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Total war games,boring gameplay?

fantadomat

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Ok guys,do you feel that most total war have really slow and boring gameplay in the campaign? It really gets fucked up by all the stupidity like agents,shit diplomacy,being able to build one building for 2-5 years or the retarded siege waiting. I am just playing the last roman attila and get bored fast because of all that shit. I have to wait three years for my glorious army to build ladders because it can't take it with them before the siege,but it can pull a whole catapult. The whole idea of the games is pretty cool,but the implementation is really bad. All it could be easily fixed but the devs are ether too stupid or too lazy.
 

Jacob

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Yes, just stick to Civ IV if you want 4x.

Or not really, there other games that are cool too like Master of Magic, but you get my point.
 
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Or even proper wargames and such. It's hard to enjoy total war campaigns after spending some time on paradox games. The battles could redeem it if the AI was top notch, or if the multiplayer wasn't insanely slow out of necessity.
 

fantadomat

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I do like the battles but all the other stuff is super annoying,you have to spend and hour before you get to do some interesting battle. And most of the time is watching slow animations and the turn wheel. The game is so slow,it really kills any dynamic with pointless shit. The worst thing is how armies get away with 5 guys and you have to waste years chasing them.

Yes, just stick to Civ IV if you want 4x.

Or not really, there other games that are cool too like Master of Magic, but you get my point.
I do like both rts and 4x games,here it just doesn't mesh well. I don't have problem wasting an hour doing shit in a 4x turn game or a campaign map in AoE2. But here it is just boring.
 

Jacob

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Because the 4x part of Total War is trash compared to a proper 4x game. And the tactical battles, while not horrible, just isn't as fun as playing AoE2.
 

catfood

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Try Shogun 1 and Medieval 1. I found those the best because the strategic layer wasn't as needlessly bloated as in later titles. They should have stuck with the board game style.
 

AwesomeButton

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Try Shogun 1 and Medieval 1. I found those the best because the strategic layer wasn't as needlessly bloated as in later titles. They should have stuck with the board game style.
And Viking Invasion - the neatest, cleanest, tightest TW ever to be released.
 

fantadomat

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Try Shogun 1 and Medieval 1. I found those the best because the strategic layer wasn't as needlessly bloated as in later titles. They should have stuck with the board game style.
I have mate,played every single TW game (except WH2). The older they are the better :)

and TW warhammer 2 is it slow as well?
It is just a expansion to the first one,everything is the same,except the performance.
 

Ludovic

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It varies a lot between games, mods and factions. Most of the factions in un-modded Attila have dreary and down-right annoying campaign play. The Warhammer games have much better campaign mechanics and flow, if you disregard the weird balance issues (dwarfball, beastman razing the entire world, diplomacy madness due to enemy-of-enemy-is-friend etc.) With some mods it can actually be relatively enjoyable, even if the challenge is mostly limited by how much you LARP, but that's really a thing in almost all strategy games. And the campaign AI is SkyNet compared to Civ6.

I don't consider the TW campaigns 4x games, and they're not really proper Grand Strategy either. They're just relatively simple strategy games meant to serve as a backdrop for the real-time battles. For me, the worst thing is the crazy waiting while the AI factions take their turns: don't slow down my game because you want to animate AI agent spam on a different continent. Speeding up animations is not a fix. Let me skip it completely.

Siege gameplay, on the campaign and battle-level both, is annoying and/or buggy. That's the single biggest improvement they can/should make to the series.

TL;DR - Don't buy TW games for the campaigns - you should enjoy the real-time battles, or you'll get bored really fast. If multiplayer is not your thing, you should enjoy cheesing a cheating AI or LARP'ing. If these are also not your thing, I think you'll have to wait at least a decade before you'll find any use for strategy games other than map painting or looking at pretty pictures.
 

Galdred

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The problems with the "strategic" portion of TW is that it takes way too much time, and it is too complext for the AI.
Age of Wonders and XCOM both have more streamlined strategic layers because their designers knew that the core gameplay was the combat.
But for some reason, they inflated the "geoscape" of Total War a lot in most iterations.
 

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The problems with the "strategic" portion of TW is that it takes way too much time, and it is too complext for the AI.
Age of Wonders and XCOM both have more streamlined strategic layers because their designers knew that the core gameplay was the combat.
But for some reason, they inflated the "geoscape" of Total War a lot in most iterations.
I've argued the same for years. Thank you. The only solution I can see is make TW games on a smaller, less complex campaign map. Region-sized ideally. Balkans, Iberian peninsula, Apenine peninsula, Scandinavia, British isles... Another problem with TW's campaign gameplay is that your campaign turns take progressively more time as the game advances. At some point I'm prone to giving up on the campaign because I'm too lazy to go through all my settlements when my turn comes. The game beginning to CTD after a large number of turns (or not so large, out of the blue) also doesn't help.
 

fantadomat

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The problems with the "strategic" portion of TW is that it takes way too much time, and it is too complext for the AI.
Age of Wonders and XCOM both have more streamlined strategic layers because their designers knew that the core gameplay was the combat.
But for some reason, they inflated the "geoscape" of Total War a lot in most iterations.
I've argued the same for years. Thank you. The only solution I can see is make TW games on a smaller, less complex campaign map. Region-sized ideally. Balkans, Iberian peninsula, Apenine peninsula, Scandinavia, British isles... Another problem with TW's campaign gameplay is that your campaign turns take progressively more time as the game advances. At some point I'm prone to giving up on the campaign because I'm too lazy to go through all my settlements when my turn comes. The game beginning to CTD after a large number of turns (or not so large, out of the blue) also doesn't help.
I dissagree on the region part mate.The game will improve if they decide to scrap all the pointless slow animation,eradicate all the agents and make them as part of the army. Increase the movement of armies,make the turns be 3 months not a year. Make it so you can attack a city after one turn of besieging,make buildings take only one year or turn to finish and add a epic structures that take a lot of time to finish. Also me it so that if an army looses 70% of its people is disbanded. Also make all that senate and family shit optional and not game destroying because of betrayals and rebellions. Also fix the idiotic unrest system.
 

AwesomeButton

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The game will improve if they decide to scrap all the pointless slow animation,eradicate all the agents and make them as part of the army.
They are doing exactly this in Thrones of Britannia.

Increase the movement of armies,make the turns be 3 months not a year.
If you mean the animation of movement of armies, there is an option for that in the game options. If you mean give them more movement per turn, this is moddable, a question of balance. I would prefer if the movement per turn is adjusted for the realistic distance an army could travel per turn time. In a region-sized map, this would be a longer distance, hence your requirement will be fulfilled.

I think in Thrones of Britannia they will have 4 turns per game year. Again, as long as the game is balanced, I am ok with 2 turns per year or 4 turns per year. The important thing is not how many turns per year, but that the AI remains reasonably capable of playing after a big number of turns has passed.

Make it so you can attack a city after one turn of besieging
Settlements taking years to siege is a gamy thing, there are only rarely cases of sieges that took a year, let alone more time. It would be realistic if it wasn't like that, but then the value of upgrading settlement defences would shrink to be very low.
 

Mark Richard

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The campaign map may be too slow, but the battles are too fast. In modern Total War iterations a battle with 10,000 soldiers typically ends after about 6-8 minutes. It's somewhat of a contradiction because Creative Assembly clearly want you to zoom in and admire their elaborate interlocking animations, yet if your gaze lingers for more than a couple of brief seconds they'll make you pay for it in blood. 'Oh cool, look at my giant! He's swinging his club... and I've just lost half my army off-screen.'
 

fantadomat

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The game will improve if they decide to scrap all the pointless slow animation,eradicate all the agents and make them as part of the army.
They are doing exactly this in Thrones of Britannia.

Increase the movement of armies,make the turns be 3 months not a year.
If you mean the animation of movement of armies, there is an option for that in the game options. If you mean give them more movement per turn, this is moddable, a question of balance. I would prefer if the movement per turn is adjusted for the realistic distance an army could travel per turn time. In a region-sized map, this would be a longer distance, hence your requirement will be fulfilled.

I think in Thrones of Britannia they will have 4 turns per game year. Again, as long as the game is balanced, I am ok with 2 turns per year or 4 turns per year. The important thing is not how many turns per year, but that the AI remains reasonably capable of playing after a big number of turns has passed.

Make it so you can attack a city after one turn of besieging
Settlements taking years to siege is a gamy thing, there are only rarely cases of sieges that took a year, let alone more time. It would be realistic if it wasn't like that, but then the value of upgrading settlement defences would shrink to be very low.

Don't know what it will be in upcoming games,only care about what is in released ones ;),i could die by the time it comes out or the world could burn,life is a nasty bitch.Also i am not talking about mods,but about the vanilla game,even skyrim is playable with mods.

I see that on most things we are on the same page.

Yeas movement should be more realistic...which means that armies should have a lot more movement points. An army doesn't marches a 200 kilometres in a year. Most armies of the time could march the map in a year. Romans could have marched a 30-40 kilometres in a day and put up camp. In a year it will be around 8000 to 10000 kilometres.

For sieges i meant to say that they should be no more than a turn which is equal to a year in TW game. I was really annoyed at how it takes 3 years to make ladder and 5 to make battleram or siege tower. Value would come in the numbers of casualties you have to experience during the siege. Sieges took that much time not because of needing a year to cut down a sturdy tree,but because they didn't want to loose a lot of men. Make it harder in a siege battle and decrees bonus in to malleus after a few turns of besieging.
 

Raghar

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Try Shogun 1 and Medieval 1. I found those the best because the strategic layer wasn't as needlessly bloated as in later titles. They should have stuck with the board game style.
Turnbull worked with developers when they made Shogun I. Thus it has style. But more detailed strategic layer was necessary. The trouble is they simplified other elements.

Total War like games needs proper detailed economy. Large space for planing, not a simplification. Outmaneuver enemy, outhink enemy, or make better economy when AI would be able to resist outsmarting and outmaneuvering.
 

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I'd be happy if they just scrapped the catch-me-if-you-can chasing around of armies, armies magically popping out of nowhere and maybe made some realm upgrading less simple AND less silly than in Warhammer...
 

AwesomeButton

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I'd be happy if they just scrapped the catch-me-if-you-can chasing around of armies, armies magically popping out of nowhere and maybe made some realm upgrading less simple AND less silly than in Warhammer...
You mean scrap the AI's cheating? They believe that in this way the are keeping the player more engaged.
 

Stavrophore

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Yes total wars are snoozefest since medieval 2 total war or even rome total war. Nothing substantial was added or changed since then. They look nice, and can be good for some short LARPing but ultimately get boring after dozen of hours.
 

fantadomat

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Yes total wars are snoozefest since medieval 2 total war or even rome total war. Nothing substantial was added or changed since then. They look nice, and can be good for some short LARPing but ultimately get boring after dozen of hours.
Yeah,medieval 2 was the last campaign i managed to finish,after that is mainly shit. Shogun 2 was not that bad,but still leagues away from Medieval 2.
 

fantadomat

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Just finished the last roman,after i spend two hours looking for mods,then coming to the conclusion that the mod manager is shit and ended up just modding the game files myself.After all that annoyance i ended up getting pissed off by the retarded byzantine AI and the endless amount of rebels. And the end cinematic is the worst thing i have seen in the last decade. May Creative assembly devs die from pox!
:negative:
At least the uninstallation was fast.
 

mbv123

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You made a few mistakes
  • Played vanilla
  • Played any TW title past Medieval 2
Only fun I've had in TW was in Rome 1/Medieval 2 with overhaul mods like EB or SS. They add plenty of flavor and challenge to the campaigns and the battles aren't arcadey shit that last for 2 minutes.
 

vonAchdorf

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Because the 4x part of Total War is trash compared to a proper 4x game. And the tactical battles, while not horrible, just isn't as fun as playing AoE2.

That's my problem with the franchise - both parts get pretty quickly stale in a campaign, which leads to a boring campaign part with inadequate AI and a click on auto-resolve.
 

Falksi

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Too many games have a wank overworld. I've just finished Hard West and thoroughly enjoyed it, but that was despite a fairly pointless & largely dull overworld.

Occasionally it became interesting, but most of the time it was just "click button to proceed", with no real thought, stratergy or C&C involved. Similar case for later Total War games alongside others. It's as if they put these extra layers in because they feel they nned to, because most certainly don't add anything.
 

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