of their game because they can't be bothered to edit some spreadsheets is quite disappointing to say the least.
@@zrize101 worse is when you have a bunch of mods like DEI that proudly *buff* unit morale because that was sorely needed it's also worse in shogun 2 where for some reason modders seem to have a hard-on for making units impossible to rout.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 yes, indeed. I appreciate having the modability, but of course people will take it in drastically different ways to suit their subjective opinions. To my mind it’s the job of the devs to playtest and use very clear rules of logic when designing their game to fit its goal. With rome 1, medieval 2, shogun 2 I think they did a good job, where they kept things simple enough but effective. I have no desire to change the values with mods. But with everything after and including Rome 2, it’s just impossible for me to not constantly wonder why they chose the values they did. Everything has just become so random and arbitrary. So thoughtless. 3K is the peak of randomness, everything needs to have some stat effect, however unrelated or out of context it is. It’s also very apparent in the technology trees where before technologies had some ‘content’, it unlocked some ‘thing’, but now every technology is just a random arbitrary stat increase. We certainly talk a lot about battles, but the campaigns of Total War suffer equally as much from these design decisions.
Rome 2 still has the morale system, but because one of the big impactors on moral is losses taken, the hitpoints system prevents losses from being taken until very near the end of the fight, and then they just start dropping like flies, so most of them will die before the moral impact can kick in. Where with the statistical model of 1hp systems the losses taken will be more regular and build up a morale penalty over the course of the battle which is more severe for the losing side, allowing the other moral effects to stack better with it.
The "MUH FANTASY LLULU" is probably the biggest low IQ argument I've ever seen in a discussion, it just shows how they actually have no argument and are just stupidly apologising for something they like, but they won't agree that the thing they like has any flaws. Next time I write a ticket to CA about why I can't win a battle automatically by just deleting all my units, it's a fantasy setting after all. Why can't I just infinitely move on the campaign map? It's a fantasy setting after all. Why don't I win the campaign when I just ALT-F4 the game CA? It's a fantasy game! If it's the case that fantasy just makes you not bound by the rules, then you can't argue against the points I've made, stupid as they are, because the whole argument is absolutely nonsensical and stupid.
I can name a couple of times where having a high amount of Morale in Shogun 2 saved me a few battles when I was still new and learning how to win against anything past the normal difficulty. Samurai Retainers especially gave me the ability to cause some last-ditch morale shocks that ended up in units mass routing. It was quite the spectacle for me back then. But now? Enemy units come back all the fucking time. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. You could have reduced a unit of 200 men down to just 30 and they will still come back. The battle could practically be over, and yet they will still un-rout themselves and come back.
THIS!! The whole unit routes then rallies, only to rout then rally, etc etc, was jarring as hell when I first played totalwarhammer. The change very nearly killed the games for me. Took a long time to "get used to it" or more accurately I just learned to tolerate it. I still don't understand why they did this? Must have done it for a reason but I can't think of any possible benefits of the change....
When they introduced the current HP and armour system with Rome 2, it was really over... Having HP on a model base could make sense. If a model has more than 1 HP, like 3 HP, then there's essentially a system of wounds in the game. The model can either die outright or get wounded, which makes sense. But that idea falls completely short when the armour system is no longer based around a chance to block damage, instead it's a percentage reduction in damage... Oh and armour piercing damage just completely ignoring damage. It makes no sense, it's just taking away from the actual simulation aspect. What a shame CA.
I've been saying this for years now! I started total war with Shogun 2, and everything else has felt horrible! Except for the older ones, without the health system!
@@zrize101I always thought that's exactly what the older games had? Like most units had 1 hp, while a few special units like elephants had 3. Was I mistaken?
@@zachthompson9976 You're correct. Models always had 1 HP before, with some exceptions like bodyguards, elephants etc. So what I meant with the 'current HP system' is every model not having 1 HP, but health "pools" of around 50 HP or more.
To add some of my own observations about Rome 2 to the discussion: There is a distinct difference between playing Rome 2 on Legendary where units get a +7 morale bonus, with Latin/Hellenic armies, vs playing with the intended morale levels and using Barbarian factions. You can see in a lot of multiplayer battles at high level that barbarian units will flee between 75%-50% casualties, especially if the general has been killed, while Latin/Hellenic units don't have this issue. Why? Latin/Hellenic professional units like pikes, hoplites, Hastati, Legionaries, etc have a "disciplined" trait that significantly reduces the impact of morale shocks to the unit. This completely damages the gameplay and leads to the results you showed in the video. So what's my point? Rome 2 was on the knife's edge of not being completely terrible and poor balancing with careless design invariably made it utter dogwater when it didn't have to be. I urge you to test the difference between the two army types and you'll likely notice how less-terrible battles are with mid tier barbarian swords compared to Roman units that always fight to the death essentially. Legionaries weren't superhuman though so the whole thing reeks of historical fanboyism anyway
I actually did both tests on legendary and normal, both in rome 2 and the warhammer titles, and was surprised to see how little the difference mattered in practice. +7 morale isnt much when a unit has 40 or 50 base already. Though I should have added a note on that.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 right, I think my point is how careless it was to both stack a flat bonus to morale while also adding a trait that made that morale impossible to reduce by any reasonable amount
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 And then of course we now have units that are "Unbrakeable" and at least in case of troy also "unflankable" (whatever that does.)
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Maybe try the multiplayer. In my Rome vs Parthia matches once the Roman general is dead, a rare charge from a cataphract is enough usually to route your average legionary, while the late to mid tier units require a cycle charge to kill. They are harder to route than in Shogun 2 but the battles are a lot more slow paced in general in Rome 2. Note at Cannae it took hours of repeated charges by the Carthaginian cavalry to break the Roman blob of infantry.
16:59 The ones used by Guards and Foreign Marines are actually breech Loaders, not bolt action despite there's some Retainer weapon such as Needle Rifle Retainer which is a German Bolt Action Rifle made in 1824. While the main problem of implementing the 5 Round Clips(not magazines) is the absurd fire rate a WW1 Total war would have, in WW1 it's quite rare for a Soldier to get shot by another Soldier despite how accurate the Bolt Action weapon is, while there are speculation as Soldiers doesn't shoot to kill or both sides pretending to shoot eachother while missing on purpose, a WW1 Total War would probably be Fall of the Samurai without the Samurai 19:00 iirc there's a small Penalty for Melee Attack and Defense when Soldiers are too bunched up in Rome 2, but it's mostly negligible as the only way to stop them is either a Heavy Shock Cav cycle charges(if the blobs are Medium Weight) or Rear Missile Attacks followed by a Cavalry Charge as Morale Calculation in Rome 2 tends to view Morale as a second health bar rather than a pillar you need to break for the unit to rout. This is also prevalent in Warhammer viewing Morale/Leadership as a Second Health bar which isn't really that easy to drain unless the unit is filled with unicorn magic, lost 80% of the Men, or just puke at the sight of 19 Cow Man with specific traits that reduced Morale.
Great video, agree with most points. Only thing I want to add is that there has been one notable counter example of proper use of defeat in details and the importance of flanking/surrounding enemies in 'Attila: total war', particularly in the video 'how to alans' by Yrrdian where he uses low tier melee cav to pull apart enemy formation and kill the most threatening units one at a time. It still runs into the problem of absurd number of casualties (particularly since he is using a fully light cavalry army), and doesn't have the fight to the death mechanic, but it's probably the closest thing I've seen in modern total war games where clever tactics are used to defeat stronger enemies. It's rather telling that this is pretty much the only example I can think of where it feels like the player is outsmarting their foe rather than out statting them or cheesing them. And even then, it's in one of the less popular/forgotten games and requires an extremely unbalanced (as in 0 infantry, archers) composition to work.
28:12 same with Spear Milita, Urban Spear Milita, etc in med 2. I been learning to respect Shogun 2 more, already liked it but its getting close to the same level as med2 for me.
Yes, but even then they are useful for some. I beat the game on the hardest difficulty as the romans and most of my armies were spear militia and militia or trebizond archers.
One of my favorite aspects of Shogun 2 is the rewarding feeling of seizing a hill or cleverly defeating a superior army in detail- being able to quickly put a small force to rout being the crux of the victory, and the witty tactics being the only way to win against a better equipped and numerically superior foe. It’s such a simple sentiment, and yet it’s the difference between the games that we love (Shogun 2) and the games that we don’t (Three Kingdoms)
Tbh, at least in rome1, the fighting to the death state heavily debuffed the unit. They usually get massacred quick without dealing too much damage in that state, it was often worth to just grind em down instead of letting em run and risk their escape
What we want: Actual combat, Tactics matter, blob punishing, Single entities either have important roles to the massive armies and battles or outright remove, a functional moral system, Good AI that knows how to protect, flank and charge, Guns function as guns, and developers taking more time to fix up every major and minor details and functions. The fantasy setting is alright but keep the fundamental gameplay intact. We are ok if CA want to try new things, as well as QoLs. What shills and CA heard: Not Shogun 2, bad! Not Historical, bad.
Great video, you captured some good points. I would argue in favor of HP that it's a good way to handle the effects of magic, without making it too weak/broken. Also HP are individual: every man has their HP bar, which are summed up to the unit's one. I also partially disagree on your arguments about morale and single entity units. TW Warhammer could improve in many ways, but at its core it has great mechanics. And I don't speak from my own experience only: you speak about experiments, there's plenty of other channels doing them, and they all put emphasis on the importance of morale. That being said, I still think you have valuable points. Older Total War were broken for other reasons (mainly pathfinding and AI - often problematic to this day), but battles were more realistic. And it's not a matter of being historical vs fantasy: Rome 2, Britannia, Three Kingdoms (which is amazing, but definitely not for the battles) are essentially historical titles, but the battles suck, a lot, precisely for the reasons you explained. I would finally also add another thing to the argument: artillery. Artillery fucking ruins a Total War game. Rome, Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 artillery is amazing, because it's inaccurate and because it doesn't deal more than its value in damage (often even less). Of course, if you support it correctly, it can be even more effective, but that goes for every unit, and it's essential for sieges anyways, so you have to bring it. Artillery is an asset because it forces an enemy to chose between taking casualties but keep their position and moving somewhere else / attack themselves. New Total War artillery has pin-point accuracy, it can unleash devastating napalm attacks and it's easily the main source of damage of an army. Such a powerful weapon is boring, because it destroys tactics and it just encourages corner camping (and it also makes me mad, as an history enthusiast, but that's on me). Even FotS artillery is a bit on the broken side, but I can accept it. They usually kill up to 300 people, but it's just two units in the end of the day, and they themselves cost probably more than that. Definitely a great asset worth having, but not necessarily wrong. A trebuchet in Three Kingdoms can annihilate between 500 and 1200 people per battle, in a game with less men on the ground, set in a era of melee combat. Outrageous. Thanks for reading my essay lmao
"TW Warhammer could improve in many ways, but at its core it has great mechanics." Mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, I have a one hour video where I go over how bad the games have gotten on the campaign layer: th-cam.com/video/rW7PFNqGuog/w-d-xo.html Magic and other timed abilities have been implemented poorly, HP is a bandage solution that doesn't actually solve the issue and creates its own problems as shown in the video. If you watch any footage of anyone decent at the WH games, you will find range and single-entity spam front and center; this is not a point up for debate, that's literally the game as it is. Artillery in Fall of the Samurai has limited ammo and it frequently runs out of it, especially in multiplayer battles. Useful, not overpowered. Trees, hills, and structures can be used to obstruct it.
HP bars making sense "because magic" is a horrible argument. Total War Warhammer is derived from a tabletop game where models have 1 "Wound" or 1 "HP", and guess what, healing magic still worked. Healing magic in the tabletop game is essentially about "invigourating" units with strength and endurance. Healing isn't only about HP numbers.
@@zrize101 also the whole magic argument often acts like artillery and naval bombardments weren't already a thing in past games and they worked fine under the hitpoint system. It also fails to acknowledge that the new system was brought in with Rome 2, a game that very much does not have the spells featured in the WH titles. The chronology itself discredits the idea that healthbars were implemented for the sake of balancing magic.
disagreed on the magic: most magic can work fine on a 1hp unit basis: all you need to do is replace dmg with kill chance (pre-rome 2 already used this diceroll system to determine if an attack kills or not, and armor/shield/melee saves are still calculated with a diceroll to this day) So imagine if instead of Burning Head dealing 40-60%dmg to all 100 models, it'd just kill ~50% of models it hits following the dmg diceroll. You'd have to tone down the dmg potential of a lot of spells to compensate for the increased kill rates but you absolutely could make a magic system like that work with very similar results to what we have in WH2. the HP bar's problem in general is that it removes the correlation between combat effectiveness and a unit's total HP left; a unit of halberds or (especially) archers at 20%hp left is in many ways just as effective as it was with 80% hp left if they happen to have the same amount of models left, this seems like it's no big deal but it can lead to situations where you charge your heavy cavalry into the enemy's rear-line, but instead of getting a bunch of kills you just deplete the HP bar a bit and knock some guys around; with the attacked unit now being able to turn around and kill your cavalry with the same amount of spears they had before your charge; it also means that where archers used to lose damage output proportionally to damage taken, they now have a "buffer area" where they can take damage from enemy ranged fire and still maintain (most of) their full firepower. As for morale, it does matter in WH2; nowhere nearly as much as in earlier titles but it does still make a difference if you are used to the system in Troy and WH2 (not sure about Rome 2). problem is that morale values are just too high across the board and so as soon as you get past the low tier units the value of morale drops off extemely quickly and significnt morale shock can only be really achieved by combining the various debuffs with a hefty morale shock from burst dmg. (or units with the "causes terror" attribute) In PvP morale matters a bit more in general because you need to pick between quality and quantity, but in campaign it just makes the late-game a slog. Definitely agree with you on the Artillery thing; (though it isn't really limited to artilery, all ranged units suffer this to a degree) it is incredibly easy to get all your damage out of just planting artillery or archers on the map and killing any unit who walks into their cof before they can even make it to the battle line; FotS artillery was already becoming too much but in WH2 it's not limited to artillery at all; basically every ranged unit can quickly and easily rack up incredible dmg numbers (relative to their cost) due to their high accuracy (and no more dicerolls for dmg like in Shogun 2).
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498the single entity and ranged spam is really judt because of the god awful A.I. though, any domination multiplayer battle even inlcuding the very best players makes use of nearly ever unit in a factions roster. Land battles are a different story, but i think the way the game is setup right now can definitely work to make interesting and fun battles. If the A.I. wouldnt be as stupid as it is.
The only solid blueprint that would a make a Total War WW1 or 2 game possible, is a small game called Graviteam Tactics, the game simulates WW2 combat on the battalion-level and it looks amazing, i myself have a couple hours on the game and whilst navigating it should be difficult (Slavic indie devs) its something you should definitely check out.
@@SpeartonMan Combine The Great War -Western front with how artillery and combat works in say Shogun 2 Total war and it would be amazing. I started with Napoleon,then discovered Empire from a friend and saldy using forts isnt as fun as it should be while artillery is okayish to use. Then *BOOM* comes in shogun 2 total war, The Fall of the Samurai with its gunpowdered units and artillery pieces and its SUCH a MUCH better game! If you would give the Infantery units the same "moral,manpower and fighting style" as shogun 2 and it would be amazing. You would see how your line that charges lose moral and falter while some would still get into meele range while you reserve line would get pounded by artillery pieces to pin you down.
On the Topic of "Guns, guns, guns, who took my guns?", such Cheap anti Elite counter does exist in both Shogun 2 and Rome 2, where in Shogun 2 it's the Matchlock Ashigaru while in Rome 2 it's the Javelin Skirmishers units, while the Javelins in Rome 2 doesn't really have a fast projectile speed nor instant kill units like the Shogun 2 Matchlocks, the Javelins no matter the cheap Javelinmen or the Picked Peltast would deal good damage to any unit especially on the rear or right flank(weapon hand), although unlike Shogun 2 Matchlock who needs good terrain and timing to effectively counter the Elite Armored Units, Rome 2 needs timing and placements while you can loose a hail of javelins at a Praetorian Guards, most of those Javelins would be blocked by their Shields and finding the perfect terrain to fire at a flank in a middle of a battle would be harder making the only way for a Javelin Skirmishers to deal with Elite Armored units is for them to literally assume the role of Cavalry and maybe Light Melee units being placed in the Flank of the army and having to work with the Cavalry who chases down the opposing Skirmishers allowing the Javelin Skirmishers to take a clear shot at the Elite Armored unit's rear. In Warhammer every Ranged units with 140+ Range are all stop gap for any unit as a single volley of arrows by 8 High Elves Archers would deal more damage without any loss to fighting power due to literally fighting at range, or how Crossbows and Bows are basically the same weapon as Empire Crossbows and Huntsman bows have the same projectile speed and can lob their shots.
Battles in old total war games: we must expertly position ourselves to outmaneuver the enemy Battles in Total War: Warhammer: SEND IN THE MUTANT RAT OGRE BLOB
you did not have to expertly position yourself to outmaneouver a mentaly challenged opponent like the total war ai , this is such a weak ˝argument˝ that i cant even laugh anymore , you could just line up your units in a great line and then let the rng run the show or whichever unit had the better stat (stats always mattered but were less obvious) and still win , using hammer and anvil or planting yourself on top of a hill doesnt exactly require intense brain power to achieve either everything else is just roleplay , and on the topic of the rat blob i just dont care , i never wanted and never will use doomstacks , basicaly its a non issue so i wont comment further
I feel like expanding on WWI Total War as a tangent and putting my two cents into the idea. Tanks would actually make an interesting unit type for Total War, a kind of inverse to the matchlocks in Shogun 2 if you will. In fact, you can think of them almost akin to a Testudo formation applied to artillery. with strong armor against bullets to the front, but weaker armor to the sides and rear. Unsupported, they are actually vulnerable to infantry attacks as their motors can't outrun running infantry, and neither can their guns cover enough area to handle being torn apart by infantry. Even without flanking, enough firepower may be enough to cripple the crew or the tank itself, as while armor is thick, there is still the chance to get a lucky shot through a vision port, to break through armor, or cause spalling. I suppose they can borrow from ships even as ships have crew and guns on them, as well as "hull health", or effectively "land ships" Artillery can be a unique "land-based" bombardment unit, which are slow to move on the campaign map, but doesn't require the sea to do its bombardments. It can also be selected individually while in an army in order to do its bombardments. and when partaking in a pitched battle, it has a long range but is very slow to move, It can also be balanced by giving it low ammo. Fortifications, such as Trenches, Bunkers, or so on. can be constructed by armies in friendly territory similar to forts in Empire and can be occupied by armies, Trenches provide similar bonuses to earthworks from Empire, while bunkers perhaps provide additional firepower akin to say Gatling towers in FOTS. Units themselves would be changed in just a few unique ways from typical total war games. Perhaps a funny inverse would be that early-game units have tighter formations and later units have looser formations, compared to normal total war where weaker units usually have loose formations. Regardless, the default would be looser formations when not entrenched since cavalry is basically obsolete, and melee isn't as big of a threat. I would also say that while a unit is in the open and not moving, their units will naturally go prone while they wait for orders, and leave prone once given orders to move. Units may also use trees, buildings, fences, and so forth for cover. Snipers are a bit confusing but my best idea is to make them agents akin to foreign veterans from FOTS and ninjas from Shogun 2 with the "harass" action, which will cause a loss of men and lower morale, they can also be used to kill other snipers in a "sniper duel", While in an army they will act like ninjas who allow the army to move further and provide more vision, They can also be used to scout ahead, but, I would think they have a much larger chance of critical failure while in enemy territory, as they are just a man (or squad) with a scoped gun, and unlike ninjas, aren't masters of disguise. Grenades have already been implemented in Empire Total War under Grenadiers, so honestly, this point is already covered. Aircraft unfortunately I think is way out of bounds for Total War to implement, at least not without some kind of overhaul, so I don't have much to say in this regard. Generals no longer lead armies from the front I'd imagine, instead, I would say something akin to you having a "Faction Leader" who is not visible on the map, and instead just confers bonuses on armies globally. maybe there could be something akin to a Captain/Major? but in general, I would see them less as a combat unit and more so an agent on the field that provides bonuses to armies in a radius. Units classes could be considered something like this Rifles (Bolt Action, Long Range, Poor Close Range Performance Assault (Submachine Guns, Grenades, Good Close Range Performance) Team Weapons(MGs/Mortars/Anti-Tank, Slow and requires set up, but deadly performance while set up) Motors(Armored Cars/Tanks, Varying Speed, but generally more resistant to bullets, Small Unit Size, Poor Performance in Melee) But yeah, apart from Generals and Aircraft. Bam. You basically got WWI combat
One way you could implement aircraft, as a start, is to have them act autonomously; you can give them a general order to scout, strafe, bomb, which if left to its own devices, it will do its job but inefficiently. The player at any point can interfere in its movement, change target, etc. Basically, a more developed version of skirmish mode. Also I think this would be a prime time to finally expand on mixed arm units, rather than the homogenous regiments that has been a standard in Total War; I say expand because that was already featured in a few select units in 3K. By the end of the First World War, combat had evolved from human wave attacks to "stormtrooper" teams, basically specialized teams made up of assault soldiers with a few machine guns, who would concentrate their efforts on a specific point in the enemy defenses to establish a foothold for the rest of the infantry to advance. Finally, cavalry: while they were mostly used for reconnaissance and transport on the western front, they were featured pretty prominently on the eastern front given the relative lack of natural barriers. They could still definitely play a role in disrupting infantry formations in such a game.
On the jets and planes point. It would be trivial to implement off map assets like this attached to an army. We already have general abilities and spells and spawning units. Hypothetical units like officers, general or forward observers could call in assets like biplanes or jets and could strafe areas like wind spells work in Warhammer except they are strafing enemies with bullets and bombs/missiles. The plane can simply fly off map and despawn with a timer cool down. They could even have animations for crashing and being destroyed. Outside the map assets with animations already exist, see green skin wyverns flying around on badlands maps. Don't see why this couldn't be done with jets in a holding pattern waiting to be called in. The main difficulty with a ww1 total war would be changing the campaign map/mechanics to implement trench front lines but that could be done even if that meant changing how armies move and how settlements work. If the battles were good enough players would be enjoy the game.
27:24 This almost feels like most of the Cheap unit that will punch above their weight if used well, from the Rome 1 Greek Militia Hoplites being able to be used for the majority of the campaign if you can use Phalanx having the weakness of needing to keep their formation as they have low morale, Medieval 2 European Spear Militia where they can take charges and Missile fire due to the combination of having good shields and upgradable armor with their only weakness being overpowered by a super rare Sword Infantry units or being flanked. even Rome 2 have such units from the Roman Rorarii being able to form Square formation which could delay or tire Low to Mid Tier units, Celtic Levy Freemen being a Speedy Light Spear unit who have Precursor Javelins and high anti Cavalry, making them somewhat of a damage dealer, Greek Militia Hoplites that have high armor due to their Shields and being quite effective against other Infantry when in Hoplite Wall but is extremely vulnerable to flank and rear attacks as they actually have low armor, to even the Eastern Spearmen who are better used as meatshields against both Melee and Ranged attacks due to having cheap cost and shields specialized in blocking missiles. And then there's Warhammer where Empire Spearmen are best used for...huh...a road block until you get Spearmen(Shields) or Halberdiers as by the time those 2 units are available Spearmen are completely obsolete even against Factions who doesn't bring Missiles, which in many cases Halberdiers are just better.
32:31 I think this is a very true argument as well- in FOTS, for example, you can field an army of traditional units, or of modern units, or of a combined arms type- I’ve fielded all three against traditional and modern armies. They change the way you play but I don’t think that one is necessarily superior to the other.
Morale has definitely taken a backseat in terms of importance that much is true (you can even see when the CHARGE of a cav charge ends by how the morale bar fills back up). However, one stat the really isn't talked about in Warhammer, SPEED. Sounds simple i know but, If your unit can't be caught (or hit) then they can't be killed. While the speed may not be drastically different, if you can out run and "skirmish" with the enemy They will get tired as well as start dying before your troops do. Free Company Milita, Dark Elf Shades, and Wood elf archers are good examples of this. Their is also Unit Mass/Unit Weight and Unit Stamina to consider as well. In Rome 2 units where classified by Type and Weight, the Heavier the unit the faster they got tired. Skirmishers where also inherently faster then infantry so you needed your own Skirmishers or Cavalry to catch them. As we all know, the more tired a unit is the worse it preforms (this effects among other things, Moral, Melee attack and defense, and how fast they move). Then their is the whole WEAPON DAMAGE and ARMOR thing. In Rome 2 and Attila Armor flat out blocked damage, which is why Heavy infantry fights drag on so long, and why Flanking with Javelins (which have High AP damage) is so effective. In Warhammer armor only blocks a Percentage of damage taken (down to a minimum of 1 damage, or so iv been told) which is why Ranged unit spam is stupidly effective. AP damage is obviously more effective vs Heavy Armored units while Normal damage better vs lighter armored troops. (or at least its supposed to be. Feels like the more AP damage the better since it CAN NOT BE BLOCKED) Then in Warhammers case you have all the Buff Spells and Healing spells and shit just gets awkword and complicated. Hell everyone Recommends the LORE OF FIRE because it specifically DOES moral damage (the Burned state effect gives minus 8 moral while active). Meanwhile you all these buff spells that NO ONE ever recommends, although some do when you read into what they do.
These are good points. Beside the fact that some tuning might be required, mechanics are strong. I would say that fatigue also has a bit fall down in relevance, since running doesn't tire units anymore. This influences tactics too: when slow marching, you can make mistakes and get your units risking being clumped together in bad positions by a well times attack from the enemy; so you either start running to prevent it from happening, or you may even get stuck. Of course that also requires units not being able to compenetrate eachother.
I think health bars were introduced for consistency. Having 100hp means you can always take 100 damage, but having 1HP and 90% chance for enemy to miss can still one shot the unit. But in the grand picture it was statistically consistent because there were hundreds units on the battlefield, so maybe I am wrong. Introducing HP system make sence for warhammer and single entities and elite troops.
Yes, hitpoints worked fine because the larger size if units invoked the law of large numbers; the more times you roll two dice, the closer the real frequency of a number gets to its expected frequency. It's easy to roll a 3 two times in a row; much harder to do that when you expand the set to 200 or 300.
On the ww1 thing? I've wanted to make a modern warfare mod for TW myself if I could code. Planes helicopters strategic bombing, tanks armored vehicles etc etc can be managed in game just like how we do it irl, you build an air base, it has a dedicated range or engagement and you can slot the amount of armaments you plan to use for certain engagements etc. It wouldn't even be that hard to integrate exploitable supply lines, road conditions etc as the components for such already exist in TWWH abd the China one that no one played after the checks stopped coming
After being severely disappointed by Rome 2 (disastrous launch + the changes to the campaign map ruined it for me) I tried TWWH many years later and noticed every battle just devolved into chaotic blobs, despite my attempts to use the tactics I was familiar with in RTW and MTW. It makes sense that this is a consequence of the changes to the morale system, the HP system and how armor etc now work. Very unfortunate that we will probably never see this series return to it's former glory.
If someone interested with the concept of ww2 total war, then i suggest trying order of war, a game made by collaboration wargaming and square enix (i think). its not 100% realistic (there are other like graviteam tactics) but its close enough as a concept. I think if they ever wanted to include plane in a total war game than make it a callable support like how naval support work in fots. Btw love your videos keep up the awesome work❤ Edit:Recently rewatched some gameplay for order of war, realizing how close it was to company of heroes, Which is a bad sign for people expecting a good combat.
I really like this video, but it feels like idea vomit. Your ideas are valid but presented in a disjointed way. I think there are too many chapters and cutaways to you playing other games. Having chapters and cutaways are cool but there are so many that it cuts the flow off and lessens the overall impact of your message. I agree with you 100% though, I never realized this until playing shogun 2 after exclusivity playing Warhammer 2. I could tell immediately it was way better, you can always tell when the developers put love into a game.
another effect of having the 1-2 hitpoint system in the older games was that it really broke elite infantry into different roles. In Rome 1, the arcani were elite infantry with 2 hitpoints, the ability to hide, and great stamina. They were also much less numerous per unit than something like an urban cohort. So they would be able to engage in quick, aggressive action subsequently run away before the rest of the army could envelop them. But if they pushed things too far, they'd start snowballing casualties. In medieval 2, the hungarian assassins and the muslim Hashashiin also were 2-hitpoint-units with the ability to hide. Because they had less manpower, they didnt have the offensive capability as comparable elite infantry. But medieval 2 was structured heavily around sieges, sometimes against castles with multiple lines of walls. And on walls, when you only have a certain amount of space to cram defenders on or are limited in how quickly your attackers are able to scale the ladders, having men with twice the survivability was such a force multiplier
Total Wars terrain has just become too elementary, rarely if ever do i find myself actually considering the implications of a say, small forested hill in the center of the map, maybe a large forest to my Southern flank. The A.I proves itself too dumb to ever actually use positions like those. However in a game like Graviteam Tactics, local terrain proves itself the most important factor in all engagements, any even minor hill can prove itself a valuable position for some mortars and HMG's, or maybe you can place an artillery spotter, a large forest can be used to covertly and securely move large formations of men in and around the battle area to get a better position on the overall objective, Scouting units can be told to go on covert missions on the extreme flanks of the players line in order to set up new firing positions and perform recon. This is all from a game made by a couple of guys in Ukraine, really recommend you check out this game.
I have plenty of FotS clips and streams where I can defeat a much larger force of rifles by just using even the most minor of depressions in the terrain; force the enemy to close in as close as possible then order the charge just as they're about to enter the ditch. Even better if you can get their units to all concentrate so they end up blocking one another.
Idk why im thinking of this now after years playing the series, since medieval 1. But what if when you lose a battle your units scattered around the campaign map, so you had to take some time to regroup your arny? 🤔 Every unit scattering would probably get tedious, so what if they only scattered if they routed off the battlefield before your general did? Or maybe only if they routed a decent amount of time before the rest of the army? Idk, could be cool to see! It would fit so well, desertion has forever been an issue for armies. What do you think??
While I disagree with parts of your video, the point you have about games being BETTER than their predecessors strikes home. It is entirely messed up that even if we disagree on what we think are some of the fundemental designs of total war, and what we can expect from it - CA has still somehow managed to disappoint both of us with mediocre titles that barely hold a candle to the earlier games. Goes to show that they have a focus on it being pretty, and having lots of buttons to press with flashy animations, over being truly "deep" and engaging in a way that holds you captive from start to finish. To be fair to Total War, I haven't had that love for the franchise since Medieval 2 ( and even that wore out quickly enough once I learned how to blitz the game ) but it is extremely disappointing that no game in the series has, for a decade and a half straight, failed to capture me the same way again. I might like some of them - but I don't think I've ever loved any of them quite as much, or will ever again if this design keeps up.
Yea I have to put that part into every critique video I make, because I need to pre-empt the "lol boomer" comments from people who get angry at the title.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Understandable. Some Total War fans are just "Wow you're just biased you don't get it." Even if that's the case, it still doesn't stop the video from being a well intentioned critique piece with solid ( and fair ) arguments beyond just "New bad, old good." Shame most people won't see it that way.
My favorite doctrine in Total war was massive infantery fire with artillery support. I just LOVE my battle line in Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai consisting of elite troops of the highest level,with all the accuracy buffs you can get from buildings, generals and advisors, US marines and Kneeling Fire just to keep the guns going. Supported by 5 Armstrong cannon groups to POUND the enemy forces into OBLIVION as soon as they group up, to crush cavalery before they can flank me with my 5 Yari Infantery from the VERY BEGINNING of the game right behind the cannons ready to charge forward to drive back meele attacks,to swing around to cover flanks against infantery. I just love how much "Shock and Awe" could be done to absolutly crush the enemys. Sad that Napoleon had a lacking artillery and fort mechanic while empire,even older as napoleon, felt even worse then using artillery or forts. Oh yes. And the defensive war in Fall of the Samurai is peak fighting. You old the outer egdges and fire,retreat inwards while the 2nd line fires on the ariving soldiers who have to regroup under fire before going for the next wall with more soldiers. Edit: You mentioned the powercreep in Fall of the Samurai as a starting point, but you can even go back to napoleon where a french militia unit would have the same moral as a austrian or prussian infantery of the line with just worse accuracy and reload, while the french infantery of the line was as good as its counterpart with 2-4 moral more, almost double of what another nation would field on the base level!
To be fair, it's kinda hard to make units with firearms different other than adjusting morale, accuracy and reload. Interesting thing about firearms really, they made everyone equal in combat in a way
@@WormsMaster100 I mean that what made war so much...easier to wage. arm people with a firearm, train them for some weeks and you have a soldier as capable in dealing damage to your enemy as a trained soldier. Meanwhile other wappons need far more time to be properly used.
Ill never forget the disappointment i felt when i executed my first hammer and anvil maneuver in rome 2. Hype and excitement at the carnage i was about to inflict immediately turned to confused, underwhelmed, disappointment 😔
the fun of the older games was that even though you might have smaller forces or weaker units, than the enemy, you could win by using smarter tactics, taking advantage of terrian, flanking, formations, etc. gameplay changed from using to superior tactics to getting armies with superior stats some say this is because the battle AI was, and still is, incredibly stupid, so rather making the AI better, they just changes the nature of the game to make it easier for the AI (amassing high stat units) and more challenging for the player, which, as you say, is pretty much what AOE is
Graviteam Tactics and Wargame both are examples of WW2 and Modern games with TW esque mechanics, a turn based strategy map leading to realtime tactical battles. You would have to change some things but the concept absolutely can work.
I think the biggest problem with implementing World War 1 in Total War is the hindsight problem. Everyone nowadays know that trench warfare is not benefiting the attacker. So with that in mind no one would attack a good dug out trench if it does not give an attack bonus or economy boost. So the game mechanics have to reward you for wasting manpower and material to gain a few meters of useless territory. While also punishing you for wasting these resources to make it somehow realistic. I think this is the reason there are not so many good WW1 games that try to be somewhat realistic and it is especially not working for Total War.
''Shogun 2 is only Ashigaru spam'' Yeah cause when the AI has 20 stack of Ashigaru Spearmen, i cry and shit myself cause my veteran Katana Samurai, are now useless. God forbid you flank them or something. What next? ''Fall of the Samurai is just Line Infantry spam''
4:10 for real the numbers always amazed me how armies so big lost not even half their men but it already led to a decisive outcome and you really think how morale actually even played out and when you play these “historical games” where morale has been made an absolute joke and it does not even depend on shocks like a cavalry meant to quickly deliver a finishing blow on rear or flank to rout the entire battle line but you have to wait for your infantry first to drop some significant hit points on enemy units just so that your cavalry charge could be barely effective is downright stupid. Great bideo as always
So CA struck gold when they developed morale, which combined with advancements in computing power allowed them to model historical battles in a more historically accurate way. More soldiers in battle lines who fought until they lost the will to fight, and not just 5 guys fighting until their HP dropped to 0. The problem is they didn't continue pushing the boundaries of accurate military history, only their graphics. This left their gameplay to stagnate and ultimately influenced by the community it drew from: RTS players. Instead of, say, exploring the idea of friction where your troops visibly lose cohesion as the battle drags on. Instead of exploring logistics where scouting and raiding and foraging are just as important as the set piece battles. Instead of expanding the experience system with unit officer growth, training drills, or discipline and reaction speed to practiced vs unpracticed maneuvers. CA couldn't afford to upset this audience, and so did nothing but appeal to them with QoL and a variety of popular settings and units. A small group of these players found something to like in how the unique parts of TW combat mechanics allowed for slightly different RTS experiences, but the majority were here for the same reasons they came for Age of Empires.
One of my favorite total war games to play to this day is the OG medieval, it improved on Shogun 1's controls and took what it did well and made it bigger(yes irrelevant but fun when done well) and more importantly better.
My favorite Tactic is Shogun II was creating a intentional gap in my frontline, the enemy would try to use that gap to attack my archers, where incidentally was where my vicious katana samurai were hidden. Horses on the wings tucked into a forest, and you get some pretty realistic depiction of warfare tactics.
I love your takes on Total War, by far one of the greatest franchises imo. We all loved playing with the green little army men as kids, and the ability to do so in a fleshed out game is a dream come true in a sense, even if we have to play the ancient Total Wars, im still happy CA at least made our childhood dreams come true.
Relating the point made in 19:05 - as a matter it's not that cavalry rear charges are effective because of "charge bonus" or even having the unit surrounded per se (greater surface area and all that). Infantry beats cavalry, or more like makes charging in a suicide pact for the cavalrymen... if they hold. It's that facing great beasts with pounding hooves is inherently terrifying, and even if the infantry formation would beat the cavalry, the first rank involved in the suicide pact might have different ideas: perhaps it's better to run away and maybe survive, than die for sure. That is to say, the impact is almost completely psychological, and even the earlier Total War games were unthematic for less cohesive infantry forces standing long enough to receive a charge in the first place (most of the time), which makes unbreakable units in neo-TW simply appalling.
Its funny cos tabletop warhammer did the same mistake. Leadership was a gamecore mechanic and you can wipe out the entire squad by breaking their morale. U can kill only 5 model of 20 and break they morale. And then gw bring up so many artefacts, units, special rules and auras with no fear bullshit, that u cant even scare some petty villager with your dead dragon cos he has no fear rule sharing by some lord nearby. Fearless is one of the most common keyword in warhammer. Sorry for my english
For convenience sake I'll split each comment for each chapter as to not make it into a solid wall of text. Ch1: Oh god the foreshadowing on units still fighting the same with 1 health as they do with full health (except with wounded trait which just decreases stats for a single entity unit) Ch2: It was mostly the AI that was made with the inspiration of The Art of War, how the AI would react if it outnumbers 10:1, 5:1, 2:1, etc., the book's influence is far gone ever since the tile based movement system introduced in Rome 1 that no longer allows the player to strategize nearly as much or get punished for overextending as counter attacks are very rare by the AI 3:50 - Shogun/Medieval had army destruction from just cutting off the retreat path of an army which resulted in entire armies either getting executed or ransomed off, kinda impossible with the tile based movement now. 4:15 - Would've been very different if irl battles had TW style chasing where one light cav can one shot entire armies or set off charges that send men flying, without anyone stabbing nor shooting back. 4:40 - That aspect of letting units rout has been sadly toned down, no longer generals get coward/captured traits that decrease the effectiveness of the army, Attila sort of tried with the integrity system but one click of a button (decimate) fixes that with no real downside as autoreplenishment is fairly generous. 6:35 - But the goal instead is to just stackwipe armies by destroying most units so they don't randomly replenish out of nowhere and be a nuisance later on, sadly another part of TW that isn't really dynamic, it's just individual army strength, no manpower or other armies being affected by the destruction. War weariness was a pretty neat concept but I'd rather just see it in EU4 than TW. 8:55 - Could've pointed out the lack of experience and how those units can break almost instantly even from just fighting uphill 10:00 - Rears and flanks exposed is a pretty accurate view of how units are engineered, there can be a thousand units attacking the rear of a unit and the second it's not touched in the side it won't get the side morale damage penalty, which is kinda why these penalties have seen the most adjustment in any TW game 10:30 - Cannot wait for Ceasar to be like yeeaa see those Gauls? Hit them in the rear for -30 morale damage but don't hit them in the sides, that doesn't deal morale damage. Capisce? Ch3: Could be an interesting commentary on how the TW games are just player centric, there's no abstraction of the units relaying orders it's just the player. There's also an issue of the battles just boiling down to fatigue/ammo/army strength. Would also add how it's possible to abuse gaps in the formation that are caused by uneven inf lines, oblique order sadly doesn't quite work in TW though. 14:35 - Oh my another gamey aspect where the units would die much faster from pulling out, very abusable in games like Rome 2/Attila Ch4: www.rockpapershotgun.com/talking-about-total-war-with-mike-simpson "Okay, well, the way we look at it is that there is a long list of things we can do with Total War, and I should think that almost anything you've ever thought of is on that list. We argue constantly about the things on that list, and the order in which we're going to do them. The order changes all the time. The 20th century is on the list, but of course it's not exactly the easiest transition from the kinds of battles that Empire was all about, which was all about formal armies and men moving around in units. The 20th century is much more fragmented, much larger battlefields, and there's just more to deal with: aircraft, and so on. It's certainly something we want and intend to tackle one day, but it wasn't the thing we most wanted to do after Empire. What we really wanted to do was go back and redo Shogun." If the executive producer tells it can be done then idk try telling that to the fans who have no clue what can be done, kinda tired of things becoming a set formula out of context. Ch5: Thorax swordsmen are very heavy infantry who are really sturdy units, it also has pretty good morale that matches legionaries. Could've made it so the battle difficulty is on normal so the morale modifiers are shown, stuff like attacked in the rear appears a lot which is -30 but it's just not enough to do much. Not sure what to think about that section like the bunching up is how units held together because of flanks secured and friendlies nearby/general nearby, though I would be a big fan of it if it was possible to use lesser units to break elite ones which sadly started to get phased out in favour of casualties sustained and army losses taking the top of morale damage penalty modifiers that are meaningful. Morale still is decisive but instead of starting chainrouts it's to aim for that sweet army losses penalty which is sad since friendlies routing took the backseat. Fextralife's vid is pretty good but it could've been used to point out how fatigue penalties also took a step back, same with rear/side flank penalties that even Rome 2 had it pretty big. As for the Shogun 2 footage at the end the katana samurai did have to deal with a routing/dead general on top of projectiles giving a slight morale penalty so even in Rome 2 it would be kinda similar especially if the inf holding are hoplites/pikemen in lanx Ch6: Terrain's kinda always been a morale/damage modifier but it's sadly so negligible especially on higher difficulties. I would rather make the argument for just the xp/upgrade stacking making everything morale/terrain based really pointless lately, at least in Rome 1/Medieval 2 the friendlies routing penalty could potentially rout 12 morale units due to how hard it stacked, 12 morale being pretty much for some of the best units around. Ch7: wtf is a half hitpoint of damage tho LOL but yea it was mostly a thing with units either getting one shot from the first hit or taking multiple hits at a time without anything affecting them. Health was introduced for that as to make those hits eventually take the unit down but at a cost of removing those one shot kills that used to happen especially with charges www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?548136-Exclusive-Content-and-Dev-chat-for-Total-War-Center&s=7b9c3f9786cc7880c64fa5e3b540bf81&p=12805863&viewfull=1#post12805863 Jack lusted explaining health and all other stuff that's being implemented for Rome 2 went through this and while I agree with his sentiment of getting the weapon damage modeled idk I just wish there was something about health that made the engagements more dynamic like the entity becoming effectively exhausted or bleeding out. Don't care if there's muh PC performance argument if Shogun 1 had individual xp with individual stats attached then I don't see how health couldn't be implemented the same way. This alone made morale just a thing where casualties sustained becomes the morale for units rather than playing around the concepts of flanking, fighting downhill, surprising units, etc. The tangent section on guns: Shogun 1 had the morale shock alone giving guns such a huge impact that it didn't really matter how much damage they deal. Might as well just use archers with armour piercing if you want to deal damage. Sad that it got removed making Shogun 2 matchlocks like armour piercing slingers basically. Also I don't agree that every unit really needs a counter for everything, the biggest reason I got into TW is that I can finally just leave the stupid interactions of spears beat cav, inf beats cav if I can just isolate a bunch of spears and rout them in detail. I still don't get what's with this rock paper scissors design if morale is a thing, make spears formiddable but break easily when using combined arms like missiles with inf idk. Ch8: Based Ch9: Stats can be deceiving since you'd need to develop a really big trust into what to expect of the unit. It still would require one to look at the stats eventually to see if you're not missing out on anything. Hint: bonus vs cav on riflemen in FoTS where one needs a bayonet mod. I think health made it a little too consistent, how charges are always meant to be damage dealers at the start and then nuke when the battle has developed, there is technically less randomization as you don't have to pray that a charge breaks the unit with enough kills rather than be sure that the charge dealt its expected damage which leads to all the cycle charging/softening up bs with precursors and so on 42:55 - Shogun 1 was also made because of the tech race - th-cam.com/video/8rFh9BDNLqk/w-d-xo.html Epilogue bit: Fight to the death is the biggest bait I've seen people fall for where even the most bugged out yari ashigaru or Rome 2 pikemen are putting up more of a fight than these seemingly desperate units while in Shogun/Medieval it was just an attack bonus to the chasing unit so a bunch of spears can still potentially be a threat to light cav while starting from Rome 1 they can just walk in and nuke everything without any consequences. I would much rather focus on how those routing units can make another reinforcing army passing through instantly shaken from the friendlies routing so letting them rout can give you an opportunity to destroy another army. I still can't believe people fall for the fight to the death bait though I would still have it implemented, as well as a chance of multiple units routing being able to repel a single chasing unit rather than perpetually not being able to rally just because there's a single light inf/cav chasing them which makes them completely harmless.
One aside is that there already exists a template for a World War Total War: Wargame/Steel Division by Eugen Software. There are issues, but it works. Planes are destroyable call-ins that you have a limited number of and can be shot down when they appear for missions by other planes or AA artillery. Tanks are deployed independently while infantry are used in squads and instead of pulling all units of a stack in at once you deploy with a set number and call the rest in as reinforcements to either reinforce a position or concentrate for an assault.
As someone who just couldn't hold the line, I bought Pharoh. I am sorry everyone but one year from this video I can say that the morale system is still shockingly bad. The worst being how my armies never seem to have any, despite better positioning, armor & weapons, and having not lost any auto-resolves but as soon as I manually play a balanced fight the enemy basically is an army of motivational speakers who can flee and rally multiple times!
cavalry were also pretty prominent on the eastern front; planes were almost exclusively used for reconnaissance (most aerial combat was between scout planes); tanks didn't show up till the later half and their effect on the outcome is questionable (blockade is what really broke the back of the Germans).
A WW1 Total War game, it's a mod for Napoleon Total War, which did an amazing job. I was one of those people who dismissed the idea both on the tactical(battle) and strategic(campaign) levels but as this mod proved it's very much possible. Is it an accurate representation of WW1? Hell no. But under the confines of a Total War game, and being a mod of an existing game at that, it did pretty darn good job. I still don't think it's an ideal setting for the series but considering other games, like the afore mentioned Napoleon, also don't perfectly fit(as opposed to Empire which a terrific setting) it's really not that much of a leap from those. Heck the mod even managed to incorporate recon planes into the game, something I thought would be impossible in a Total War setting as no game before WW1 had air combat to begin with, unlike naval combat which is incredibly old. So I still digress that a WW1 Total War, as an official title I mean, still isn't really a great fit, the mod for Napoleon proved that the setting is very much feasible.
I think health is not inherently a bad thing in total war, but it has been used too much and in too high amounts, would a giant in warhammer die to being shot 10 times, probably no, but would it also be able to tank 5 units of huntsmen shooting it full of arrows for like 30 seconds, again probably not. Same has happened with moral, it has gotten too high with too little negatives for reducing it. I think a perfect example of this is the " immune to psychology" trait from warhammer. You would think this would be a great trait in a world full of monsters, magic, walking corpses and skeleton. But no, most units have a base leadership so high that this is one of the most useless traits to have, it has uses but most are extremely situational and can often be countered by other means. It kinda diminishes your elite units when everything from the mid game up will often fight until it has only 20 men left, even less if they have experience levels that the ai has cheats for anyways, so theyr units will almost always fight to the last 5 man.
I have over 400 hours in shogun 2. I couldn't tell you a single stat number of any unit. I just know what each unit is good at, I don't need to know the number of melee attack on a katana samurai to know they are going to defeat yari samurai. All I need to know is katanas beat yaris
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 That's also an added problem with the whole unit variety fiasco. If there are 300 variants of regiments of dude with sword, how do I know if the scaly dude with sword is better than the demon dude with sword, or the pointy ear dude with sword? Who will win a a 1 to 1 engagement? Now I have to check stuff like melee attack, melee defense, armor, silver shield, magic resistance. Wtf...
One of the things I don't like about total war is how you can have broken lines and nuts acting independently from the commander. That just doesn't work in real combat. Numerous reenactment groups have tried something similar (like the sca) and shit falls apart immediately when confronted by an inferior force properly arrayed. And that's just melee on melee, not accounting for calvary and stuff. In every document we have about warfare from Asia and Europe it almost always ends with "and then we caused their peasant infantry to break apart into different units and exploited the gaps
In warhammer encircling with infantry is worse because now you have both sides of a unit fighting you while if you push from the same direction only one side fights against your 2 unit blob + unit mass advantage + charge bonus still counting even if you see your unit being stalled from the blob of your other units
24:40 I have another charitable reading: in "most games" units simply fight to the death, so an army in Warhammer beginning a rout after 75% casualties means morale is a thing, so it "matters" relative to most other games the players are familiar with. By my reckoning, most TW veterans agree with the point being made here vigorously.
Making a "WORLD WAR 1 GAME" isn't just a matter of having Bolt action riffles and Machine guns. Its a matter of Organization at scale and style of warfare that is functionally plausible. Cavalry was also used up until World war 2 in Russia but that doesn't mean that just having cavalry with a ww1 skin means you're accurately representing a World war 1 military setting. This stuff matters if you are trying to make a military strategy game. I can imagine the kind of shitty WW1 game CA would make with riflemen who are just reskins of muskets with a higher fire rate and the tanks are just the steam tanks from Warhammer with a mark v skin. Just because you "CAN" doesn't mean you "SHOULD". Part of the facts are that Rome which was created decades ago to simulate ancient roman warfare became the template for every total war game no matter what the setting and we have sometimes seen minimal changes to accurately represent different time periods. And then instead of adding new depth for different settings CA adds an artificial aesthetic/façade of mechanics and removes actual depth from combat
"Making a "WORLD WAR 1 GAME" isn't just a matter of having Bolt action riffles and Machine guns." It might not be the only thing, but it is a huge part of it. "Cavalry was also used up until World war 2 in Russia but that doesn't mean that just having cavalry with a ww1 skin means you're accurately representing a World war 1 military setting." I'm confused; is this supposed to be addressing my video, because at no point did I even talk about the implementation of cavalry in a supposed WW1 TW game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I'm talking about the subject of what a world war 1 game should be like. My point about cavalry is an allegory for how total war games are designed. If they were to make a world war 1 game. I want it to actually reflect the unique position of world war 1 military affairs. Most total war games are basically reskins. If a world war 1 game is made with that philosophy, then I think its a failure as far as capturing the setting. Maybe it could still be a good total war game, but I don't think it would succeed as a total war set in world war 1
Rome 2 not only added HP but WEAPON DAMAGE as stats. I swear to god every single issue with Total War STARTS with Rome 2, GOD DAME YOU CA! What Level of Irony are we on when the Sequel to the game that PUT TOTAL WAR ON MAP, is the same game that signals its decline from grace and glory. Total War has shifted quite a bit from Shogun 2/Rise of the Samurai to Fall of the Samurai then to Rome 2 and onword. To be FAIR though, one thing that Shogun 2 really showed was that MORAL SHOCK mattered more then anything else, admittedly most of that was from the MASS SLAUGHTER of the unit itself but still. Moral may not matter as much as it did, BUT unit "stamina" and Flanking does (to a point). As it as always been, units that are Fresh fight better then units that are Winded, Tired or Exhausted, you still arn't going to with the "quality battle" but you will take more of them with you. As for Flanking, that mostly has to do with Ranged units, as most units have Shields and most of their armor on the FRONT side, and have less and less as you Flank them and eventually get around their back side. I still prefer Shogun 2s Rock Paper Scissors style, its simple but it works. Now we have HP bars, Weapon Damage, Armor Piercing Damage, Unit MASS, UNIT SPEED and Spells to worry about.
Shogun 2 already had dumbed down a lot of the army simulation. In Medieval 2, all soldiers were still physical units, that would fight more actively. Formations mattered a lot more, and you had to think ahead when sending forces. S2 had almost no unit physics, inheriting the broken engine of Empire. Units are just pushed around as if pulled by magnets. Horses literally just clip athrough your other units. In combat most soldiers dont do anything, just reguarly someone hits an enemy, sometimes you get some stupid 1v1 animation. Formations, flanking and positioning was much more forgiving and less strategic. FOTS mostly benefitted because it retained Empires' strengths, with line infantry mechanics. Idk why people sometimes talk like Rome 2 was the one that destroyed the battlefield simulation. Shogun 2 was already halfway there, making the unity interactions behind flanking, surrounding and concaves much less relevant. And yeah, morale was a much weaker factor too. Ive tested some bridge battles in S2, where I had the perfect position, and it was so much elss effective than in M2.
@@termitreter6545 Excuse me, are we playing the same game in the same universe? ALL THE SOLIDERS FIGHT instead of just being the front rank and everyone else just stands their and do cheerleader impressions. When units charge into each other they intermingle, bend and flex slightly. When Cavalry Charge into enemy units they send dudes flying like 5 feet into the air (hilarious, if over the top) giving them a real sense of weight (if extremely over exaggerated). I will admit the "interaction" between units is pretty bad (formations casually walking though each other), as you said inherited from Empire. But the actual unit combat is grate. Not to mention how GOD AWFUL the AI is with Siege battles, and after FOTS came out it BROKE the existing Navel AI. Far as i can tell the Navel AI always uses the FOTS navel AI even when playing S2 or ROTS so it just brakes the Navel battles. (AI just sits in spawn till you get into firing range)
@@jaywerner8415 In Shogun 2, most of the soldiers dont do anything at any given time. Like, have you ever looked at the frontlines? Most soldiers there will indeed not do anything, they just stare at the enemy. From time to time someones attacks. Idk how people can say that this is great, it looks so bad. Im not sure how Medieval 2 exactly works, but it seems much more that each soldiers can fight and got their own cooldown. But the unit movement and formation in Shogun 2 is clearly nonsensical. Cavalry formations impacting are the only time it feels like theres weight. But even then it doesnt simulate acceleration and force of cavalry like Medieval 2 did. Thats why you get stuff like cycle charging; in M2 cavalry actually needed to build up speed for maximum effect. Foot soldiers in S2 just get "magically" pulled around by unknown forces (aka scripts) during movement. During attacks, soldiers are like magnets pushed into each other, and then repelling each other. Formations can act like sponges deflating on impact, and then inflating. Theres no solid unit physics, just scripts pushing around soldiers. Im Medieval 2, it goes further to treat soldiers as actual, physical objects, they arent just magically pushed around all the time. They hit each other, concaves are partially powerful because soldiers can get stunlocked if attacked by multiple enemies. Shogun 2 cant even simulate something like that. And that actually makes a massive difference for flanking, concaves, moral, etc. Sure it was never perfect, but if battlefield simulation and realism is a sign of quality, then Shogun 2 was already a massive downgrade from Medieval 2. And Rome 2 then just turned it into a joke. Heck, maybe people being so blind for S2's shortcomings was why CA thought R2 was a good idea?
@@termitreter6545 Hmmm, Yeah their was just something about the previous TW engine before empire that "just worked". If I remember the wiki correctly Rome 1 and Med 2 run on TW engine 2 and everything after is on TW engine 3. Its been over 10 YEARS, CA really should develop a new engine at this point.
@@jaywerner8415 I 100% agree with that. I dont really want to hate on Shogun 2, clearly lots of people obviously love that game. IMO its more that S2 had some flaws compared to previous games. And rather than fixing it, CA just went "eh screw it" and minimized morale with Rome 2. Was the same with the campaign map imo. R2 introduced some really flawed army/province management systems that haunt Total War to this day. CA just did some superficial bandaid fixes in Total Warhammer, but didnt actually redesign the offenders. Which is a shame imo, I still like a lot of their games. But to me, Shogun 2 is a good game, but its frustrating how much potential they left. And even moreso with Total Warhammer.
No, FOTS isn't remotely comparable to WW1. Line infantry based combat was not a regular feature of WW1. Maxim guns and fully automatic machine guns were far beyond gatling guns in their killing power. artillery was massed and significantly more accurate. The sort of artillery you saw in the mid 19th century may as well have been muskets compared to breach loaded. The Franco Prussian war was Europe's wake-up call to how it was unnaceptable to wage war in the traditional way. Massed bolt action rifles meant frontal engagements would lead to utter massacres. Artillery was increasingly relied on as a consequence and armies were forced to become looser, lest they lose 1000s of men within minutes. The Boshin war was a bizarre theatre that worked only because it served as one of the last sightings of traditional line rank and fire and matched with the isolated Japanese more traditional based war doctrines. Sure you could do it, but it would be so fantastical and far removed from history, you may as well be playing WH. It would have next to no resemblance to the actual conflict and do it a mssive disservice. A WW1 total war would require a complete change-up of the formula.
yea but like....this is implying that the other "historical" TW games didn't already have massive historical inaccuracies. I don't expect a WW1 total war would be 100% faithful to its setting. Plus, I have read more than a few books on the matter and the first 6 months or so of the war actually did have quite a lot of maneuver and formation fighting, similar to 1871.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 ".this is implying that the other "historical" TW games didn't already have massive historical inaccuracies. " Uh no, it isn't. Flaming pigs/other inaccurate units, sieges not lasting years, Egypt looking Ptolemaic the and other innacuracies is not on the same level as flat out misrepresenting how these battles were fought as a whole. "I don't expect a WW1 total war would be 100% faithful to its setting. " I don't either, but there is a limit. That limit is when it stops resembling the conflict. 6 months of isolated bayonet charges and blokes in lines doesn't cut it. Same as how making ToB a hack and slash herofest would be stupid, just because of that one Viking at Stamford bridge.
I don’t hate the idea of a health bar if it was just a stand in for showing total hit points in the unit but having overall unit hit points instead of points based on entity number in the unit is really dumb and isn’t even true to how it works in at least Warhammer 40k on tabletop.
I think the HP system can actually work, and the intention of it may have been honest. But you must show exceptional restraint and clear thinking to use it well. Essentually what it would model is glancing blows and nonlethal injuries. In the earlier games, an arrow might either kill or do no damage, with no inbetween state. But with HP, assuming that the HP value is always below the maximum damage of the arrow then you still have the possibility for a lucky shot, with HP you could model armor which is totally impervious to light arrows, or medium armor which will deflect most arrows, or light armor that has a small chance to save the wearer. In Med2 even full plate armor is vulnerable to any attack even though realistically it would be 100% impervious to most non-piercing weapons. You could also use HP to model armor which can be worn down, or armor where a multitude of blunt strikes will eventually kill through sheer force alone but where any one strike is not itself lethal. Unfortunately this careful design is nowhere to be found and it just turns into whittling down a bar.
I stopped playing Total Wars after Shogun 2 after seeing what they did with Rome 2. And I won't touch Warhammer games because I was curious and watched tons of multiplayer battles for those awesome animations and units and EVERY SINGLE ONE ENDED WITH A BRAWL OF 3-4 HEROES after the 10 minutes top battle.
Have you found any combat mod for warhammer that adresses the issue? Also what do you think about three kingdoms. From what i recall it was close to shogun combat wise
I covered this mod recently by Juggernaut: th-cam.com/video/n6flWwBWhUE/w-d-xo.html Three Kingdoms is a copy-paste of Warhammer with a change in the setting. I have a video where I go over some of the broken battle aspects and the terrible UI: th-cam.com/video/F1a9O3aMeis/w-d-xo.html
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 maybe because of the campaign map, but three kingdoms is the only total war i actually finished campaigns since shogun. Sadly, i dont think anything will change. As time goes by games have to sell and to adapt to the masses which are more or less not very bright. Hence why have total war be a strategy game and appeal 10 guys when it can be what it is now and appeal to 100 guys. Saldy i see every game is like this nowadays. Good thing we still have gems from the past to play
I had a completelly different opinion over this worth noting i've only player warhammer total war III Because you've provided footage of combat where the key features of the enemy units are their high leadership, or directly unbreackable such as,korne, lizardmen, bretonians, wehre a cavalry charge will only deal damage, and not hinder much of their moralle, since these factions have units specifically made to be used on slugfest Because, personally, i find that a lot of battles i have low casualities numbers, simply because i for the enemy to route before actually having any pushback In the case that you feel that the units have too much moralle, you should play against skavens or the empire, where lines of units can or will fall due to fear Key exceptions to these rules are korne, vampiric factions, lizardman and bretonians (sort of) Korne has high leadership, frenzy....etc, so if they're on melee combat, they're harder to rally down all vampiric factions non-human units don't rally up, they unbind/desintegrate when an ussual unit would rally up and lizarman/bretonians have high leadership, meaning that they will not rally up unless massive ammount of damage is taken I understand and somewhat agree with you over moralle, but you should have used other examples where the combat is not meant to be an slugfest
Just my two cents before watching the video; I think the morale difference in Warhammer is part of why I feel those games to have such slogging battles. When I first played the Warhammer games and realized that leadership was morale, and then saw basic units with 70+ leadership, buffs that add like twenty leadership a pop, and then morale effects of flanking, rear charging, and taking casualties being negligible, I knew I was in for a poor time.
While its true that flanking in rome 2 has an honestly negligible effect on morale for even mid tier units, it does provide a pretty significant penalty to melee attack and defense, 50% iirc. It is a terrible way to have flanking as a mechanic in a historical lens, but strictly as a gameplay mechanic it's mostly fine
In Warhammer 2, playing as the Empire is the only way I can start a new game. I've tried multiple factions by now, and only Tomb Kings come close to the _possibility_ of varied army composition - but only with some critical mods. Even the imperial roster needs some special abilities to become truly interesting and worthwhile competitors to doomstacks, otherwise handgunners are, as you said, archers with a different skin. I've always liked modding TW games, but Warhammer is, by a longshot, the one which needs most "fixing" mods, not bug-patching, but gameplay correctives.
"How do you do tanks?" Warhammer has giant monsters. Tanks are easy. "Snipers?" Off the top of my head? Have a smaller unit of "normies" with the sniper in it. "Unit sizes, formations, front lines, etc?" Yes, a few things may need to change, like the actual sizes of units, and they'd need to invent new mechanics to, say, dig trenches. Your point? You mean Creative Assembly would have to do some actual competent work? Clearly they're not big on that anymore, so I guess the naysayers are right, WW1 Total War is impossible.
they already attempted snipers in FotS with rifle units that could remain hidden whilst firing. Granted the implementation was lazy and broken against the AI who would get shot to death but even that kind of attempt at an idea is something beyond them today.
Exactly. it would take work, some experimentation, but it's not impossible. Sure, maybe have them be single unit troops, but not a giant. One hit takes them down, so you keep them back and hidden, like a sniper should be, or otherwise covered, and they're devastating. ESPECIALLY to commanders. That took no work to think up.@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
Hi again. I've been thinking about this all night and I have some more thoughts, especially for sniper. First, in the original Shogun we HAD single entity units, in the form of hero samurai. The guy worked, and Volound showed in one of his vids that the hero could kill HUNDREDS before going down, but would be erased by any amount of bullets. As for jets, well, it's WW1, so one would not have them. Now, if they meant BIPLANES, yes, that would be a little harder to properly field... if modern TW didn't already provide a solution. Spells. It would work like a spell from Warhammer. You build the unit, add it to your army, and CAST a biplane run like a spell, or like how Fall Of The Samurai did artillery support from coastal ships. Pick the angle they come in at, and boom, strafing run. Have another on patrol to stop enemy planes from doing the same. I mean, the modern TW players LOVE their spells, and behold, and actual way to properly use such a concept without it being dumb.@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
Completely agree that Shogun 2 is GOAT, but still bro does not understand that medieval/victorian Japan is not the same as ancient Europe or a fucking Fantasy World with Demons, Zombies (which have the specialty that they dont flee) and giant Monsters
classic mouthbreather warhemmoroid "this is a game with dragons and monsters and ratpeople with lazorrrsss omg" apparently your game having a "fantasy" setting counts as a license for it to be garbage
A World War 1 Total War would be really good. Like you said, the closest thing to it is Fall of the Samurai. Gatling guns could be a Vickers or MG 08. The naval barrage feature could include longer ranged artillery. Gas attacks. Tanks that get unlocked through research. And maybe a logistics system where you need to feed and arm your troops and have sufficient shells for your artillery.
Off-topic but the sliding scale between "gameplay vs plot/characters/atmosphere" is an interesting beast. I only recently discovered that to me, if the plot is locked behind atrocious gameplay, I might as well read a book or watch the game's walkthrough. That makes me feel a bit sad for the game - people poured their blood and tears into it and yet many can only enjoy the game by treating it like a book or a spectator sport. And yet at some point of badness, the gameplay becomes so terrible that it is better for my sanity to switch to a) watching instead of interacting with it b) a book c) another game with a better gameplay and not necessarily that much worse of a plot/characters/atmosphere. The thing is - gameplay is what you deal with minute to minute - if you torture yourself by subjecting yourself to overly tedious if not painful gameplay, I think you might start developing repulsion not just for that one game, but gaming as a whole, subconsciously.
lot of modern AAA games seem to be leaning heavily on being moving art galleries, probably because it also looks more impressive in marketing material.
I've never played any TW games after Rome 2, I didn't know the gameplay got so bad. The whole point of TW back in the day was to get as close to real historical battles as possible. They stopped going down that road long ago.
The game being fantasy actually works against it as an excuse. A historical game like Shogun 2 should have a meta that one should spam since that is what happened in real life - they made 500,000 guns in 50 years afterall. However, that is not what happens in Shogun 2 campaigns or even multiplayer.
Ive only played 2 total wars, shogun 2 and 3 kingdoms, and the battles felt so bad in 3 kingdoms that i only played one campaign and did everything to just auto win battles because it was awful when in shogun 2 every battle feels great even if its one sided
You had me UNTIL "CONCISTANCY" What is More concistant than a 1 million HP bar being hit by 10k attacks? You do t get more concistant than that. DPS is a measure for game with Health bars you dounce Meanwhile the other have 1 HP and can die by any ARBITRARY RNG roll. So what really happen is that Moral became LESS predominant With Raw damage and bonus damage becoming the main gate. So now you kill before route, UNLSS you cant and need to depend on route Also, scaring Some enemy formation amke other elite one vulnerable, like how tanks NEED infantry support otherwise is a metal duck waiting for an RPG, mine or Artillery shot. Game changes, i concure on that. But in a way more mainstream, precise and where NUMBERSatters Until the point power creep make is so "number are so big they stop making sense. Or the korean MMO sindrome
The RNG roll doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things because of something called "the law of large numbers." In theory, a coin toss will have 50% probability of heads, or 50% for tails. But it's possible that you can toss it 5 times and have every result be heads. But the more and more times you toss, the more the actual results will be in line with theory. It's possible for a yari ashigaru soldier to win in RNG vs 1,2,3 Katana Samurai. But against 140? 160? Virtually impossible. Try a 1v1 Katana Samurai in Shogun 2. 160 vs 160. Every single attempt will be even, with a variance of 5-10 men.
Shogun 2 had really good morale system but sadly high level multiplayer was dominated by leveled up ashigaru with skills giving them unbreakable morale.... and super gun cav units which made the game more kill focused
17:00 I am also one of those people that thinks a wwi total war isn't plausible. Sure, you can give battles the aesthetics of wwi, but if you have played say, the wwi mod for ntw, you'll see how it's basically impossible to recreate the situation that allowed static warfare to flourish. I can conquer France as the German empire with less than 10k men. You just can't replicate the scale of the world wars in the total war engine. All units will move as amorphous blobs instead of rigid rectangles. You can just gen snipe the opposing army with your Uber artillery every time because total war requires having a general present on the field.
you're reducing the argument to a question of scale, which is not my point and also missing the point entirely. The game should be aimed at replicating the dynamics of such a conflict (at its core, it was a challenge of the defender having an incredibly strong advantage which resulted in the stalemate). Fall of the Samurai already did this, just see all the damage you can do placing your line infantry in a prepared position with overlapping zones of fire. also why would this total war game need to have a general on the battlefield? you do know that before rome 2 this was not a requirement, right?
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Don't try to argue to me that wwi wasn't a war of scale. To create a campaign that emulates the scale of wwi you would need at LEAST 30-40 stacks of armies against the borders for each front to simulate the deadlock. That would get really boring and tedious to fight really fast. Again, static warfare isn't that fun in total war. Total war is all about movement, flanking, and small unit tactics. The engine can't really simulate infantry behavior of each individual man diving into craters, crawling on their bellys to cut barbed wire and toss grenades into trenches. A game more suited for this era of war would either be something like men of war/Gates of hell, for smaller unit tactics, or hoi4 for the sheer scale of production of equipment. Also, I love fots. That's honestly where all my hours in Shogun 2 come from. It's a great case for why a mid to late 1800s Victorian era total war would be very fun. Fots works because the boshin war was a relatively small conflict. You can faithfully recreate the battles and campaign map from that era in the total war engine. Siege battles in a total war sense also weren't really a thing by the time wwi broke out. Towns and villages were completely flattened by the barrages. You cant really recreate the battle of Verdun in total war. Same with the somme. Maybe you can do a small pocket of the battle, but that's about it. This is why CA will never ever create a total war past the Victorian era. It's just not feasible
Lol man ok You just theorycrafted a bunch of reasons for why it won't work as if you know the inner workings of the engine. Also i find your insistence about the war of scale laughable, in a game its the interactions and dynamics that count, not the historical accuracy. All of the good Total war games are very ahistorical anyway, I don't see why this weird constraint about scale needs to be imposed on WW1. That's a constraint that you made up, sorry that I'm not willing to take it seriously. Yet another person who talks about MUH GAME ENGINE as some sort of boogeyman that will forever prevent the games from moving forward (instead of the lack of will or competence on part of CA.)
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 lmao try not to strawman your opponent challenge (impossible) so you can fight arguments I'm not making. I've played enough total war to know their formula and how unit behavior works yeah it's not that difficult to understand. You drag your mouse to set what rectangle shape you want your unit to form up in. You get your nice big block of infantry and march towards the enemy and you use cav to flank. That's how it's always been from shogun 1 to warhammer 3. > Also i find your insistence about the war of scale laughable, in a game its the interactions and dynamics that count, not the historical accuracy. And I find your insistence that a ww1 total war would be perfectly historically authentic with barely a brigades worth of men fighting on the western front. I'd also love for you to tell me what these ww1 dynamics and interactions are because you keep spouting it off like I'm supposed to follow. > That's a constraint that you made up, sorry that I'm not willing to take it seriously. Ah yes I remember when ww1 broke out and the german empire entered neutral belgium with an eyewatering 2,800 man doomstack. Lead by general Moltke himself on horseback! After effortlessly taking brussels he immediately besieged paris after defeating the one halfstack army defending it. Thusly ending the war with the destruction of france in october of 1914. Get real dude this shit would be so fucking boring without any sort of frontline system. sorry that I'm not willing to take it seriously. Yet another person who talks out their ass pretending they know how game design works thinking CA can do literally anything with their engine if they just believed in themselves.
great video. it is very nice that cover so well everything that is wrong with total war this days. and is a real pity that such a good game went to waste given all the improvements that came with computing. hope that a good company picks up where shogun II left.
Yeah, even though modern Total War has battle scales that are smaller than ever thanks to single entities, the games run like crap because most everything is done on a single-thread.
😳 22:26 Never realized how crazy the ai unit buffs are in higher difficulty, i assume this footage must be from legendary?? Im a scrub that plays on normal in tww2 & 3, because fuck that shit😅!! But when i get off a good flank charge the vast majority of units rout super quickly! Does ai get morale buff too? I thought it was just ma and md...
I agree with most of this video but I'm not sure if health bars work like that in warhammer. I feel like I consistently see single models in a unit take a specific amount of damage for they die as if they all have their own health bars. I'm might be wrong but I think it's just that units are far too tanky.
yes each model has its own healthbar and all of them are aggregated together to give you the value that you see when hovering over a unit. This is why you can have a unit take 3 volleys of arrows and not lose any men, only to have 5 or 10 die to the fourth volley. And why charges have inconsistent kill counts.
Yeah the idea that ww1 total war could work is just straight up wrong. It's true that the change in weaponry wasn't exactly revolutionary but... no, ww1 combat did not look anything like any total war game on a doctrinal level.
sorry man CA themselves considered it achievable: www.rockpapershotgun.com/talking-about-total-war-with-mike-simpson I've gotten like 7 comments on this exact point these past few days and I wish people would stop role-playing game developers and inventing 10,000 excuses for why x won't actually work.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Oh damn, CA think it's a good idea? well shit they're so famous for making good decisions... Never said they couldn't make it, just that it wouldn't work.
here's the 2013 GDC talk where the show precisely a unit splitting feature: th-cam.com/video/6A0lPZw1FQU/w-d-xo.html WW1 total war is really not a stretch dude, we already had implementations of manning walls with units, machine guns (gatling guns), and rifles. Cringe historical total war fans: I WANT MY GAME TO BE 100% HISTORICALLY ACCURATE OR NOTHING as if the older TW games weren't already riddled with historical inaccuracies.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I mean it's an interesting video I guess, and I don't doubt CA could hypothetically make a world war 1 game, in the same way the could make a first person looter shooter. It wouldn't be the total war formula though, or if it did it'd just be bad. Total war just doesn't work for a setting with continuous frontlines and small unit tactics being executed by armies of millions. Even god damn world war 2 would be less stupid, and even then it would have to be a Company of Heroes clone. I have to ask why on earth you would want to encouage CA to make "Napoleon but with an extra century of technological advancement" when they could be making a game their formula actually works for like Empire 2 or Medieval 3. Whatever, that whole rant about historical accuracy is a pretty clear indicator of how much attention you're even paying. But damn, you did call me cringe I guess, so that's me blown the fuck out.
Particularly concerning, especially after seeing Filaxim Historia's video on Roman battles. Ain't no simulator like a carnage simulator tbh. Blood for the Blood God n all that.
Frankly, I think Sun Tzu is bullshit. He’s like George Orwell, people quote him without knowing anything more than surface level about his writing. However, having read The Art of War, I find most of the things he wrote either straight bad advice or only applicable on a purely tactical scale, and unfeasible in real life. For instance, take the fact that he recommends not even attacking the enemy unless you outnumber them 32:1. This makes me think that he’s either a complete fool or has never seen a battle before in his life. Most of Sun Tzu’s strategies are completely impossible to achieve in real war.
Sun Tzus writing is more philosophical than literal, though. The big takeaway is that a good strategist will ensure the battle is won before it is even fought (hence his point about "a good commander will not demand victory from his men", such a quote is of course stupid if you take it in a purely literal sense, but it's not meant to be taken that way.
To consider the emergence of health bars as intending to implement classic rts elements is just naive. It is obvious that it is meant to make the game more forgiving for new players combined with the decline of morale factor. You can read it throughout all of CA's advertisement for Rome 2. It is meant to draw new players rather than improving on what the old players considered as flaws and hoped to get better. I don't think CA is going to reverse what they've done for that reason. It is a marketting decision rather than a design decision and it works perfectly well in that regard for them. This is always what happens when a company tries to please every kind of people with their game.
@@zachthompson9976 game encourages you to get better tier units. You do that and stack modifiers on top of that. There are also tanky regiments with the "high health" written in their description. Combine these with the fact that units lose morale relative to their hp loss more than any other factor like elevation etc. The result is the fights take 3x longer and player has more time to react and he is not heavily punished for making mistakes. In my recent playthroughs in warhammer 2 I felt that the more my army and its general levels up the more convenient the battles become, and also I get more and more lazy with each passing battle and win battles that I shouldnt be able to win. I dunno if it makes sense to you but thats how I see it.
@@Kasro_Z yeah that actually makes alot of sense after you broke it down for me. Appreciate that And I absolutely agree about the game becoming trivial with high tier units and high level lords. Slaanesh is my favorite faction, purely based on their playstyle, has NOTHING to do with their theme or lore, I swear 😏 But I've beat entire full stack armies using only Nkari, it's insane. Admittedly it is pretty fun, at first, yo play with op lordsn but it rapidly gets stale and boring
20:20
Exactly the problem with the "morale/leadership" roles in this game, it no longer rewards you at all for out maneveuring the AI. Because CA knows it can't cook up a decent enough AI to challenge the player they've now switched gears to make it a stat-based game.
The primary focus's are no longer revolved around positioning and tactics, they're revolved around matching units stat for stat and META-crafting up spells.
So, trying to recreate a battle of cannae is now impossible. You can't put mid/low tier troops in the centre to hold ground while enveloping a larger force, your front line will shatter at breakneck speeds before your horses can even move 100 yards and the entire battle plan goes to shit.
And even if they somehow manage to hold out, the morale shock of a flank does neglible effect. To where people now are having to APM spam cycle charges.
This has completely ruined well layed out plans and executions, because chain routing is no longer a thing either. They have supposedly streamlined it to be the battle loss penalty (another stat, oh boy) where if you kill a significant amount of units the entire army shatters, context be damned.
So what this means is if you rally 3 or 4 units at 70% strength at a crucial choke point, like a bridge crossing or gatehouse, and the enemy wipes the other last stray unit 600m away, the entire force at the bridge just instantly shatters because it crossed that army loss penalty threshold. It doesn't matter that the men would have obviously won the day against a tired and depleted enemy. You lost x% more than the enemy so you lose.
It also has gutted chainrouting, a long battle line will no longer collapse and break at a devestating charge on the left flank causing unit after unit to break at the sight of it's fellow units running...nope! Only that ONE specific unit breaks and the others hold out because the army loss penalty hasn't kicked in! Yeah nah m8, don't care that you out manoveured me, you're in the grind fest now, hope you brought better units than mine!
It really is a fancy card game in all intents and purpose at this point.
Also first.
Sadly this might be a consequence or limitation of the RTS/4X mechanics these games inherited from the start. In an RTS what's important is the player's ability to organize and direct their units to achieve a very predictable and consistent result. Positioning is only important in how the player likes to group their troops together when moving them, but unless they're doing quirky micro like using a light tank to circle a heavier one, coordinated movement isn't a big deal.
So morale, as one of the only new mechanics TW innovated from outside the RTS genre, is also one of the mechanics that's withered away since it only got in the way of traditional RTS gameplay. The average player (and the AI) just wasn't incentivized nor trained to play these games as a grand puzzle where one side has to break the other. They're instead guided towards throwing things with bigger numbers at each other, with the players being rewarded during game progression with better and better units while the AI can only calculate based on numbers and math, and where it falls short it gets cheats to buff those numbers.
I think this is what made Shogun 2 so good, yet also catch so much flak from the fan base for the sameness of its armies. You got all the tools for your army from the first 20 or so turns onwards, yari ashigaru and samurai specialists, meaning you were partly incentivized to play smarter against equally capable enemy troops. But CA and most fans I guess preferred the number buffing game with heroes, upgrade buildings, and faction bonuses. This makes sense if the game you've been playing is throwing better and better units at each other, rewarding those with better build orders or spending the right amount on strong counters to units (rather than tactics). It makes sense if gameplay ultimately boils down to box selection and clicking on a target, and expecting immediate results so you can do it again.
It's no wonder really why CA can't design an AI to challenge players. What players who focus on chain routing style mechanics are doing is emergent gameplay not easily quantifiable by some number CA can tweak. So instead, like what happens with MMOs, the devs focus on serving the player base with gameplay tweaks that boil down to "big number go up" + spectacle.
Morale should be more important, units should die much much slower in frontal fights. Also mass should be way more important or there should be a mechanic where unit losing combat is giving ground slowly and getting pushed back.
Yeah I agree, and the problems get worse with higher combat difficulty since all it seems to do is jack up the stats even higher. So now you can either stack so many number bonuses until your units have the better stats, or you cheese the AI with I win buttons (range blob, SEM blob, etc).
The garbage AI is truly the original sin of total war games in my opinion. Stat-based rather than tactics based gameplay, gutted systems of province management, joining units to the commanders at the hip, unit blobbing, god awful sieges (especially the ones in warhammer 2 and 3) and more. So many issues stem from CA trying to put band-aids around the problem of having terrible AI (both in campaign and in battles) rather than having to spend the not insignificant time and resources that would be needed to actually make the AI challenging/interesting.
@@filipzietek5146 Didn't older games like rome 1 have something like that? It's a pity since it'd be another way to emphasize the 'elite' units over weaker ones.
😳 SERIOUSLY!?!? I've got something like 200 to 300 hours in TWW2 AND TWW3 and I've NEVER understood the stupid fucking battle loses mechanic! Remember when game mechanics in TW were intuitive!?
🙄 But now that you've explained it some of the bizarre shit I've seen in battles def makes more sense 😒
I'm glad you talked about units fighting to the death when surrounded in the older games. When I was just starting to play Rome as a kid that mechanic was what got me to start thinking about unit positioning instead of just throwing blobs of legionaries at my problems.
Yes, it's one of those "aha" moments that being a gamer really is about. I had the same feeling when I first started playing these games and found out that units suffer morale debuffs when their friends are routing; it got me thinking about deliberately forcing the enemy to rout in a certain direction to incite fear into units further down the line.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 ive enocuntered firelock armed citizenry in empire fighting to the last man against guards,line infantry and even grenadiers just because there are a few walls standing
I loved putting one or two Praetorians against the weakest barbarian units and watching them fight to the death, killing hundreds or thousands as they slowly fell one by one.
Miss when the game mechanics naturally and organically led you to think more strategically. We've lost so much in this series
My favorite old morale based status was "charges without orders". What I find ironic is that TW moved to health bars and used that for Warhammer when the tabletop version of Warhammer played more like the older TW.
@@AnalyticalReckoner They did kinda sorta have that in warhammer trilogy too, it's called rampage. It's basically a worse far more frustrating version of charge without orders
The health thing from table top being like old total war is soo ironic 😅
HP introduction was supposed to granulate the ability of two units fighting to kill each other. It was purely designed to stretch out battle times. At some point they must have realized this wasn't enough, so they gave units far too much leadership(morale). A basic unit of swordsmen in warhammer 2 has 69hp/model and 60 morale. It is intended by design that the unit will remain in combat until at least 50% casualties. The accumulated morale penalty from entity losses is much higher than taking a rear charge or from facing a stronger opponent or being flanked. While it is possible to quickly rout any given unit, you're typically required to cause such a massive Ld debuff including via damage taken within 8 seconds that its almost impossible. Only monstrous cavalry like great stag knights, appropriately buffed have the charge damage and splash damage required to rout or outright shatter a basic infantry unit on the charge.
As units don't get any consideration to their weapon type in melee, for example, there is no phalanx in WH3, there is no scenario where the sheer density of weapons is repelling enemy models and preserving the wielder. When a unit is charging, it doesn't matter if it is a halberd unit, axeman, sword or spearman, who each would have completely different engagement openers, there is only impact and then an attack animation to provide any impetus to the charge. The arms race we see in these games comes from stat-stacking where you are constantly chasing units that have better armour, more hp and more MA. MD is an important stat too but I would argue having 200MA and killing the enemy in a few seconds is more valuable than having 200MD and taking 30 minutes to die in a protracted and very stagnant melee. If you don't chase these stat boosts then you need to have another strategy to reinforce it, such as crapstacking archers or some other gimmick unit that is either extremely easy to replace or has a nuanced ability that offsets their trailing effectiveness relative to the opponents continuous army composition improvements. Nasty skulkers are a good example of a crappy melee unit that can punch above its weight, they do a lot of AP damage and can remain hidden for a long time. They're also very small models so you can pack more attacks in over a given physical area.
I'm not really sure I would ever want to see CA do 20th century era game, not because I don't think they want to (and I am sure prototypes of the games were made many years ago to test viability) but rather because I doubt their competence at making a compelling game that doesn't degenerate in to tank spam. I don't think they can make the game people want and why would I? They can't make games that attract universal praise today, why would I expect them to do a great job in the future? I believe in judging a person by the merits of their actions and ever since Empire they have released more duds than successes. They have a filthy habit of dropping games early leaving them broken or to chase an expansion/DLC model that has also proven to generate animosity against them. I wish CA the best but I am not going to hold my breath lest I die while waiting.
Oh yes, I don't have any confidence in them making any good Total War game, whatever the setting is. My point is that it has nothing to do with the setting or the technical limitations; modern hardware is so, so much more powerful than the games we have and I just hate it when people on forums start making up 1000 different excuses for why "x" couldn't possibly work, rather than just focusing on the human explanation: the people behind the game either don't care or don't know how.
Perfectly explained
PREACH ON MY STRATEGY GAME LOVIN BROTHER 🙏
Tldr: even the WFB tabletop game had a lot of focus on morale and allowed you to chase units off the map or kill them entirely if you rolled good after breaking them.
To add to your argument against "meaningless morale is accurate in warhammer!" Point, morale is even heavily featured in the tabletop game as well. In warhammer fantasy battle every time you had a round of combat between units you would add up points based on certain factors to decide who "won" that round of combat. There's a myriad of modifiers to it, whether or not the unit's leader or banner bearer was still alive, whether or not you charged/got charged, who killed the most, who has more ranks of men, etc. Every time you lost, you would have to roll for whether or not your men would route. There was a leadership Stat that also had modifiers for things like being close to your leader or a terrifying unit/monster, if you routed you rolled to see how far and where you run, and the enemy could choose to pursue and roll their own distance. If they could remain in contact with the routing unit, or it routed off the game board, that was it. The whole thing is gone.
If I remember correctly, the tabletop also had chain routing, forcing units within a certain distance of a routing one to make a test. Routing units could also come back if they hadn't left the table and you rolled well
The absolute worst experience I have had with the health system was when my artillery had taken more than half the health of a Chosen unit, but it had lost zero entities when they hit my front line.
Nobody has any fun experiencing that.
That's brutal
One aspect you haven't really delved into is tabletop Warhammer. I say this because, despite the fact CA took inspiration from a tabletop game, they completely omitted following in its logical ruleset. Like, first of all, banners and officers were always a staple of Total War units before, and they play a significant rule in tabletop as well. In Total War Warhammer though? Totally neglected. Armour, damage, health, morale... Everything made so much more sense, there was a system around dealing with single entities, there were costs and tradeoffs and weaknesses etc., so for a Total War game, it is simply ridiculous that the tabletop game offers a better combat simulation. Basically Total War Warhammer is a slap in the face to everyone except the newcomers who just want a new shinier Warcraft game.
The more you look into it the worse it gets.
But yea I decided I'd rather go directly to the source material to shut this nonsense down.
"Arms Race" is a really fitting way to put it.
Great video as always mate
It's crazy how a lot of issues *could* be alleviated greatly if they just went and changed some numbers for morale for example. It's all in there and because of modding tools it's very easy to find these values. So for the devs to just neglect the potential of their game because they can't be bothered to edit some spreadsheets is quite disappointing to say the least.
@@zrize101 worse is when you have a bunch of mods like DEI that proudly *buff* unit morale because that was sorely needed
it's also worse in shogun 2 where for some reason modders seem to have a hard-on for making units impossible to rout.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 yes, indeed. I appreciate having the modability, but of course people will take it in drastically different ways to suit their subjective opinions. To my mind it’s the job of the devs to playtest and use very clear rules of logic when designing their game to fit its goal. With rome 1, medieval 2, shogun 2 I think they did a good job, where they kept things simple enough but effective. I have no desire to change the values with mods. But with everything after and including Rome 2, it’s just impossible for me to not constantly wonder why they chose the values they did. Everything has just become so random and arbitrary. So thoughtless. 3K is the peak of randomness, everything needs to have some stat effect, however unrelated or out of context it is. It’s also very apparent in the technology trees where before technologies had some ‘content’, it unlocked some ‘thing’, but now every technology is just a random arbitrary stat increase. We certainly talk a lot about battles, but the campaigns of Total War suffer equally as much from these design decisions.
Rome 2 still has the morale system, but because one of the big impactors on moral is losses taken, the hitpoints system prevents losses from being taken until very near the end of the fight, and then they just start dropping like flies, so most of them will die before the moral impact can kick in. Where with the statistical model of 1hp systems the losses taken will be more regular and build up a morale penalty over the course of the battle which is more severe for the losing side, allowing the other moral effects to stack better with it.
The "MUH FANTASY LLULU" is probably the biggest low IQ argument I've ever seen in a discussion, it just shows how they actually have no argument and are just stupidly apologising for something they like, but they won't agree that the thing they like has any flaws. Next time I write a ticket to CA about why I can't win a battle automatically by just deleting all my units, it's a fantasy setting after all. Why can't I just infinitely move on the campaign map? It's a fantasy setting after all. Why don't I win the campaign when I just ALT-F4 the game CA? It's a fantasy game!
If it's the case that fantasy just makes you not bound by the rules, then you can't argue against the points I've made, stupid as they are, because the whole argument is absolutely nonsensical and stupid.
I think the fans have a hard case of sunk-cost Fallacy.
I can name a couple of times where having a high amount of Morale in Shogun 2 saved me a few battles when I was still new and learning how to win against anything past the normal difficulty. Samurai Retainers especially gave me the ability to cause some last-ditch morale shocks that ended up in units mass routing. It was quite the spectacle for me back then.
But now? Enemy units come back all the fucking time. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. You could have reduced a unit of 200 men down to just 30 and they will still come back. The battle could practically be over, and yet they will still un-rout themselves and come back.
THIS!! The whole unit routes then rallies, only to rout then rally, etc etc, was jarring as hell when I first played totalwarhammer. The change very nearly killed the games for me. Took a long time to "get used to it" or more accurately I just learned to tolerate it. I still don't understand why they did this? Must have done it for a reason but I can't think of any possible benefits of the change....
Great stuff man, I agree that the HP system in the newer games ruined everything
When they introduced the current HP and armour system with Rome 2, it was really over... Having HP on a model base could make sense. If a model has more than 1 HP, like 3 HP, then there's essentially a system of wounds in the game. The model can either die outright or get wounded, which makes sense. But that idea falls completely short when the armour system is no longer based around a chance to block damage, instead it's a percentage reduction in damage... Oh and armour piercing damage just completely ignoring damage. It makes no sense, it's just taking away from the actual simulation aspect. What a shame CA.
I've been saying this for years now! I started total war with Shogun 2, and everything else has felt horrible! Except for the older ones, without the health system!
Doesn't the older ones just have a hidden hp system??
@@zrize101I always thought that's exactly what the older games had? Like most units had 1 hp, while a few special units like elephants had 3. Was I mistaken?
@@zachthompson9976 You're correct. Models always had 1 HP before, with some exceptions like bodyguards, elephants etc.
So what I meant with the 'current HP system' is every model not having 1 HP, but health "pools" of around 50 HP or more.
To add some of my own observations about Rome 2 to the discussion:
There is a distinct difference between playing Rome 2 on Legendary where units get a +7 morale bonus, with Latin/Hellenic armies, vs playing with the intended morale levels and using Barbarian factions. You can see in a lot of multiplayer battles at high level that barbarian units will flee between 75%-50% casualties, especially if the general has been killed, while Latin/Hellenic units don't have this issue. Why? Latin/Hellenic professional units like pikes, hoplites, Hastati, Legionaries, etc have a "disciplined" trait that significantly reduces the impact of morale shocks to the unit. This completely damages the gameplay and leads to the results you showed in the video.
So what's my point? Rome 2 was on the knife's edge of not being completely terrible and poor balancing with careless design invariably made it utter dogwater when it didn't have to be. I urge you to test the difference between the two army types and you'll likely notice how less-terrible battles are with mid tier barbarian swords compared to Roman units that always fight to the death essentially.
Legionaries weren't superhuman though so the whole thing reeks of historical fanboyism anyway
I actually did both tests on legendary and normal, both in rome 2 and the warhammer titles, and was surprised to see how little the difference mattered in practice.
+7 morale isnt much when a unit has 40 or 50 base already.
Though I should have added a note on that.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 right, I think my point is how careless it was to both stack a flat bonus to morale while also adding a trait that made that morale impossible to reduce by any reasonable amount
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 And then of course we now have units that are "Unbrakeable" and at least in case of troy also "unflankable" (whatever that does.)
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Maybe try the multiplayer. In my Rome vs Parthia matches once the Roman general is dead, a rare charge from a cataphract is enough usually to route your average legionary, while the late to mid tier units require a cycle charge to kill. They are harder to route than in Shogun 2 but the battles are a lot more slow paced in general in Rome 2. Note at Cannae it took hours of repeated charges by the Carthaginian cavalry to break the Roman blob of infantry.
@@dabo5078Battle of Cannae lasted for the entire day anyway. In games we have battles lasting 20 minutes max. Your argument has no sense.
16:59 The ones used by Guards and Foreign Marines are actually breech Loaders, not bolt action despite there's some Retainer weapon such as Needle Rifle Retainer which is a German Bolt Action Rifle made in 1824.
While the main problem of implementing the 5 Round Clips(not magazines) is the absurd fire rate a WW1 Total war would have, in WW1 it's quite rare for a Soldier to get shot by another Soldier despite how accurate the Bolt Action weapon is, while there are speculation as Soldiers doesn't shoot to kill or both sides pretending to shoot eachother while missing on purpose, a WW1 Total War would probably be Fall of the Samurai without the Samurai
19:00 iirc there's a small Penalty for Melee Attack and Defense when Soldiers are too bunched up in Rome 2, but it's mostly negligible as the only way to stop them is either a Heavy Shock Cav cycle charges(if the blobs are Medium Weight) or Rear Missile Attacks followed by a Cavalry Charge as Morale Calculation in Rome 2 tends to view Morale as a second health bar rather than a pillar you need to break for the unit to rout.
This is also prevalent in Warhammer viewing Morale/Leadership as a Second Health bar which isn't really that easy to drain unless the unit is filled with unicorn magic, lost 80% of the Men, or just puke at the sight of 19 Cow Man with specific traits that reduced Morale.
Great video, agree with most points. Only thing I want to add is that there has been one notable counter example of proper use of defeat in details and the importance of flanking/surrounding enemies in 'Attila: total war', particularly in the video 'how to alans' by Yrrdian where he uses low tier melee cav to pull apart enemy formation and kill the most threatening units one at a time.
It still runs into the problem of absurd number of casualties (particularly since he is using a fully light cavalry army), and doesn't have the fight to the death mechanic, but it's probably the closest thing I've seen in modern total war games where clever tactics are used to defeat stronger enemies.
It's rather telling that this is pretty much the only example I can think of where it feels like the player is outsmarting their foe rather than out statting them or cheesing them. And even then, it's in one of the less popular/forgotten games and requires an extremely unbalanced (as in 0 infantry, archers) composition to work.
28:12 same with Spear Milita, Urban Spear Milita, etc in med 2. I been learning to respect Shogun 2 more, already liked it but its getting close to the same level as med2 for me.
I so wish med 2 played mechanicly like shogun, i can only go as far back as empire. Maybe there is a mod that improves the controls?
Yes, but even then they are useful for some. I beat the game on the hardest difficulty as the romans and most of my armies were spear militia and militia or trebizond archers.
Rome 1 also had several levels of legionaries.
One of my favorite aspects of Shogun 2 is the rewarding feeling of seizing a hill or cleverly defeating a superior army in detail- being able to quickly put a small force to rout being the crux of the victory, and the witty tactics being the only way to win against a better equipped and numerically superior foe.
It’s such a simple sentiment, and yet it’s the difference between the games that we love (Shogun 2) and the games that we don’t (Three Kingdoms)
Tbh, at least in rome1, the fighting to the death state heavily debuffed the unit. They usually get massacred quick without dealing too much damage in that state, it was often worth to just grind em down instead of letting em run and risk their escape
What we want: Actual combat, Tactics matter, blob punishing, Single entities either have important roles to the massive armies and battles or outright remove, a functional moral system, Good AI that knows how to protect, flank and charge, Guns function as guns, and developers taking more time to fix up every major and minor details and functions. The fantasy setting is alright but keep the fundamental gameplay intact. We are ok if CA want to try new things, as well as QoLs.
What shills and CA heard: Not Shogun 2, bad! Not Historical, bad.
Great video, you captured some good points.
I would argue in favor of HP that it's a good way to handle the effects of magic, without making it too weak/broken. Also HP are individual: every man has their HP bar, which are summed up to the unit's one. I also partially disagree on your arguments about morale and single entity units. TW Warhammer could improve in many ways, but at its core it has great mechanics.
And I don't speak from my own experience only: you speak about experiments, there's plenty of other channels doing them, and they all put emphasis on the importance of morale.
That being said, I still think you have valuable points. Older Total War were broken for other reasons (mainly pathfinding and AI - often problematic to this day), but battles were more realistic. And it's not a matter of being historical vs fantasy: Rome 2, Britannia, Three Kingdoms (which is amazing, but definitely not for the battles) are essentially historical titles, but the battles suck, a lot, precisely for the reasons you explained.
I would finally also add another thing to the argument: artillery. Artillery fucking ruins a Total War game. Rome, Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 artillery is amazing, because it's inaccurate and because it doesn't deal more than its value in damage (often even less). Of course, if you support it correctly, it can be even more effective, but that goes for every unit, and it's essential for sieges anyways, so you have to bring it. Artillery is an asset because it forces an enemy to chose between taking casualties but keep their position and moving somewhere else / attack themselves.
New Total War artillery has pin-point accuracy, it can unleash devastating napalm attacks and it's easily the main source of damage of an army. Such a powerful weapon is boring, because it destroys tactics and it just encourages corner camping (and it also makes me mad, as an history enthusiast, but that's on me). Even FotS artillery is a bit on the broken side, but I can accept it. They usually kill up to 300 people, but it's just two units in the end of the day, and they themselves cost probably more than that. Definitely a great asset worth having, but not necessarily wrong.
A trebuchet in Three Kingdoms can annihilate between 500 and 1200 people per battle, in a game with less men on the ground, set in a era of melee combat. Outrageous.
Thanks for reading my essay lmao
"TW Warhammer could improve in many ways, but at its core it has great mechanics."
Mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, I have a one hour video where I go over how bad the games have gotten on the campaign layer: th-cam.com/video/rW7PFNqGuog/w-d-xo.html
Magic and other timed abilities have been implemented poorly, HP is a bandage solution that doesn't actually solve the issue and creates its own problems as shown in the video. If you watch any footage of anyone decent at the WH games, you will find range and single-entity spam front and center; this is not a point up for debate, that's literally the game as it is.
Artillery in Fall of the Samurai has limited ammo and it frequently runs out of it, especially in multiplayer battles. Useful, not overpowered. Trees, hills, and structures can be used to obstruct it.
HP bars making sense "because magic" is a horrible argument. Total War Warhammer is derived from a tabletop game where models have 1 "Wound" or 1 "HP", and guess what, healing magic still worked. Healing magic in the tabletop game is essentially about "invigourating" units with strength and endurance. Healing isn't only about HP numbers.
@@zrize101 also the whole magic argument often acts like artillery and naval bombardments weren't already a thing in past games and they worked fine under the hitpoint system.
It also fails to acknowledge that the new system was brought in with Rome 2, a game that very much does not have the spells featured in the WH titles. The chronology itself discredits the idea that healthbars were implemented for the sake of balancing magic.
disagreed on the magic: most magic can work fine on a 1hp unit basis: all you need to do is replace dmg with kill chance (pre-rome 2 already used this diceroll system to determine if an attack kills or not, and armor/shield/melee saves are still calculated with a diceroll to this day)
So imagine if instead of Burning Head dealing 40-60%dmg to all 100 models, it'd just kill ~50% of models it hits following the dmg diceroll. You'd have to tone down the dmg potential of a lot of spells to compensate for the increased kill rates but you absolutely could make a magic system like that work with very similar results to what we have in WH2.
the HP bar's problem in general is that it removes the correlation between combat effectiveness and a unit's total HP left; a unit of halberds or (especially) archers at 20%hp left is in many ways just as effective as it was with 80% hp left if they happen to have the same amount of models left, this seems like it's no big deal but it can lead to situations where you charge your heavy cavalry into the enemy's rear-line, but instead of getting a bunch of kills you just deplete the HP bar a bit and knock some guys around; with the attacked unit now being able to turn around and kill your cavalry with the same amount of spears they had before your charge; it also means that where archers used to lose damage output proportionally to damage taken, they now have a "buffer area" where they can take damage from enemy ranged fire and still maintain (most of) their full firepower.
As for morale, it does matter in WH2; nowhere nearly as much as in earlier titles but it does still make a difference if you are used to the system in Troy and WH2 (not sure about Rome 2). problem is that morale values are just too high across the board and so as soon as you get past the low tier units the value of morale drops off extemely quickly and significnt morale shock can only be really achieved by combining the various debuffs with a hefty morale shock from burst dmg. (or units with the "causes terror" attribute) In PvP morale matters a bit more in general because you need to pick between quality and quantity, but in campaign it just makes the late-game a slog.
Definitely agree with you on the Artillery thing; (though it isn't really limited to artilery, all ranged units suffer this to a degree) it is incredibly easy to get all your damage out of just planting artillery or archers on the map and killing any unit who walks into their cof before they can even make it to the battle line; FotS artillery was already becoming too much but in WH2 it's not limited to artillery at all; basically every ranged unit can quickly and easily rack up incredible dmg numbers (relative to their cost) due to their high accuracy (and no more dicerolls for dmg like in Shogun 2).
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498the single entity and ranged spam is really judt because of the god awful A.I. though, any domination multiplayer battle even inlcuding the very best players makes use of nearly ever unit in a factions roster. Land battles are a different story, but i think the way the game is setup right now can definitely work to make interesting and fun battles. If the A.I. wouldnt be as stupid as it is.
The only solid blueprint that would a make a Total War WW1 or 2 game possible, is a small game called Graviteam Tactics, the game simulates WW2 combat on the battalion-level and it looks amazing, i myself have a couple hours on the game and whilst navigating it should be difficult (Slavic indie devs) its something you should definitely check out.
What about The Great War - Western Front?
@@SpeartonMan Combine The Great War -Western front with how artillery and combat works in say Shogun 2 Total war and it would be amazing.
I started with Napoleon,then discovered Empire from a friend and saldy using forts isnt as fun as it should be while artillery is okayish to use.
Then *BOOM* comes in shogun 2 total war, The Fall of the Samurai with its gunpowdered units and artillery pieces and its SUCH a MUCH better game!
If you would give the Infantery units the same "moral,manpower and fighting style" as shogun 2 and it would be amazing. You would see how your line that charges lose moral and falter while some would still get into meele range while you reserve line would get pounded by artillery pieces to pin you down.
Steel Division 2 would be a good starting point.
On the Topic of "Guns, guns, guns, who took my guns?", such Cheap anti Elite counter does exist in both Shogun 2 and Rome 2, where in Shogun 2 it's the Matchlock Ashigaru while in Rome 2 it's the Javelin Skirmishers units, while the Javelins in Rome 2 doesn't really have a fast projectile speed nor instant kill units like the Shogun 2 Matchlocks, the Javelins no matter the cheap Javelinmen or the Picked Peltast would deal good damage to any unit especially on the rear or right flank(weapon hand), although unlike Shogun 2 Matchlock who needs good terrain and timing to effectively counter the Elite Armored Units, Rome 2 needs timing and placements while you can loose a hail of javelins at a Praetorian Guards, most of those Javelins would be blocked by their Shields and finding the perfect terrain to fire at a flank in a middle of a battle would be harder making the only way for a Javelin Skirmishers to deal with Elite Armored units is for them to literally assume the role of Cavalry and maybe Light Melee units being placed in the Flank of the army and having to work with the Cavalry who chases down the opposing Skirmishers allowing the Javelin Skirmishers to take a clear shot at the Elite Armored unit's rear.
In Warhammer every Ranged units with 140+ Range are all stop gap for any unit as a single volley of arrows by 8 High Elves Archers would deal more damage without any loss to fighting power due to literally fighting at range, or how Crossbows and Bows are basically the same weapon as Empire Crossbows and Huntsman bows have the same projectile speed and can lob their shots.
The thing about the total wars after Shogun 2 is the units being fixed to generals and each province having a town/city and nothing else.
Battles in old total war games: we must expertly position ourselves to outmaneuver the enemy
Battles in Total War: Warhammer: SEND IN THE MUTANT RAT OGRE BLOB
you did not have to expertly position yourself to outmaneouver a mentaly challenged opponent like the total war ai , this is such a weak ˝argument˝ that i cant even laugh anymore , you could just line up your units in a great line and then let the rng run the show or whichever unit had the better stat (stats always mattered but were less obvious) and still win , using hammer and anvil or planting yourself on top of a hill doesnt exactly require intense brain power to achieve either everything else is just roleplay , and on the topic of the rat blob i just dont care , i never wanted and never will use doomstacks , basicaly its a non issue so i wont comment further
I feel like expanding on WWI Total War as a tangent and putting my two cents into the idea.
Tanks would actually make an interesting unit type for Total War, a kind of inverse to the matchlocks in Shogun 2 if you will. In fact, you can think of them almost akin to a Testudo formation applied to artillery. with strong armor against bullets to the front, but weaker armor to the sides and rear. Unsupported, they are actually vulnerable to infantry attacks as their motors can't outrun running infantry, and neither can their guns cover enough area to handle being torn apart by infantry. Even without flanking, enough firepower may be enough to cripple the crew or the tank itself, as while armor is thick, there is still the chance to get a lucky shot through a vision port, to break through armor, or cause spalling. I suppose they can borrow from ships even as ships have crew and guns on them, as well as "hull health", or effectively "land ships"
Artillery can be a unique "land-based" bombardment unit, which are slow to move on the campaign map, but doesn't require the sea to do its bombardments. It can also be selected individually while in an army in order to do its bombardments. and when partaking in a pitched battle, it has a long range but is very slow to move, It can also be balanced by giving it low ammo.
Fortifications, such as Trenches, Bunkers, or so on. can be constructed by armies in friendly territory similar to forts in Empire and can be occupied by armies, Trenches provide similar bonuses to earthworks from Empire, while bunkers perhaps provide additional firepower akin to say Gatling towers in FOTS.
Units themselves would be changed in just a few unique ways from typical total war games. Perhaps a funny inverse would be that early-game units have tighter formations and later units have looser formations, compared to normal total war where weaker units usually have loose formations. Regardless, the default would be looser formations when not entrenched since cavalry is basically obsolete, and melee isn't as big of a threat. I would also say that while a unit is in the open and not moving, their units will naturally go prone while they wait for orders, and leave prone once given orders to move. Units may also use trees, buildings, fences, and so forth for cover.
Snipers are a bit confusing but my best idea is to make them agents akin to foreign veterans from FOTS and ninjas from Shogun 2 with the "harass" action, which will cause a loss of men and lower morale, they can also be used to kill other snipers in a "sniper duel", While in an army they will act like ninjas who allow the army to move further and provide more vision, They can also be used to scout ahead, but, I would think they have a much larger chance of critical failure while in enemy territory, as they are just a man (or squad) with a scoped gun, and unlike ninjas, aren't masters of disguise.
Grenades have already been implemented in Empire Total War under Grenadiers, so honestly, this point is already covered.
Aircraft unfortunately I think is way out of bounds for Total War to implement, at least not without some kind of overhaul, so I don't have much to say in this regard.
Generals no longer lead armies from the front I'd imagine, instead, I would say something akin to you having a "Faction Leader" who is not visible on the map, and instead just confers bonuses on armies globally. maybe there could be something akin to a Captain/Major? but in general, I would see them less as a combat unit and more so an agent on the field that provides bonuses to armies in a radius.
Units classes could be considered something like this
Rifles (Bolt Action, Long Range, Poor Close Range Performance
Assault (Submachine Guns, Grenades, Good Close Range Performance)
Team Weapons(MGs/Mortars/Anti-Tank, Slow and requires set up, but deadly performance while set up)
Motors(Armored Cars/Tanks, Varying Speed, but generally more resistant to bullets, Small Unit Size, Poor Performance in Melee)
But yeah, apart from Generals and Aircraft. Bam. You basically got WWI combat
One way you could implement aircraft, as a start, is to have them act autonomously; you can give them a general order to scout, strafe, bomb, which if left to its own devices, it will do its job but inefficiently. The player at any point can interfere in its movement, change target, etc. Basically, a more developed version of skirmish mode.
Also I think this would be a prime time to finally expand on mixed arm units, rather than the homogenous regiments that has been a standard in Total War; I say expand because that was already featured in a few select units in 3K. By the end of the First World War, combat had evolved from human wave attacks to "stormtrooper" teams, basically specialized teams made up of assault soldiers with a few machine guns, who would concentrate their efforts on a specific point in the enemy defenses to establish a foothold for the rest of the infantry to advance.
Finally, cavalry: while they were mostly used for reconnaissance and transport on the western front, they were featured pretty prominently on the eastern front given the relative lack of natural barriers. They could still definitely play a role in disrupting infantry formations in such a game.
AFAIK The Great War mod implements airplanes as agents and I honestly find that idea really good.
On the jets and planes point. It would be trivial to implement off map assets like this attached to an army. We already have general abilities and spells and spawning units. Hypothetical units like officers, general or forward observers could call in assets like biplanes or jets and could strafe areas like wind spells work in Warhammer except they are strafing enemies with bullets and bombs/missiles.
The plane can simply fly off map and despawn with a timer cool down. They could even have animations for crashing and being destroyed. Outside the map assets with animations already exist, see green skin wyverns flying around on badlands maps. Don't see why this couldn't be done with jets in a holding pattern waiting to be called in.
The main difficulty with a ww1 total war would be changing the campaign map/mechanics to implement trench front lines but that could be done even if that meant changing how armies move and how settlements work. If the battles were good enough players would be enjoy the game.
27:24 This almost feels like most of the Cheap unit that will punch above their weight if used well, from the Rome 1 Greek Militia Hoplites being able to be used for the majority of the campaign if you can use Phalanx having the weakness of needing to keep their formation as they have low morale, Medieval 2 European Spear Militia where they can take charges and Missile fire due to the combination of having good shields and upgradable armor with their only weakness being overpowered by a super rare Sword Infantry units or being flanked.
even Rome 2 have such units from the Roman Rorarii being able to form Square formation which could delay or tire Low to Mid Tier units, Celtic Levy Freemen being a Speedy Light Spear unit who have Precursor Javelins and high anti Cavalry, making them somewhat of a damage dealer, Greek Militia Hoplites that have high armor due to their Shields and being quite effective against other Infantry when in Hoplite Wall but is extremely vulnerable to flank and rear attacks as they actually have low armor, to even the Eastern Spearmen who are better used as meatshields against both Melee and Ranged attacks due to having cheap cost and shields specialized in blocking missiles.
And then there's Warhammer where Empire Spearmen are best used for...huh...a road block until you get Spearmen(Shields) or Halberdiers as by the time those 2 units are available Spearmen are completely obsolete even against Factions who doesn't bring Missiles, which in many cases Halberdiers are just better.
32:31 I think this is a very true argument as well- in FOTS, for example, you can field an army of traditional units, or of modern units, or of a combined arms type- I’ve fielded all three against traditional and modern armies. They change the way you play but I don’t think that one is necessarily superior to the other.
Morale has definitely taken a backseat in terms of importance that much is true (you can even see when the CHARGE of a cav charge ends by how the morale bar fills back up). However, one stat the really isn't talked about in Warhammer, SPEED. Sounds simple i know but, If your unit can't be caught (or hit) then they can't be killed. While the speed may not be drastically different, if you can out run and "skirmish" with the enemy They will get tired as well as start dying before your troops do. Free Company Milita, Dark Elf Shades, and Wood elf archers are good examples of this.
Their is also Unit Mass/Unit Weight and Unit Stamina to consider as well. In Rome 2 units where classified by Type and Weight, the Heavier the unit the faster they got tired. Skirmishers where also inherently faster then infantry so you needed your own Skirmishers or Cavalry to catch them. As we all know, the more tired a unit is the worse it preforms (this effects among other things, Moral, Melee attack and defense, and how fast they move).
Then their is the whole WEAPON DAMAGE and ARMOR thing. In Rome 2 and Attila Armor flat out blocked damage, which is why Heavy infantry fights drag on so long, and why Flanking with Javelins (which have High AP damage) is so effective. In Warhammer armor only blocks a Percentage of damage taken (down to a minimum of 1 damage, or so iv been told) which is why Ranged unit spam is stupidly effective. AP damage is obviously more effective vs Heavy Armored units while Normal damage better vs lighter armored troops. (or at least its supposed to be. Feels like the more AP damage the better since it CAN NOT BE BLOCKED)
Then in Warhammers case you have all the Buff Spells and Healing spells and shit just gets awkword and complicated. Hell everyone Recommends the LORE OF FIRE because it specifically DOES moral damage (the Burned state effect gives minus 8 moral while active). Meanwhile you all these buff spells that NO ONE ever recommends, although some do when you read into what they do.
These are good points. Beside the fact that some tuning might be required, mechanics are strong.
I would say that fatigue also has a bit fall down in relevance, since running doesn't tire units anymore. This influences tactics too: when slow marching, you can make mistakes and get your units risking being clumped together in bad positions by a well times attack from the enemy; so you either start running to prevent it from happening, or you may even get stuck.
Of course that also requires units not being able to compenetrate eachother.
I think health bars were introduced for consistency. Having 100hp means you can always take 100 damage, but having 1HP and 90% chance for enemy to miss can still one shot the unit. But in the grand picture it was statistically consistent because there were hundreds units on the battlefield, so maybe I am wrong. Introducing HP system make sence for warhammer and single entities and elite troops.
Yes, hitpoints worked fine because the larger size if units invoked the law of large numbers; the more times you roll two dice, the closer the real frequency of a number gets to its expected frequency. It's easy to roll a 3 two times in a row; much harder to do that when you expand the set to 200 or 300.
On the ww1 thing? I've wanted to make a modern warfare mod for TW myself if I could code. Planes helicopters strategic bombing, tanks armored vehicles etc etc can be managed in game just like how we do it irl, you build an air base, it has a dedicated range or engagement and you can slot the amount of armaments you plan to use for certain engagements etc.
It wouldn't even be that hard to integrate exploitable supply lines, road conditions etc as the components for such already exist in TWWH abd the China one that no one played after the checks stopped coming
After being severely disappointed by Rome 2 (disastrous launch + the changes to the campaign map ruined it for me) I tried TWWH many years later and noticed every battle just devolved into chaotic blobs, despite my attempts to use the tactics I was familiar with in RTW and MTW. It makes sense that this is a consequence of the changes to the morale system, the HP system and how armor etc now work. Very unfortunate that we will probably never see this series return to it's former glory.
If someone interested with the concept of ww2 total war, then i suggest trying order of war, a game made by collaboration wargaming and square enix (i think). its not 100% realistic (there are other like graviteam tactics) but its close enough as a concept. I think if they ever wanted to include plane in a total war game than make it a callable support like how naval support work in fots. Btw love your videos keep up the awesome work❤
Edit:Recently rewatched some gameplay for order of war, realizing how close it was to company of heroes, Which is a bad sign for people expecting a good combat.
Napoleon total war has a Ww1 mod you can get from the Web for free
I really like this video, but it feels like idea vomit. Your ideas are valid but presented in a disjointed way. I think there are too many chapters and cutaways to you playing other games. Having chapters and cutaways are cool but there are so many that it cuts the flow off and lessens the overall impact of your message. I agree with you 100% though, I never realized this until playing shogun 2 after exclusivity playing Warhammer 2. I could tell immediately it was way better, you can always tell when the developers put love into a game.
another effect of having the 1-2 hitpoint system in the older games was that it really broke elite infantry into different roles. In Rome 1, the arcani were elite infantry with 2 hitpoints, the ability to hide, and great stamina. They were also much less numerous per unit than something like an urban cohort. So they would be able to engage in quick, aggressive action subsequently run away before the rest of the army could envelop them. But if they pushed things too far, they'd start snowballing casualties.
In medieval 2, the hungarian assassins and the muslim Hashashiin also were 2-hitpoint-units with the ability to hide. Because they had less manpower, they didnt have the offensive capability as comparable elite infantry. But medieval 2 was structured heavily around sieges, sometimes against castles with multiple lines of walls. And on walls, when you only have a certain amount of space to cram defenders on or are limited in how quickly your attackers are able to scale the ladders, having men with twice the survivability was such a force multiplier
Total Wars terrain has just become too elementary, rarely if ever do i find myself actually considering the implications of a say, small forested hill in the center of the map, maybe a large forest to my Southern flank. The A.I proves itself too dumb to ever actually use positions like those. However in a game like Graviteam Tactics, local terrain proves itself the most important factor in all engagements, any even minor hill can prove itself a valuable position for some mortars and HMG's, or maybe you can place an artillery spotter, a large forest can be used to covertly and securely move large formations of men in and around the battle area to get a better position on the overall objective, Scouting units can be told to go on covert missions on the extreme flanks of the players line in order to set up new firing positions and perform recon. This is all from a game made by a couple of guys in Ukraine, really recommend you check out this game.
I have plenty of FotS clips and streams where I can defeat a much larger force of rifles by just using even the most minor of depressions in the terrain; force the enemy to close in as close as possible then order the charge just as they're about to enter the ditch. Even better if you can get their units to all concentrate so they end up blocking one another.
28:45 saying what aboutism is just a defense of hypocrisy
Idk why im thinking of this now after years playing the series, since medieval 1. But what if when you lose a battle your units scattered around the campaign map, so you had to take some time to regroup your arny? 🤔 Every unit scattering would probably get tedious, so what if they only scattered if they routed off the battlefield before your general did? Or maybe only if they routed a decent amount of time before the rest of the army? Idk, could be cool to see! It would fit so well, desertion has forever been an issue for armies. What do you think??
While I disagree with parts of your video, the point you have about games being BETTER than their predecessors strikes home. It is entirely messed up that even if we disagree on what we think are some of the fundemental designs of total war, and what we can expect from it - CA has still somehow managed to disappoint both of us with mediocre titles that barely hold a candle to the earlier games.
Goes to show that they have a focus on it being pretty, and having lots of buttons to press with flashy animations, over being truly "deep" and engaging in a way that holds you captive from start to finish.
To be fair to Total War, I haven't had that love for the franchise since Medieval 2 ( and even that wore out quickly enough once I learned how to blitz the game ) but it is extremely disappointing that no game in the series has, for a decade and a half straight, failed to capture me the same way again. I might like some of them - but I don't think I've ever loved any of them quite as much, or will ever again if this design keeps up.
Yea I have to put that part into every critique video I make, because I need to pre-empt the "lol boomer" comments from people who get angry at the title.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Understandable. Some Total War fans are just "Wow you're just biased you don't get it."
Even if that's the case, it still doesn't stop the video from being a well intentioned critique piece with solid ( and fair ) arguments beyond just "New bad, old good."
Shame most people won't see it that way.
My favorite doctrine in Total war was massive infantery fire with artillery support.
I just LOVE my battle line in Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai consisting of elite troops of the highest level,with all the accuracy buffs you can get from buildings, generals and advisors, US marines and Kneeling Fire just to keep the guns going.
Supported by 5 Armstrong cannon groups to POUND the enemy forces into OBLIVION as soon as they group up, to crush cavalery before they can flank me with my 5 Yari Infantery from the VERY BEGINNING of the game right behind the cannons ready to charge forward to drive back meele attacks,to swing around to cover flanks against infantery.
I just love how much "Shock and Awe" could be done to absolutly crush the enemys.
Sad that Napoleon had a lacking artillery and fort mechanic while empire,even older as napoleon, felt even worse then using artillery or forts.
Oh yes. And the defensive war in Fall of the Samurai is peak fighting. You old the outer egdges and fire,retreat inwards while the 2nd line fires on the ariving soldiers who have to regroup under fire before going for the next wall with more soldiers.
Edit: You mentioned the powercreep in Fall of the Samurai as a starting point, but you can even go back to napoleon where a french militia unit would have the same moral as a austrian or prussian infantery of the line with just worse accuracy and reload, while the french infantery of the line was as good as its counterpart with 2-4 moral more, almost double of what another nation would field on the base level!
To be fair, it's kinda hard to make units with firearms different other than adjusting morale, accuracy and reload.
Interesting thing about firearms really, they made everyone equal in combat in a way
@@WormsMaster100 I mean that what made war so much...easier to wage. arm people with a firearm, train them for some weeks and you have a soldier as capable in dealing damage to your enemy as a trained soldier.
Meanwhile other wappons need far more time to be properly used.
Ill never forget the disappointment i felt when i executed my first hammer and anvil maneuver in rome 2. Hype and excitement at the carnage i was about to inflict immediately turned to confused, underwhelmed, disappointment 😔
the fun of the older games was that even though you might have smaller forces or weaker units, than the enemy, you could win by using smarter tactics, taking advantage of terrian, flanking, formations, etc.
gameplay changed from using to superior tactics to getting armies with superior stats
some say this is because the battle AI was, and still is, incredibly stupid, so rather making the AI better, they just changes the nature of the game to make it easier for the AI (amassing high stat units) and more challenging for the player, which, as you say, is pretty much what AOE is
Graviteam Tactics and Wargame both are examples of WW2 and Modern games with TW esque mechanics, a turn based strategy map leading to realtime tactical battles. You would have to change some things but the concept absolutely can work.
I think the biggest problem with implementing World War 1 in Total War is the hindsight problem. Everyone nowadays know that trench warfare is not benefiting the attacker. So with that in mind no one would attack a good dug out trench if it does not give an attack bonus or economy boost. So the game mechanics have to reward you for wasting manpower and material to gain a few meters of useless territory. While also punishing you for wasting these resources to make it somehow realistic. I think this is the reason there are not so many good WW1 games that try to be somewhat realistic and it is especially not working for Total War.
''Shogun 2 is only Ashigaru spam''
Yeah cause when the AI has 20 stack of Ashigaru Spearmen, i cry and shit myself cause my veteran Katana Samurai, are now useless. God forbid you flank them or something. What next?
''Fall of the Samurai is just Line Infantry spam''
4:10 for real the numbers always amazed me how armies so big lost not even half their men but it already led to a decisive outcome and you really think how morale actually even played out and when you play these “historical games” where morale has been made an absolute joke and it does not even depend on shocks like a cavalry meant to quickly deliver a finishing blow on rear or flank to rout the entire battle line but you have to wait for your infantry first to drop some significant hit points on enemy units just so that your cavalry charge could be barely effective is downright stupid.
Great bideo as always
So CA struck gold when they developed morale, which combined with advancements in computing power allowed them to model historical battles in a more historically accurate way. More soldiers in battle lines who fought until they lost the will to fight, and not just 5 guys fighting until their HP dropped to 0.
The problem is they didn't continue pushing the boundaries of accurate military history, only their graphics. This left their gameplay to stagnate and ultimately influenced by the community it drew from: RTS players.
Instead of, say, exploring the idea of friction where your troops visibly lose cohesion as the battle drags on. Instead of exploring logistics where scouting and raiding and foraging are just as important as the set piece battles. Instead of expanding the experience system with unit officer growth, training drills, or discipline and reaction speed to practiced vs unpracticed maneuvers.
CA couldn't afford to upset this audience, and so did nothing but appeal to them with QoL and a variety of popular settings and units. A small group of these players found something to like in how the unique parts of TW combat mechanics allowed for slightly different RTS experiences, but the majority were here for the same reasons they came for Age of Empires.
One of my favorite total war games to play to this day is the OG medieval, it improved on Shogun 1's controls and took what it did well and made it bigger(yes irrelevant but fun when done well) and more importantly better.
My favorite Tactic is Shogun II was creating a intentional gap in my frontline, the enemy would try to use that gap to attack my archers, where incidentally was where my vicious katana samurai were hidden. Horses on the wings tucked into a forest, and you get some pretty realistic depiction of warfare tactics.
I love your takes on Total War, by far one of the greatest franchises imo. We all loved playing with the green little army men as kids, and the ability to do so in a fleshed out game is a dream come true in a sense, even if we have to play the ancient Total Wars, im still happy CA at least made our childhood dreams come true.
these random battlefield clips are so distracting
Relating the point made in 19:05 - as a matter it's not that cavalry rear charges are effective because of "charge bonus" or even having the unit surrounded per se (greater surface area and all that). Infantry beats cavalry, or more like makes charging in a suicide pact for the cavalrymen... if they hold. It's that facing great beasts with pounding hooves is inherently terrifying, and even if the infantry formation would beat the cavalry, the first rank involved in the suicide pact might have different ideas: perhaps it's better to run away and maybe survive, than die for sure. That is to say, the impact is almost completely psychological, and even the earlier Total War games were unthematic for less cohesive infantry forces standing long enough to receive a charge in the first place (most of the time), which makes unbreakable units in neo-TW simply appalling.
Its funny cos tabletop warhammer did the same mistake.
Leadership was a gamecore mechanic and you can wipe out the entire squad by breaking their morale. U can kill only 5 model of 20 and break they morale.
And then gw bring up so many artefacts, units, special rules and auras with no fear bullshit, that u cant even scare some petty villager with your dead dragon cos he has no fear rule sharing by some lord nearby.
Fearless is one of the most common keyword in warhammer.
Sorry for my english
For convenience sake I'll split each comment for each chapter as to not make it into a solid wall of text.
Ch1:
Oh god the foreshadowing on units still fighting the same with 1 health as they do with full health (except with wounded trait which just decreases stats for a single entity unit)
Ch2:
It was mostly the AI that was made with the inspiration of The Art of War, how the AI would react if it outnumbers 10:1, 5:1, 2:1, etc., the book's influence is far gone ever since the tile based movement system introduced in Rome 1 that no longer allows the player to strategize nearly as much or get punished for overextending as counter attacks are very rare by the AI
3:50 - Shogun/Medieval had army destruction from just cutting off the retreat path of an army which resulted in entire armies either getting executed or ransomed off, kinda impossible with the tile based movement now.
4:15 - Would've been very different if irl battles had TW style chasing where one light cav can one shot entire armies or set off charges that send men flying, without anyone stabbing nor shooting back.
4:40 - That aspect of letting units rout has been sadly toned down, no longer generals get coward/captured traits that decrease the effectiveness of the army, Attila sort of tried with the integrity system but one click of a button (decimate) fixes that with no real downside as autoreplenishment is fairly generous.
6:35 - But the goal instead is to just stackwipe armies by destroying most units so they don't randomly replenish out of nowhere and be a nuisance later on, sadly another part of TW that isn't really dynamic, it's just individual army strength, no manpower or other armies being affected by the destruction. War weariness was a pretty neat concept but I'd rather just see it in EU4 than TW.
8:55 - Could've pointed out the lack of experience and how those units can break almost instantly even from just fighting uphill
10:00 - Rears and flanks exposed is a pretty accurate view of how units are engineered, there can be a thousand units attacking the rear of a unit and the second it's not touched in the side it won't get the side morale damage penalty, which is kinda why these penalties have seen the most adjustment in any TW game
10:30 - Cannot wait for Ceasar to be like yeeaa see those Gauls? Hit them in the rear for -30 morale damage but don't hit them in the sides, that doesn't deal morale damage. Capisce?
Ch3:
Could be an interesting commentary on how the TW games are just player centric, there's no abstraction of the units relaying orders it's just the player.
There's also an issue of the battles just boiling down to fatigue/ammo/army strength. Would also add how it's possible to abuse gaps in the formation that are caused by uneven inf lines, oblique order sadly doesn't quite work in TW though.
14:35 - Oh my another gamey aspect where the units would die much faster from pulling out, very abusable in games like Rome 2/Attila
Ch4:
www.rockpapershotgun.com/talking-about-total-war-with-mike-simpson
"Okay, well, the way we look at it is that there is a long list of things we can do with Total War, and I should think that almost anything you've ever thought of is on that list. We argue constantly about the things on that list, and the order in which we're going to do them. The order changes all the time. The 20th century is on the list, but of course it's not exactly the easiest transition from the kinds of battles that Empire was all about, which was all about formal armies and men moving around in units. The 20th century is much more fragmented, much larger battlefields, and there's just more to deal with: aircraft, and so on. It's certainly something we want and intend to tackle one day, but it wasn't the thing we most wanted to do after Empire. What we really wanted to do was go back and redo Shogun."
If the executive producer tells it can be done then idk try telling that to the fans who have no clue what can be done, kinda tired of things becoming a set formula out of context.
Ch5:
Thorax swordsmen are very heavy infantry who are really sturdy units, it also has pretty good morale that matches legionaries.
Could've made it so the battle difficulty is on normal so the morale modifiers are shown, stuff like attacked in the rear appears a lot which is -30 but it's just not enough to do much.
Not sure what to think about that section like the bunching up is how units held together because of flanks secured and friendlies nearby/general nearby, though I would be a big fan of it if it was possible to use lesser units to break elite ones which sadly started to get phased out in favour of casualties sustained and army losses taking the top of morale damage penalty modifiers that are meaningful.
Morale still is decisive but instead of starting chainrouts it's to aim for that sweet army losses penalty which is sad since friendlies routing took the backseat.
Fextralife's vid is pretty good but it could've been used to point out how fatigue penalties also took a step back, same with rear/side flank penalties that even Rome 2 had it pretty big.
As for the Shogun 2 footage at the end the katana samurai did have to deal with a routing/dead general on top of projectiles giving a slight morale penalty so even in Rome 2 it would be kinda similar especially if the inf holding are hoplites/pikemen in lanx
Ch6:
Terrain's kinda always been a morale/damage modifier but it's sadly so negligible especially on higher difficulties.
I would rather make the argument for just the xp/upgrade stacking making everything morale/terrain based really pointless lately, at least in Rome 1/Medieval 2 the friendlies routing penalty could potentially rout 12 morale units due to how hard it stacked, 12 morale being pretty much for some of the best units around.
Ch7:
wtf is a half hitpoint of damage tho LOL but yea it was mostly a thing with units either getting one shot from the first hit or taking multiple hits at a time without anything affecting them.
Health was introduced for that as to make those hits eventually take the unit down but at a cost of removing those one shot kills that used to happen especially with charges
www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?548136-Exclusive-Content-and-Dev-chat-for-Total-War-Center&s=7b9c3f9786cc7880c64fa5e3b540bf81&p=12805863&viewfull=1#post12805863
Jack lusted explaining health and all other stuff that's being implemented for Rome 2 went through this and while I agree with his sentiment of getting the weapon damage modeled idk I just wish there was something about health that made the engagements more dynamic like the entity becoming effectively exhausted or bleeding out. Don't care if there's muh PC performance argument if Shogun 1 had individual xp with individual stats attached then I don't see how health couldn't be implemented the same way.
This alone made morale just a thing where casualties sustained becomes the morale for units rather than playing around the concepts of flanking, fighting downhill, surprising units, etc.
The tangent section on guns:
Shogun 1 had the morale shock alone giving guns such a huge impact that it didn't really matter how much damage they deal. Might as well just use archers with armour piercing if you want to deal damage. Sad that it got removed making Shogun 2 matchlocks like armour piercing slingers basically.
Also I don't agree that every unit really needs a counter for everything, the biggest reason I got into TW is that I can finally just leave the stupid interactions of spears beat cav, inf beats cav if I can just isolate a bunch of spears and rout them in detail. I still don't get what's with this rock paper scissors design if morale is a thing, make spears formiddable but break easily when using combined arms like missiles with inf idk.
Ch8:
Based
Ch9:
Stats can be deceiving since you'd need to develop a really big trust into what to expect of the unit. It still would require one to look at the stats eventually to see if you're not missing out on anything. Hint: bonus vs cav on riflemen in FoTS where one needs a bayonet mod.
I think health made it a little too consistent, how charges are always meant to be damage dealers at the start and then nuke when the battle has developed, there is technically less randomization as you don't have to pray that a charge breaks the unit with enough kills rather than be sure that the charge dealt its expected damage which leads to all the cycle charging/softening up bs with precursors and so on
42:55 - Shogun 1 was also made because of the tech race - th-cam.com/video/8rFh9BDNLqk/w-d-xo.html
Epilogue bit:
Fight to the death is the biggest bait I've seen people fall for where even the most bugged out yari ashigaru or Rome 2 pikemen are putting up more of a fight than these seemingly desperate units while in Shogun/Medieval it was just an attack bonus to the chasing unit so a bunch of spears can still potentially be a threat to light cav while starting from Rome 1 they can just walk in and nuke everything without any consequences.
I would much rather focus on how those routing units can make another reinforcing army passing through instantly shaken from the friendlies routing so letting them rout can give you an opportunity to destroy another army.
I still can't believe people fall for the fight to the death bait though I would still have it implemented, as well as a chance of multiple units routing being able to repel a single chasing unit rather than perpetually not being able to rally just because there's a single light inf/cav chasing them which makes them completely harmless.
Wow that's a lot of words, Too bad i aint reading em. 😎
Oren deez nuts
One aside is that there already exists a template for a World War Total War: Wargame/Steel Division by Eugen Software. There are issues, but it works. Planes are destroyable call-ins that you have a limited number of and can be shot down when they appear for missions by other planes or AA artillery. Tanks are deployed independently while infantry are used in squads and instead of pulling all units of a stack in at once you deploy with a set number and call the rest in as reinforcements to either reinforce a position or concentrate for an assault.
As someone who just couldn't hold the line, I bought Pharoh. I am sorry everyone but one year from this video I can say that the morale system is still shockingly bad. The worst being how my armies never seem to have any, despite better positioning, armor & weapons, and having not lost any auto-resolves but as soon as I manually play a balanced fight the enemy basically is an army of motivational speakers who can flee and rally multiple times!
Many forget, ww1 started with line infantry tactics.
cavalry were also pretty prominent on the eastern front; planes were almost exclusively used for reconnaissance (most aerial combat was between scout planes); tanks didn't show up till the later half and their effect on the outcome is questionable (blockade is what really broke the back of the Germans).
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 yep
it wasn’t that much different of a war in 1914 compared to late victorian
A WW1 Total War game, it's a mod for Napoleon Total War, which did an amazing job. I was one of those people who dismissed the idea both on the tactical(battle) and strategic(campaign) levels but as this mod proved it's very much possible. Is it an accurate representation of WW1? Hell no. But under the confines of a Total War game, and being a mod of an existing game at that, it did pretty darn good job. I still don't think it's an ideal setting for the series but considering other games, like the afore mentioned Napoleon, also don't perfectly fit(as opposed to Empire which a terrific setting) it's really not that much of a leap from those. Heck the mod even managed to incorporate recon planes into the game, something I thought would be impossible in a Total War setting as no game before WW1 had air combat to begin with, unlike naval combat which is incredibly old. So I still digress that a WW1 Total War, as an official title I mean, still isn't really a great fit, the mod for Napoleon proved that the setting is very much feasible.
21:53 THE CAVALRY IS SO DAMN SLOW, SLOWER THAN THE HEAVIEST CAVALRY UNIT IN MEDIEVAL 2 (that being byzantine schrolli)
I think health is not inherently a bad thing in total war, but it has been used too much and in too high amounts, would a giant in warhammer die to being shot 10 times, probably no, but would it also be able to tank 5 units of huntsmen shooting it full of arrows for like 30 seconds, again probably not.
Same has happened with moral, it has gotten too high with too little negatives for reducing it.
I think a perfect example of this is the " immune to psychology" trait from warhammer.
You would think this would be a great trait in a world full of monsters, magic, walking corpses and skeleton.
But no, most units have a base leadership so high that this is one of the most useless traits to have, it has uses but most are extremely situational and can often be countered by other means.
It kinda diminishes your elite units when everything from the mid game up will often fight until it has only 20 men left, even less if they have experience levels that the ai has cheats for anyways, so theyr units will almost always fight to the last 5 man.
I have over 400 hours in shogun 2. I couldn't tell you a single stat number of any unit. I just know what each unit is good at, I don't need to know the number of melee attack on a katana samurai to know they are going to defeat yari samurai. All I need to know is katanas beat yaris
newer games seem to be designed to be read by computers.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 That's also an added problem with the whole unit variety fiasco. If there are 300 variants of regiments of dude with sword, how do I know if the scaly dude with sword is better than the demon dude with sword, or the pointy ear dude with sword? Who will win a a 1 to 1 engagement? Now I have to check stuff like melee attack, melee defense, armor, silver shield, magic resistance. Wtf...
One of the things I don't like about total war is how you can have broken lines and nuts acting independently from the commander. That just doesn't work in real combat. Numerous reenactment groups have tried something similar (like the sca) and shit falls apart immediately when confronted by an inferior force properly arrayed. And that's just melee on melee, not accounting for calvary and stuff.
In every document we have about warfare from Asia and Europe it almost always ends with "and then we caused their peasant infantry to break apart into different units and exploited the gaps
In warhammer encircling with infantry is worse because now you have both sides of a unit fighting you while if you push from the same direction only one side fights against your 2 unit blob + unit mass advantage + charge bonus still counting even if you see your unit being stalled from the blob of your other units
24:40 I have another charitable reading: in "most games" units simply fight to the death, so an army in Warhammer beginning a rout after 75% casualties means morale is a thing, so it "matters" relative to most other games the players are familiar with. By my reckoning, most TW veterans agree with the point being made here vigorously.
Making a "WORLD WAR 1 GAME" isn't just a matter of having Bolt action riffles and Machine guns. Its a matter of Organization at scale and style of warfare that is functionally plausible. Cavalry was also used up until World war 2 in Russia but that doesn't mean that just having cavalry with a ww1 skin means you're accurately representing a World war 1 military setting.
This stuff matters if you are trying to make a military strategy game.
I can imagine the kind of shitty WW1 game CA would make with riflemen who are just reskins of muskets with a higher fire rate and the tanks are just the steam tanks from Warhammer with a mark v skin. Just because you "CAN" doesn't mean you "SHOULD".
Part of the facts are that Rome which was created decades ago to simulate ancient roman warfare became the template for every total war game no matter what the setting and we have sometimes seen minimal changes to accurately represent different time periods. And then instead of adding new depth for different settings CA adds an artificial aesthetic/façade of mechanics and removes actual depth from combat
"Making a "WORLD WAR 1 GAME" isn't just a matter of having Bolt action riffles and Machine guns."
It might not be the only thing, but it is a huge part of it.
"Cavalry was also used up until World war 2 in Russia but that doesn't mean that just having cavalry with a ww1 skin means you're accurately representing a World war 1 military setting."
I'm confused; is this supposed to be addressing my video, because at no point did I even talk about the implementation of cavalry in a supposed WW1 TW game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
I'm talking about the subject of what a world war 1 game should be like.
My point about cavalry is an allegory for how total war games are designed.
If they were to make a world war 1 game. I want it to actually reflect the unique position of world war 1 military affairs.
Most total war games are basically reskins. If a world war 1 game is made with that philosophy, then I think its a failure as far as capturing the setting.
Maybe it could still be a good total war game, but I don't think it would succeed as a total war set in world war 1
Rome 2 not only added HP but WEAPON DAMAGE as stats. I swear to god every single issue with Total War STARTS with Rome 2, GOD DAME YOU CA! What Level of Irony are we on when the Sequel to the game that PUT TOTAL WAR ON MAP, is the same game that signals its decline from grace and glory. Total War has shifted quite a bit from Shogun 2/Rise of the Samurai to Fall of the Samurai then to Rome 2 and onword.
To be FAIR though, one thing that Shogun 2 really showed was that MORAL SHOCK mattered more then anything else, admittedly most of that was from the MASS SLAUGHTER of the unit itself but still. Moral may not matter as much as it did, BUT unit "stamina" and Flanking does (to a point). As it as always been, units that are Fresh fight better then units that are Winded, Tired or Exhausted, you still arn't going to with the "quality battle" but you will take more of them with you. As for Flanking, that mostly has to do with Ranged units, as most units have Shields and most of their armor on the FRONT side, and have less and less as you Flank them and eventually get around their back side.
I still prefer Shogun 2s Rock Paper Scissors style, its simple but it works. Now we have HP bars, Weapon Damage, Armor Piercing Damage, Unit MASS, UNIT SPEED and Spells to worry about.
Shogun 2 already had dumbed down a lot of the army simulation. In Medieval 2, all soldiers were still physical units, that would fight more actively. Formations mattered a lot more, and you had to think ahead when sending forces.
S2 had almost no unit physics, inheriting the broken engine of Empire. Units are just pushed around as if pulled by magnets. Horses literally just clip athrough your other units. In combat most soldiers dont do anything, just reguarly someone hits an enemy, sometimes you get some stupid 1v1 animation. Formations, flanking and positioning was much more forgiving and less strategic.
FOTS mostly benefitted because it retained Empires' strengths, with line infantry mechanics.
Idk why people sometimes talk like Rome 2 was the one that destroyed the battlefield simulation. Shogun 2 was already halfway there, making the unity interactions behind flanking, surrounding and concaves much less relevant. And yeah, morale was a much weaker factor too. Ive tested some bridge battles in S2, where I had the perfect position, and it was so much elss effective than in M2.
@@termitreter6545 Excuse me, are we playing the same game in the same universe? ALL THE SOLIDERS FIGHT instead of just being the front rank and everyone else just stands their and do cheerleader impressions. When units charge into each other they intermingle, bend and flex slightly. When Cavalry Charge into enemy units they send dudes flying like 5 feet into the air (hilarious, if over the top) giving them a real sense of weight (if extremely over exaggerated).
I will admit the "interaction" between units is pretty bad (formations casually walking though each other), as you said inherited from Empire. But the actual unit combat is grate.
Not to mention how GOD AWFUL the AI is with Siege battles, and after FOTS came out it BROKE the existing Navel AI. Far as i can tell the Navel AI always uses the FOTS navel AI even when playing S2 or ROTS so it just brakes the Navel battles. (AI just sits in spawn till you get into firing range)
@@jaywerner8415 In Shogun 2, most of the soldiers dont do anything at any given time.
Like, have you ever looked at the frontlines? Most soldiers there will indeed not do anything, they just stare at the enemy. From time to time someones attacks.
Idk how people can say that this is great, it looks so bad.
Im not sure how Medieval 2 exactly works, but it seems much more that each soldiers can fight and got their own cooldown.
But the unit movement and formation in Shogun 2 is clearly nonsensical. Cavalry formations impacting are the only time it feels like theres weight.
But even then it doesnt simulate acceleration and force of cavalry like Medieval 2 did. Thats why you get stuff like cycle charging; in M2 cavalry actually needed to build up speed for maximum effect.
Foot soldiers in S2 just get "magically" pulled around by unknown forces (aka scripts) during movement.
During attacks, soldiers are like magnets pushed into each other, and then repelling each other. Formations can act like sponges deflating on impact, and then inflating.
Theres no solid unit physics, just scripts pushing around soldiers.
Im Medieval 2, it goes further to treat soldiers as actual, physical objects, they arent just magically pushed around all the time. They hit each other, concaves are partially powerful because soldiers can get stunlocked if attacked by multiple enemies. Shogun 2 cant even simulate something like that.
And that actually makes a massive difference for flanking, concaves, moral, etc.
Sure it was never perfect, but if battlefield simulation and realism is a sign of quality, then Shogun 2 was already a massive downgrade from Medieval 2. And Rome 2 then just turned it into a joke.
Heck, maybe people being so blind for S2's shortcomings was why CA thought R2 was a good idea?
@@termitreter6545 Hmmm, Yeah their was just something about the previous TW engine before empire that "just worked". If I remember the wiki correctly Rome 1 and Med 2 run on TW engine 2 and everything after is on TW engine 3.
Its been over 10 YEARS, CA really should develop a new engine at this point.
@@jaywerner8415 I 100% agree with that.
I dont really want to hate on Shogun 2, clearly lots of people obviously love that game.
IMO its more that S2 had some flaws compared to previous games. And rather than fixing it, CA just went "eh screw it" and minimized morale with Rome 2.
Was the same with the campaign map imo. R2 introduced some really flawed army/province management systems that haunt Total War to this day. CA just did some superficial bandaid fixes in Total Warhammer, but didnt actually redesign the offenders.
Which is a shame imo, I still like a lot of their games. But to me, Shogun 2 is a good game, but its frustrating how much potential they left. And even moreso with Total Warhammer.
No, FOTS isn't remotely comparable to WW1. Line infantry based combat was not a regular feature of WW1. Maxim guns and fully automatic machine guns were far beyond gatling guns in their killing power. artillery was massed and significantly more accurate. The sort of artillery you saw in the mid 19th century may as well have been muskets compared to breach loaded. The Franco Prussian war was Europe's wake-up call to how it was unnaceptable to wage war in the traditional way. Massed bolt action rifles meant frontal engagements would lead to utter massacres. Artillery was increasingly relied on as a consequence and armies were forced to become looser, lest they lose 1000s of men within minutes.
The Boshin war was a bizarre theatre that worked only because it served as one of the last sightings of traditional line rank and fire and matched with the isolated Japanese more traditional based war doctrines.
Sure you could do it, but it would be so fantastical and far removed from history, you may as well be playing WH. It would have next to no resemblance to the actual conflict and do it a mssive disservice.
A WW1 total war would require a complete change-up of the formula.
yea but like....this is implying that the other "historical" TW games didn't already have massive historical inaccuracies.
I don't expect a WW1 total war would be 100% faithful to its setting.
Plus, I have read more than a few books on the matter and the first 6 months or so of the war actually did have quite a lot of maneuver and formation fighting, similar to 1871.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
".this is implying that the other "historical" TW games didn't already have massive historical inaccuracies. "
Uh no, it isn't. Flaming pigs/other inaccurate units, sieges not lasting years, Egypt looking Ptolemaic the and other innacuracies is not on the same level as flat out misrepresenting how these battles were fought as a whole.
"I don't expect a WW1 total war would be 100% faithful to its setting. "
I don't either, but there is a limit. That limit is when it stops resembling the conflict. 6 months of isolated bayonet charges and blokes in lines doesn't cut it. Same as how making ToB a hack and slash herofest would be stupid, just because of that one Viking at Stamford bridge.
I don’t hate the idea of a health bar if it was just a stand in for showing total hit points in the unit but having overall unit hit points instead of points based on entity number in the unit is really dumb and isn’t even true to how it works in at least Warhammer 40k on tabletop.
I think the HP system can actually work, and the intention of it may have been honest. But you must show exceptional restraint and clear thinking to use it well. Essentually what it would model is glancing blows and nonlethal injuries. In the earlier games, an arrow might either kill or do no damage, with no inbetween state. But with HP, assuming that the HP value is always below the maximum damage of the arrow then you still have the possibility for a lucky shot, with HP you could model armor which is totally impervious to light arrows, or medium armor which will deflect most arrows, or light armor that has a small chance to save the wearer. In Med2 even full plate armor is vulnerable to any attack even though realistically it would be 100% impervious to most non-piercing weapons. You could also use HP to model armor which can be worn down, or armor where a multitude of blunt strikes will eventually kill through sheer force alone but where any one strike is not itself lethal.
Unfortunately this careful design is nowhere to be found and it just turns into whittling down a bar.
I stopped playing Total Wars after Shogun 2 after seeing what they did with Rome 2. And I won't touch Warhammer games because I was curious and watched tons of multiplayer battles for those awesome animations and units and EVERY SINGLE ONE ENDED WITH A BRAWL OF 3-4 HEROES after the 10 minutes top battle.
Have you found any combat mod for warhammer that adresses the issue? Also what do you think about three kingdoms. From what i recall it was close to shogun combat wise
I covered this mod recently by Juggernaut: th-cam.com/video/n6flWwBWhUE/w-d-xo.html
Three Kingdoms is a copy-paste of Warhammer with a change in the setting. I have a video where I go over some of the broken battle aspects and the terrible UI: th-cam.com/video/F1a9O3aMeis/w-d-xo.html
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 maybe because of the campaign map, but three kingdoms is the only total war i actually finished campaigns since shogun. Sadly, i dont think anything will change. As time goes by games have to sell and to adapt to the masses which are more or less not very bright. Hence why have total war be a strategy game and appeal 10 guys when it can be what it is now and appeal to 100 guys. Saldy i see every game is like this nowadays. Good thing we still have gems from the past to play
TW A.I. were never designed to fight on a Player's level; only to somewhat oppose it.
I had a completelly different opinion over this
worth noting i've only player warhammer total war III
Because you've provided footage of combat where the key features of the enemy units are their high leadership, or directly unbreackable such as,korne, lizardmen, bretonians, wehre a cavalry charge will only deal damage, and not hinder much of their moralle, since these factions have units specifically made to be used on slugfest
Because, personally, i find that a lot of battles i have low casualities numbers, simply because i for the enemy to route before actually having any pushback
In the case that you feel that the units have too much moralle, you should play against skavens or the empire, where lines of units can or will fall due to fear
Key exceptions to these rules are korne, vampiric factions, lizardman and bretonians (sort of)
Korne has high leadership, frenzy....etc, so if they're on melee combat, they're harder to rally down
all vampiric factions non-human units don't rally up, they unbind/desintegrate when an ussual unit would rally up
and lizarman/bretonians have high leadership, meaning that they will not rally up unless massive ammount of damage is taken
I understand and somewhat agree with you over moralle, but you should have used other examples where the combat is not meant to be an slugfest
Just my two cents before watching the video; I think the morale difference in Warhammer is part of why I feel those games to have such slogging battles. When I first played the Warhammer games and realized that leadership was morale, and then saw basic units with 70+ leadership, buffs that add like twenty leadership a pop, and then morale effects of flanking, rear charging, and taking casualties being negligible, I knew I was in for a poor time.
While its true that flanking in rome 2 has an honestly negligible effect on morale for even mid tier units, it does provide a pretty significant penalty to melee attack and defense, 50% iirc. It is a terrible way to have flanking as a mechanic in a historical lens, but strictly as a gameplay mechanic it's mostly fine
In Warhammer 2, playing as the Empire is the only way I can start a new game. I've tried multiple factions by now, and only Tomb Kings come close to the _possibility_ of varied army composition - but only with some critical mods. Even the imperial roster needs some special abilities to become truly interesting and worthwhile competitors to doomstacks, otherwise handgunners are, as you said, archers with a different skin. I've always liked modding TW games, but Warhammer is, by a longshot, the one which needs most "fixing" mods, not bug-patching, but gameplay correctives.
"How do you do tanks?"
Warhammer has giant monsters. Tanks are easy.
"Snipers?"
Off the top of my head? Have a smaller unit of "normies" with the sniper in it.
"Unit sizes, formations, front lines, etc?" Yes, a few things may need to change, like the actual sizes of units, and they'd need to invent new mechanics to, say, dig trenches. Your point? You mean Creative Assembly would have to do some actual competent work?
Clearly they're not big on that anymore, so I guess the naysayers are right, WW1 Total War is impossible.
they already attempted snipers in FotS with rifle units that could remain hidden whilst firing.
Granted the implementation was lazy and broken against the AI who would get shot to death but even that kind of attempt at an idea is something beyond them today.
Exactly. it would take work, some experimentation, but it's not impossible. Sure, maybe have them be single unit troops, but not a giant. One hit takes them down, so you keep them back and hidden, like a sniper should be, or otherwise covered, and they're devastating. ESPECIALLY to commanders. That took no work to think up.@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
Hi again. I've been thinking about this all night and I have some more thoughts, especially for sniper. First, in the original Shogun we HAD single entity units, in the form of hero samurai. The guy worked, and Volound showed in one of his vids that the hero could kill HUNDREDS before going down, but would be erased by any amount of bullets.
As for jets, well, it's WW1, so one would not have them. Now, if they meant BIPLANES, yes, that would be a little harder to properly field... if modern TW didn't already provide a solution.
Spells.
It would work like a spell from Warhammer. You build the unit, add it to your army, and CAST a biplane run like a spell, or like how Fall Of The Samurai did artillery support from coastal ships. Pick the angle they come in at, and boom, strafing run. Have another on patrol to stop enemy planes from doing the same. I mean, the modern TW players LOVE their spells, and behold, and actual way to properly use such a concept without it being dumb.@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
Completely agree that Shogun 2 is GOAT, but still bro does not understand that medieval/victorian Japan is not the same as ancient Europe or a fucking Fantasy World with Demons, Zombies (which have the specialty that they dont flee) and giant Monsters
classic mouthbreather warhemmoroid "this is a game with dragons and monsters and ratpeople with lazorrrsss omg"
apparently your game having a "fantasy" setting counts as a license for it to be garbage
16:25 I also rather have the great northern war
A World War 1 Total War would be really good. Like you said, the closest thing to it is Fall of the Samurai. Gatling guns could be a Vickers or MG 08. The naval barrage feature could include longer ranged artillery. Gas attacks. Tanks that get unlocked through research. And maybe a logistics system where you need to feed and arm your troops and have sufficient shells for your artillery.
Remember, That in WW1, Musket and One-Shot rifles are no longer used, Meaning there would be no Formation War.
@@successtospectre6778Podría ser algo así como Company of héroes pero a gran escala tal vez
Off-topic but the sliding scale between "gameplay vs plot/characters/atmosphere" is an interesting beast. I only recently discovered that to me, if the plot is locked behind atrocious gameplay, I might as well read a book or watch the game's walkthrough. That makes me feel a bit sad for the game - people poured their blood and tears into it and yet many can only enjoy the game by treating it like a book or a spectator sport. And yet at some point of badness, the gameplay becomes so terrible that it is better for my sanity to switch to a) watching instead of interacting with it b) a book c) another game with a better gameplay and not necessarily that much worse of a plot/characters/atmosphere. The thing is - gameplay is what you deal with minute to minute - if you torture yourself by subjecting yourself to overly tedious if not painful gameplay, I think you might start developing repulsion not just for that one game, but gaming as a whole, subconsciously.
lot of modern AAA games seem to be leaning heavily on being moving art galleries, probably because it also looks more impressive in marketing material.
I've never played any TW games after Rome 2, I didn't know the gameplay got so bad. The whole point of TW back in the day was to get as close to real historical battles as possible. They stopped going down that road long ago.
55:10 That zoom in made me laugh so much ahahahah
The game being fantasy actually works against it as an excuse. A historical game like Shogun 2 should have a meta that one should spam since that is what happened in real life - they made 500,000 guns in 50 years afterall. However, that is not what happens in Shogun 2 campaigns or even multiplayer.
If CA made a WW1 game they would give the tanks a healthbar.
Ive only played 2 total wars, shogun 2 and 3 kingdoms, and the battles felt so bad in 3 kingdoms that i only played one campaign and did everything to just auto win battles because it was awful when in shogun 2 every battle feels great even if its one sided
You had me UNTIL "CONCISTANCY"
What is More concistant than a 1 million HP bar being hit by 10k attacks?
You do t get more concistant than that.
DPS is a measure for game with Health bars you dounce
Meanwhile the other have 1 HP and can die by any ARBITRARY RNG roll.
So what really happen is that Moral became LESS predominant With Raw damage and bonus damage becoming the main gate.
So now you kill before route, UNLSS you cant and need to depend on route
Also, scaring Some enemy formation amke other elite one vulnerable, like how tanks NEED infantry support otherwise is a metal duck waiting for an RPG, mine or Artillery shot.
Game changes, i concure on that.
But in a way more mainstream, precise and where NUMBERSatters
Until the point power creep make is so "number are so big they stop making sense.
Or the korean MMO sindrome
The RNG roll doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things because of something called "the law of large numbers."
In theory, a coin toss will have 50% probability of heads, or 50% for tails. But it's possible that you can toss it 5 times and have every result be heads. But the more and more times you toss, the more the actual results will be in line with theory.
It's possible for a yari ashigaru soldier to win in RNG vs 1,2,3 Katana Samurai. But against 140? 160? Virtually impossible.
Try a 1v1 Katana Samurai in Shogun 2. 160 vs 160. Every single attempt will be even, with a variance of 5-10 men.
Shogun 2 had really good morale system but sadly high level multiplayer was dominated by leveled up ashigaru with skills giving them unbreakable morale.... and super gun cav units which made the game more kill focused
17:00 I am also one of those people that thinks a wwi total war isn't plausible. Sure, you can give battles the aesthetics of wwi, but if you have played say, the wwi mod for ntw, you'll see how it's basically impossible to recreate the situation that allowed static warfare to flourish. I can conquer France as the German empire with less than 10k men. You just can't replicate the scale of the world wars in the total war engine. All units will move as amorphous blobs instead of rigid rectangles. You can just gen snipe the opposing army with your Uber artillery every time because total war requires having a general present on the field.
you're reducing the argument to a question of scale, which is not my point and also missing the point entirely.
The game should be aimed at replicating the dynamics of such a conflict (at its core, it was a challenge of the defender having an incredibly strong advantage which resulted in the stalemate).
Fall of the Samurai already did this, just see all the damage you can do placing your line infantry in a prepared position with overlapping zones of fire.
also why would this total war game need to have a general on the battlefield? you do know that before rome 2 this was not a requirement, right?
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Don't try to argue to me that wwi wasn't a war of scale. To create a campaign that emulates the scale of wwi you would need at LEAST 30-40 stacks of armies against the borders for each front to simulate the deadlock. That would get really boring and tedious to fight really fast. Again, static warfare isn't that fun in total war. Total war is all about movement, flanking, and small unit tactics. The engine can't really simulate infantry behavior of each individual man diving into craters, crawling on their bellys to cut barbed wire and toss grenades into trenches.
A game more suited for this era of war would either be something like men of war/Gates of hell, for smaller unit tactics, or hoi4 for the sheer scale of production of equipment.
Also, I love fots. That's honestly where all my hours in Shogun 2 come from. It's a great case for why a mid to late 1800s Victorian era total war would be very fun.
Fots works because the boshin war was a relatively small conflict. You can faithfully recreate the battles and campaign map from that era in the total war engine.
Siege battles in a total war sense also weren't really a thing by the time wwi broke out. Towns and villages were completely flattened by the barrages.
You cant really recreate the battle of Verdun in total war. Same with the somme. Maybe you can do a small pocket of the battle, but that's about it.
This is why CA will never ever create a total war past the Victorian era. It's just not feasible
Lol man ok
You just theorycrafted a bunch of reasons for why it won't work as if you know the inner workings of the engine.
Also i find your insistence about the war of scale laughable, in a game its the interactions and dynamics that count, not the historical accuracy.
All of the good Total war games are very ahistorical anyway, I don't see why this weird constraint about scale needs to be imposed on WW1.
That's a constraint that you made up, sorry that I'm not willing to take it seriously.
Yet another person who talks about MUH GAME ENGINE as some sort of boogeyman that will forever prevent the games from moving forward (instead of the lack of will or competence on part of CA.)
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
lmao try not to strawman your opponent challenge (impossible) so you can fight arguments I'm not making.
I've played enough total war to know their formula and how unit behavior works yeah it's not that difficult to understand. You drag your mouse to set what rectangle shape you want your unit to form up in. You get your nice big block of infantry and march towards the enemy and you use cav to flank. That's how it's always been from shogun 1 to warhammer 3.
> Also i find your insistence about the war of scale laughable, in a game its the interactions and dynamics that count, not the historical accuracy.
And I find your insistence that a ww1 total war would be perfectly historically authentic with barely a brigades worth of men fighting on the western front. I'd also love for you to tell me what these ww1 dynamics and interactions are because you keep spouting it off like I'm supposed to follow.
> That's a constraint that you made up, sorry that I'm not willing to take it seriously.
Ah yes I remember when ww1 broke out and the german empire entered neutral belgium with an eyewatering 2,800 man doomstack. Lead by general Moltke himself on horseback! After effortlessly taking brussels he immediately besieged paris after defeating the one halfstack army defending it. Thusly ending the war with the destruction of france in october of 1914.
Get real dude this shit would be so fucking boring without any sort of frontline system. sorry that I'm not willing to take it seriously.
Yet another person who talks out their ass pretending they know how game design works thinking CA can do literally anything with their engine if they just believed in themselves.
Muh game engineezzz
@ 21:07
Come out to playyyyyyyyy-yayyy *clinking bottles*
great video. it is very nice that cover so well everything that is wrong with total war this days. and is a real pity that such a good game went to waste given all the improvements that came with computing. hope that a good company picks up where shogun II left.
Yeah, even though modern Total War has battle scales that are smaller than ever thanks to single entities, the games run like crap because most everything is done on a single-thread.
😳 22:26 Never realized how crazy the ai unit buffs are in higher difficulty, i assume this footage must be from legendary?? Im a scrub that plays on normal in tww2 & 3, because fuck that shit😅!! But when i get off a good flank charge the vast majority of units rout super quickly! Does ai get morale buff too? I thought it was just ma and md...
Found your channel. Great stuff
I agree with most of this video but I'm not sure if health bars work like that in warhammer. I feel like I consistently see single models in a unit take a specific amount of damage for they die as if they all have their own health bars. I'm might be wrong but I think it's just that units are far too tanky.
yes each model has its own healthbar and all of them are aggregated together to give you the value that you see when hovering over a unit.
This is why you can have a unit take 3 volleys of arrows and not lose any men, only to have 5 or 10 die to the fourth volley. And why charges have inconsistent kill counts.
Honestly, I'd rather them have a newer engine tailored for WW1.
Yeah the idea that ww1 total war could work is just straight up wrong. It's true that the change in weaponry wasn't exactly revolutionary but... no, ww1 combat did not look anything like any total war game on a doctrinal level.
sorry man
CA themselves considered it achievable: www.rockpapershotgun.com/talking-about-total-war-with-mike-simpson
I've gotten like 7 comments on this exact point these past few days and I wish people would stop role-playing game developers and inventing 10,000 excuses for why x won't actually work.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Oh damn, CA think it's a good idea? well shit they're so famous for making good decisions... Never said they couldn't make it, just that it wouldn't work.
here's the 2013 GDC talk where the show precisely a unit splitting feature: th-cam.com/video/6A0lPZw1FQU/w-d-xo.html
WW1 total war is really not a stretch dude, we already had implementations of manning walls with units, machine guns (gatling guns), and rifles.
Cringe historical total war fans: I WANT MY GAME TO BE 100% HISTORICALLY ACCURATE OR NOTHING
as if the older TW games weren't already riddled with historical inaccuracies.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I mean it's an interesting video I guess, and I don't doubt CA could hypothetically make a world war 1 game, in the same way the could make a first person looter shooter. It wouldn't be the total war formula though, or if it did it'd just be bad. Total war just doesn't work for a setting with continuous frontlines and small unit tactics being executed by armies of millions. Even god damn world war 2 would be less stupid, and even then it would have to be a Company of Heroes clone.
I have to ask why on earth you would want to encouage CA to make "Napoleon but with an extra century of technological advancement" when they could be making a game their formula actually works for like Empire 2 or Medieval 3. Whatever, that whole rant about historical accuracy is a pretty clear indicator of how much attention you're even paying. But damn, you did call me cringe I guess, so that's me blown the fuck out.
Particularly concerning, especially after seeing Filaxim Historia's video on Roman battles.
Ain't no simulator like a carnage simulator tbh. Blood for the Blood God n all that.
There is a wwq game total war. The great war, western front, check it out
Frankly, I think Sun Tzu is bullshit. He’s like George Orwell, people quote him without knowing anything more than surface level about his writing. However, having read The Art of War, I find most of the things he wrote either straight bad advice or only applicable on a purely tactical scale, and unfeasible in real life. For instance, take the fact that he recommends not even attacking the enemy unless you outnumber them 32:1. This makes me think that he’s either a complete fool or has never seen a battle before in his life. Most of Sun Tzu’s strategies are completely impossible to achieve in real war.
Sun Tzus writing is more philosophical than literal, though.
The big takeaway is that a good strategist will ensure the battle is won before it is even fought (hence his point about "a good commander will not demand victory from his men", such a quote is of course stupid if you take it in a purely literal sense, but it's not meant to be taken that way.
To consider the emergence of health bars as intending to implement classic rts elements is just naive. It is obvious that it is meant to make the game more forgiving for new players combined with the decline of morale factor. You can read it throughout all of CA's advertisement for Rome 2. It is meant to draw new players rather than improving on what the old players considered as flaws and hoped to get better. I don't think CA is going to reverse what they've done for that reason. It is a marketting decision rather than a design decision and it works perfectly well in that regard for them. This is always what happens when a company tries to please every kind of people with their game.
How do the health bars make the game easier exactly? I don't understand
@@zachthompson9976 game encourages you to get better tier units. You do that and stack modifiers on top of that. There are also tanky regiments with the "high health" written in their description. Combine these with the fact that units lose morale relative to their hp loss more than any other factor like elevation etc. The result is the fights take 3x longer and player has more time to react and he is not heavily punished for making mistakes. In my recent playthroughs in warhammer 2 I felt that the more my army and its general levels up the more convenient the battles become, and also I get more and more lazy with each passing battle and win battles that I shouldnt be able to win. I dunno if it makes sense to you but thats how I see it.
@@Kasro_Z yeah that actually makes alot of sense after you broke it down for me. Appreciate that
And I absolutely agree about the game becoming trivial with high tier units and high level lords. Slaanesh is my favorite faction, purely based on their playstyle, has NOTHING to do with their theme or lore, I swear 😏 But I've beat entire full stack armies using only Nkari, it's insane. Admittedly it is pretty fun, at first, yo play with op lordsn but it rapidly gets stale and boring