Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Agame]

Campaign map generally seems fine to me. I've actually caught myself admiring how pretty it can be at times.

Yep, pretty much the first thing I noticed is how primitive the strategic map looks. Some assets, like towns for example, look straight out of late nineties. The map in Atilla looked much better. On the bright side, outside of bad AI turn times and load times that can strangle your will to live even on a new SSD, the game performs fine on almost everything maxed on my 3yo 1070 rig.

See there is something strange here, Jinn have you zoomed in to look at details, cos when I look at all the assets, towns and trees etc its all horrible pixelated 2D. As Zboj said Rome 2, Atilla looks WAY better. This just seems really bizarre they would downgrade so much for a newer game.

 

[razvedchiki]

What happened to Creative Assembly after Shogun 2? Because I think that was the last game where they weren't assholes with DLC or overly shitty optimization.

With Shogun 2 you had the best game and Fall of the Samurai, which was a proper expansion, and the game ran pretty well and looked great.

After Shogun 2 the games started to look like shit, started to run like shit, and came with a crap load of DLC that bloated the cost of an already expensive game. Wtf happened? Am I mistaken?

the downfall started with empire and its warscape engine they use,the last game with something new/innovative was medieval 2.everything from there on was a constant downhill of dumping down mechanics.
why should they change their games to be as complex as the old ones where when hot garbage like warhammer sells good?

 

[Jinn]

See there is something strange here, Jinn have you zoomed in to look at details, cos when I look at all the assets, towns and trees etc its all horrible pixelated 2D. As Zboj said Rome 2, Atilla looks WAY better. This just seems really bizarre they would downgrade so much for a newer game.

I just loaded it up to take a closer look and yeah, I suppose you're right. Trees are definitely the worst offender. Cities are just simple 3D models that could probably use way more detail too. Not terrible, but not good. Everything looks a lot nicer zoomed out at least halfway. I guess that had to do it because the size of the world, or other more magical effects that occur on the campaign map?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

What happened to Creative Assembly after Shogun 2? Because I think that was the last game where they weren't assholes with DLC or overly shitty optimization.

With Shogun 2 you had the best game and Fall of the Samurai, which was a proper expansion, and the game ran pretty well and looked great.

After Shogun 2 the games started to look like shit, started to run like shit, and came with a crap load of DLC that bloated the cost of an already expensive game. Wtf happened? Am I mistaken?

the downfall started with empire and its warscape engine they use,the last game with something new/innovative was medieval 2.everything from there on was a constant downhill of dumping down mechanics.
why should they change their games to be as complex as the old ones where when hot garbage like warhammer sells good?

Yeah, medieval 2 is great. I meant to write "Best game after Empire", but I derped.
Warhammer isn't bad, but its plagued by poor optimization, weird design descisions and DLC shit.

 

[Agame]

See there is something strange here, Jinn have you zoomed in to look at details, cos when I look at all the assets, towns and trees etc its all horrible pixelated 2D. As Zboj said Rome 2, Atilla looks WAY better. This just seems really bizarre they would downgrade so much for a newer game.

I just loaded it up to take a closer look and yeah, I suppose you're right. Trees are definitely the worst offender. Cities are just simple 3D models that could probably use way more detail too. Not terrible, but not good. Everything looks a lot nicer zoomed out at least halfway. I guess that had to do it because the size of the world, or other more magical effects that occur on the campaign map?

I think its an art/design decision, Rome 2 also has 2d assets on the map, its just that it all gels together and looks pretty good. For some reason with TW:WH they made a lot of clashing colors and textures, for example: look around the Empire lands, that brown ground color is just FUGLY and it shows up the awful 2d trees. In Rome 2 the color pallets of ground/vegetation blend into each other far better.

Anyway Im sperging into artist mode now, just for some reason the TW:WH map really bothers me every time I see it... Partly because half the reason of playing TW games is for the graphics whoring, if your not here to see beautiful shiny knights crashing into decrepit disgusting skaven there are far better games to play.

 

[Jinn]

Anyway Im sperging into artist mode now, just for some reason the TW:WH map really bothers me every time I see it... Partly because half the reason of playing TW games is for the graphics whoring, if your not here to see beautiful shiny knights crashing into decrepit disgusting skaven there are far better games to play.

Damn, you should have mentioned this part when you were recommending the game to me

 

[A horse of course]

And a question to people who play the game and know what they're talking about - are mounts for generals a good idea? They seem to boost speed, hp and charge at the cost of decreasing everything else, often by a lot. Also, being vulnerable to anti large units seems not very cool as there is a lot of those.

In general, mounts are faster, increase your general's mass (makes pushing other units out of the way easier), significantly increase your charge bonus (allowing them to cycle charge other heroes/lords repeatedly for large bonuses) and also from a metagaming POV prevent your general from being knocked down. In multiplayer battles you'll notice players will cycle charge infantry heroes and repeatedly knock them over. This can actually be disadvantageous if you're trying to kill something quickly, though (same problem with flying units going after fleeing units). Also, not all mount options are equal - some Legendary Lords have, say horse mounts that cause far less of a melee defense/armour debuff than regular warhorses/barded warhorses.

So when thinking about mounts I'd not only look at the stat difference but also how you intend to use them. If you just want to plonk them inside the front line and help slow the enemy's center then mounts might not be the best idea (although it's worth noting that whilst AI is very good at micromanaging in Warhammer, they're poor at prioritizing targets - they typically won't take advantage of large targets aready engaged in melee if there are other options, for example). If you want a combat hero to zoom in and assassinate casters behind the lines, then mounts are perfect. And flying mounts are of course great for disrupting enemy formations and sieges, though the ones that aren't giant monsters have pretty poor stats and can die extremely quickly (e.g. High Elf nobles on great eagles).

 

[A horse of course]

Some confirmation there'll be at least one more DLC after the reddit rats and lizardmemes Lord pack.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Watch it be sigmarines and fans of the old world just lose their shit over such a stupid addition.

 

[Raghar]

What happened to Creative Assembly after Shogun 2? Because I think that was the last game where they weren't assholes with DLC or overly shitty optimization.

Denuvo happened to them. They learned they can reap money from full sales, and started to think about how to do stuff with least effort and without thought. They also started to think about sales and what customers wants. Customers screamed murder when they had theirs level 17 hero killed, customers screamed murder when they had lord killed then army attacked and obliterated, thus they removed feature that caused distres to some paying customers, to avoid losing paying customers.

When 90 percent of theirs games were pirated and they got money from die hard fans, they did what they wanted, and the result was better designed.
Actually Shogun 2 might be better than Empire TW, because they had inspiration from previous Shogun. And they went to shit already. Look if they lost some developers between Empire TW and now. If not, SEGA had bad influence on them, and in contrast to me they were 8 hour 5 day work week reduced by 3 hours on Fridays, just as office ladies.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah, Shogun 2 is much better than Empire.
Its my 3rd favorite, after Medieval 2 and Fall of the Samurai. Fall of the Samurai is weird in that it uses the Shogun 2 launcher, client, engine and mechanics, but its a stand alone game.
Total Warhammer is 4th. I like it, and I'm a sucker for Warhammer (especially after GW killed the Old World and effectively invalidated my army. Seraphon are not Lizardmen, I don't fucking care what they say), but there's some annoying bullshit in that game.

I used to play Rome a lot, but I got bored with it. The further you go East the more tedious the game gets, because everything feels so far apart. I just couldn't finish playing the Selucids. They feel like shitty Egyptians. And Egypt was boring. I think its because of the Phalanxes, which is the most braindead unit in the game. If you get enough of them you can make an unchargeable wall of death and all you have to do is march forward. Which is dumb. Changing the difficulty doesn't really help, as then you'd get stupid crap like peasants breaking urban cohorts in combat.
I guess that's 5th place then.

I keep thinking about going back to Empire, and every time I'm like "eh...maybe after I play something else"

I haven't played Rome 2, Kingdoms of Britannia or Attila. Well, I did play Rome 2 when it was on a free Weekend, and I immediately thought it was shit. I remember thinking "they went from Shogun 2 to this? What the fuck happened?!"

I initially thought that Attila was just an add on for Rome 2, but apparently its a different game that's better? I don't know, it came out not too long after Rome 2.

Kingdoms of Brittannia is apparently a disappointment, and I don't want to spend the time or money to find out.

 

[A horse of course]

Shogun 2 is the worst TW by far.

Don't reply to this post because I'll just ignore you.

 

[tabacila]

Watch it be sigmarines and fans of the old world just lose their shit over such a stupid addition.

Stop talking. Someone at Sega Corporate is probably listening.

Most likely they'll have a new race. Araby fits really well into the WH2 Vortex map, but since CA is going pretty SJWish lately they could steer clear of them in fear of not being accused of parodying/appropriating Allahuakbars. So maybe we get lucky and they finally do Southern Realms.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Watch it be sigmarines and fans of the old world just lose their shit over such a stupid addition.

Stop talking. Someone at Sega Corporate is probably listening.

Most likely they'll have a new race. Araby fits really well into the WH2 Vortex map, but since CA is going pretty SJWish lately they could steer clear of them in fear of not being accused of parodying/appropriating Allahuakbars. So maybe we get lucky and they finally do Southern Realms.

Cathay might be pretty interesting to see as well.
One of the things that annoyed me about Age of Sigmar is that GW could have expanded the world and explored previously hinted at factions, such as the Southern Realms, Araby, Cathay, etc, but they decided to nuke everything instead.

CA could take advantage of that and fill the void for them. They already did that with the Vampire Coast, which appear to be pretty different from Vampire Counts.

 

[tabacila]

Cathay will only be in WH3, if at all.
People seem to think that the combined map for WH3 will probably just fill up the unused space from the current Mortal Empires map, which means the Darklands and parts of the mountains of Mourn. The mountains of Mourn are as wide as Bretonnia and the Empire put together so getting to Cathay they'll have to either really compress the Ogre Kingdoms or really stretch the map and stretching isn't really an option unless they do some serious optimization in WH3.

 

[zapotec]

I guess they will add another attrition type for the chaos dwarf because pollution. :D

 

[A horse of course]

See there is something strange here, Jinn have you zoomed in to look at details, cos when I look at all the assets, towns and trees etc its all horrible pixelated 2D. As Zboj said Rome 2, Atilla looks WAY better. This just seems really bizarre they would downgrade so much for a newer game.

I just loaded it up to take a closer look and yeah, I suppose you're right. Trees are definitely the worst offender. Cities are just simple 3D models that could probably use way more detail too. Not terrible, but not good. Everything looks a lot nicer zoomed out at least halfway. I guess that had to do it because the size of the world, or other more magical effects that occur on the campaign map?

You can hit up all the different artists who contributed to the games on artstation, and you'll find that the ones who did campaign models for cities, ships etc. are all very inexperienced, entry-level subcontracted artists probably paid in "exposure", which (along with optimization) is why a lot of campaign assets look like something out of a Chinese iOS fantasy kingdom management clone. There's not a huge amount of consistency between the different low-level artists, which is why there is some absolutely fantastic professional 2d art (which could certainly pass for something out of an Age of Shitmar battletome, and in a handful of cases even the old WFB armybooks) for certain events, and then some very amateurish cartoon crap or the infamous 3d model tracing in the Dark Elf cutscenes.

 

[FreeKaner]

This is the warhammer thread, histcels and 16 year old graphic fidelity addicts leave.

The game looks fine and its graphics are not an issue, if anything most of what's on campaign and battle map could use less polygons it's a fucking strategy game played mainly on a map.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

This is the warhammer thread, histcels and 16 year old graphic fidelity addicts leave.

The game looks fine and its graphics are not an issue, if anything most of what's on campaign and battle map could use less polygons it's a fucking strategy game played mainly on a map.

It's 2019 and they're charging $60 for the base game and $20 for each dlc. The game engine, factions, gameplay are all just imported from their older games so what the fuck have they been spending time on with the new games? At least try to make it not look 10 years old.

this is 'ultra' graphics. it looks like a fucking mess, even the UI looks like shit.

Why even bother rendering the units at this point? 90% of the time in battles you can't make out a unit from the grass. They may as well just rip off battle brothers or something

at least I can tell the difference between a rock and a soldier here

 

[FreeKaner]

I remembered now, we discussed this same shit 2 months ago, go read it again if you feel like being triggered about it again. Here let me help you:

How it looks in game:

Is that a bug or did you disable everything in the graphics options?

Also zoomed out beyond the vanilla camera height, I think. Regardless he's correct - all Warhammer trailers are "in-engine" which means they use far superior lighting and postprocessing effects and also use the original (high poly) art assets for everything.

Yeah why doesn't a strategy game with regularly over 4k and possibly over 6k units in a small map at any given time have as high polygons, big textures and detailed backgrounds as a trailer. I have my timetravelling quantum PC ready just to play with those graphics.

You can read it all over again.

PS, if you think this looks bad for a strategy game with so many units, you are fucking retarded.



The game could use lower polygons across the board and more styling if anything it doesn't need this much detail on units.

Graphic fidelity whores are also everything wrong with this industry.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

CA shill spotted

 

[FreeKaner]

CA is a shit incompetent company that can't patch a bug for months or even manage to patch the game without content release. The game's graphics however are just fine. Stop being retarded.

 

[AwesomeButton]

What made me lose interest in Total War games as a whole had nothing to do with graphics. It was the fact that from one point on every battle played the same, and the campaign gameplay became progressively dumbed down up to the point where it's just a straightforward succession of upgrades for a few buildings. That, and the eternal cheating AI. Until these things chage, CA can produce all the pretty graphics they want.

 

[Jinn]

What made me lose interest in Total War games as a whole had nothing to do with graphics. It was the fact that from one point on every battle played the same

I'm still pretty new to Total Warhammer II, but it seems that there is the potential for a fair amount of variation in battles when you take in consideration the differences between factions, units, lords, heroes, and magic. There has definitely been times when I thought there would be no way for me to come out victorious against an imposing army, but have managed a close victory with careful utilization of specialized units, terrain, spells, and tactics.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Maybe I just played too early patches, but my battles turned into meat grinders and whoever would flank the other first usually broke the morale of the whole force. I've played a full campaign with Dwarfs and then one with Vampires up to the point where I had taken over the Empire completely. My impression was that battles felt repetitive and you mostly fight the same enemy faction for most of the campaign.

There is also a difficulty curve, where after you've become the single most powerful faction, there is no challenge left as you complete your campaign objective and you are more and more inclined to auto resolve battles.