New Total War game: Warhammer

[Zboj Lamignat]

The cult Halo developers don't want to be associated with shitty PC gaymes like Myth so they pretend it never existed and it's not even available on digital distribution sites.

 

[A horse of course]

Getting Myth 3 to work with the editing tools is like trying to discover the secret of Greek Fire.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Oh, they only removed anything remotely interesting/satisfying from the strategy layer.

What's been removed by comparison to, say, Medieval 2?

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh, they only removed anything remotely interesting/satisfying from the strategy layer. All the bad stuff like agent spam or AI cheating the movement point system worse than in HoMM are in and worse than ever.

And don't forget the satellite which tells AI the position of players army hiding in ambush. And bealining from the other side of map while ignoring more pressing threats.

I haven't noticed that. In fact it's almost too easy to have the AI bumble into ambushes, especially with heroes that have extra ambush chance.

 

[kris]

Am I missing something?

Do you feel like you are? The strategic layer has been hammered into a complete irrelevance and source of constant annoyance with cheating AI attacking and sacking defenseless settlements. Tactical layer is greatly simplified, but still pretty satisfying, if you don't mind abusing the shit out of the horrible AI.

Yes. the strategic layer kind of require you to build walls in every single settlement as the AI always ignore them for the joy of burning one without. As I wrote earlier in the thread, in my first games I pretty much never had any siege defense battles at all since the AI simply didn't even try to take something with a wall. Except against another AI, I guess they wanted to autoresolve those battles.

Overall i do have plentty of grievancies about the strategy layers which I expressed here. first and foremost being how you have to bend backwards to get to those big battles except in some cases.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Am I missing something?

Do you feel like you are? The strategic layer has been hammered into a complete irrelevance and source of constant annoyance with cheating AI attacking and sacking defenseless settlements. Tactical layer is greatly simplified, but still pretty satisfying, if you don't mind abusing the shit out of the horrible AI.

Yes. the strategic layer kind of require you to build walls in every single settlement as the AI always ignore them for the joy of burning one without. As I wrote earlier in the thread, in my first games I pretty much never had any siege defense battles at all since the AI simply didn't even try to take something with a wall. Except against another AI, I guess they wanted to autoresolve those battles.

Overall i do have plentty of grievancies about the strategy layers which I expressed here. first and foremost being how you have to bend backwards to get to those big battles except in some cases.

I think it's reasonable to build walls on settlements to protect them, even if hit and run tactics from movement from fog can be quite annoying.

 

[kris]

Reasonable? It is more like mandatory.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I mean I think it's reasonable to have to build walls on settlements to protect them from raiding parties.

 

[Galdred]

Oh, they only removed anything remotely interesting/satisfying from the strategy layer. All the bad stuff like agent spam or AI cheating the movement point system worse than in HoMM are in and worse than ever.

I don't remember much of interest on the strategy layer. I hated the change in RTW, as it made their weak point m

I mean I think it's reasonable to have to build walls on settlements to protect them from raiding parties.

The only problem with walls is that they don't make that big a difference when you play the battle compared to their deterence

 

[Teepo]

What tactical elements are dumbed down in Total War Hammer?

After watching some movement control tutorials I am having a way smoother experience controlling my army. And it seems like the models are actually fighting each other unlike Shogun 2. Feels really smooth but I was never good at Total War.

 

[Great Deceiver]

From the little I played, there's a lack of fine control options (no option to incrementally increase rank and file size, for example), preset unit formations are gone except for a generic melee in front/ranged in front formation that makes no sense (any options not to drag boxes around all the time is appreciated, not sure why they would take them out, especially since they could make a few thematic formations for each army), and most importantly, siege battles are a joke and definitely the biggest step back in the entire series IMO.

I'm sure there are other things that I haven't noticed because I haven't played long.

I still feel melee combat is floaty and not an improvement over other Warscape titles. Not sure what you mean.

 

[Teepo]

Agree it's a tad floaty. It was my impression that the unit models in Shogun 2 didn't actually fight each other, which is a step back from Medieval 2. I've actually autoresolved all my siege battles because honestly I fucking hate sieging. Don't know if it's better than older ones but I sucked at getting my dudes through the wall efficiently. I'm playing orcs though so I always outnumber the enemy by a stack.

Zerkovich was the dude I was watching going through all the controls. Might be shit you already know but you never know.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ZerkovichVsThePeople/videos

 

[Great Deceiver]

Shogun 2 melee combat definitely feels like a step back from Medieval 2 (and cavalry charges too), that's been a common complaint about the Warscape engine that has powered Total War games since Empire. I remember Rome 2 being particulary egregious in feeling awful, but maybe I'm not remembering too well. Warhammer definitely doesn't seem very good in that units don't engage properly, it's just some of the soldiers in front while the rest sucks their thumbs and sort of slides and shuffles around.

There's been a lot of forum posts on this subject and a great many videos, but most of them unfortunately come out waxing nostalgic about the awesomeness of the Rome 1/Medieval 2 engine (which is a joke to me, since that was janky as fuck too).

I just feel that with this almost limitless budget that they have now, CA could afford to put some more work into their collision work and make battles feel a little better. I had hoped that with their decision to streamline the strategy layer they would actually add to the tactical layer instead of removing shit and still having the same old problems, but I guess I was wrong.

 

[Fedora Master]

If you dig around in the game's guts, you'll still find leftover assets from Empire. That's the state of Warscape. Remember, they only managed to make a decent 64bit version with Warhammer.

 

[Great Deceiver]

To be fair, load times in Warhammer are very snappy, much faster than in Shogun 2, for example.

 

[Fedora Master]

Right, which is one of the main improvements. I think Warhammer is as good as it gets as far as formations and the general weight and feel of the combat go in Warscape.

Also I recommend the Southern Realms mod (with SFO support now), it's basically a faction DLC worth of stuff for the Not-Italians.

 

[Jugashvili]

I had hoped that with their decision to streamline the strategy layer they would actually add to the tactical layer

The only thing they've added to the tactical layer is even more micromanagement for ADHD kids with four hands and twenty fingers to GG EZ REKT their opponents in five-minute battles. The trend was already worrying enough in Rome 2 / Attila with all the meme buff buttons but now that they've added wizards and heroes with half a dozen spells, abilities and items each any semblance of tactics has vanished to be replaced by frantic clicking and spamming lore of life spells on your tankiest units until they out-kill the opponent.

 

[Andkat]

The removal of formations and of the one major positive innovation of the Warscape engine, which was the ability to fucking dismount my cavalry stands out as particularly egregious. It was already implemented and working fine in the engine. Why on earth would you take it out?

Also, I like how they took out the motion-captured epic dueling bullshit for the one game where it would've had a place (between monstrous creatures and lords/heroes). True brilliance lies not in recognizing your weaknesses, but in reversing them only where they would've been strengths instead.

Although it is poorly documented, I'd say I much prefer Wake's 'realism' mod to SFO . Combat speed is comparable to that of the good Medieval mods (Third Age, Stainless Steel) and a lot of glaring incongruities, like random human heroes having as much HP as chaos lords and orc warbosses, have been addressed. Some unit caps are also in place for exotic elite shit like gryphon riders, so you can't just stuff half a stack with them. They also added in general's bodyguards and formations, but have them disabled for the time being due to a patch fucking them over or whatever. I'm not sure quite how balanced it is overall, but it is certainly more entertaining.

 

[kris]

I mean I think it's reasonable to have to build walls on settlements to protect them from raiding parties.

But it is bad design when you have settlements with limited amount of building slots and a game that more or less force you to build one of them.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I agree that provinces have bad design, but I think it mostly has to do with tying building upgrades and building slots to a province-level, population surplus stat. It feels gamey and contrived and is really annoying to be honest.

 

[Fedora Master]

Legendary Lords Remastered makes for some... interesting options.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Andnjord]

Cool, maybe now Norsca won't just be a crappier version of Chaos with too many chariots.

 

[Fedora Master]

IDGI, are the Norscans a new faction for the old or the new Warhammer title? Both?

This "One map, three games" thing is confusing.

e:

We called these big DLCs ‘Campaign Packs’ in the past, with Call of the Beastmen and Realm of the Wood Elves, but we’re heard the feedback that players would prefer larger rosters instead of the mini campaigns that came with these.

So the biggest change we’ll be making with the first large DLC for Warhammer II is to swap out the mini campaign for two more additional Legendary Lords, for a total of 4 playable Lords in the pack. These four will each have their own factions, unique start positions, quests-chains, epic gear, benefits and playstyle… the whole nine yards. They’ll be playable in both the Eye of the Vortex campaign and the forthcoming combined campaign map, if you also own Warhammer 1. So twice as many play-through opportunities than before. We’ll be watching closely to see if players think this is a good trade.

 

[Raghar]

Any news of CA getting clue and removing Denuvo? Even ME4 is Denuvo free now, and EA is called villain of the week.