civilization4+total war= good idea?

[kristopherb]

Personally, I think it would be a pain for every battle...

you chould have a button which does by comp.ages ago there was a tread about stack attack that you gewt bonus for attacking with alarge stack tw has got the right idea.

 

[KMadCandy]

As long as combat remains turn-based, I'm not against tactical combat in Civ. However, Civ is first and foremost a strategy game, not a tactical game, and I like it this way. I wouldn't want to see one of my favourite strategy games going down the "click faster and you'll win" drain.

as is often the case, i agree with Psyringe 100%! heck i'd not even mind if the graphics were still like civ2 or civ3, i play it for the game itself and not the pictures, and a clickfest would drive me nuts.

i'd never heard of the game total war. i thought the thread was going to be about the 'always war' option haha.

 

[kristopherb]

as is often the case, i agree with Psyringe 100%! heck i'd not even mind if the graphics were still like civ2 or civ3, i play it for the game itself and not the pictures, and a clickfest would drive me nuts.

i'd never heard of the game total war. i thought the thread was going to be about the 'always war' option haha.

wasnt what you thought it whould be

 

[Shadzy19]

I gave m2TW a try , it was my first total war game and I must say i was deeply disappointed .
Ive enjoyed RTS MP games a lot and also enjoyed the civ series for TBS SP games so the idea where thse 2 got combined sounded greta and the reviews looked good .
Boy was I disappointed , the battles are incredible easy even on the hardest level and is filled with way to many bugs .
Same with the campaign map , the special agents are tedious to use and its incredible simplified , alliance doesnt mean **** since they will just backstab anyway .
Only 1 victory condition and always the same map?

Maybe its worth playing in a year or so once the modders have fixed most of the crap .
So for whats it worth , most definatly keep the combat system from CIV , sure we all yell at it when we lose 5 times in a row with good odds but its fast and simple and you gotta think about how you will use/combine your stacks .
In M2TW you can just have a army of light cav and peasants and peasant archers and defeat a army of the best cavs and dismounted knights without much trouble ...

 

[Holycannoli]

The only problem I see with Civ having R:TW's RTS-style battles is getting every unit from every age to act appropriately. In R:TW battles worked out well with things like morale, cavalry charges on exposed flanks etc. But in Civ we go from lowly ancient warriors up to gunships and mechanized infantry.

It has the potential unfortunately to be very 'generic' ala Empire Earth II unless the developers really took the time to create a true tactical battlefield experience. But I would so love to see it! It would be the single greatest game ever if it could combine Civ's city-building and civ-management with R:TW's tactical battles and maybe even family tree.

 

[feldmarshall]

Nah. I know it adds more realism and I know that way I won't be screaming at my computer when my unit lost at 98% odds, but it would destroy the classic Civ experience. To Civilization worshipping tribes of Alpha Centauri merging the games would be like committing sacrilege! (ok I'm overreacting).

And how long would a game take? Let's say it's a 500 turns game. Let's say you'll be at war for 200 of those turns, and for each of the turn you're at war you'll conduct 1 battle. Each battle takes, say 10 minutes. Add that to the time you spent doing playing normally, say, 1 minute per turn that comes to...200x10+500 = 2500 minutes = 42 hours.

how about you can choose in each battle if you want to go for tactical battlefield or just normal battle

 

[Sisonpyh]

MTW2 meets Civ 4 would be the greatest game ever created. End of discussion.

And stop crying about the battles being too long. You can always use the auto-calculate feature.

 

[MrCynical]

It's not an original idea to merge the two games, and it does have some possibilities. You'd need to get a proper system in Civ for stacking units into armies, but it's not that much of a stretch of the imagination for that to be in the next civ game anyway.

There are a few obvious downsides though. As others have highlighted, the most important of these is time. Even if you smooth combat out to effectively be between SoD's then it will still be extremely time consuming. Yes you could use the auto-calculate, but then you have a vast chunk of the game which a player might not use that much, if at all. The time and effort required to make these kind of battles would likely impact the quality of the rest of the game. Just try playing one of the Total War games autocalculating all the battles; it gets very tedious very fast. (Granted the Total War strategic map is very primitive compared to that of Civ, so it might not suffer quite as much).

The second is of course AI weakness. In the Total War series it is trivial to win battles against the AI where the game informs you that the odds are wildly against you, unlike in Civ. Given that warfare is already the AI's weakest point in Civ, I'm unconvinced the game would present that much of a challenge with Total War style battles.

 

[Holycannoli]

Well Civ would need a new AI wouldn't it? One that could handle the RTS.

Plus like others have said, having the option of autoresolve like current Civ should solve the problem of people wanting shorter games. R:TW and M2:TW already have an autoresolve option; Civ's autoresolve could be simply how it is now.

The time and effort required to make these kind of battles would likely impact the quality of the rest of the game.

Nah. That's only if they rush the game. If they take their time it will work just fine.

In M2TW you can just have a army of light cav and peasants and peasant archers and defeat a army of the best cavs and dismounted knights without much trouble ...

Hmm that shouldn't be. I don't have M2:TW but in R:TW if you try to use an army of clearly inferior units they will lose unless you have totally overwhelming numbers. A unit of 200 peasants can be defeated by just a few cavalry. Now, if each army has units comparable to each other, then the smaller army does have a chance at victory. But mostly peasants? Cannon fodder. Those are the kinds of armies I love throwing my generals at because they can rack up hundreds of kills with little to no losses. The rebel faction usually has armies of mostly peasants.

 

[Arlborn]

<Remembering of Braveheart>

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!


And I also didn't like Rome total war much.. I played for 3 hours, quited and never tried again

 

[ben123]

I thnk it would be awesome - I recently played a bit of Medieval total war 2 and apart from the bugs I found very enjoyable - of course there's room for improvement but that's where 'civ 5' would win out by taking the civ perspective on RTS. I think games like MTW:2 have always come more from the gamer/ kill 'em up fraternity and thats why stuff civ'ers want is missing. I think it could be a way to really make war interesting and more 'realistic' - with armies/tactics and real importance of terrains, forts etc. imagine the MTW:2 graphics and engine applied to all domains: air, land and sea (and combinations of them) and eras!!

Another concept that I have thought about is a kind of 'intelligent zoom' where the whole of civ could be RTS (don't all recoil!!!). I know this is blasphemous to hardcore civvers! the idea is that the game speed and detail and controls available are a function of the 'zoom' such that you can see units moving around on the world map etc but if you zoom in the game slows to real-time so they don't move 100miles in 1second but real speeds(whether it will be implementable in 2 years from now technology -who knows??).

I'm really intrigued if all the good things of civ could be merged with real-time building/ fighting etc. As long as the mad-rush tactics of C&C etc can be avoided and sufficient 'AI helpers' can be implemented to aid the player I think it could be done.