lol
>>2164193This is what you get when you don't fix the AI.Should've worked more on the AI instead of balancing stuff.
>>2164193>>2164216PS: That AI problem was in the background for some time and now it's a Mammoth in the Chieftain's Hall and no Norscan can't ignore it.
I truly don't understand how CA can be so incompetent like this.
>>2164193I legit thought they were going to hot fix the problem rather than wait 2 fucking months for the DLC update, if even then.CA is now operating on the Blizzard timescale.
>>2164539strategy gamers are goycattle who devour their slop and beg for more
>>2164193>fantasy paypigs not so though when getting left to rot
>>2164539Basically development has been getting steadily more bogged down over years and years of building on spaghetti code and doing whatever they cannot avoid needing to untangle it.This year, CA's main studio abandoned the game and dropped it into the lap of Sofia. Sofia has been developing on their own separate development branch which is cleaner and less fucked by technical debt for years, the last time they worked on the main branch was fixing Rome 2 all that time ago.So they were dumped back into the main branch with no external support or consulting and a shoestring budget and told to keep the corpse of WH3 warm until next year, when they can start shilling their next projects to replace it. And because those next projects are built on a new engine fork explicitly to pay off this mountain of technical debt, CA doesn't want to pay Sofia to duplicate effort fixing shit in WH3.So we reach this point. Sofia gets to work developing DLC and making patches and immediately steps on a spaghetti code landmine. They petition CA for separate funding and assistance to unfuck the fucked code in parallel with their DLC development and CA says "no, we can't spare the duplication of effort while we work on these other lifeline projects" so Sofia is forced to pull people off of content development and split the budget to work on bugfixing, leaving both teams understaffed and underesourced, working with unfamiliar code and tools and with no help or consulting from the people that have been working on this codebase for a decade.To illustrate just how challenging of an environment this is, apparently what broke the AI code was basic frontend changes to UI and stat numbers, because the AI code being used in WH3 was actually written in Rome 2 and has been "updated" over the years not by editing the code directly but by adding layer upon layer of external references that essentially say "when this game/faction-specific value does something, run that part of the AI script"
Nobody cares about your eceleb drama, support CA and remember to preorder the Tides of Torment DLC.
>>2164193What happened this time?
>>2164694Retard either refresh or read before asking redundant questions. Here you go anyway >>2164685
>>2164694Nothing, some faggot eceleb retired and now his fanbase is having a meltie.
>>2164698>completely ignores the reason for the meltdown, in addition to CA's current shady business practices
>>2164700>WAAAAAH CA ISN'T GIVING ME CONTENT FAST ENOUGH, ME WANT FREE SHIT
>>2164703Has nothing to do with content, dumb nigger. It's about bugs.
>>2164703what a fucking retard
>>2164697I'm not surprised. Not that anything will come out of this, anyway, not while CA still has an army of paypigs to keep them afloat in spite of their yearly fuckups.
>>2164685that's cursed. i wonder if CA also tried to "make up" for the lack of resources with AI tools and completely underestimated the difficulty of unfucking legacy code because they thought AI would be of actual help. as a professional legacy code unfucker i can confidently say that AI will never be able to unfuck legacy code, but only add to the existing technical debt.
I like legend but he started this whole thing with >"ugggggh I hate doing this everyone is going to be so mean to me :(((( I just have to speak up I'm only saying what needs to be said I'm the real victim here I'm going to get so much hate for this!!!" but now that people are review bombing the game he's doing hour long gay response videos to some IRL basedjak and making fun of whatever skeleton crew is working on the issue for trying to communicate with the playerbase about what the problem is. Aptly skaven-like behavior, I suppose.I haven't played Warhammer 3 in a long while because I was waiting for the upcoming faction updates so if existing problems are fixed alongside that it's a big plus for me, but it's so lame how this cattle community will pretend nothing is wrong for months and months until their favorite youtuber calls them to action and then suddenly it's an unforgivable problem that they must demand a fix for it RIGHT NOW.
>>2166325It's a normal part of the youtuber cycle>onetrick for a game that you like>it's popular enough to get you views and ad money>slowly get burnt out being forced to play said game way more than you enjoy because of youtube's impossible output standards that are geared towards professional media companies and AIJeets>get further burnt out when the decline of said game or natural shifts in the algorithm crater your revenue>try out other games to see if you can grow your audience that way>it has the opposite effect, further cementing you as a one-trick pony in a dying franchise that hates you as much as you hate them>eventually shift to drama content out of desperationA lot of these youtubers get a big head thinking that their audience is at their beck and call only to wake up to the realization that they are trapped within a hyper-specific niche with a limited shelf life because people are watching for the franchise and not for their glowing personality. When the money tree withers, or the algorithm screws them they eventually just fall back on drama content because it's the last viable way to engage the audience of their niche.
>>2164685Rome 2 and its consequences have been a disaster for the Total War race.
>>2164218>That AI problem was in the background for some timeSince release. It's only barely been functional but the AI since release has struggled to actually build high tier units. I think they almost fixed it during one of the betas they did.>>2164685I do have to admire sofia. They clearly have a level of competence far beyond the main studio and are willing to admit everything is fucked.
>>2166455Fuck...CA really are either lazy, not giving a fuck or both.
>>2166456That should have been clear when they released shadows of change with about 6 units for 24,99 and the changeling didn't even have functional AI so just stands in place raiding forever.
>>2164216AI fixes were very popular, which is why they kept doing them, often the same ones.
>>2166455Sofia is great and it sucks that they are always forced to handle the worst projects, but Horsham might actually be one hundred percent incompetent, I have no doubt about it at this point.
>>2166455>I do have to admire sofiaThey really saved what was left of Rome 2 and Pharaoh iirc. They should own TW
>>2166739They made Pharaoh. I personally find it very funny that the studio that was being shit on a few years ago for releasing Pharaoh is suddenly being praised by the same retards desu but whatever they deserve the long overdue praise and I am vindicated.
>>2166759Pharaoh still wasn't very good thoughever, even disregarding the drama at the time. The game felt very cheap and small for a supposed main title.
>>2166769I disagree, it was pretty good and definitely much, much better than people made it seem at the time and even after they rushed content out to it was still shat on. But now Sofia is based because they're working on WH3 instead of Pharaoh o algo.
legend isn't going anywhere lol there's no way he'll ever get an actual job especially not in that shithole he lives in.
>>2167104>there's no way he'll ever get an actual jobHis bald spot is an hazard to everyone around him
>>2166769>The game felt very cheap and small for a supposed main title.Well yeah because it wasn't a main title it was a saga game which they priced as full title.Didn't help that bronze age was thematically close to the existing Troy and most history players were already obsessing over Med3.CA fumbled the entire launch and expectations but that wasn't the fault of Sofia.
>>2167104He talks about quitting all the time and he only ever made a serious attempt once and it was launching a valheim channel of all things which never took off and he crawled back to warhammer
>>2167109The game was also released after 3K but it's a different evolutionary pathways based on Troy based on wh2 design so it has none of its features and feels like a step back for a supposed "mainline" title.
>>2166446that shit started with empire(if not with rome 1)
>>2166769>>2166759couldn't pirate so never played itdid you folks of color played it?
fuckwrong name
>>2167122Depends if slavs are coloured or not. The game is not bad but sort of doesn't make sense in the lineup.
>>2167131yeah, i wasn't interested in the setting at all
>>2167131>Depends if slavs are coloured or notSnow melanin enriched unironically
>>2167131absolutely, bronze age it's a good setting for a civ or, in general, a economy oriented strategy game
>>2167102It's not their worst game (that's Empire) and it is definitely overhated, but it has a lot of issues.Sofia deserves credit for pushing out Dynasties for free amidst heavy criticism, even if it's buggy and unpolished, but the game itself is still not up to par after Three Kingdoms made it seem like the franchise was finally moving on from the perpetual Rome 2 clones.>>2167133I think it's more so that it felt dated before it was even out because it is not based off Three Kingdoms, it's a Warhammer/Rome 2 fork but without magic, janky formations and disjointed mechanics that feel like busywork. Also, the game was limited by only covering the Bronze Age collapse with a heavy focus on Egypt when it should have been more expansive, maybe even covering the Iron Age, especially when you consider that making a pre-Rome game for a community that largely doesn't know the first thing about pre-Roman antiquity is such a huge risk. If you're going to make a game in a niche setting you have to go all the way and really sell it or you won't find an audience.
>>2166769I thought they only made Pharaoh Dynasties. The dlc or expansion whatever
>>2164703Are CA fans actually worse than Paracucks?
>>2167153>finally moving on from the perpetual Rome 2 clone>it's a Warhammer/Rome 2 fork but without magicThis is the dealbreaker here. It came out 4 fucking years after 3K but it feels like it should have come out years before it.Troy already had that issue but they gave that shot fir free under the saga banner so everyone just wrote it off, but now they come with troy 2 and it's not that terrible game in a vacuum but you just can't pass off a game that's derived from a side projects that's like 5 yeas past it's due as a "mainline" game. I have no idea who allowed that to happen.I suppose that with 3K getting futured, plans for 3K2 quietly abandoned and whatever the next big project was going to be still years away at best they felt they have to do something in the meantime, but it's clear they can barely keep up with maintaining one game, much less work on 2 full titles at the same time.
>>2167280The Bulgarian studio did:>Rome 2 Emperor Edition and fixing the piece of shit up.>Co-development of SAGA Thrones of Britannia>SAGA Troy>Fixing and DLC of Warhammer 2 while CA worked on Warhammer 3.>totally-not-SAGA (winks at shareholders) Pharaoh>Pharaoh Dynasties after CA got in deep shit and let them a budget of 2! whole instant ramen cups a week.>Support of Warhammer 3 unfucking efforts
I know that it's easier said than done and that it's very difficult and expensive to do so.But at this point it needs to be said: make a new game engine, stop using the same engine from 2012 which has hoarded so much tech debt and "patches" to the point of being down right unusable for development and playing.
CA really is a godawful fucking company. they've been making essentially the same game for 20 years and even the most basic mechanics like moving a unit from A to B don't work half of the time
>>2167124Based shardpunk anon. Who's your fav character and automaton?
>>2167338A completely new engine, like any new platform, is going to be terribly buggy and hardly usable in its first iteration.To make a modern graphics engine from scratch, they'd need some 5 years of work and then release the biggest pile of broken shit since Rome 2.Yes, assuming that a shitpile of a game wouldn't turn the upper cadres batshit who would force them to throw horribly shortsighted spaghetti at the codebase to "fix" it... it would end up working as a much better foundation to make further games on in about an 8-10 year horizon.But that's almost assuredly a fantasy and any such rewrite would end up the same way corporate rewrites do, with something just as fucked up as the codebase they tried to get rid of.It's why no one makes new engines today. Corporate development doesn't allow for good code. Vidya development above indie shit is all corporate-funded and corporate-ruled since about 2008 or so.No. The only realistic way forward is to Ship of Theseus shitty code bases into usably shitty codebases. But CA is clearly not doing that either.
>>2167346eh, I only played a little when it releasedIt was looking fine but didn't really hook me upit was kind of easy first roll and it bored medo it get better?
>>2167348its gonna get worse with vibe coding and shit
>>2167350It's kind of hard on hard, it was kicking my ass at first because the meta is to hurry up and use slash and burn tactics damage and stress be damned. The later areas can get really dangerous but a lot of your characters have rather insane crowd clearing potential like that insane gunslinger eho can only gain or lose stress from his own abilities. All in all, it's easy until something goes wrong
>>2167340Somebody say WARHAMMER 4?COME EMPTY YOUR WALLETS AGAIN
>>2167348Plenty of devs use inhouse engines that aren't complete fucking dumpster fires in their first iteration.All code will have bugs and be imperfect, but there's a big difference between "has some bugs" and "is basically unusable."The reason The warscape engine began as the steaming dumpster fire that it did is because CA was subsumed by SEGA and had to partner with AMD to get the engine made. It was borne out of necessity, because gamedev was transitioning to 64bit and that was beyond the capacity of most developers to do alone at the time. SEGA underestimated how much the whole project would cost and as a result Empire nearly bankrupt CA, the game was shat out kind of half-finished with a piece of a workable engine and CA just had to hit the ground running and build the rest themselves from project to project.Several developers went through a similar thing at the time. 64bit became something of a collapse for the pc dev industry. But the difference is that most of the companies who survived have since moved on from the half-baked engines they shat out a decade ago to avoid being rendered obsolete by microsoft. CA has not. By all accounts this isn't a "we couldn't" thing, but rather some very incompetent people, who have been named and smeared repeatedly by outgoing employees on glassdoor, failing so completely to understand the technical aspect of gamedev that they simply asked "why would we need that?" Not believing that paying off a decade of accumulated technical debt was worth the money, they insisted on sticking to this engine, even as the cost of developing new games on it ballooned due to all the legacy bugs and dysfunctional tools that have only gotten worse and tangled deeper and deeper with time.
>>2167511Starting from scratch is really tempting but It's probably better on work on tech debt on existing codebase, it's possible to really improve the engine without having to do it. Unfortunately game devs are absolute allergic to paying off tech debt. It's also something that requires you to know what you are doing while most companies would rather cycle out anyone too senior because they become too expensive and their work doesn't contribute to new DLC this quarter so you end up with franchises that are like 10 years out of date.Anyway I don't think TW strictly needs a brand new engine if we are keeping to formation fighting, but if there's a paradigm shift and they really are trying to make 40k work they will force them if the game is to make any sense.
>>2167153a bronze age+iron age tw actually sounds kinda cool
>>2167898There's enough bizarre shit and greatly varying units and styles during that time to make it really funJust don't try to make it realistic and have most your units poorly equipped dirty troops or go too fantasy to make it dynasty warriors.
>>2164193Damn, I haven't played total warhammer 2 in years, was thinking of grabbing this and the chaos dwarfs. What'd they fuck this time, anything I'd notice if it was my first campaign in a long time?
>>2167947They essentially did a three kingdoms and ditched the game
>>2167925playing as greece and going from mycenaean era with pikes and bronze plate armor into archaic era hoplites seems like kino of the highest order
TW:W3 was stillborn. CA have just been keeping the body warm and parade it around Weekend at Bernies style every now and then.
>>2164685>>2166296>checked CA financials>found 2021>revenue of 137M pounds>profit after tax 6.7M>fucking barely ~5%In the same year, Paradox had>114M pounds (from Swedish Krona, not adjusted for exchange rate variance)>and had a profit 19.5M>a rate of ~17%And that was actually shit year for them, because COVID kicked their ass. Where the fuck did CA's resources go? Are they employing too many devs?
>>2168013>Are they employing too many devs?They JOINED THE PACK
We did it bros! TW is saved!
>>2168014Okay, I see Hyenas was a cancelled FPS? Why are people upset? Is it the Warhammer players?
>>2168020Not only did Warhammer 3 release in a terrible state (when Warhammer 2 was in a pretty good place) but support for W3 was put on the back-burner in the wake of Hyenas (people assume they are working on their new super-project, Total War: 40k). CA have been consistently inconsistent with providing meaningful updates and bugfixes and only do so when the community loudly complains (like in 2023). There hasn't been a piece of DLC released since December last year (and that DLC was shit and I didn't buy it) and they keep delaying this latest one over and over again and the game remains in a broken state and people are sick of it. As mentioned previously the head CA office dumped support for W3 off to the Sophia studio but they are left to clean up a mess made by others while also produce new DLC to keep the money rolling in until CA can launch pre-orders for their next proper game.
>>2167993Well did they abruptly cancel map expansion and new factions plans in a video titled "future of GAME" where the future was in fact ending support in favour of a sequel that hasn't even entered production and never will?If they just quietly dropped it, it would have been one thing, support for games just ends, but they had to slap your face while at it.
>>2168020They've banked shit ton of money on that and diverted dev resources, time and people. Only to get 0 public interest and mostly negative feedback in return. People think TWW3 suffered poor launch and support because of that. They've been scrambling to get back on track ever since. This is especially annoying since Warhammer 2 basically made the studio at that point, yet they decided to waste time on random bs instead of going all in on W3.
>>2168020Pretty sure Hyenas was >100 million put into a product which never had any hope of making profit.There is a reason why Sega killed it and put restrictions on CA's autonomy afterwards.
>>2168026>>2168023>>2168027Okay, so Paradox Dev simultaneously updates and maintains 4 (soon to be 5) games, which, I believe, stretches them rather thin. But it keeps the lights on.What's CA strategy? No DLC in ten months? How many games are they working on?
>>2168030Nobody knows, there have been no announcements but of course they keep hinting at a BIIIIIG one, for real guys trust us!!
>>2168032Wait, so all of your DLC heavy games are "finished"?
>>2168033I've been expecting them to pull the plug on Warhammer 3 for a year now.
>>2168030>Paradox Dev simultaneously updates and maintains 4 (soon to be 5) gamesYeah and CA can barely maintain one game, they are that mismanaged.At this point they're expected to pull the plug on games before they are properly fixed and feature complete. Look at Medieval 2, Empire, Atilla, Three Kingdoms and Pharaoh.
>>2164685sega needs to DIE
>Pour 135 million and 6 years in to a literal tranny zoomer shooter>People thinks it's so shit that you cancel it a week before releaseI still laugh about it to this dayhhaahahahahahahahahaha
>>2168068and they're doing it againit's pretty obvious that they're working on a big project behind the scenes, they've given warhammer 3, their main and pretty much only money printer currently, to a secondary studio with far less resources and experience with the assignment of keeping the corpse worm basically until the announcement of their next big title, I hope it's at least a total war game
>>2168077>I hope it's at least a total war gameI don't care at this point.There is absolutely no way they can make anything decent ever again. They're gone too deep.
>>2168068>you will never play as antro space hyenas fighting corrupted space lions and their goons(space gorillas, space buffaloes, space giraffes etc)it hurt
>>2168077My expectations are at an all time low, I'm more curious at how badly the announcement is going to disappoint everyone. Even if it's Medieval 3/Empire 2, they haven't made a good Total War game in years and there's no way it will please anyone but the dumbest fans. The closest they got to making a truly good game since Shogun 2 was Three Kingdoms and even then it still had its flaws with the combat, not to mention that they abandoned that shit before delivering on their promises.
>>2168091i fear that a huge percentage of their audience now is made up of warhammer fans with no interest in any sort of historical setting or realism in battles
>>2168088>Slopper has shit taste Many such cases!
>>2168096it was joke anonthe game was never about anthrosinstead you get characters that looks like they were made by /pol/ shitposters
>>2168094Fantasy fans have proven time and again that they're happy to pay for anything. Shit, this thread exists because their biggest e-celeb just quit playing Total War out of frustration with CA and its fans. 40K/WH4 will sell even if it's a buggy mess at launch like WH3, its retarded audience will complain on Reddit and reviewbomb the game and then go right back to opening their wallets after CA issues their yearly apology letter.
>>2168068I wanted that shit to be released. It was a real bummer they didn't release the game and watch CA receive the fruits of their labor.
>>2168106If there is another Warhammer game my bets on an Age of Sigmar versionGotta sell that plastic smack
>>2168032>>2168077It's not much hinting as they as they outright said they are going to announce a new game by the end of a year, though that announcement of an announcement was buried at the end of some random blogpost.Pretty sure it said it's a TW game.I expect that they are going to announce it at the end of their 25year anniversary they've been dragging out with the weekly retrospectives and shit.
>>2168232>Pretty sure it said it's a TW gameHopefully is not another Wah-hamma. I don't play fantasy but I heard there was some drama recently
>>2168235Yeah primarily due to the technical debt of the game.There is the real possibility that any new TW game inherits the debt though.
>>2168235From what I gather, they broke the AI a while back, at first it was only affecting some factions so it was possible to miss it or blame them dying early in campaigns on something else but with subsequent updates it started to show up in more and more of them and now most are lobotomized and just stay passive because they can't recruit any units.What is going to be the next big game nobody knows. They've been working on it for a while now presumably. Some people think it's 40k but that would require a pretty big shift to make it work so maybe that's what taking the time.
>>2168258It's always been broken, maybe from before WH1. The basic problem is that the AI is coded to make assumptions about what it can and can't recruit. When it tries to recruit something that it can't actually recruit, recruitment breaks and it doesn't recruit anything at all. When it can't build the armies it wants, it doesn't move those armies and just sits them turn after turn trying and failing to recruit.This bug has affected AI factions in some way shape or form since WH1 at least but because alternate recruitment methods have grown over time the number of AI factions affected has grown to the point where it's no longer just some hidden issue causing a few undiscovered factions to die off early in the fog of war and has become something that regularly breaks entire regions of the map. The recent rework for liggers and kangz brought the bug to all of their factions, which is what finally made it visible enough for people to realize what was going on.Initially, CA was radio silent about the bug. Then they implied they were going to wait for the next DLC launch to fix it. Only after a big uproar did they finally address it publicly and commit to a hotfix.
>>2168276>Only after a big uproar did they finally address it publicly and commit to a hotfix.I still think that it helped communication that Sofia is now at the helm.Pretty sure Horsham wouldn't have laid out what the issue is.
>>2168247>>2168258Damn that's terrible. Main CA is getting worse by the year.
>>2168298Kind of yes, doesn't help that these are issues that accumulate and in turn aren't easily fixed.Waham is just a pretty bad example because instead of simply using an, iterative, version of the previous engine it literally is the same game since 1.They grafted updates and changes onto it but at its core it's still a game from 1 decade ago.
>>2168307I see. I thought they were trying to improve things at least in the fantasy titles, but it seems they don't give two fucks about their product. It is unfortunate since they have no true competition in the market.
>>2168362But also no real profit, if they tried to do an FPS shooter. Is it really only Total Warhammer that has several hundred dollars of DLC?There's a reason Paradox gouges us with DLC, and why there is no competition - this is a niche hobby, and there's barely any profit here. If you want quality, you have to pay for it.
>>2168546Actually, ironically, Paradox also tried going Reformist. They got a new CEO in 2018. This resulted in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which went into development hell. A new studio in California, making Life by You, which was cancelled, and studio shuttered. City Skylines 2, which was rushed. And Empire of Sin... was just okay, and flopped.She resigned in 2021 over creative differences. Perestroika at Paradox has been cancelled. The hardliners are back in control.
>>2168579That was a period when they tried to become big boy publisher or something. Outside of the already mentioned in that period they also bought prison architect way past it's prime to do a couple shit DLCs and a sequel cancelled/in dev hell, paid shitload of money for Harebrained Schemes only to not do anything with BattleTech and dropping the studio after their next game bombed.Most of it seems to have been dropped or cancelled and they seem to just focus on maximizing margins by putting the absolute least amount of effort they can get away with into the DLCs and games being maintained by skeleton crews of like 1 fag and 2 interns per game.
>>2168607They also published Magicka, Age of Wonders games, Penumbra, and the first Cities: Skylines, which is what made people butthurt about the sequel, and a couple of Obsidian games.It's just... okay. Trying to be a big boy publisher would require taking risks that could kill the company, if they don't pay off.
>>2168977I think ca's case is much worse, paradox still kept their focus on their main grand strategy titles and if they diverted large amounts of resources it was for eu5 and dlcs for their main gs games, the diversification was left to smaller secondary studios with less resources, so when it mostly failed (with a few exceptions like AOW) it wasn't such a massive blow to paradox. They were way more cautiousCA half abandoned their total war games and invested the most amount of money they've ever invested in something completely different
>>2168977Out of more famous ones you didn't mention they also published Mount&Blade. PDX has been a publisher for a long time and they've had some good games come out of it. A lot of those were before the main rapid expansion period of like 2015-2020 when they bought up or bunch of other different games, organized their own convention. Now that one was weird, remember PDXCon being a thing, I actually went to 2 of those, but a fairly niche company doing in person events is a bit ???, what were they thinking.I'd say that period largely didn't pay off. They used the early 10s CK2 and EU4 money to build up but a lot of those projects stalled or they just failed to do anything with them. Even their in-house development has trouble following up the "golden age" of PDX.
>>2168097Hello Anon, I am writing you in regards to our last exchange of posts. I wish to elaborate on my writings: when I called your taste "shit" I was referring to your desire for an anthro hyena game, not what hyenas actually was.Apologies for the confusion.Kind regards,Anon.P.S.If the joke was about spreading misinformation on what hyenas was then I have missed that joke and I must look quite foolish in your eyes. Please refrain from any mocking reply if that's the case, I am very insecure.P.P.S.Female hyenas have pseudo penises. Make of that information what you will.
>>2169362eh, no harm done but you should chill out
>>2168546Well, I think most of us don't mind paying for quality, but CA's stuff has been subpar for quite some time now, rightthis is pathetic I know but I like unit skin packs
>>2167313>Sofia CA singlehandedly keeping the franchise a float while the Brits seem determined to run it into the groundMaybe not all Bulgarians need to blinded.
>>2169643Sofia is a bit depressing.They have proven to be quite capable but always get saddled withAt the same time they are too small and/or inexperienced with making their own product from the ground up.Pharaoh had some great attempts at shaking up the mechanics but it was rough early on.
>>2169678Pharaoh was also given the budget and turnover of a saga title but marketed as a mainline installment for the sake of pricing, it was never going to meet expectations.
>>2169725I wouldn't say that's the real reason it doesn't meet expectations.The mistake many people make about TW as a franchise is they assume it is just really big battles and then a campaign layer. This isn't entirely true. If it were then you'd see things like Civil War TW and the like, which we don't because it's more complicated than that. You need things like a setting that's a free for all, epic units like elephants or cannons in order to generate late game interest and variety, and you also need elements of grand strategy like pop mechanics or technological change.TW's failure has been the abandonment of these core features, and the insistence that if CA just puts out a really cool trailer then enough interest will be generated for it to be profitable. The marketing department has run the franchise and the company into the ground.
>>2169736>late game interest >pop mechanics or technological change.Most of the most successful TWs are those which extensively cover a period of time to showcase the technological and tactical changes that occur over time. See Medieval 2 going from the high middle ages into the Renaissance and the colonisation of the Americas, Shogun 2 going from gunpowderless feudal Japan into full on pike and shot, or FOTS with the conflict between traditionalists and 19th century industrialization. Even Empire, despite being objectively a bad game, has enough of an element of change going on to earn a cult following.A game that only covers a tiny fraction of time where no technological revolution takes place doesn't hit the same. Instead of just the collapse, Pharaoh needed to cover the whole late bronze age+the iron age to hit the same notes as those games.>>2169678Sofia probably gets too much credit. They are better than Horsham insofar as they have the ability to fix their mess, but when they're given the reins to make a game from the ground up it always results in failure. We could argue that this is not entirely their fault, though.
>>2167153Super excited for the Rise of Empires Shogun 2 mod.It'll be nice to have a thought out campaign, a little less leftie horseshit/historical political illiteracy/period technology illiteracy, and a map that doesn't make Europe the size of Malta in comparison to titanic continents for everywhere else. 1 city France lmfao, not 1 province, just Paris. 1 turn from there moves you to Poland. Utterly outrageous.
>>2168182Storm of Chaos will always be the true timeline, they can fuck themselves if they do that. Absolute Star Wars-tier joke of a retconGW were and are scum
>>2169831Japan continued to be a backwater ricehole, until the late 1800s. The cutting off of Europeans led them to just mixing matchlocks into their katana and naginata one-on-one memefights.TW's historical commentary is usually horseshit. Always, actually. All the games have huge problems, but Shogun's really get to me because Stephen Turnbull is such an obnoxious weaboo ("katana steel folded 1000 times" unironically shows up)
>>2169831>>2170366Meaning, it wasn't any kind of military science/pike and shot at all.Their 2 story "bune" floating shacks getting blown the fuck out in scores by a single lightly armed (20 cannons) Portuguese carrack ("the Black Ship" unit) is always hilarious though, and exactly what would have happened
>>2170366>The cutting off of Europeans led them to just mixing matchlocks into their katana and naginata one-on-one memefights.They didn't cut off contact with Europe (except the Dutch) until the period ended, and they had moved on from that ritualistic warrior culture when firearms were introduced and Nobunaga pushed everyone's shit in. It wasn't a 1:1 copy of European 16th century warfare, but armies had gotten too big and organized for muh honorable samurai battles to be anything but a retarded idea.>TW's historical commentary is usually horseshitTrue, everyone knows that, the point is that for the gameplay to be interesting, the source material needs to be evocative. But, strictly speaking, Shogun 2 (FOTS included) is among the least accurate historical TWs.
>>2170443I think we agree.It always gets me, reading Roman and Chinese/Japanese self-written histories, the absurdly inflated numbers they come up with for men involved.
>>2164193*Sigh*What did they do this time?
>>2170443>they had moved on from that ritualistic warrior culture when firearms were introducedNope they didn't bother with that nonsense even years before shogun takes place, even during the Kamakura period it wasn't a thing.
>>2170443*and Turnbull's garbo is cited as the #1 source (I suspect sole source) for the in-game "encyclopedia". It's abysmal, but here and there offers interesting insight into things like the Kinza mint.
>>2170443I think all the gunpowder based Total Wars are a huge waste of potential. The army sizes and tactics are not well represented in any of those games because we're still using principles and design set by RTW(or technically and ironically, Shogun 1), and trying to use period tactics fundamentally doesn't work. Shogun 2 in particular suffers the most because warfare in that period was very unique and the game doesn't come close to replicating it.
>>2170450People decided to chimp out about the "AI Lobotomy" bug that was in the game for years. First minor WoC factions in the north, then VC in the center of the Old World, but for some reason Lizards and big hat Skellies were the last straw. To be fair, CA said they fixed the bug in the latest hotfix but they actually didn't. People for some reason claim it got worse, but it can't be true since nothing fucking changed. We should be seeing a second hotfix this week, with a sole purpose to at least try to fix over 200 cases of broken recruitment behavior.Some people also bashing them for the greed, it would be fair if CA actually could at least try to consistently launch some paid content.
What's wrong with Turnbull? Every time he's mentioned on 4chan people seem to despise him. All I know is that katanas weren't used as much on the battlefield as they are in Shogun 2.
>>2170768Virtually every entry in the encyclopedia is brimming with weaboo-ism about the samurai, especially about the katana, some claim that the spirit of bushido motivated all Japanese soldiers in the 1940s, just go and start reading it, it's all online. "Shogun 2 wiki", the Description sections, he's just nakedly wrong or hyperbolic about most stuff.Empire/Napoleon is the same, though not by him, and comes off strangely disparaging. I'm complaining about it across TW games.
>>2170768The bottom line is that you shouldn't trust the TW Encyclopedia, as most information shown is outdated, biased or straight up wrong.
