New Total War game: Warhammer

[Great Deceiver]

So, basically, this twat wants a series that's called Total WAR to be about the positive reinforcement mollycoddling that spergs get for clicking on every tech in Civ games, as opposed to being about conquest and domination. Right.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

At this point the strategic layer of their games is so pointless and sometimes just irritating that replacing it with some simplified army management mechanic and turning the game into RT tactical game with pre-defined campaigns would probably end with incline. Especially if they diverted resources to coming up with better AI, interesting hand crafted scenarios, more varied units and factions and so on.

 

[spectre]

At this point the strategic layer of their games is so pointless and sometimes just irritating that replacing it with some simplified army management mechanic and turning the game into RT tactical game with pre-defined campaigns would probably end with incline.

You'd end up with Total War's historic battles then.
Or more seriously, that would give us King Arthur, or another Dark Omen. And that would be pretty swell, although I would argue that it's not what Total Wars used to be about. The best hand crafted branching campaign does not replace the possibility to play your conquest game fully on your terms - choosing enemies, unit roster, place of battle, etc. etc.

 

[A horse of course]

King Arthur battles were rubbish. They tried to ape that CTF/traditional RTS gameplay with the original release of Rome 2 (those fucking "baggage trains" lmao) and thank christ they got enough pushback to drop it.

Then they went and dumped unavoidable (if you actually want the gear your Lords are supposed to have on the tabletop) Quest Battles into Warhammer. And of course retards eat it up because muh ebin scripted cinematic experiences

 

[Lone Wolf]

The quest battles are - at times - interesting situations that you otherwise wouldn't get against campaign enemies.

For example, the Battle of the Crossroads, as Thorgrim.

 

[Galdred]

At this point the strategic layer of their games is so pointless and sometimes just irritating that replacing it with some simplified army management mechanic and turning the game into RT tactical game with pre-defined campaigns would probably end with incline. Especially if they diverted resources to coming up with better AI, interesting hand crafted scenarios, more varied units and factions and so on.

Real warfare 1242 and RW:Northern crusades did something like that actually iirc.
But King Arthur 2 got much worse when they did this and dropped the campaign, so beware what you wish for.

 

[A horse of course]

Pre-defined, linear scripted campaigns are the domain of the the classic RTS formula. Creative Assembly forcing them into the open system of the TW series is like Bethesda trying to do Biowarian story-driven quests in Fallout 4. Stuff like Hannibal at the Gates or The Last Roman is fine for sub-campaigns, but the core campaign should be characterized by battles that arise from the player's actions and the natural development of the AI factions, not totally disconnected mini-battles like tutorial quests, Artifacts quests and The Fall of Man from the beastman campaign. Keep that shit where it belongs and maybe actually fix the fucking reinforcements glitch that has existed since Day 1.

Of course then I went on plebbit to look at the CA Q+A comments and people are jizzing over the scripted battles

 

[Delterius]

A disciple of the Church of Todd suggests TW games need constant positive conditioning feedback:

While that thesis does indeed suck, I think that by the end the video almost perceived the actual nail on the Total War franchise. As recently as Medieval 2, Total War had enough of a building system to make the moment to moment gameplay interesting enough and, more importantly, made sure the game's battles remained fresh with varied armies fighting on the battlefield.

At this point the strategic layer of their games is so pointless and sometimes just irritating that replacing it with some simplified army management mechanic and turning the game into RT tactical game with pre-defined campaigns would probably end with incline. Especially if they diverted resources to coming up with better AI, interesting hand crafted scenarios, more varied units and factions and so on.

I always wondered if it would be interesting to just do away with the politics/economics simulation. The way things are now I can't really justify the processing power sunk on the campaign map. Imagine instead playing as just the military command of your kingdom/nation/empire. You are constantly at war in historical and quasi historical scenarios generated by the AI. You can't really pick and choose every facet of the empire, but instead makes do with what the territory afford you. All political and economic gains are indirectly derived from glory in the battlefield. And since you aren't a God from above, instead of 3D maps with characters walking all over, you get intel from reports, surveys and your own 2D 'maps'. You have to make your decisions on potentially faulty information.

 

[A horse of course]

I wouldn't mind the economic/cultural crap being replaced by a simplistic supply/logistics system. The intelligence/subterfuge stuff is difficult to approach. Nobody likes percentage-based crap when the player has absolutely no way to influence the result - imagine if every time the enemy had a 51% or more advantage over the player in battles, you were locked out of playing it yourself. But you can't put a stealth/assassination minigame in its place (closest parallels I can think of were the minigames in Sid Meier's Pirates! or the Diablo dungeons in Kingdom Under Fire). Perhaps something akin to KoH where it's just something you devote resources to over time.

 

[Trash]

Why not take Ageod's campaign mechanics and add to that the CA battles? Voila.

 

[Aothan]

not an official release but this High Elves mod looks really well done:




for now I am still waiting for the Wood Elves

 

[Lone Wolf]

Just FYI - in case people don't realize - that's a Medieval 2 mod, not a TW: WH mod.

 

[Aothan]

my mistake I knew there were preexisting mods of this type but thought the wording on the video ("Warhammer total war mod") suggested it was for this game

 

[AngryEddy]

Why are these faggot codexers trying to remove the strategy element from a strategy game?

"you know whatd be really cool? if we took out all the rpg elements in warhammer and replaced it with an anthropomorphic love story about 2 frogs"

Fuck you

 

[thesheeep]

"an anthropomorphic love story about 2 frogs"

How is it even possible this rings a bell?

 

[Forest Dweller]

So I haven't been paying much attention: how many DLC have they released for this game?

 

[A horse of course]

So I haven't been paying much attention: how many DLC have they released for this game?

Chaos Warriors DLC Race Pack
Blood and Gore DLC Cosmetic Pack
Call of the Beastmen DLC Race Pack
The Grim and the Grave DLC Lords and Units Pack
The King and the Warlord DLC Lords and Units Pack

Total: £34 of DLC

Wood Elves are coming soon, Bretonnia is supposed to be free, and after that we'll probably see a couple of smaller DLCs before the first major expansion pack.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Wood Elves are coming soon,

I assumed they were saving races for the other two "full games" in this series. They're still planning on doing a "trilogy," right?

 

[Galdred]

A disciple of the Church of Todd suggests TW games need constant positive conditioning feedback:

While that thesis does indeed suck, I think that by the end the video almost perceived the actual nail on the Total War franchise. As recently as Medieval 2, Total War had enough of a building system to make the moment to moment gameplay interesting enough and, more importantly, made sure the game's battles remained fresh with varied armies fighting on the battlefield.

At this point the strategic layer of their games is so pointless and sometimes just irritating that replacing it with some simplified army management mechanic and turning the game into RT tactical game with pre-defined campaigns would probably end with incline. Especially if they diverted resources to coming up with better AI, interesting hand crafted scenarios, more varied units and factions and so on.

I always wondered if it would be interesting to just do away with the politics/economics simulation. The way things are now I can't really justify the processing power sunk on the campaign map. Imagine instead playing as just the military command of your kingdom/nation/empire. You are constantly at war in historical and quasi historical scenarios generated by the AI. You can't really pick and choose every facet of the empire, but instead makes do with what the territory afford you. All political and economic gains are indirectly derived from glory in the battlefield. And since you aren't a God from above, instead of 3D maps with characters walking all over, you get intel from reports, surveys and your own 2D 'maps'. You have to make your decisions on potentially faulty information.

Actually, I doubt it would improve the series:
Even though the strategic layer has been horrible for quite a long time (maybe from MTW onwards, but it's down to personal preferences...), it gives a context and some stakes to battles: getting your economic capital taken over is much more dramatic than failing a mission in a linear campaign.
The problem is that the strategic "mini game" takes too much time to the point it is unclear whether we are in a tactical game with some strategic elements (like XCOM) or a strategic game with tactical battles (like Master of Orion).
I think this confusion started with RTW (in STW, and MTW, it is pretty clear you are supposed to spend most of your time battling opponent, except in the mop up phase of the campaign), which added a ton of stuff to do on the strategic map, and added movement inside regions.

 

[A horse of course]

Wood Elves are coming soon,

I assumed they were saving races for the other two "full games" in this series. They're still planning on doing a "trilogy," right?

Yes. By logic, High Elves/Dark Elves/Lizardmen etc. would be in the first expansion with a new landmass.

 

[Delterius]

getting your economic capital taken over is much more dramatic than failing a mission in a linear campaign.

To be honest, I think this argument is completely outside of reality: as things stand, the campaign map is so simplistic and exploitable that a scenario such as you described isn't really likely. The only modern Total War game I couldn't move troops in the early game to completely cripple all of my neighbors and enemies was Shogun 2 and that was mostly due to the fuckton of factions involved. If you go on the offensive turn 1 in, say, Medieval 2 the whole system falls apart because suddenly you are the local hegemon. It was really funny to pick Portugal and sweep down from Vasconia (which was their for whatever reason), taking over every rebel settlement while attacking the Moors and unifying the peninsula early game.

However, I don't want to substitute that with a linear campaign. That would be even worse. Linear campaigns worked wonders for, say, Age of Empires because those are games where you manage more than just the battle itself. As you said, battles in total war need some sort of context. The choice here is how to deliver on that.

Total War has progressively added the wrong things to the campaign map. They streamlined the building system but added a bunch of diplomatic options, techs and agents that are either borderline useless or completely unused by the AI. The result is a system that doesn't reward moment to moment engagement with the base development from older titles while shoveling pointless busywork for the player to accomplish every turn. From where we stand on the franchise, I think, there's only one real option. Refocus everything to military logistics and remove politics from the simulation.

As things stand, we manage a simplistic economy and channel it to conquering whatever land we envision first. Along the way we deal with a lot of nearly pointless busywork that gives us minimal increments over decades of in game time. Odds are we succeed less so for our tactics on the field, but rather because the campaign AI is braindead. This is not a winning formula and needs to change.

On one hand, we won't go back in time. Map movement within regions won't be cut and the campaign map won't go away any time soon. Something like that would be unjustifiable before the Powers that Be. On the other, we shouldn't just keep adding things to the Campaign Map until it somehow becomes a Paradox/Civilization lite esque game. It would be painful to buy a game from a series which draws people for the thousands of soldiers on the battlefield only to spend most of your gametime staring at the campaign map. Nor would it fix the issue of the AI being so dumb.

My proposal is that instead of serving as Judge, Jury and Executioner we pick one role and abstract the others. We play the military command of whatever nation and era we are in. If not in battle, we interact with maps and reports of a logistical nature. We manage the army's supplies and ready the units based on whatever intel we can get. The economic and political gains are all indirect from our glory on the battlefield. Let the computer fiddle with the boardgame of Risk while we order just the armies around. Its not that different from what we already have, but more focused.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

On the DLC/expamsions I imagine Wood Elves will get a mini-campaign in the same vein as the Beastmen DLC where Athel Loren is its own stand alone map. They don't make much sense as a playable faction on the full campaign map. How they're going to do any justice to the Skaven whenever they finally make an appearance is a mystery to me. They really should implement the underway as a separate map layer. They better not half-ass it and add the ratmen as some form of horde faction like Chaos or the Beastmen.

 

[A horse of course]

There's no way they won't Wood Elves to the main campaign alongside the mini-campaign. That area of the map is specifically set aside for them.

CA have claimed that a second campaign map layer is completely impossible in the engine so there won't be an underway or whatever. That basically rules out a proper three-way underground war for Karak Eight Peaks. Most likely Skaven will be a traditional faction but their armies are in permanent hidden stance or something. Or they'll just have underway teleportation like Dwarfs/Orcs. I don't see how they can do Skaven justice without massive changes to the way the campaign map works, so they'll either not bother trying beyond some crappy gimmick (most likely) or release Skaven as part of one of the expansions with a whole new mechanic.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

I guess by "completely impossible" they mean "we can't be arsed". Empire: Total War had three different theaters of war with special "off-board" exit points to move units between them. Something similar for Warhammer seems feasible to me. Failing that, I hope the Under Empire at least makes an appearance as a mini-campaign.

 

[A horse of course]

We are thrilled to announce that in February 2017 we will be releasing a new edition of Total War: WARHAMMER with selected high street retailers. The big news is that it comes with a new playable race – Bretonnia. Why should you care if you already own Total War: WARHAMMER? Because you can download the Bretonnia Race Pack for free then too!

A contrast of lowly peasant masses and proud knightly orders, the feudal kingdom of Bretonnia features a host of powerful units and is lead into battle by a choice of three playable Legendary Lords; King Louen Leoncoeur, Alberic of Bordeleaux and the Fay Enchantress. More details about this iconic Warhammer Fantasy Battles Race will be revealed in the new year.

We’ve answered some of the most likely questions below.

1) What’s in the Total War: WARHAMMER – Old World Edition?
It is the original game, plus the Bretonnia Race Pack and an exclusive novella, ‘The Prince of Altdorf’ by Total War Writer Andy Hall.

2) Does it come with all the DLC? Is it a GoTY or Gold version?
No, it’s the original game and the Bretonnia Race Pack, and all the free-LC we’ve released to date of course. There are no plans to release a Gold or GoTY version of the game currently.

3) Why are you releasing this Edition?
It’s a great opportunity to mark the inclusion of a great and iconic Warhammer Fantasy Battles race, and a great point for anyone who hasn’t dived into the Total War: WARHAMMER game yet to get on board.

4) What will existing players get?
If you already own Total War: WARHAMMER, your game will be updated, and you will see the Bretonnia Race Pack available for free download in the Steam store. However, ‘The Prince of Altdorf’ novella is only available with physical copies of the game.

5) You said Bretonnia was coming this year, why is it delayed till February?
As we mentioned at the time, our free content plan is subject to change, and we took the opportunity of repackaging the game to add in more content for Bretonnia, with additional units and a third Legendary Lord for example.

6) Is anymore DLC coming for Total War: WARHAMMER?
Yes, our next major DLC expansion, and the next Free-LC is due before Christmas. It is growing now, there will be more news soon.

7) Will there be any more Free-LC after Bretonnia?
Yes, checkout our latest Free Content schedule for a hint:

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War:_WARHAMMER_Future_Content_Blog#Free-LC