I have been a fan of the 'Total War' games since the first 'Shogun:Total War' released back in 1999. Being both interested in history and the possible alternatives, epic games covering decades and even centuries, combining both battlefield and strategic levels have appealed to me. However, as the years have progress, despite the increased sophistication and the improved graphics, I have become more and more frustrated with basic flaws in the games, despite all the different settings, that never seem to be resolved. With the advent of 'Total War: Rome II' new problems were introduced which now seem to be adding to the growing list. See my previous posting about Rome II for what I see as these tedious problems: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/total-war-rome-ii-same-old-problems.html
I am still excited by a new 'Total War' game and pre-ordered the latest 'Total War: Attila' back in November 2014. A flaw in downloading meant that until an update in March 2015, despite reporting the problem to Steam, I was unable to run it. Once it was functioning I was keen to play. The 'Barbarian Invasion' expansion (2005) to the original 'Rome Total War' (2004) featuring the late Western and Eastern Roman Empires and the migrating barbarian tribes was always a favourite of mine and so I was keen to play this updated version of that expansion for the 'Rome II' approach.
The game is certainly visually stunning. However, some of this causes problems. In 'Rome II', the different troop and building types are represented by symbolic images. This makes it easy to distinguish between them. With 'Attila' they are represented by my realistic images. This makes it difficult to tell at a glance between similar units. It is particularly a difficulty telling between the range of buildings many of which look pretty much the same. It is important to tell, because unlike with 'Rome II' each province has to have sufficient food rather than this being the case right across your empire. It also has to have a sufficient level of sanitation. This can be hard when you only control part of a province because the rest is held by an enemy, an ally or has been made desolate. Desolation is a new factor cause by barbarian tribes laying waste to a region. It can be revived by colonisation if you can spare enough money.
The key problem is that even if you have a good level of food supplies you will typically find one or more provinces starving leading to unrest. You will also find that disease caused by a lack of baths or reservoirs is far more prevalent than in 'Rome II'. Thus, as with 'Rome II' you find yourself incessantly fighting uprisings and pumping money into keeping people alive, leaving little for fighting off opponents or developing your empire. This is one problem of recent Total War games, they end up becoming 'Total Management' because unless you load up modifications provided by amateurs you will find yourself simply struggling not to lose your empire to famine or uprising, even on the Easy setting. These things did happen, but bear in mind the Byzantine Empire, what had been the Eastern Roman Empire, lasted until 1453CE, a thousand years after this game is set.
Many problems that were seen as early as 'Medieval 2 Total War' (2006) and have never been rectified. One is catapults that move around the battlefield as fast as heavy infantry and, even in thick fog or when firing into a forest or up a steep hill, are able to hit your soldiers more precisely than laser-guided weapons of today. In turn, your catapult weapons will miss the opponents despite firing repeatedly even at a static line across flat terrain with perfect visibility. Ships will always hunt you down when you move at sea, covering hundreds of miles to be in the correct place, again something even challenging with modern technology.
Another problem which has continued from 'Rome II' is in terms of towers in towns. In small towns these are typically wooden structures. The strength of them varies considerable between how they impact on AI (artificial intelligence - i.e. the one controlled by the computer) soldiers and how they impact on yours. I have lost entire units trying to knock down a single tower because of the incessant arrows which fire into them as they march up and take so long to destroy it. In contrast, an AI unit can march up to your towers receiving only 1-2 casualties and destroy it rapidly. Thus it is far easier for the computer faction to take a town than it is for you to take even the same settlement. Similarly you can only place barricades in largely ridiculous places that do little if nothing to protect your settlement, they simply hamper moving your troops around. In contrast, when the AI is in charge of the town the barricades prove to be a genuine defence. You can win, but your casualties will be far higher than for a computer driven faction taking the same place.
Armies even from factions which are not friendly will precisely co-ordinate so your defenders will face wave after wave of attackers. Even if good at fighting on the defence you are strained when the third army in a row, twice your strength comes down the same road to get you in a single turn. The AI player never makes mistakes and for some reason while you can not march past its armies and constantly seem to be just that little bit short of catching them, your opponent will always have the precise amount of movement necessary; can march right through your zone of control and in 'Attila' will often even fight you and march off and attack someone else or a different town in the same turn, all things you will be unable to do. I cannot understand how a barbarian horde, i.e. consisting of the entire population including non-combatants, can march faster and farther than a trained Roman army. A crucial difference is that, unless you are extremely lucky, your neighbouring armies do not support each other. In contrast, the AI ones are always in perfect balance and you find some armies supporting more than one offensive, something I have never been able to achieve despite very careful positioning.
The big mistake that was added to these flaws in 'Rome II' was limiting the number of armies. In 'Medieval 2 Total War' one useful function was that you could strengthen garrisons without need for a general. Now you are limited to 16 armies and if you are trying to control an empire as large as the two Roman Empires or the Sassanid you find yourself struggling to get from one end of the empire to the other with enough force, exacerbated by the blocking zone of control problems noted above. City garrisons are utterly pathetic, no matter how much you develop the buildings in a city. Rebels even revolting slaves turn up with far more experienced soldiers and crucially soldiers equipped with better weapons and more advanced armour than you can even recruit in your empire, despite them coming from that empire. Thus, some towns are lost almost on a constant basis. You have to leave armies to garrison in case an opponent by-passes you as they very often can which again means no expansion of your own empire.
Another flaw which came with 'Rome II' and continues with Attila is disappearing units. I accept there are issues about line of sight on a bumpy or forested terrain. However, even on flat plains for some reason units disappear even when walking towards you. The problem is that any soldiers you have sent marching towards them stop dead once the unit fades and do not resume their march if it reappears. Similarly missile troops and catapults stop firing at it and again simply spectate if it reappears. Yet, your opponent keeps firing incessantly and with great accuracy.
Since 'Rome II' the default setting for marching an entire army on the battlefield is that it fans out. This causes many to set off away from the enemy. Similarly trying to congregate them back when they have chased off the opponent sees them heading in random directions. The soldiers have no sense of self-preservation to turn and face an attacker or aid their fellow soldiers right next to them. Control of units has deteriorated severely since the days of 'Medieval 2 Total War'.
All of these flaws mean that you need to be able to see into the future and amass soldiers in precisely the right location to see off an opponent. You will incessantly have to be fighting for the smaller towns and villages as their defence is so feeble. At times it seems that the AI will not let you hold a particular town and even opponents with a few and poor territories are able to field vast, well-equipped armies that outstrip anything your country can produce. Now, a new element in 'Attila' is that if you start hiring mercenaries their prices rise so it even proves difficult to bring in supplementary forces quickly or put in ones suited to a local environment, especially as all your money is going into building local farms and water supplies rather than recruitment buildings.
The key problem with so many barbarian tribes is that they are incessant and it is easy to find yourself at war with fifteen to twenty factions. They are not as hard to destroy as they were back in 'Barbarian Invasion', but there are simply so many bent of destroying everything. As has long been the case, the diplomacy system is largely pointless. You struggle to find anyone to trade with you let alone ally with you. Allies simply drag you into more wars and yet rarely assist you. Trade partners often remain hostile and break off trade at random leading to a sudden drop in income. I emphasise that these problems are playing at the 'Easy' level by someone with 16 years' experience on these games.
The only improvements with 'Rome II' that are also seen in 'Attila' is with the agents. These used to be really pathetic in 'Medieval 2 Total War' and could not be kept alive. Now they stand a decent chance and I have managed to get at least one of each - Spy, Dignitary and Champion up to the top level. They add to the game and the armies. Though I note that the Merchant has not made an appearance, they lived such a short time it was simply a waste of cash.
I appreciate the effort that has gone into 'Attila' in terms of getting it looking great and historically accurate. What is infuriating is the persistence of gameplay flaws which have now been in place for a decade and seem to be worsening. In many ways, as I have noted before, Sega and Creative Assembly seem to be leaving enhancement up to the amateur developer community rather than actually resolving these themselves. They have been stubborn in not addressing flaws that mean it can be tiresome playing when hard work and clever strategy is defeated by the great advantages the AI had with its armies. What is worse is that such situations are anachronistic and it is a shame to find that your wonderful Roman legions are effectively coming up against 21st century armies.
Showing posts with label 'Total War: Rome II'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 'Total War: Rome II'. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Friday, 12 December 2014
Three Years Old And My Computer Is Dying
In the movie, 'Blade Runner' (1982), the replicants, the life-like androids have a life expectancy of only four years. The portrayed society of November 2019, like that of the Roman Empire, is worried that its slaves would become too strong and would overpower the citizens. The plots of the movie is around replicants seeking their maker to have their lives extended. It seems that we are quite a way from having androids threaten our society, though Stephen Hawking fears basic artificial intelligence will be able to do it first. However, the built-in expiry date seen in 'Blade Runner' already appears to be in place.
In the summer of 2011, I bought an Alienware laptop computer for £1400 (€ 1750; US$2240). Being a keen PC gamer, I ordered one of the highest graphic and sound quality and with a fast processor so that I could enjoy the online 'Total War' games and 'World of Warcraft' to the best standard. This summer, 2014, moving into a room I was renting in a new house one of the current tenants, a postgraduate pharmacy student asked me about my laptop and when he found out it was coming up to three years old he scoffed, asking me how I hoped to achieve anything with something 'that old'. I did not mention that my mobile phone was bought in 2005 and does not have a camera in it.
My housemate's predictions rapidly have come true. I know in terms of online games, you expect fast developments and I do not expect it to run as quickly as it would have done in 2011. I am also aware that in a house with five residents, even broadband gets stretched between all the uses. However, even offline, the computer now struggles. It is a pain to watch it labour to open Word and you have to expect it to crash at random even when simply looking at text documents. It can struggle to open a second document or move between two. Very challenging when you write as much fiction as I do. I spend a lot of time watching a spinning disk against a black or a white blank screen. Ironically I end up reading the newspaper, writing a diary (by hand with a pen) and even practicing Chinese characters, again with pen and paper. It is almost as if my laptop feels that I am too old these days to use its facilities.
The deterioration in speed over the past three years has been phenomenal; declining very rapidly this year and so naturally I worried something was wrong. I have a scheduled 'defrag' every Wednesday and a virus check every Monday evening. I run through the list of all the software I have installed and eliminate anything which does not appear to be of use. I removed every image from the laptop and put it on a 1 TB external hard drive, not that I had that many photos that it should have taxed the laptop. I have even taken it apart and cleaned the fans, concerned they may be clogged and so it was overheating. None of these things have been able to halt the slowing down and the increases in crashes. It is as if, in the way my housemate viewed it, at 3.5 years old, my laptop is elderly and no longer can even do the basic tasks it once did such as handle a Word document, let alone play the games it was bought for.
Part of the problem is that the computer only occasionally does what I ask of it. Much of the time I can switch it on and it can happily play with itself. Every day there is some download that seems to take precedence over anything I might want to do. In the middle of games, the machine will shut down and tell me it has to restart to accommodate a new update which seems to make absolutely no difference to the running of my computer bar from ruining my game. Humans now have minimal control over their computers. We are shaped by what they want to do and they make it clear our interests are a long way down the list behind the masturbation that are all these updates.
Obviously I feel that I have thrown away a lot of money on something that really was going to cost me £700 per year for the kind of service I wanted. There seems to be no point in buying anything except the cheapest computer next time round. Clearly online gaming with a PC is really only open to people who can afford £1000 per year in hardware in order to engage with it. Given that my car cost £900, it is clear that I am no longer in that social class and so will be shut our of 'Total Rome II' let alone 'Shogun 2' which taxes my machine even more because of the greater landscape graphics. Yes, before you suggest it, I have scaled down the graphic detail on these games and that is all that has allowed me to play them into mid- to late-2014, but clearly not in 2015.
I feel an idiot for believing if I spent a large sum of money it would be enough to own a machine that would remain with me for five years. Clearly you can only expect to have the performance you paid for, for two years. This adds to the ever growing pile of discarded computers and all the components that go into them. It also makes them devices which have a life expectancy far less than many electrical devices out there. If you had to replace your washing machine every two years, it would become tiresome. Even while I write this, the computer is straining to keep up the connection to the blog and is going into overdrive downloading some update that I cannot even see when I search the system.
I would be grateful if someone could direct me to a company that makes computers that do what you want them to do rather than insisting that their desires have priority. Clearly that company is not Alienware and I am angered that I was so misled by them.
In the summer of 2011, I bought an Alienware laptop computer for £1400 (€ 1750; US$2240). Being a keen PC gamer, I ordered one of the highest graphic and sound quality and with a fast processor so that I could enjoy the online 'Total War' games and 'World of Warcraft' to the best standard. This summer, 2014, moving into a room I was renting in a new house one of the current tenants, a postgraduate pharmacy student asked me about my laptop and when he found out it was coming up to three years old he scoffed, asking me how I hoped to achieve anything with something 'that old'. I did not mention that my mobile phone was bought in 2005 and does not have a camera in it.
My housemate's predictions rapidly have come true. I know in terms of online games, you expect fast developments and I do not expect it to run as quickly as it would have done in 2011. I am also aware that in a house with five residents, even broadband gets stretched between all the uses. However, even offline, the computer now struggles. It is a pain to watch it labour to open Word and you have to expect it to crash at random even when simply looking at text documents. It can struggle to open a second document or move between two. Very challenging when you write as much fiction as I do. I spend a lot of time watching a spinning disk against a black or a white blank screen. Ironically I end up reading the newspaper, writing a diary (by hand with a pen) and even practicing Chinese characters, again with pen and paper. It is almost as if my laptop feels that I am too old these days to use its facilities.
The deterioration in speed over the past three years has been phenomenal; declining very rapidly this year and so naturally I worried something was wrong. I have a scheduled 'defrag' every Wednesday and a virus check every Monday evening. I run through the list of all the software I have installed and eliminate anything which does not appear to be of use. I removed every image from the laptop and put it on a 1 TB external hard drive, not that I had that many photos that it should have taxed the laptop. I have even taken it apart and cleaned the fans, concerned they may be clogged and so it was overheating. None of these things have been able to halt the slowing down and the increases in crashes. It is as if, in the way my housemate viewed it, at 3.5 years old, my laptop is elderly and no longer can even do the basic tasks it once did such as handle a Word document, let alone play the games it was bought for.
Part of the problem is that the computer only occasionally does what I ask of it. Much of the time I can switch it on and it can happily play with itself. Every day there is some download that seems to take precedence over anything I might want to do. In the middle of games, the machine will shut down and tell me it has to restart to accommodate a new update which seems to make absolutely no difference to the running of my computer bar from ruining my game. Humans now have minimal control over their computers. We are shaped by what they want to do and they make it clear our interests are a long way down the list behind the masturbation that are all these updates.
Obviously I feel that I have thrown away a lot of money on something that really was going to cost me £700 per year for the kind of service I wanted. There seems to be no point in buying anything except the cheapest computer next time round. Clearly online gaming with a PC is really only open to people who can afford £1000 per year in hardware in order to engage with it. Given that my car cost £900, it is clear that I am no longer in that social class and so will be shut our of 'Total Rome II' let alone 'Shogun 2' which taxes my machine even more because of the greater landscape graphics. Yes, before you suggest it, I have scaled down the graphic detail on these games and that is all that has allowed me to play them into mid- to late-2014, but clearly not in 2015.
I feel an idiot for believing if I spent a large sum of money it would be enough to own a machine that would remain with me for five years. Clearly you can only expect to have the performance you paid for, for two years. This adds to the ever growing pile of discarded computers and all the components that go into them. It also makes them devices which have a life expectancy far less than many electrical devices out there. If you had to replace your washing machine every two years, it would become tiresome. Even while I write this, the computer is straining to keep up the connection to the blog and is going into overdrive downloading some update that I cannot even see when I search the system.
I would be grateful if someone could direct me to a company that makes computers that do what you want them to do rather than insisting that their desires have priority. Clearly that company is not Alienware and I am angered that I was so misled by them.
Saturday, 5 October 2013
'Total War: Rome II': The Same Old Problems
I have been playing the Total War series of computer games, produced by The Creative Assembly, and latterly sold by Sega, since 1999. I have realised that I am not at all good at them and I struggle to win even on the Easy level. No-one has told me how to win on any higher levels and despite playing these games for many hours, I have never improved. In fact, I am now worse at the original 'Medieval Total War' than I was ten years ago. However, I love to engage with the possibility of changing history. I am utterly useless at shooting games, whether first person or third person, but I have enjoyed computer gaming for the last thirty years. The Total War games are certainly immersive. I love the attention to historical detail, even the scenery that you fight over. Naturally, I had pre-ordered 'Total War: Rome II', despite the fact that these days you really just rent it from Steam and if your internet connection slows or decides to go down you cannot play a game you actually have the disks for (hence sometimes being compelled to go back to 'Medieval Total War' which was free-standing).
Lots of people will tell you that games sales now exceed movie watching. This is why even quality newspapers now cover the industry. In particular 'The Guardian' got very involved in discussing 'Total War: Rome II', though the debate was less than that around 'Grand Theft Auto V', which always attracts attention in part for the twisted morality of the game. The Total War games, are, as this coverage shows, seen as standing above your average purchase. In part, I guess because they are bought by reasonably well-educated, forty-something men like me and to some degree we are stronger opinion shapers than men twenty years younger than us with perhaps a lower income.
Though I love the game series, I have always had gripes about them. I was not alone with 'Rome Total War'. It functioned well enough and had innovations of its predecessors, but historical accuracy was sacrificed for playability. There were Egyptian troops centuries out of their time and the Gauls had their territory cut back to provide more room for Roman factions. The Total War games always have a lot of amateur built content and many of these variants, usually free to download, tend to have a greater impact on the next phase of the series than many thousands of comments by gamers. Thus, 'Total War: Rome II' has a far larger map stretching outside the Mediterranean area right to modern day Pakistan allowing the building of empires to rival those of Alexander the Great. Territories have been made more complex and cities have more points to hold so making an attack or the defence more challenging.
Graphics are very good though there has been some simplification on the interfaces to speed things up, the images look appropriate for the era portrayed (the game starts in the early 3rd century BCE). There were issues, and it must embarrass Sega that they have had to release three patches in the first month. In part this stemmed from over-ambition as so many factions feature that running through all of them at the end of each term really slowed down the game. The patches seem to have got the game back on track and it loads up and progresses faster than 'Total War: Shogun 2' despite that having a smaller geographical spread and fewer factions.
If the game is at least half-decent, why am I here writing about it rather than playing it? Well, the simple answer is that there are core flaws in the Total War game that utterly exasperate me. Foolishly, game after game, I think they will address these. They never do and so pretty soon I ended up downloading an amateur-produced variant from Total War Center: http://www.twcenter.net/ You can find numerous small-scale modifications, but I look out for ones that redraft the game to the way it should be. I do not know whether it is worthwhile reprising my gripes or recognise that The Creative Assembly never pays attention and keeps including the same flaws in game after game.
My experiences of playing against real people online have always been unpleasant. I enjoy playing against the computer. However, in the Total War games, this is always an imbalanced experience. It is one aspect that almost every Total War Center variant resolves. Perhaps I like historical accuracy too much. I cannot accept anyone pushing a trebuchet uphill in a storm to precisely hit my troops sheltered by the trees with rocks shot after shot. In Rome II, you now even get conflicting advice. It tells you holding a hilltop is a good position, but then points out you can be shifted from it by missile fire from below. Perhaps with a 19th or 20th century mortar, but have you ever tried firing slingshot uphill and even arrows lose effectiveness. Yet, I find ranks of my troops being swept away by slung stones from far below.
I cannot accept a ship even from the 20th century let alone the 14th or 1st centuries, being able to locate another ship on the other side of the Mediterranean precisely and move to sink it with exactly the correct number of ships. The thing that angers me most is that the rules for me as the human do not apply to the computer. Of course, it never makes mistake. While my troops set off around the long way because I have not spotted a single spy 'blocking' my army's route, the computer's troops move exactly correctly and rapidly.
Yet, how come if I have a small, poor territory I can only raise a few weak troops whereas my computer opponent with the same land and lack of cash can conjure up huge, well equipped armies? If you push back an opponent and seize his resources, surely he should become poorer, but no, these rules do not apply. It is far harder and requires far more troops for you to defeat an opponent than it does for them to do the same to you. I do not expect an advantage, I just expect equal treatment. You will find that the morale and skill of an opponent especially in the early stages is far higher than anything you might achieve through experience or research. One commentator to 'The Guardian' noted that even after many game years, his Spartan force simply fled when opponents appeared, totally anachronistic to what we know about the Spartans when faced even with overwhelming odds.
As in previous games, you find that rebels in one of your territories suddenly appear with a large army with troops that go way beyond the level that can be recruited at that time or in that region and with experience far higher than your most experienced armies, making it almost impossible to defeat them. This has been a problem across the Total War games, but seems to have returned to the situation of the original 'Medieval Total War'. Rebellions are common as you can do little to please the population. Squalor from enlarged settlements is the main cause of dissent, so you have a choice of not to develop the cities or face unrest. There are a few cultural buildings to alleviate the unhappiness, but confined to the capital of a province meaning unhappiness can develop elsewhere. You can run your taxes at the lowest level possible (in this game unlike previous ones, you cannot exempt territories from tax) and people are still unhappy; neo-liberal attitudes persist here as in many city-building/strategy games.
One improvement is that your agents such as spies and dignitaries are not slaughtered almost immediately as they are recruited. In preceding Total War games this happened constantly making it that there was really no point in paying for such people as there would be a high-level assassin waiting to eliminate them the moment they stepped outside the town. Thus, you could never get any increase in skill. This was at its worst in 'Medieval II Total War' in which recruiting merchants was an utter waste of time, but still persisted as recently as 'Total War: Shogun 2' made worse because newly-recruited agents appear outside rather than within the city, making them prone to attack before they even could move.
A problem which does endure in Rome II as with all its predecessors is the fact that whilst your opponents have a 'zone of control' for each army, which you cannot march through without triggering an attack, you do not have this in return. Thus, opponents can simply walk past you even if you are in a narrow valley. This is one flaw which if corrected would make a lot of play against the computer far less imbalanced. One advantage of Rome II, is that a city can raise a decent garrison force, including of ships if it is a port. Thus, if your opponent slips passed the army guarding the road to the city, they cannot simply just walk in and claim it for themselves.
Co-ordination between different armies is far harder for the human player than the computer. You find it difficult to move two armies close enough so that when the battle comes they can support each other, the computer never has such a challenge. The reason why I abandoned playing tonight is that I faced a combined attack from an army on land and another invading from the sea at night in a thunderstorm. Such a combined attack would be challenging even today with modern technology, satellites, etc., in 260 BCE it would be impossible to co-ordinate let alone in a way that allows the armies to sweep right into a city.
The invisible army problem is far worse in 'Rome II' than any of the preceding games in the series. From 'Rome Total War' onwards it was quite common when moving around the strategic map to suddenly find an army appearing right by one of your settlements or you running into in a valley without seeing it until the last moment. I can accept you can be surprised and ambushed, but I cannot accept your spies and armies would not notice if a few thousand men was marching towards them, especially in their own lands where they would have agents and a largely loyal population to inform you. This problem became far worse in 'Shogun 2'. You could march back and forth across a forest but it was able to conceal many hundreds of men. Of course your computer opponent always knows precisely where your army is an marches directly to attack you now matter where you might try to hide.
I can accept that in forest or even particular grasslands, that some units can conceal themselves, particularly if they have special skills. However, in 'Rome II' you witness entire armies that you have begun firing at suddenly disappear, even on wide open plains or in deserts. In reality you would hear their marching and their clanking weapons and armour, let alone the amount of dust an army typically throws up, even if you could not see the troops themselves. Again, of course, they can see you as clearly as you would expect in such terrain. However, I have had tens of units suddenly appear and disappear within a few metres of my troops. Once they disappear your troops stop firing at them and it is impossible to gauge how many troops there are or who you are fighting. This is exacerbated by the fact that fleeing troops no longer appear on the radar map. The invisible forces make battles incredibly difficult even if you use scouts on horseback to try to find them. Why this ability has been introduced, I do not know. Even more than the imbalance in morale and the laser-guided artillery, the invisible army factor makes it very hard to fight any battles and stand a chance of winning.
Attacking cities is much harder. Since you have been able to do city assaults in these games, they have often been fixed towers which fire out missiles. These can be challenging to take and can wreak a lot of damage on your attackers. In 'Rome II' such towers are limited to provincial capitals but their speed of fire has been ramped up greatly and you will lose unit after unit trying even to get close to the towers to knock them out of action. With fewer artillery weapons available than in the medieval games and needing you to research to pretty high levels, this makes attacks on cities far harder. Defending the provincial capitals is easier, but defending the bulk of towns for which you cannot build walls is very difficult. In previous games you could build up the garrisons of towns and naturally would do this in contested areas. In 'Rome II' you can build only a limited number of armies and as you generally need three to be invading others' territory you cannot leave too many behind. As your empire grows they move too slowly to be able to march to cover towns. Each town has a garrison generated by its size and the specific buildings it has, but these are generally poor quality troops and certainly are no match for any rebel army that appears with its high level forces; indeed some slave revolt armies are better equipped.
I wish that The Creative Assembly would look at the basics of their games. With greater balance between the human and the computer players their games would be far better. Instead, they keep wheeling out the same flawed assumptions that were prevalent as far back as 'Medieval Total War' and have not been addressed in all the rush for better graphics and more downloadable content to sell.
P.P. 24/05/2015
Talking of downloadable content I was interested to play 'The Wrath Of Sparta' set in the 5th century BCE allowing you to play one of four Greek factions. It seemed to be a challenge because each of them has fragmented territories spread across modern day Greece, its islands and what is now western Turkey. However, it is a useless expansion. As has happened in the past with 'Total War' games, the developers have created invincible forces. In the past they did this with the Mongols and the Byzantine Cataphracts in 'Medieval II Total War'. Now it is the Spartan hoplites. You can have a thousand men attacking a single unit, throwing hundreds of javelins and thrusting at them on all sides (Greek troops were always vulnerable on their right hand side where they held the spear) and yet you will not inflict a single casualty on them. With the fragmented territory you will simply run back and forth trying to hold individual cities. The requirement of 'Rome II' for generals in order to have armies and the pathetic garrison armies means a small naval fleet can capture any old town it fancies.
As usual, play is imbalanced against the human player. Fleets converge perfectly over hundreds of miles magically. I played as Athens which is supposed to have the strongest navies, but with my enemies knowing precisely where my ships were and co-ordinating to trap and destroy them, they were eliminated in the first few turns of the game. This download game has no skill element at all. It is very easy even on the Easy setting to have lost within a few turns of beginning. There is however an additional bitter twist. You cannot go against your opponents' capitals, despite the fact that they lie close to your starting point. You receive constant warnings against doing this and severe penalties if you take one. Thus, this game is simply a process in humiliation. You have one hand tied behind your back as you dodge around the capital cities and an array of fleets and armies turn up to crush you wherever they fancy no matter how skilled your defence. That is even leaving out the usual unrest due to food shortage and squalor. I do not really understand the motive of making such a hard game. They would get the money if it was dead easy and in fact are liable to damage future sales through piling up the imbalance game play and the anti-historical approach. If Sparta had been that strong in reality, we would not have Greece but Sparta.
Lots of people will tell you that games sales now exceed movie watching. This is why even quality newspapers now cover the industry. In particular 'The Guardian' got very involved in discussing 'Total War: Rome II', though the debate was less than that around 'Grand Theft Auto V', which always attracts attention in part for the twisted morality of the game. The Total War games, are, as this coverage shows, seen as standing above your average purchase. In part, I guess because they are bought by reasonably well-educated, forty-something men like me and to some degree we are stronger opinion shapers than men twenty years younger than us with perhaps a lower income.
Though I love the game series, I have always had gripes about them. I was not alone with 'Rome Total War'. It functioned well enough and had innovations of its predecessors, but historical accuracy was sacrificed for playability. There were Egyptian troops centuries out of their time and the Gauls had their territory cut back to provide more room for Roman factions. The Total War games always have a lot of amateur built content and many of these variants, usually free to download, tend to have a greater impact on the next phase of the series than many thousands of comments by gamers. Thus, 'Total War: Rome II' has a far larger map stretching outside the Mediterranean area right to modern day Pakistan allowing the building of empires to rival those of Alexander the Great. Territories have been made more complex and cities have more points to hold so making an attack or the defence more challenging.
Graphics are very good though there has been some simplification on the interfaces to speed things up, the images look appropriate for the era portrayed (the game starts in the early 3rd century BCE). There were issues, and it must embarrass Sega that they have had to release three patches in the first month. In part this stemmed from over-ambition as so many factions feature that running through all of them at the end of each term really slowed down the game. The patches seem to have got the game back on track and it loads up and progresses faster than 'Total War: Shogun 2' despite that having a smaller geographical spread and fewer factions.
If the game is at least half-decent, why am I here writing about it rather than playing it? Well, the simple answer is that there are core flaws in the Total War game that utterly exasperate me. Foolishly, game after game, I think they will address these. They never do and so pretty soon I ended up downloading an amateur-produced variant from Total War Center: http://www.twcenter.net/ You can find numerous small-scale modifications, but I look out for ones that redraft the game to the way it should be. I do not know whether it is worthwhile reprising my gripes or recognise that The Creative Assembly never pays attention and keeps including the same flaws in game after game.
My experiences of playing against real people online have always been unpleasant. I enjoy playing against the computer. However, in the Total War games, this is always an imbalanced experience. It is one aspect that almost every Total War Center variant resolves. Perhaps I like historical accuracy too much. I cannot accept anyone pushing a trebuchet uphill in a storm to precisely hit my troops sheltered by the trees with rocks shot after shot. In Rome II, you now even get conflicting advice. It tells you holding a hilltop is a good position, but then points out you can be shifted from it by missile fire from below. Perhaps with a 19th or 20th century mortar, but have you ever tried firing slingshot uphill and even arrows lose effectiveness. Yet, I find ranks of my troops being swept away by slung stones from far below.
I cannot accept a ship even from the 20th century let alone the 14th or 1st centuries, being able to locate another ship on the other side of the Mediterranean precisely and move to sink it with exactly the correct number of ships. The thing that angers me most is that the rules for me as the human do not apply to the computer. Of course, it never makes mistake. While my troops set off around the long way because I have not spotted a single spy 'blocking' my army's route, the computer's troops move exactly correctly and rapidly.
Yet, how come if I have a small, poor territory I can only raise a few weak troops whereas my computer opponent with the same land and lack of cash can conjure up huge, well equipped armies? If you push back an opponent and seize his resources, surely he should become poorer, but no, these rules do not apply. It is far harder and requires far more troops for you to defeat an opponent than it does for them to do the same to you. I do not expect an advantage, I just expect equal treatment. You will find that the morale and skill of an opponent especially in the early stages is far higher than anything you might achieve through experience or research. One commentator to 'The Guardian' noted that even after many game years, his Spartan force simply fled when opponents appeared, totally anachronistic to what we know about the Spartans when faced even with overwhelming odds.
As in previous games, you find that rebels in one of your territories suddenly appear with a large army with troops that go way beyond the level that can be recruited at that time or in that region and with experience far higher than your most experienced armies, making it almost impossible to defeat them. This has been a problem across the Total War games, but seems to have returned to the situation of the original 'Medieval Total War'. Rebellions are common as you can do little to please the population. Squalor from enlarged settlements is the main cause of dissent, so you have a choice of not to develop the cities or face unrest. There are a few cultural buildings to alleviate the unhappiness, but confined to the capital of a province meaning unhappiness can develop elsewhere. You can run your taxes at the lowest level possible (in this game unlike previous ones, you cannot exempt territories from tax) and people are still unhappy; neo-liberal attitudes persist here as in many city-building/strategy games.
One improvement is that your agents such as spies and dignitaries are not slaughtered almost immediately as they are recruited. In preceding Total War games this happened constantly making it that there was really no point in paying for such people as there would be a high-level assassin waiting to eliminate them the moment they stepped outside the town. Thus, you could never get any increase in skill. This was at its worst in 'Medieval II Total War' in which recruiting merchants was an utter waste of time, but still persisted as recently as 'Total War: Shogun 2' made worse because newly-recruited agents appear outside rather than within the city, making them prone to attack before they even could move.
A problem which does endure in Rome II as with all its predecessors is the fact that whilst your opponents have a 'zone of control' for each army, which you cannot march through without triggering an attack, you do not have this in return. Thus, opponents can simply walk past you even if you are in a narrow valley. This is one flaw which if corrected would make a lot of play against the computer far less imbalanced. One advantage of Rome II, is that a city can raise a decent garrison force, including of ships if it is a port. Thus, if your opponent slips passed the army guarding the road to the city, they cannot simply just walk in and claim it for themselves.
Co-ordination between different armies is far harder for the human player than the computer. You find it difficult to move two armies close enough so that when the battle comes they can support each other, the computer never has such a challenge. The reason why I abandoned playing tonight is that I faced a combined attack from an army on land and another invading from the sea at night in a thunderstorm. Such a combined attack would be challenging even today with modern technology, satellites, etc., in 260 BCE it would be impossible to co-ordinate let alone in a way that allows the armies to sweep right into a city.
The invisible army problem is far worse in 'Rome II' than any of the preceding games in the series. From 'Rome Total War' onwards it was quite common when moving around the strategic map to suddenly find an army appearing right by one of your settlements or you running into in a valley without seeing it until the last moment. I can accept you can be surprised and ambushed, but I cannot accept your spies and armies would not notice if a few thousand men was marching towards them, especially in their own lands where they would have agents and a largely loyal population to inform you. This problem became far worse in 'Shogun 2'. You could march back and forth across a forest but it was able to conceal many hundreds of men. Of course your computer opponent always knows precisely where your army is an marches directly to attack you now matter where you might try to hide.
I can accept that in forest or even particular grasslands, that some units can conceal themselves, particularly if they have special skills. However, in 'Rome II' you witness entire armies that you have begun firing at suddenly disappear, even on wide open plains or in deserts. In reality you would hear their marching and their clanking weapons and armour, let alone the amount of dust an army typically throws up, even if you could not see the troops themselves. Again, of course, they can see you as clearly as you would expect in such terrain. However, I have had tens of units suddenly appear and disappear within a few metres of my troops. Once they disappear your troops stop firing at them and it is impossible to gauge how many troops there are or who you are fighting. This is exacerbated by the fact that fleeing troops no longer appear on the radar map. The invisible forces make battles incredibly difficult even if you use scouts on horseback to try to find them. Why this ability has been introduced, I do not know. Even more than the imbalance in morale and the laser-guided artillery, the invisible army factor makes it very hard to fight any battles and stand a chance of winning.
Attacking cities is much harder. Since you have been able to do city assaults in these games, they have often been fixed towers which fire out missiles. These can be challenging to take and can wreak a lot of damage on your attackers. In 'Rome II' such towers are limited to provincial capitals but their speed of fire has been ramped up greatly and you will lose unit after unit trying even to get close to the towers to knock them out of action. With fewer artillery weapons available than in the medieval games and needing you to research to pretty high levels, this makes attacks on cities far harder. Defending the provincial capitals is easier, but defending the bulk of towns for which you cannot build walls is very difficult. In previous games you could build up the garrisons of towns and naturally would do this in contested areas. In 'Rome II' you can build only a limited number of armies and as you generally need three to be invading others' territory you cannot leave too many behind. As your empire grows they move too slowly to be able to march to cover towns. Each town has a garrison generated by its size and the specific buildings it has, but these are generally poor quality troops and certainly are no match for any rebel army that appears with its high level forces; indeed some slave revolt armies are better equipped.
I wish that The Creative Assembly would look at the basics of their games. With greater balance between the human and the computer players their games would be far better. Instead, they keep wheeling out the same flawed assumptions that were prevalent as far back as 'Medieval Total War' and have not been addressed in all the rush for better graphics and more downloadable content to sell.
P.P. 24/05/2015
Talking of downloadable content I was interested to play 'The Wrath Of Sparta' set in the 5th century BCE allowing you to play one of four Greek factions. It seemed to be a challenge because each of them has fragmented territories spread across modern day Greece, its islands and what is now western Turkey. However, it is a useless expansion. As has happened in the past with 'Total War' games, the developers have created invincible forces. In the past they did this with the Mongols and the Byzantine Cataphracts in 'Medieval II Total War'. Now it is the Spartan hoplites. You can have a thousand men attacking a single unit, throwing hundreds of javelins and thrusting at them on all sides (Greek troops were always vulnerable on their right hand side where they held the spear) and yet you will not inflict a single casualty on them. With the fragmented territory you will simply run back and forth trying to hold individual cities. The requirement of 'Rome II' for generals in order to have armies and the pathetic garrison armies means a small naval fleet can capture any old town it fancies.
As usual, play is imbalanced against the human player. Fleets converge perfectly over hundreds of miles magically. I played as Athens which is supposed to have the strongest navies, but with my enemies knowing precisely where my ships were and co-ordinating to trap and destroy them, they were eliminated in the first few turns of the game. This download game has no skill element at all. It is very easy even on the Easy setting to have lost within a few turns of beginning. There is however an additional bitter twist. You cannot go against your opponents' capitals, despite the fact that they lie close to your starting point. You receive constant warnings against doing this and severe penalties if you take one. Thus, this game is simply a process in humiliation. You have one hand tied behind your back as you dodge around the capital cities and an array of fleets and armies turn up to crush you wherever they fancy no matter how skilled your defence. That is even leaving out the usual unrest due to food shortage and squalor. I do not really understand the motive of making such a hard game. They would get the money if it was dead easy and in fact are liable to damage future sales through piling up the imbalance game play and the anti-historical approach. If Sparta had been that strong in reality, we would not have Greece but Sparta.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
