CA's Total War: The Celtic-Han-Lizardmen alliance that never was

[Corvinus85]

I picked up the full Troy game on steam, and I've played it for a few hours. Nothing impressive about it. It's not the Trojan War in a Total War game, it's Warhammer with Greek names, and that's assuming you play in the Mythos mode. I've briefly tried the historical mode, and don't care about the truth-behind-the-myth mode.

Don't expect to get a massive siege of Troy, though of course it would have been boring if you besieged or were besieged for 10 years with the occasional battle. But neither should one expect armadas of Achaean ships sailing across the Aegean to wreak havoc upon Troy. Nor are the Trojans mainly massing around their city. Yeah, Troy was given some buffs so it's harder to conquer. But in general, factions act like in other TW games, moving armies where and when they want.

The individual factions have nice mechanics, but no more special than what Warhammer races have. Its diplomacy is slightly better and more complex than WH, but well short of Three Kingdoms, which is odd because alliances should actually mean something in this game. Then they introduced this administration mechanic, which is a simplified way of throwing penalties and some rewards at you for having a large empire.

Sure the game has some nice features. You have multiple resources to worry about, use and trade, since this was a time before minted coins. You have to keep the gods in mind, though I haven't really seen angry gods. If you favor a god, he/she will help you, if you ignore a god, you simply get nothing. I've not gone far enough to undergo a hunting quest for one of the big three beasts, but that looks like an interesting diversion from the usual. Magic usage and magical beasts are suitably harder to earn than in WH, though. It has a gorgeous map, though the settlement icons are nothing to gush over, and I think I still prefer the grittier look of the WH maps. But it's much better than the 3K map.

Battles haven't grabbed me. This being a time before mounted battle tactics, there is hardly any cavalry. Instead, the developers created classes for infantry: light, medium, heavy. Some units can switch weapons (or how they use their weapon, like a spear unit putting their shields on their backs and fighting two-handed), but I haven't discovered what effects that has. Light units move quicker, so are basically your cavalry, in the sense that you should use them for flanking maneuvers, and the others go in the frontline. Some additional terrain features like mud and tall grass add a bit of variety to the battlefield, but the game largely suffers like all its predecessors, in that armies simply don't ever fill the terrain, and thus can't quite use it effectively.

The characters are ok. Typical skillsets like in WH, but weirdly organized. If you play the historical mode your heroes are just good soldiers, and require bodyguards, which adds a nice feature to their skillset giving you the possibility to get better bodyguards. I'm thinking that CA has become too comfortable with framing a game around characters, rather than cultures/peoples/nations. Gone are the days when a random general became your most awesome character, simply because of how you ran your campaign.

I may keep playing, but I'm tempted to just go back to Warhammer II and wait for the 3rd one.

[Heartofice]

Is Troy reusing a lot of the mechanics from Warhammer anyway? That’s my impression. Every time I see a new feature in there it seems pretty simply to say that it comes from 3 Kingdoms or WH. 
 

I don’t get what these saga games even are, and that’s as someone who had the misfortune to pay for Britannia

[Werthead]

The Saga games, as far as I can tell, were a way of keeping the OG historical fans happy whilst the main series transitioned to a fantasy or "fantasised history" hybrid series. Thrones of Britannia seemed to sabotage that by not selling very well (and CA blaming the setting rather than the fact that the game, for example, was crap), so we're now seeing "fantasy creep" to the Saga games as well.

I suspect CA's new plan is to keep the history fans mollified by remasters of older games, since Rome Remastered apparently did well, and new mainline games will either be outright fantasy (they've been talking about following up Warhammer with Middle-earth or maybe a Witcher tie-in) or, at best, Three Kingdoms-style games with a nod towards history but retaining a focus on hero units with special abilities. A historically-focused Medieval III would now seem to be impossible. At best they might make one in which King Richard, Saladin, El Cid etc are powerful units who can wander around the map wiping out entire enemy armies by themselves, but the purely historical focus of the series is likely gone for good because the two Warhammer games sold so much more than the previous titles.

[Toth]

Sigh... I see that the series will never return the roots that intrigued me first... or at least adopt an engine that has proper unit collision again... -.-

[Corvinus85]

Well, it's not a Total War game if the AI doesn't abuse a feature. For Rome II - Warhammer II, it's been the forced march feature that was most abused by the AI. For Troy it's the barter system. The AI is quick to look at what resource you're low on for the turn, and offer you some bullshit trade. I keep refusing trade offers, because most of the time I'm simply low due to actually spending resources. Some of the AI factions are simply hoarders, like how in Rome II and Attila there are the tiny factions who park the bus with two full stack armies in their territory.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Well, it's not a Total War game if the AI doesn't abuse a feature. For Rome II - Warhammer II, it's been the forced march feature that was most abused by the AI. For Troy it's the barter system. The AI is quick to look at what resource you're low on for the turn, and offer you some bullshit trade. I keep refusing trade offers, because most of the time I'm simply low due to actually spending resources. Some of the AI factions are simply hoarders, like how in Rome II and Attila there are the tiny factions who park the bus with two full stack armies in their territory.

Ha. Rome Remastered, which retrofitted the Merchant mechanic from Medieval II, had the AI go absolutely batshit with that feature, to the point where by about Turn 20 every single resource has a Merchant parked on it and if you do a hostile takeover the AI gets really antsy and sends three or four Merchants to try to unseat you. It made me give up on using it (fortunately the merchant income is only a bonus, and you get much more money by simply splattering everyone and conquering and razing cities).

[Corvinus85]

On 9/7/2021 at 3:03 PM, Werthead said:

The Saga games, as far as I can tell, were a way of keeping the OG historical fans happy whilst the main series transitioned to a fantasy or "fantasised history" hybrid series. Thrones of Britannia seemed to sabotage that by not selling very well (and CA blaming the setting rather than the fact that the game, for example, was crap), so we're now seeing "fantasy creep" to the Saga games as well.

I suspect CA's new plan is to keep the history fans mollified by remasters of older games, since Rome Remastered apparently did well, and new mainline games will either be outright fantasy (they've been talking about following up Warhammer with Middle-earth or maybe a Witcher tie-in) or, at best, Three Kingdoms-style games with a nod towards history but retaining a focus on hero units with special abilities. A historically-focused Medieval III would now seem to be impossible. At best they might make one in which King Richard, Saladin, El Cid etc are powerful units who can wander around the map wiping out entire enemy armies by themselves, but the purely historical focus of the series is likely gone for good because the two Warhammer games sold so much more than the previous titles.

I'm not sure CA is ready to give up the Warhammer cash cow yet. They seem to have developed a good working relationship with Games Workshop, so it's possible they'll continue on with Age of Sigmar, and who knows maybe even 40K.

I don't know how much the license would cost them for a Middle-earth or Witcher game.

There is no believable or sensible way in which they can have superhuman generals in the high/late medieval age. At most they could do an Arthurian or Norse mythology game, but those are well-tread grounds, and the fandom may just revolt.

They will do another Three Kingdoms game that is even closer to the Romance novel and possibly Chinese mythology than the current title.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

I'm not sure CA is ready to give up the Warhammer cash cow yet. They seem to have developed a good working relationship with Games Workshop, so it's possible they'll continue on with Age of Sigmar, and who knows maybe even 40K.

Frontier got the Age of Sigmar licence and they're developing their own RTS based on the property. That may not rule out a later Age of Sigmar: Total War, but I think makes it less likely in the near future.

40K with the current Total War paradigm I think is unworkable, but who knows?

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I don't know how much the license would cost them for a Middle-earth or Witcher game.

CDPR still own the video game licence for the Witcher franchise, so they'd have to negotiate with CDPR as co-producers on the game (even in name only), which could get too complicated to make it worthwhile. It also depends if the original contract with Sapkowski was exclusive. Given how little money exchanged hands, it might not have been, and they can get another licence.

Middle-earth I think is doable - look at all the other Middle-earth games flying around recently - but it depends on what money Tolkien Enterprises charges, and whether WB Games still has a stake that they'd have to work around, or if they'd have to deal with Amazon.

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There is no believable or sensible way in which they can have superhuman generals in the high/late medieval age. At most they could do an Arthurian or Norse mythology game, but those are well-tread grounds, and the fandom may just revolt.

I mean, based on Three Kingdoms, it looks like the sales they gain from going more fantastical massively outweigh the small number of sales they lose from OG historical fans losing interest and checking out of the series.

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I mean, based on Three Kingdoms, it looks like the sales they gain from going more fantastical massively outweigh the small number of sales they lose from OG historical fans losing interest and checking out of the series.

Yes, my point is that for the Three Kingdoms they have the fantastical Romance novel. With Troy it also works because they draw from the Homeric writings. What do they have for the European middle ages other than what I mentioned before? Turn Vlad Tepes into an actual vampire?

So like you said, it's more likely Medieval III will never happen, they'll appease the historical crowd with remasters, and they'll carry with drawing from existing IP where it's fine to include fantasy elements. 

[Heartofice]

I think this is all unfortunately correct. Even given the unprofitable nature of the history games ( which is debatable given that they seemed to do well at the time.. just not Warhammer levels), I always got the sense that those were a thankless task for the devs.

I used to browse the old TW forums back in the day looking for tips on playing the games and the boards were absolutely poisonous. The hate towards the devs for even tiny historical accuracy was bizarre. People took it very seriously. I wouldn’t blame any dev for wanting to stay well away from that.

It would be a shame, because what I would like is a game that felt more like an ancient battle simulator and less like an arcade game that I need to be constantly clicking around in

[The Anti-Targ]

I've only played the Warhammer series, and only campaigns. I do like watching multiplayer battles on Youtube, but I have not been able to play through many battles in campaign without pausing a decent number of times, so multiplayer is not for me.

A problem with campaigns I have is that once the stop being a challenge they get boring, so I found it hard to push through to the end of campaigns for all but a handful of campaigns. Some of the campaigns for DLC legendary lords are better since they are designed to be much shorter in duration than the main game campaigns. I finished both Thorek Ironbrow and Oxyotl no sweat. I managed to finish a couple of Orc Campaigns, though interestingly not Gromm the Paunch. The faction I find the least interesting to play are Tomb Kings, though I want to like playing them.

[Heartofice]

The problem with Warhammer, and probably a lot of total war games, is that the basic mechanic is still the same, no matter all the little bells and whistles they add to make it more interesting.

Essentially the game is, press buttons on the campaign map to upgrade your stuff so that you can have more battles, win those battles and upgrade more stuff. It’s not really very much more complex than that. I thought about it the other day after playing a few different factions. I’m still just doing the same thing over and over again. 

[Werthead]

The historical games sold well, but looking at the Noclip documentary and various interviews over the years, it looks like Creative Assembly expanded and upgraded the team after every shift upwards in sales, which means they can't now take the hit of investing a lot of time into a mainline Total War game (one that takes 2-4 years) that is going to have a substantial drop-off in sales. If you accept the Warhammer jump in sales was from the name and the fantasy aspect, and Three Kingdoms from both the fantasy aspect and the popularity in the Chinese market, then it makes the prospect of making another pure historical game rather dicey for them.

I also think the main problem that have now is the AI, which they just can't seem to get a handle on. They dropped complex elements like full-bodied sieges and naval battles because the AI just couldn't hack them, and those are elements people will want to see upgraded in, say, a Medieval III. I think they've snookered themselves a bit on what to do next, which is why I think they launched the Saga line, as it's a line of smaller, cheaper games they can develop in 12-18 months and experiment in, and they don't lose out so much if sales are not great.

I think they also really need a new engine (Warscape has been nicely upgradeable but after twelve years it's definitely creaking a lot), maybe with a larger sense of scale to it. I always thought it weird that, although Warscape is undeniably prettier than the Rome I engine, it's in many respects much less sophisticated, particularly in how each cell of the campaign map could auto-generate a completely different battle map (with a geographically correct view of all the surrounding cells) which Warscape can't do for some reason.

[Corvinus85]

Warhammer III is being pushed to early 2022. Not all surprising, given how little it had been revealed so far, and how the devs had been saying they're still working on numerous features. 

However, tomorrow we'll get our first look at Grand Cathay. Much speculation here, since even the lore is thin, though GW and CA have been working together to develop this faction.

[Toth]

So, in anticipation of Warhammer 3 that I won't buy anyway until it's at bargain bin price... I returned to Warhammer 2 and actually finished my Teclis campaign over the course of last week.

Honestly, I haven't that much to tell. Since the campaign was already almost finished, it was quite the smooth sailing. I frustratingly lost one army to the very last Skaven invasion spawn dropping right on top of it... and in the process lost an immortal general because it turns out you can't recruit those again when you have gained them through confederation and you don't have a tab for their type of lord. Actually, why Teclis can't recruit the super useful mage lords is beyond me, isn't he the freaking chief wizard?

Anyway, the state of the world in the end was quite elven heavy. I conquered Almost all of Lustria, defeating Hexoatl, with just the Spine of Sotek dwarves and the Huntsman's expedition existing as allies. Teclis kept pushing north and I just a couple turns before the final mission conquered Naggarond. Malekith is still around with a sizeable territory, especially since he made a push south taking some land from the Tomb King exiles, but all in all I'm thinking this broke his neck as now the ludicrously strong Skaven also pushing from the north, which is quite frustrating since I can't go anywhere now without triggering an ambush. Amusingly, Tyrion also recently landed in Naggaroth to join the tumble.

Ulthuan is fine, just the occasional raiders show up, but I refrained from confederating most of the factions because I didn't want to bother too much whacking raiders.

Then comes my dragon-less dragon prince Imrik fighting Queek. Frustratingly I'm stuck. Queek sent a plague priest infecting half my cities, so Imrik tried to stay outside, but somehow Queek got himself infected, attacked Imrik, who smashed his army, but was then forever stuck with extreme attrition while Queek threw ever more full armies at him. Had to retreat and block the path with a fresh army. I'm stupefied how strong Queek still is despite being down to three cities or so, what with Malus Darkblade also making a push from the south on him.

Anyway, the last battle was quite fun with infinite arrows, infinite magic, and the rapid cooldown vortex blasts. Quite amusing that my army still consisted mostly of shield-less Lothern Seaguard for this. These guys are just too good throughout the game, so I never lost and had to replace them.

I wonder what I should go for next up. Throughout the 11 months that this campaign took me I also bought Warhammer I and the Tomb Kings DLC in sales. So... I somewhat want to see Mortal Empires and start in the Old World, but also really like the look of the Tomb Kings. But I'm lazy and want to sit on my ass shooting stuff, so I will probably go for the dwarves.

[Heartofice]

So far haven’t been blown away by anything I’ve seen for Warhammer 3. Cathay is a deeply uninteresting faction so far, feels like a realigned version of other factions.

I am happy to see that sieges are getting a proper rework, CA have listened to the criticisms of the community and are hopefully making sieges just a little bit fun. I’ve been playing WH2 a bit recently and when you realise how limited the siege maps are, how it makes no sense to try and man the walls in most cases, how few unit types are viable for sieges, it makes it almost unplayable.

What does look exciting however is some of the Tzeench mechanics. Being able to create chaos by just flipping cities to another faction is very Tzeenchy and fun. 
 

@Toth I’d say as a next campaign I’d go with a faction with some very different mechanics to mix it up a bit. If you have any of DLCs then maybe a Beastmen play through is interesting because it’s just so different. There is also a ton of variety now in the Skaven factions which makes them a lot more fun to play.

I love the sandbox nature of the ME map, but it’s weakness is the lack of direction, no cinematics, and the victory conditions even on short campaigns seem overwhelming at times 

[Corvinus85]

I am most excited about Grand Cathay out of all the reveals so far. The Ivory Road mechanic appears interesting, and I always prefer a range unit heavy roster. Plus their main lords are literal dragons. Come on!!!

I doubt I'll be playing much Chaos, but the Tzeench mechanics do look fun, too. Kislev's mechanics just got released on their blog. If you've played Troy, one of Kislev's mechanics is heavily drawn from the Hector/Paris rivalry mechanic to gain Priam's favor. One interesting mechanic for Kislev is that you have to send any of the Ice magic wielding characters you wish to recruit to train at the Ice Court.

Yes, the siege rework shows some promise. We'll see how it actually holds up.

I've been doing some Warhammer II playthroughs too. I've been playing with Taurox the Brass Bull. The Beastmen rework definitely improved them, but ultimately I still don't like them. They're all about wiping out everything. It gets boring fast. I like to build and slowly develop.

[Toth]

Okay, I went with the Dawi and started a Thorgrim Grudgebearer campaign. Aaaand... truth be told, I'm on one hand very confident in how my army can handle absolutely everything, but it's been 24 turns and I barely managed to get a hold of more than my one starting province because of the stupidly relentless orc attacks from two opposite directions. When I tried to move north I lost all my smaller settlements except the capital to an army coming from the south. When I marched south, I lost all the settlements I claimed in the north. Meanwhile the very same orcs that attack me loose their own settlements to the other dwarf factions that they seem to utterly ignore while concentrating all their forces on me. Yay, I guess? But that also means that there is no way in hell I'm going to get them to confederate when I'm confined to my one puny province...

But hey, at least my walled settlements seem somewhat safe. Even a lvl 1 province capital is surprisingly hardy and can take down much larger orc forces.

[Heartofice]

The reason I don’t tend to play dwarves is because almost every ME campaign I do they all confederate early and there tends to be a massive blue blob on one side of the map. I think sometimes the game gets too big and it stops being fun

[Corvinus85]

40 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

The reason I don’t tend to play dwarves is because almost every ME campaign I do they all confederate early and there tends to be a massive blue blob on one side of the map. I think sometimes the game gets too big and it stops being fun

After the Greenskin rework, they got much tougher to break. Unless you start at Kharaz-a-Kharak and are aggressive, it's Grimgor who will likely turn into a massive blob that you have to contend with. He tends to quickly confederate other Greenskin factions.

54 minutes ago, Toth said:

Okay, I went with the Dawi and started a Thorgrim Grudgebearer campaign. Aaaand... truth be told, I'm on one hand very confident in how my army can handle absolutely everything, but it's been 24 turns and I barely managed to get a hold of more than my one starting province because of the stupidly relentless orc attacks from two opposite directions. When I tried to move north I lost all my smaller settlements except the capital to an army coming from the south. When I marched south, I lost all the settlements I claimed in the north. Meanwhile the very same orcs that attack me loose their own settlements to the other dwarf factions that they seem to utterly ignore while concentrating all their forces on me. Yay, I guess? But that also means that there is no way in hell I'm going to get them to confederate when I'm confined to my one puny province...

But hey, at least my walled settlements seem somewhat safe. Even a lvl 1 province capital is surprisingly hardy and can take down much larger orc forces.

Yeah, it's a pain. Gotta use the underways, it's the only way, and ambush the shit of out them. Those stupid Greenskins will quickly attack a settlement they think is weak. I think Grombrindal would have been a better choice as starting lord at your location, as he is the better melee fighter and he can move better on the map. And you can get Thorgrim relatively early, too.