Napoleon: Total War Preview at IGN

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<p>IGN got an <a href="http://pc.ign.com/articles/105/1053026p1.html" target="_blank">early gander</a> at Creative Assembly's upcoming <strong><a href="http://www.totalwar.com/napoleon/?t=EnglishUSA" target="_blank">Napoleon: Total War</a></strong>.</p><blockquote><p>The campaign gameplay also reflects small but significant changes in the Total War experience. 'Game turns are down from six months to only two weeks. Napoleon changed the timescale of war. He campaigned against the Fourth Coalition for less than a year, which is two turns under our old system, so we've sped things up to account for that change of pace. It gets rid of that chessboard style of game and makes the campaign more dynamic.'
</p></blockquote><p>Spotted @ <a href="http://www.ign.com/">IGN</a></p>

 

I'm not sure why, but I thought journalistic incompetence was rather absent from articles on strategy games. IGN, always at the front, eager to go against the tide.

edit:

 

CA has lost all its credibility after the horrid launch of Empire, all the lies they made concerning its AI, moddability, support and mod tools and the fact that this 'new' game is nothing but a glorified expansion which they decided to release stand-alone for the money.

 

I don't know. Despite being a long-term fan of the Total War Series, this one didn't ring with me at all. Most off-putting were simply the long loading times and the general sluggishness for just about everything: Turn processing, battle loading, performance within battles, slow 'fast' walking speeds on campaign map, etc. And that on a quite good computer and including the 1.3 patch. A game should be a joy to play, but spending at least 3 minutes to even get into a game is no joy.

The second most off-putting is the screwed scale of things. Turns cover too much year, an army walks half of europe in one turn, a country consists of just one city. Meh. Much of the strategy back in the time was maneuvring your troops around before the battle even begins! If turn processing would be much quicker, we should have 10 turns for each turn that it has now, with accordinly short traveldistances of the armies. Maneuvring would be so much more fun then. Micromanagement would also go lower, because buildings decisions would now only have to be made every now and then, not several of them per turn. But it's too broken to be simply fixed with a few changes like these.

The long loading times are something that Witcher also suffered severely from. Just imagine how it would feel if bettle screens would take only 1 sec to load and turn processing as well.

So perhaps I will enjoy it on my new computer in the year 2015, with enough ram to fit the whole game into ram so that loading times drop to non-measurable amounts. But that wouldn't fix the scale problem. But perhaps some mods will by then.

 

By the way, the loading times of The Witcher wer DRASTICALLY reduced in 1.2. or 1.3; they're unobtrusive now (single core, 3 GBs of RAM here).

 

LOOK AT TEH GRAPHIX!!

 

The graphics outside of my window are still nicer. Can't even count the pixels. And AAF seems to be more then 64x! Xcept the bloom and HDR is a bit overdone during summer.

 

Couldn't have said it better myself. In the fuck-up that was ETW, CA blew their last chance to get me back as a customer (along with many other folks, it would seem). They've lied to me for the last time; no more.

 

i recently tried ETW again (my last save was from april..) to check out if patches finally improved the game but the opposite seems to be the case. plenty of new bugs that i didnt have before, AI seems to be worse than ever both in battle and on campaign map , what the fuck are those tards doing other than releasing slightly retextured new units that any modder could do in a weekend job ? speaking of modders, it seems the game is still the least accesible to mod from what you can gather on forums.... so no fixing from that side either.

such a shame, i actually like plenty of the new ideas over MTW2 .... but as it stands the game is barely playable with an utterly braindead AI, tons of broken gameplay elements and horrible performance (on the campaign map funnily enough - i can play battles almost maxed with no problems, but the retarded campaign map is utterly laggy, clunky and slow to the point it alone would be enough to make me stop playin, even if most other flaws were fixed.... )

cant believe anyone with half a brain would buy that napaloeon ripff after the ETW disaster.

btw, king arthur or armada 2526 ? i d love to play a good total war like, unfortunately CA doesnt provide them anymore. read both are rather bad at the combat, but which one s more interesting in the campaign mode ?

 

When you are mostly interested in a campaign I am not aware of another game. However, if the tactical side is your thing, there are quite a few, which offer (or promise to) tacticular combat that stands miles above TW.

Maybe one day I should turn this into a permanent list, "games that (attempt to) demonstrate what TW could have been".

TC2M and sequel (highly recommended):
http://www.madminutegames.com/
http://www.norbsoftware.com/Portal/index.php

History Great Battles Medieval:
http://www.slitherine.com/games/thcgbotma

Histwar, demo was released a few weeks ago, quite a fiasco it seems:
http://www.histwar.com/

this one was just announced, could also be interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUeDL3Gm-8o

 

Haven't tried King Arthur, but 2526 is okay. Rather unstable, missing a few favorites from the original 2525, but otherwise decent. Will crash if you push the buttons too much, though.