>the cancer that killed total war
Total War has been a corpse paraded by a procession of increasingly insane and degenerate "tech talent" for the better part of a decade. It was killed by patently insane business practices from a cabal of unhinged and out of touch management boomers who thought maintaining their development platform and expanding their tools were "bad investments" and kept chasing away everyone competent at the company by being petty and insecure.Shit games with shit DLCs is just a symptom of the problem, and the recent shit game with its recent shit DLC is no more or less shitty than the last several.Everyone cried when they released Pharaoh for full price despite it obviously being a Troy asset flip with Saga-tier content like this was the first time it happened because apparently Attila was so forgettable we all forgot that's exactly what it was.
>>2189320>Attila was so forgettable we all forgot that's exactly what it wasand what was it, exactly?I was late to the party and only played it post 2020
>>2189425Attila was being developed as a Rome 2 DLC. CA overestimated how successful R2 would be and had a whole production pipeline working on DLC before the game even launched, but the game launched as a broken dumpster fire that was barely playable. All the early DLC sold like shit because the game didn't work and players were outraged and the patches were trickling in slowly because the priority was clearly DLC-focused.So CA decides to quietly pull the plug, leave Rome 2 in a broken state and repurpose the DLC production into a standalone game, hoping for a 'clean slate.' They even had the gall to market Attila for including fixes to shit that was still broken in Rome 2.When the predictable happened and Attila flopped, CA was forced to go back and start patching Rome 2 again to try and rebuild the bridges it had burned, ironically abandoning Attila in the process. After a couple of years, players flocked back to CA's side cheering "They fixed it, it's good now" and fawned over them until they repeated the exact same mistake so many years later.
>>2189603Attila didn't flop and still has a decent player base. The same for Rome 2. CA has (to my knowledge), never released an unbroken game. CA has repackaged dogshit and released it for widespread and willing consumption. If anything killed, or is going to kill "total war", then it was warhammer and CA's business practices.
>>2189603So Attila is to Rome 2 what Napoleon was to Empire. Anyways the last good TW game was Shogun 2, never cared for the fantasy stuff
>>2189320It's funny how people praise Pharaoh after all those years, even though it and Troy were one of the most garbage games they released in the past years.Warhammer 3, while broken af, has a few novel concepts here and there, you can extract SOME fun out of it
The next new total war games announced in december 4th will be Medieval 3 and Lord of The Rings First Age.Mark my words.
>>2189745or star wars
>>2189715Attila didn't sell nearly as much as Rome II and Warhammer I, it flopped. People just gaslit each other into thinking it's good (plus mods, I guess) years later and developed a cult following around it. Same thing happened with Empire.Let's not forget that CA spread the most bold-faced lie of all time about the game's poor optimization, making sure it will always run like shit even with """"future hardware"""" and abandoned it in a buggy and unbalanced state in favour of the Warhammer trilogy and resuming development on Rome II with the B team. That's as clear a sign of a game flopping as you can get.>>2189731People praise Pharaoh for the same reason they praise Rome II:>IT GOT MORE LE CONTENT>IT GOT LE FIXEDWhich is only true to an extent. Yes those games are objectively bigger now compared to release, but they are still extremely bland and covered from head to toe with undercooked mechanics and bad design decisions.The community is just used to eating shit and WH3's success is the ultimate proof of that.
Good. Total War deserves to die.
>>2189772I still don't believe
>>2189745If it's not Medieval 3 or Empire 2 then they can kiss my ass. I'm not falling for another cheap asset flip, no more saga bullshit.
>>2189723Very much so
>>2189715Attila is genuinely good but this fact is basically incidental. It's the unloved bastard child of CA's messy years, when it thought too highly of itself and built up the shaky pedestal from which to fall from grace.Its existence is almost quintessential of CA's issues. There's talent and vision pouring from it, mechanics are well thought out and engaging, gameplay has a purpose, rosters are creative with clear intention and unit interactions and emergent strategies are largely intuitive. It's not impressive graphically but the art direction gives it a coherent look and style.But it was shat out on a compressed development cycle, hamstrung by technical issues incumbent to its overloaded and underloved engine, crippled by an AI that can't play its own game, with half of its factions excised mid-development and then sold back with pointless powercreepAND on top of all that, promptly abandoned while its latest DLC was still fresh and warm, left to rot with obvious and easily fixable bugs ranging from missing building slots to unit rosters breaking. The hard work of all the clearly talented and passionate developers being ultimately squandered in a product that's made to fail because someone above accountability deemed it so is pretty much exactly CA's problem. Only by the time of WH3 there was pretty much nobody with talent (or dignity) left to take the fall.
>>2189745Keep dreaming. It'll be either a revamp to shogun or wh4.
>>2189263>game dies 380000 times>still gets threadsStop digging up the corpse and getting mad when it stinks, retards.
>>2189603I am pretty sure Barbarian Invasion was a standalone expansion, but it's been too far back for me to remember and I can't find an answer - and the answer gets mucked with the remaster complicating things. I am going to call bullshit on Attila having been intended as a DLC though.>>2190143>half of its factions excised mid-developmentYou guys need to understand we will never, never, I mean NEVER, ever get a M2 where every faction is brought in on release. That is just never going to happen. It didn't in WH1, 2, 3, Troy, Pharaoh, 3k. To be frank even in Medieval 2 it happened because factions were samefags with nothing to distinguish them. Other complaints are valid, but>They didn't include the cut content and instead DLC'd itIs always going to happen. And to be frank it's an unrealistic prospect because if they added any DLC you would cry "Cut content" and if they didn't have any DLC you'd cry "Why no DLC?"
How optimistic we were after this dropped
>>2190182Alexander is the standalone expansion, not BI.Expansion packs are nice when they add to an already finished game, not when they're there to make some barebones piece of shit feel like it's finally starting to have some substance, like the WH trilogy. Only a braindead consoomer on reddit would complain about no DLC for a complete game.Granted with how bloated development costs are these days and how gaming at large has been enabling greedy practices for years, it's highly unlikely that we will ever get a finished game on release.
>>2189723>Anyways the last good TW game was Shogun 1fixed
>>2189263>best graphics>best gameplay>best faction variety>thriving mp>best seller>>Oy vey it's dead goys!Yeah, riiight. Keep shitting your pants doomzoom.
>>2190197That was gamey slop just like the test of wh
>>2190215Nobody cares about S1/M1 stop trying to make it a thing. This is terminal contrarianism.
>>2192689fuck off loser
>>2189723shogun 2 isnt even the last good total war, its literally the only good one. its the only total war ever where the core of the game actually feels like it works and the only one with competent AI. CA can only pull off a game with scope as small as S2, and even then its buggy and unfinished. i find it laughable when people say warhammer killed total war when rome 2 and literally everything made since exists. its tragic really, because im so tired of sengoku jidai, but no other total war and thus no other game on the market scratches that specific itch for me so im stuck in japan forever.
>>2190182>if they didn't have any DLC you'd cry "Why no DLC???????????????ive never ever ever had a thought like that tho? good complete full games dont need dlc. when elden ring got announced a dlc i was almost dreading it because the game is already so fucking massive, and so complete, that it really doesnt need more. you must be a mouth breathing consoomer to even think of that thought you just had
I got Pharaoh Dynasties for $7 and don't feel cheated but good god TW sucks now
>>2189320True. The writing was on the wall with the release state of Empire
>>2192833This is how I fell about Troy. Got it for free when they did that launch giveaway thing and I still feel like I wasted time on it.
>>2189263That would be Rome 2 and its abysmal release.Also: if a game reaches "3" in the title in a decade, it's many things, but failure is not one of them.
>>2189715>Attila didn't flopCool fanfiction>still has a decent player base... of a deluded fan, at thatDo I really need to remind you this game was hyped more than Rome 2, aka their peak overhyped garbage?
>>218974530 years war kino will arrive
>>2195454>30 Years War kino>Implying it would be anything more than Saga slop with 0 replayability buggy pikes and unsatisfying gunpowder
>>2192847It wasn't.Empire was overambitious and wanted to be a huge world map with three continents (or subcontinents as the case may be) worth of factions. It was undercooked and experimental in a lot of ways, like provinces having non-city towns that could be captured and fought over (which unfortunately meant stuff like one province France). There was a lot of hope with Empire, and some remedies were made in Shogun 2.But Rome 2 is where everything fell apart, the warscape engine truly showed itself to be unsalvageable, and CA decided that rather than fix various bugs (like the AI sending lone ship fleets to harass you) they'd just add new constraints to stop the AI from being retarded (all navies must have admirals, all armies must have generals).
Still the best
Not only does it have a great medieval campaignIt even has the best gunpowder TW experience
>>2195580>some remedies were made in Shogun 2A lot of the ambition was lost by the time we got to Shogun 2. The game still turned out good, and ultimately Empire is by far the worst game, but a lot of what made Empire so ambitious did not carry over to Shogun 2. It was a much smaller game, you couldn't even trade regions.>the warscape engine truly showed itself to be unsalvageablePinning the whole blame on the graphics engine is retarded. The sad truth is that CA's management did an extremely poor job with the franchise before Warhammer's incidental success, and a lot of the truly skilled designers have jumped ship over the years. Their engine being buggy and nearly impossible to work with is just a symptom of a larger issue, updating TW3.0 into TW4.0 or replacing Warscape now isn't magically going to make the games better.
>>2195598Warscape isn't a 'graphics engine', it handles everything such as projectiles and unit collisions. And criticizing CA for not fixing warscape after two games worth of complaints about but instead doubling down isn't 'blaming the engine', because engines can be fixed. CA cannot.
>>2189263The best one was first Medieval, way better than its shitty sequel that was saved by years of mods and patches.I wish there was a good remake of the first Med. That shit is so hard to run on modern hardware.
>>2195616dumb boomer
total war died after Medieval 2.
>>2195682M2 is by far the most overrated TW
>>2195616
>>2195616Unironically: Risk map is better than 3d map.
>dither with map modding on shogun 2>use it as an excuse to strip it from every game since>might have actually been a cover up for them losing the ability to give out an SDK at all due to licenses or some shit>>2195598Warscape is inherent to a lot of the complaints with these games. You zoom in on a fight and you'll see characters zipping into canned animations. You've got the rather well known Rome 2 videos where units will just stop fighting at a certain point.A lot of the melee "fixes" these games present was to use the simplest animation there which was a quick weapon jab. The most common thing people ask for is better melee combat in the older pre-warhammerslop games.At this point you'd need a new engine, something which would have been possible if CA didn't piss away literally all of their money on Hyenas, a game that bombed so bad SEGA was forced to restructure their Europe division and drop Relic.Unfortunately we're all doomed to [franchise]slop instead.
>>2197425People don't understand why mod making has been progressively stripped out, and it's because games are becoming increasingly reliant on third party shit as well as various in-house tricks to get basic shit working, so most games are 80% locked down and what you can do with them is limited. It's the same in the Civ series. We went from a mod golden age in IV to V where the best you could do was a custom anime civilization, with your waifu as the leader portrait.
>>2192732Modded NTW is pretty good. I like LME.
>>2195454I just want ONE historical title where I can play Poland at their golden age. It's almost as of CA is intentionally avoiding anything between 14th century to early 18th century specifically to piss me off.
>>2197506Really the only area that modding is cuckolded is the map. I think possibly audio. People forget the dark days of pre warscape with hardcoded limits for factions, units, ect. The problem is that the map is really the centerpiece of the experience, so being unable to edit the map instantly fucks you over for being able to do any kind of total conversion unless it's of the exact same geographic area. Lemme put it this way - with a map editable from the start for Attila we'd have had a LOTR mod in some kind of alpha status by 2020 at the latest, we'd have had a Westeros mod by 2018. With an editable map I'd be working on Hyboria total war for Pharaoh.
>>2192689i care about m1 but not s1i couldn't understand the economy in s1, got to a point where me and the one other remaining clan met up in the middle of japan and started stalking each other and shuffling our armies between provinces to get the jump on one another but i could never get enough money to support a large enough army to break through. shit was like the stalemate in 1984. i just gave up and left the campaign in that state
>>2189263Creative assembly already decided to shit the bed before they sold out to games workshop.Total war has been in decline since kingdoms.
>>2189745they're going to cave in to onions demand for 40k and it will flop because it makes 0 fucking sense for a TW game, and after it fails they will just say fans don't want TW anymore and close down
>>2212851it actually makes 100% sense for a TW game. Just every unit is gonna be some form of free company militia
an official Total War: Middle Earth game would print $billions
>>2203921The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is literally one of the major factions in Empire. Go LARP there.
>>2189263>>the cancer that killed total warI dropped Total War after Empire. Speak for yourself.
>>2213865nta but 18th century is hardly the golden age of Polanddon't you start off as russian puppet state in there or something like that?
Played wh3 as Cathay for a few dozen hoursRealized that I wasn't allowed to coalition with the green Lu Bu guy without buying his $8 or $9 DLCStopped playing wh3It seems like they make the game incomplete on purpose unless you buy all the DLCNot fun not cool
>>2214528Thats not even the gay part.Worst offender is you can't hire some of your faction's troops without DLC. It was one of the reasons why I looked into creamaping dlc.
>>2213849As long as they stick to the lore and keep anything Amazon-related away with a flamethrower.
>>2195616nigga it can run really well, watch this guidehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uR8WmkG1-I
>>2192847thisabsolute broken game which got overhyped by it's retarded fanbase
>histfags malding funny shit.
>>2195603>it handles everything such as projectiles and unit collisionsIt actually doesn't. And never did, either.Thanks for being a useful retard, who still blames everything on Warscape, which is the surface of the actual issue of how badly coded those games are.That doesn't mean that Warscape is good. It's simply not the real cause of the issues
>>2213917>don't you start off as russian puppet state in there or something like that?Which, unlike real historical situation, makes PLC SUPER secured and safe. You have a butt buddy to protect you, and not a foreigner power meddling in your affairs (and making sure a self-appointed king remains your ruler, too)By Empire internal logic, Polish situation couldn't be any better.
>>2189263>Legends proves they pivotedSo...CA really wanted an all cathay DLC?
>>2189745>MEE licensing the SilmarillionI'll believe it when I see it.
>>2213849Fuck I would love playing as any of the orc factions Given that they stick to the old Peter jackson style instead of the newer cartoony stuff (shadow of Mordor, yuck)
>>2213849I don't want a modern british company to touch LOTRmight as well ask for nigger porn
>>2223082But I like BBC porn
>>2223082Haradin exist.
>>2224402>harridan (noun)>an unpleasant woman, especially an older one, who is often angry and often tells other people what to doYeah they absolutely exist, and they'll poz up LotR if they touch it
I like it
>>2195593crazy how shogun 2 is the only post empire game that feels like it actually plays as intended.now go to something like WH3 or Troy and you can't shake off the feeling that the devs don't know how the game is even supposed to be played.
>>2223082>britishI sometimes wonder how many people in charge of those companies are in fact British
>>2243672>the only post empire game that feels like it actually plays as intended.Attila, performance issues aside, is probably the peak of TW game design. It's doubly frustrating because they made Attila so good and then immediately went on to make WH1 and ToB and haven't made a good game since.
>>2244067>The peak of TW is the abandonware that's good by accident and not because they had competent people at the helm
I fucking loved Rome and Medieval II, then never succeeded in getting into any of the subsequent games to that extent.
>>2244319>A systemically dysfunctional company produces it's best work entirely by accident and then immediately kills the golden goose Sounds about part for the course
>>2192689Ask me how I know you're a zoomershit younger than Rome 1
>>2244067>Attila>the peak of TW game designIt has all the cancerous elements introduced in Rome 2 (since it was originally a DLC for it)People wanking to that game are almost as insufferable as M2 crowd. Except M2 at least has good mods, and Atilla is just shit game, period.
>>2206959>economy in s1Build ports and mines always. Build farms only in rich provinces with high base farming income. You can switch to Christianity and build churches and cathedra for extra income. Build up watchtowers and keep shinobi and ninjas in border provinces for extra security.Build up few provinces with high tier dojos that produce high quality troops(preferable in iron rich provinces) , you can retrain units to get better stats.
>>2244067Nah. Its side grade of Rome 2. It have all shitty mechanics that make it no fun to play.tried to like it many times and failed each time.
>>2244067battles play exactly like rome 2its shit you coping nigger
>>2248655>It have allit have no bharat empire sar
>>2250327Its still is full of shitty mechanics you dumb mongrel.
just waiting for Strategos rn
>>2192689Shogun 1 was fun.
>>2197506>>2205822Eh, Total Warhammer's modding has been going pretty well. Still, CA are fucking cucks, afraid of GW getting pissy if some TC mods would get made. Furthermore, modders do incredibly amazing jobs (remember when they finally made 'sea' battles, only for CA to add that in patch few weeks later?), while the big company can't be bothered to add more than a couple of units or fix some really game-breaking bugs. Seriously, playing without community patch is retarded>>2197208Yeah, that old mapstyle was great.>>2217632Well, now I know what I'll be doing this weekend. Thanks bud
>>221383340k combat style absolutely does not work for Total War lmao. 40k isn't formation based combat and takes place over planets. Broken Arrow is far better a basis for a massive scale 40k game.
>>2214528Just use CreamAPI dude.
Still seething they fucked up the first major DLC and dropped 3K.Rot3K is still one of the goat strategy games in terms of management/life/diplomacy systems and something Total War really needed to learn from and the perfect setting to do it in they fucking drop despite by all accounts, TW3K sold more than Warhammer 3.
>>2192732There's a massive Empire/1700s mod being made in the Shogun 2 engine, forget the name, but it spans the Americas and then Britan all the way down to the Jeet hole. Looks amazing, it's called "Rise of Empires" on Steam.No, I'm not a bot, I know how this types.
>>2195580>subcontinent>Europe Is this some weird Jeet thing I'm not aware of? You're lucky we don't call the subcontinent "the shit and trash heap"
>>2257481Probably a russian as they teach eurasia as being one continent with europe just being a sub continent.
I only really like Rome and Medieval 2t b h (despite some issues like pathing)I tried some of the later ones (Shogun 2, Napoopan) and I don't think they were bad, but there's something missing from them, like the combat just didn't feel as visceral for whatever reason
Total War was pretty much dead since Empire. Medieval II was the last good Total War game.
>>2257510>Probably a russian as they teach eurasia as being one continent with europe just being a sub continent.Wrong. In school we're taught two separate concepts: continents (as geological regions) and the so-called 'parts of the world' (as historical regions). We're taught there are 6 continents (Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia & Oceania, Antarctica) and 6 parts of the world (Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia & Oceania, Antarctica). The only subcontinent we're taught about in school is the Indian subcontinent (since it's a separate continental plate that split off from Africa and drifted towards Asia forming the Himalayas upon impact).
>>2195580It was ambitious yes but it crashed that ambition straight into a cliff with its godawful execution. The engine change made all combat a shitty unsatisfying joke and has plagued the series ever since. The mod support was gone, the faction rosters were copy+paste jobs, the ship combat was sleep-inducing, etc.
>>2244067Attila's combat has floaty blobs clipping into each other. Anything else it does right pales in comparison to that fact given what a central role combat plays in the series.
>>2213849There's no way it would be as good as the mods that already exist.
>>2195698>Rated 16/10 when it is in fact a mere 11/10I guess you're not wrong
>>2190221This. Its "so dead" it single handedly revived Warhammer Fantasy table top, lol. Historical chuds are so cringe
>>2268503>giving a fuck about Warhammer in any way, shape or form in the Year of Our Lord 2025Imagine being this much of a faggot
>>2190221but what do they do now that warhammer is finished warhammer 1 remaster?
>>2268622warhammer 4
Obviously Rome 1 and Medieval 2 were awesome. I think the development in game mechanics peaked at Shogun 2. Most of the limitations of that game were baked into the setting, like lack of faction diversity and a very limited map. If they had just ported the Shogun 2 model basically as is to different times and places the series could have been amazing. Instead they instantly departed from it and started introducing retarded mechanics like all armies must have a general unit and basically getting rid of the awesome trade lines dynamic from Shogun. I dropped the series for a long time after Rome 2 but just tried the new Pharoah Dynasties. Some of the mechanics are OK, but the game is just so dumbed down and linear. The unit rosters suck because it's the fucking bronze age, they have straight up eliminated the concept of building harbors and fleets altogether (what the motherfuck??), there's no trade routes, no deep regional specializations like in Shogun. Now each regions just gets a tiny bump to some resource it produces. Compare that to the like 15 different specializations in Shogun from religious sites, to shipbuilding, to bow making, etc. When two opposing unit transports meet at sea they just go into a generic land battle between the two armies. I guess the game looks decent, but its so fucking lazily done too. All the generals literally look exactly the same, and not in the charming way of Shogun 2 where it's the same face but with unique characteristics. They're all the same fucking guy. The diplomacy doesn't show you a nice concise map of faction relations, it's all some vague bar graph. It's so crazy, like all this time later and almost every single gameplay dynamic that made Shogun 2 good has either been outright removed or sloppily dumbed down to the point of irrelevance. Like what the fuck have they even been developing over the last 15 years? Unit skins and a UI which is worse in every way? The battles are ok, but they aren't improved at all.
>>2269380To continue. I really think the Total War model of combining turn based and real time elements is pretty much the perfect strategy game format. But it just sucks that the sole company making games in that format has become so fucking trash. Being a Total War fan is like on par with Sonic the Hedgehog in terms of the low quality content you get to enjoy. Would be nice if a new company stepped up and took the format seriously again.
>>2189745The sad thing is even if they announce M3 you know they're going to completely fuck it up. And then there won't be anything left to squeeze out of the series.
>>2269388>Being a Total War fan is like on par with Sonic the HedgehogI always thought of CA as a less popular Bethesda; consistently releasing mediocre or outright bad games and staying afloat thanks to an unwaveringly loyal fanbase that is used to eating shit and conquering a unique niche in the market that has no real competition.
>>2257474>Shogun 2 mod>For doing line infantry armed with gunsThere is fucking FotS, which is a stand-alone game now for years. What sort of insane maniac takes a melee-centric, arrows-heavy, no-artillery game and grafts into it line infantry fire and artillery... rather than picking a game that ALREADY FUCKING HAS THOSE?!
>>2269743They HAD a competition and a lot of it. Things is, they were smart enough to sell out to SEGA first given chance and that allowed them sto simply outlast their competition with SEGA's money.
>>2270478The point is that now no one can (or is willing to) challenge their position, so they can get away with releasing low quality reskins of Rome II in perpetuity, with egregious DLC models and post-launch support.
>>2257481By 'subcontinent' I was directly referring to India. Europe, the Americas, and India.
