What Video Games Have You Been Playing #11: I should go

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Downloaded a bunch of maps and player models for Jedi Academy. The bot's default chat lines suck, so i'm redoing all of them. The Frank Drebin, Malcolm Reynolds and Deadpool ones are gonna be fun.
 
Not playing, but looking into the total war series. Anybody here familiar with it and have recommendations/objections to them?
I recommend Shogun 2 and especially Rome 2 : Emperor's Edition.
Shogun 2 is the most polished game overall, with incredible immersion and a great attention to detail. But it's a "small-scale" game, the unit roster is rather restricted, the tactical maps are pre-made (so they really get repetitive) and the fighting system is a bit too "cinematic".
Rome 2 had a TERRIBLE start, but it steadily improved. The fighting system is probably the best now in all the TW serie (fights last for long, so you have time to do actual tactics, but unit stats are important too), the unit and battle maps variety is staggering and you really get the "conqueror" feeling. The sea battles also works much better than in both STW2 and ETW. By now, I'd say it's easily the best "Total War" game (Attila is supposed to be as good, but I didn't like the excessive up-and-down in stamina in it, where units gets exhausted in seconds but back to "fresh" in seconds too).

Many loved the Warhammer series, but I heavily disliked it (I felt it's a good Warhammer game, but a terrible Total War one - it always feels like a "skirmish" game, never really a tactics-in-a-huge-battle one, and it tends to be quite confusing).
Rome 1 is just too old (it's still fun, but it pales compared to more recent entries), MTW2 has the horrible "duel-like" fighting system which makes all kind of formation pointless and make battles look ridiculous, and ETW is gundpowder-based, which makes it an automatic failure for me.
 
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MTW2 has the horrible "duel-like" fighting system which makes all kind of formation pointless and make battles look ridiculous

What do you mean by "duel-like", wouldn't armies still get penalties when getting attacked from multiple directions?
 
What do you mean by "duel-like", wouldn't armies still get penalties when getting attacked from multiple directions?
No, I mean that when there is a fight in MTW2, instead of having the whole unit fight as a group against another group, it breaks formation and enters into a serie of duel, which are even more obvious for each one having some sort of "force field" preventing any character to come close. So you have two scattered units waiting behind maybe five or ten guys having a duel with another guy from the unit in front. By the end of the fight, there is a small line of corpse on the line separating both units.
RTW1 and RTW2 have a much more "unit-based" fighting, where they can penetrate each other, push each other out of the way and so on, so it feels much less ridiculous and much more natural.

Visual example :



You can see how the units suddenly scatters, and how they are all fighting along a thin line right in the middle.
If you look more closely :



You can notice that only a very small number of guys are actually fighting, the others are pointlessly waiting.

Another thing is that fighting is INSANELY fast, and ridiculously deadly. Whole units can be slaughtered by the time you just gallop around with your cavalry. Also, there is an unpatched bug in MTW2 (and considering the age of the game, if it hasn't been patched by now, it won't be patched ever) where the ranged units uses their ranged attack as melee attack. Means that Sherwood archers are just killing hand-to-hand machines.
 
I bought myself a new GPU after realizing that I literally did not have any proper in my system, just some 512 onboard garbage card from the late 2014s. It came in the mail today, I installed it and am enjoying every single game in my steam library on max settings and 60 fps. I have never had this experience before, all PCs I've ever had were passed down or laptops, so this is a pretty amazing feeling for me.
 
Shogun 2 and its expansion is great coverage of medieval and late gunpowder warfare. The Warhammer series is continually getting stronger with the devs seeming to gain confidence in making the armies asymmetrical.
 
I bought myself a new GPU after realizing that I literally did not have any proper in my system, just some 512 onboard garbage card from the late 2014s. It came in the mail today, I installed it and am enjoying every single game in my steam library on max settings and 60 fps. I have never had this experience before, all PCs I've ever had were passed down or laptops, so this is a pretty amazing feeling for me.

I love how buttery-smooth everything looks at 60fps compared to 30.
 
My two cents on Total War:
The best total war game is Medieval 2. Graphics are still decent enough to look at and there isn't a lot of faffing about on the strategic map. The battles can be quite dynamic and the focus on heavy cavalry means the player takes an active role in all battles. I'm an infantry heavy player, but I still stay active in all phases of the battle whether I am repositioning my battle line, feinting their cavalry with mine, or sending forward skirmishers to get the enemy out of their battle lines. Rome (with Barbarian Invasion) is fun, but its age is increasingly becoming apparent though it has some of the best total war mods out there (Fourth Age: Total War, Arthurian: Total War*, and Viking Invasion 2).

@Akka it is interesting you refer to 'unit based fighting' as Rome 2 uses the same Warscape engine as Empire, Shogun, and (I think) the Total Warhammer games. Indeed, Medieval 2 has physical entities for the various units which explains why your cavalry always seem to get stuck behind enemy siege engines. The physical entities was abandoned for Empire when the game engine changed. In Empire the same unit models would frequently merge in and out of each other. Any sense of 'physicality' in the unit models in Rome 2 is due to a lot of under the hood scripting and ad hoc bodge jobs to keep track of the various models and keep them from sliding in and out of each other. You can still see the lack of physicality if you try and ram a lot of units through a gateway - in Medieval 2 they would get all jammed up in each others face trying to path around each other so that it actually ended up being slower than if you had them enter unit by unit. The same lack of physicality is why it is a relatively common tactic in Attila to place multiple different units on top of each other. The spreading out in Medieval2, I think, add some valuable gameplay decisions in that in penalizes players for just rushing at a point and can make units very vulnerable to cavalry rear charges.
As far as battles being too quick and units getting destroyed to fast, I dunno. Most battles in Medieval 2 take 15-30 minutes for me (far longer than even my biggest battle in Warhammer). Unless if there are heavy cavalry rear charges or you are fighting knights with militia, Medieval 2 units can stand and fight a long time. It is one of the reasons why morale is so important in the game because unless you can do something to shatter their moral, a unit of dismounted feudal knights will fight forever and a day.

*As an aside, more games should be set in the Romano-British Dark Ages. It is a brilliantly evocative period, but so little documentation remains from that period that one can basically make up whatever you want to have happen.


I've been playing more Dominions 5 lately. I've been trying out some of the undead nations that spawn troops for free - but their dominion kills off population.
A picture of a small Ermorian (zombie apocalypse!) raiding force fighting the monkeys of the Bandar Log. When the Ermorian armies get large, you begin to notice longdead act like a fluid, filling all available space on the battlefield!
 
Dominions? Is that like Total War but with magic?
 
All my squadmates are loyal! I guess I should mop up some sidequests before going to the dead reaper.

I still can't find the last squadmate though. Maybe I get them later?

EDIT: I'm doing some sidequests. I'm hiding behind a rock but the bullets are coming through it and hitting me. That's not fair.
 
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Dominions? Is that like Total War but with magic?
Eh, not really.
You don't really have any control over the battles besides some basic scripting for your troops and a few rounds of commands for your mages. The game has a bajillion different spells and artifacts that all interact with each other, troops, and mages in different ways. Think Paradox level systems but unlike a lot of paradox systems that exist simply for you to manage them, Dominions systems all feed back into each other. More territory allows you to recruit more troops and mages, which allows better research, which lets you fight better, which lets you conquer more territory, and so on until you have seized enough Thrones of Ascension to become the next god. There are something like 40+ different factions which all play differently, some (like Ermor, the Ashen Empire) play really differently. You have cannibalistic giants from Jewish mythology (the Nephilim), insane Cthulhu starspawn, Ivan the Terrible era Russia, the Tuatha from Irish myth, and so on.

All my squadmates are loyal! I guess I should mop up some sidequests before going to the dead reaper.

I still can't find the last squadmate though. Maybe I get them later?
If I remember right, you get the last squadmate very late in the game, so you might want to save some sidequests to do with them.
 
Total Warhammer is dope as hell, you just gotta go into it with a bit of a different mindset than the other TWs. Rome II with DeI is the best historical TW of all time if you'd rather do that.
 
If you're the sort to auto-resolve battles, Warhammer is impossible. The hero structure and the Chaos attacks may as well be GG.

Weird complaint, though, since the battles are a core part of the game. I just personally can't be bothered to fight every battle. I quickly lose interest.
 
If I remember right, you get the last squadmate very late in the game, so you might want to save some sidequests to do with them.

Yes but I also read that after getting the Reaper IFF that something bad happens if you do too many quests.
 
Total Warhammer is dope as hell, you just gotta go into it with a bit of a different mindset than the other TWs. Rome II with DeI is the best historical TW of all time if you'd rather do that.
Even looking beyond the hero-centric focus of it and attempt to create an in-game story, the battles are super fast which gives me no time to zoom in and admire the beautiful unit models and animations. Plus, unless things were massively changed in Warhammer 2, the siege battles are a massive step backwards for the game. Minor cities don't get siege battles so you get a handful of often massively outnumbered units out in the open field and get massacred, no chance to make the enemy pay for every foot of ground in a siege battle like in Attila. For major cities, you are only able to attack along a single front right into the enemy - massive letdown from Attila which had some of the best looking and best playing siege maps in Total War history.
 
Yes but I also read that after getting the Reaper IFF that something bad happens if you do too many quests.

Do all that you can before the Reaper IFF. You still have a little bit of time afterwards to do any last-second quests. Key phrase being "a little bit".
 
I'm doing sidequests and taking along different squadmates to see how their powers work. I had someone use Pull on an enemy and they got stuck on top of some sort of crate and just kept screaming and screaming and screaming. I guess it's a weird collision bug.
 
Even looking beyond the hero-centric focus of it and attempt to create an in-game story, the battles are super fast which gives me no time to zoom in and admire the beautiful unit models and animations. Plus, unless things were massively changed in Warhammer 2, the siege battles are a massive step backwards for the game. Minor cities don't get siege battles so you get a handful of often massively outnumbered units out in the open field and get massacred, no chance to make the enemy pay for every foot of ground in a siege battle like in Attila. For major cities, you are only able to attack along a single front right into the enemy - massive letdown from Attila which had some of the best looking and best playing siege maps in Total War history.

Well like every total war game except Shogun II, mods are a necessity. Combat can be slowed down without too much trouble. Siege battles are just one of the adjustments you have to make. You're more than compensated in its limited tactical options by your new army and mage abilities (skaven and vampires in particular). The main mod I use that adjusts combat also buffs garrison sizes substantially, so if you have any investment into a minor city you can still bleed the enemy when they attack, if they even bother - you can use gates to buff the garrison to something like 16 units iirc, depending on your faction of course.
 
Spoiler :


Yet again...
 
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