futurehermit
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- Joined
- Apr 3, 2006
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cIV and the Total War (TW) series (I am primarily basing this on my experience with RTW and M2TW) are both awesome imo (ciV not so much). They both have very strong points in their favour, and I am fantasizing (since it probably would never happen) about what a game that featured the best of both would be like?
Here are what I consider to be some of the main strengths of each:
cIV:
1) New maps, opponents each time--each game is very different (TW the campaign map and opponents are always the same)
2) Multiple victory conditions (TW it's always domination)
3) Choose where you want to settle (TW the settlements are fixed)
4) Develop and work the terrain (tiles, resources) around you with workers (TW it's just about building bulidings)
5) Culture determines your borders (TW borders are fixed)
6) Tech tree (TW it's confined to individual settlements)
7) World wonders (R:TW in particular the 7 wonders have fixed locations)
8) Great people (TW more so has agents, which are also interesting, but having a "Great Spy" that could do TW kinds of things would be very cool)
TW:
1) The big one for me is that you fight battles in real time, controlling each unit, on a battle map--much superior imo to both stacks of doom or ciV's 1UPT.
2) Superior campaign and battle map AI
3) Not just one leader who lives for thousands of years, but a royal family, with different members gaining different traits based on their experiences (in cIV you get two preset traits). Similarly, your generals play a more direct and interesting role, both with regards to battles and also governing settlements (in cIV the great generals have limited purpose)
4) More variety of units amongst different factions (in cIV it's just one UU)
5) Agents--having priests, merchants, princesses, spies, assassins, etc. running around causing havoc is really neat (in cIV there are spies and execs, which are similar, though execs have limited functionality)
The first 4 from each game are what inspired me to write this post. If those 8 were combined together, I think that would make for a truly great game. One difficulty that I anticipate might be the different scopes of each game (TW focusing on a limited region, while cIV it's worldwide). But, I think that could be worked out.
What do you think?
Here are what I consider to be some of the main strengths of each:
cIV:
1) New maps, opponents each time--each game is very different (TW the campaign map and opponents are always the same)
2) Multiple victory conditions (TW it's always domination)
3) Choose where you want to settle (TW the settlements are fixed)
4) Develop and work the terrain (tiles, resources) around you with workers (TW it's just about building bulidings)
5) Culture determines your borders (TW borders are fixed)
6) Tech tree (TW it's confined to individual settlements)
7) World wonders (R:TW in particular the 7 wonders have fixed locations)
8) Great people (TW more so has agents, which are also interesting, but having a "Great Spy" that could do TW kinds of things would be very cool)
TW:
1) The big one for me is that you fight battles in real time, controlling each unit, on a battle map--much superior imo to both stacks of doom or ciV's 1UPT.
2) Superior campaign and battle map AI
3) Not just one leader who lives for thousands of years, but a royal family, with different members gaining different traits based on their experiences (in cIV you get two preset traits). Similarly, your generals play a more direct and interesting role, both with regards to battles and also governing settlements (in cIV the great generals have limited purpose)
4) More variety of units amongst different factions (in cIV it's just one UU)
5) Agents--having priests, merchants, princesses, spies, assassins, etc. running around causing havoc is really neat (in cIV there are spies and execs, which are similar, though execs have limited functionality)
The first 4 from each game are what inspired me to write this post. If those 8 were combined together, I think that would make for a truly great game. One difficulty that I anticipate might be the different scopes of each game (TW focusing on a limited region, while cIV it's worldwide). But, I think that could be worked out.
What do you think?