The CFF Napoleon: Total War boycott.

[Dachs]

Though I've never played ETW, I have played all the others and unfortunately they all have the same problem. As someone mentioned "The game is called Total War and that's what u get"

Hahaha it's funny cause this changed a lot with ETW

 

[Maniacal]

After 6 patches and their PR person Kieran still admits they have issues to fix.

 

[Yui108]

The real ultimate game would be Crusader Kings merged with Medieval II Total War

 

[Dachs]

Ugh. CK and M2TW both had ****-tastic Byzantines. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that.

 

[Quintillus]

Maybe Civilisation and Total War should merge into one ULTIMATE game! i.e. use TW for graphics/battles and Civ for gameplay/strategy.

I thought that after first playing Medieval II, too. For awhile I even found it to be more fun than Civ. Of course, I noticed the terrible diplomacy, as turfcat for one has mentioned - Civ was far better in that department. But the bugs eventually got to me - battling the Timurids in epic 8000-unit battles wasn't quite as fun when the game crashed 80% of the time. I was lucky in that the 1.3 M2 patch fixed that bug, but shortly afterwards I tried several mods. There bugs appeared again, and I came to realize that Medieval II mods were much less stable than Civ3 mods. It was around that point that Civ started to regain its position as my favorite strategy game - and for that matter, mods aren't even as necessary in Civ. The variety in the regular epic game is so much greater in Civ than the Grand Campaign is in Medieval II that Medieval II needs mods to catch up.

Not long afterwards I got Rome Total War. It was fun, too, but I found it to be quite similar to Medieval II. This made me less inclined to buy Empire, as I suspected it would also be similar. The reports of rampant initial bugs, which my MedII experience made seem very plausible, and seeing the dismal pathfinding in the demo, convinced me not to buy it. I haven't regretted the decision.

In some ways I still agree. The battles in Total War are great fun, and the strategy/diplomacy in Civ is doubtless superior. The graphics are also better in Total War - I actually much prefer the Total War map to the Civ4 map, but I also prefer the Civ3 map to the Civ4 map. But I'd want Firaxis to be in charge, as they seem to do better at bug-squashing and generally paying attention to the game engine (and even they aren't perfect).

Napoleon... I'm not boycotting it per se, but I'm in no hurry to buy it. When there's an Empire Complete pack (including Napoleon/all future expansions) for $10, like there was for Rome when I bought it, I might bite. I'll save my boycotts for games that either have totally unreasonable DRM (Assassin's Creed 2, for instance, although any other with activation limits counts, too), or ones that are considerably more "broke" than Empire Total War is. And those do exist. Mostly very poor console ports, but they're out there.

 

[Rub'Rum]

I think they should probably put some more interesting battles in Civ, but not to the scale of Total War. For me, civilization is equally about diplomacy, economy, settling, war, etc. Total War is really 60-75% about war. Which is why a huge part of your time is spent on the battlefield.

I really don't want to start playing Civ and go "oh wait... I have to stop now because my next time is a 45 minutes battlefield and I don't have time for that right now". Actually, many of my Total War games end because I don't feel like spending an hour on a battle. Sometimes I do feel like it, but I stop playing after the battle because I'm not in the mood for the campaign map part since it's more fun in Civ hehe.

Maybe Civ could have a simple battle interface, something along the simplified lines of Heroes of Migt and Magic? Just a random thought. Not exactly like HOMM but... Similar. 5 min battles max.

 

[LightSpectra]

I was given Napoleon: Total War as a gift. In a singleplayer game I just had, the following happened:

(1) Cavalry just jumped right over a cavalry trap and annihilated a division of line infantry. Yeah. I appreciate the AI not falling into the same mistake made at Agincourt, but that kinda defeats the purpose of traps, doesn't it?

(2) One division of Italian light infantry (120), with zero experience bars, defeated singlehandedly four divisions of three Austrian line infantry and one light infantry (600 men altogether). Apparently, every Italian in 1803 has the marksman skills and equipment of Nazi blitzkriegers. And I'm not a Total War newbie that just let my units get wiped out just out of reach; this was in a fair one-to-one (well, five-to-one) volley exchange.

(3) A single shot of roundcannon wiped out a quarter of my army.

In summary: RAGE.

 

[W|M]

ouch. What difficulty were you playing on? And if Light Cavalry jumped over cavalry traps, thats not that unusual. Heavy Cavalry jumping over it is though.

 

[Maniacal]

Bad luck?