It blew my child mind in medieval 2 when you upgraded your units weapons or armour in the overworld map it would physically change the look of your units on the battle map, such as upgrading your peasant levies to gold rated armour, they'd be wearing plate armour, whereas units with no armour would have no armour in battle. Not to mention the music changed depending on how hectic the battle becomes.
yep video title is misleading. it's not total war, it's only total war warhammer, three kingdoms, and troy. fantasy games for the lowest common denominator
@@cagneybillingsley2165 Misleading? Title very clearly implies I'll be talking about the state of the series presently, which means the focus on newer games...
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 That game REALLY needs a remake/remaster, just give the BATTLE AI some modern AI and the game WONT SUCK! Also add in all that stuff thats STASHED in the files that they never used, cus that shit is cool. Heck look at some of the MODS that have come out for Empire lately. PEOPLE LOVE that kind of warfare, Order amongst the CHAOS of battle. Warhammer just feels Chaotic and sometimes i just go "dude WTF why are you losing in melee? Why are you dying so fast?" Also ya know, add in all the little touches from Napoleon and/or FoTS. Like repairing your SHIPS mid battle.
A small missed opportunity was the simple visual language of knights dropping their lances in Medieval 2 when given enough room to charge, activating a "mode" of sorts where the charge was much more devastating than if the unit is told to charge but doesn't have enough room to build up momentum. This property is also specific to knights and lancer units, normal cavalry don't do this, even if they do build up momentum and the momentum is still factored into their charge. Something hidden too is that the weight of the horse adds to the unit's mass in Medieval 2, but this factor is hidden from the player even though it affects the efficacy of the charge. In general there are light horses, warhorses, barded horses, and plated horses, each of which have more mass than before and which is different from the raw attack stat possessed by the unit.
It's not really hidden--not in M2TW, anyway: the horses themselves give you a sense of what to expect. Which is a really nice touch: a classic version of "show, don't tell".
@@Albukhshi It's never insinuated by the game itself at any point that the armor on the horses does anything more than be a part of the armor stat. And because the attack stat factors into the equation, it's a muddy thing you only really learn by digging through the files as there isn't any evidence that it exists within the game
@@darkfireslide I'm referring to the mass, not the attack or armor. Should have clarified on that. Sorry. To clarify: while the mass is actually coded in descr_mounts.txt, you still get a sense of what the horse can do mass wise from what you see on the battlemap: the destriers the knights ride are better at slamming into the target than, say, the ponies that a Turkish horse archer has. That's the sort of thing I was trying (ineptly) to explain. It's naturally not as precise as reading it from the text file, but it gives you the right idea. As to the armor: for cavalry that is indeed merged with the soldier's armor, under the primary_armor (secondary armor is for elephant units, for example). For attack, the export_descr_unit.txt suggests that the horse's attack is part of the secondary weapon entry, but the game itself contradicts that.
Sadly, it's just the charge bonus giving the cav extra attack. Mass only affects how much the inf are launched in the air, but armour DOES play a huge role in how much cav dies on the charge when charging into heavy inf which is abandoned in future titles for some reason in favour of charge reflect only given to spear/polearm units.
The problem is that TW just has no competition. There is just nothing like it an with all it's flaws there is still no other game that comes even close to the overall quality in what it is doing.
No serious competition anyway. We had a few games that have a campaign map and similar style large scale combat. But yea, nothing quite close to the quality CA makes
More than anything, these videos prove that the engine used since 2009 has never been up to the task. It might have started out with optimism, but I think time and time again, it's been a constant let down. Even the "good" games that use the engine have flaw after flaw you can pick out.
I think it has less to do with the engine and more to do with a clear shift in design direction and priorities. Recall that the last "good" engine was adopted before CA was acquired by SEGA; Medieval 2 was already showing signs of what was to come despite reusing Rome 1's engine (cavalry vs cavalry combat being awkward, pikes being weird, projectile physics not as tight as Rome 1, and the introduction of matched combat animations). Even if CA never moved to the TW3 Engine I still think we would see a decline in quality.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 No doubt I'd agree with your take; I just look at it as more of a "perfect storm" of the engine change and corporate design change really taking things down. You mentioning pikes in Medieval 2 just gave me some horrible flashbacks...it was such a confusing change considering how they worked in Rome 2.
@@LordVader1094 I know I'm an outlier here, But my personal Total War experience was- Rome 1- childhood "wow" seeing my cousin play, into owning and playing it for hours and hours, becoming a fan, adding mods, etc. Barbarian Invasion- spending even more hours exploring this world lost to history, inspiring a lot of research as I found out about the times surrounding the fall of Rome. Empire- Loving the game idea but it was too frustrating to run on my budget machine, so I never got to really play it until it was years out of date Shogun 2- Wait, what happened? Nothing feels right here, the combat isn't satisfying, the formations dont hold, the country management sucks... theres all these new features the game is advertising, from animations to AI and politics, but I can access any of it I'm too busy micromanaging this massive swarm I'm supposed to call an army, and this headache I'm supposed to call a nation. Rome 2- Okay. Return to greatness, finally, and they said they fixed it up. ...This feels... empty and wrong. It looks better, but its opaque, and uninteresting. Formations still dont hold. Okay... I guess I'm done with TW. I'll just play M&B.
I'm also really sad about just how much harder it is to mod newer Total War games. There are more total conversion mods for Medieval II and Rome, than for all the games after them combined.
There's another aspect of the flags in Med 2 that I love. I don't know if later games have this, but in Med 2, for every point of experience, the unit will get a small, extra, triangular flag. You can literally know how much EXP a unit has JUST BY LOOKING AT IT.
I love the warhammer entries. I play them alot. But Rome, Medieval 2 and most of all, Shogun 2, will forever be the goats of the series to me. I liked Shogun 1, since it was the game that got me into the total war series, but as of today, nostalgia isn't strong enough to overcome the graphics :P
@@calebbarnhouse496 I'm sorry but Yari Wall is not some magic win button. Anything that hits their flank will cause the unit to break and the AI on very hard difficulty regularly flanks them. And once you reach turn 10 and start fighting Samurai units with experience you will need to support your Yari with your own cavalry and specialist units. Not to mention they get shredded by archers. "Yari Ashigaru spam" is a 2011 meme.
It’s the fine details that make the “modern” total war games substantially worse than MED 2 or Shogun 2. One specific detail is that in MED 2 if you have crossbows and you put infantry in front they will not fire if they do not have an angle. Additionally if they do fire you are likely to kill more of your own men than the enemies. Angles are huge in Med 2 your archers being placed to get just the right angle on their shots could be the difference from winning a battle to doing absolutely nothing.
Similar thing with shogun 2 and empire. In those games in order for all the lines to fire they needed line of sight, so the back rows of the unit could fire because they had other soldiers in front of them. If you wanted them to fire you needed to have them kneel, but in Warhammer everyone in the unit fires regardless of if there's a friendly infront of them or not. Having a unit on a hill was such and advantage in older games cause every single soldier in the unit had line of sight on the enemy.
One another cool thing I noticed in Med 2 recently is how you can extend your ranged units' range EXTENSIVELY (like even twice or thrice) by putting them in a position where they will have line of sight and the trajectory to hit their target (for example a reversed slope or a hill). I really love when games take terrain into account and this is one of the best ways to do that.
While I really enjoy Warhammer 2 and 3, I'm sad that cavalry is so useless there. After a charge, they ragdoll infantry without dealing any substantial dagame, then in a fight they usually end up losing more health than the infantry before they can disengage. Another thing I don't like is the lack of navy. Not even naval battles, but simply the navy itself. In older games you had to plan an entire logistic operation in order to move your troops across the sea. Now you just move your army into water and they conjure up a ship out of thin air. This is disappointing, especially considering that Warhammer has a couple of naval-focused factions, like Norsca, Vampire Coast, High Elves with their maritime empire and Dark Elves with their Black Arks. So yeah, cavalry and navy are my two biggest problems in Warhammer. Other than that, I'm fine with the rest of the changes.
I feel like if you rag doll a group of infantry its really easy to finish that group off. I do understand what your saying but if you break an infantry line and they go flying most of the time you can wipe that unit out quickly.
well the naval part is somewhat mor understandable... beyond diversity Warhammer just includes some factions that dont know what a boat is. Be ist Beastmen, most of chaos or even woodelves
@@iandevine3063 yeah people talk about this in competitive warhammer 3. Just breaking the line is good because the time it takes to reform is time you can use to deal free damage.
i think one reason why they didnt add the whole naval system to the warhammer games is that those feel like theyre supposed to be more accessible for a broader variety of players. A little bit like comparing an arcade racing game to a sim one.
I think your critique of the degradation of Total War would probably get more fans to agree with you As much as Volound is correct , he sadly has a reputation with outsiders for being a cynical boomer You have a more analytical with your critiques , thus you'll probably get more nods than "DON'T CARE , LOOKS GOOD"
Volound has no credibility he killed his yt channel by raging at kids in the comments. CA blacklisted him cuz he is actually toxic not because he made valid points.
he made hours long videos basically showing the same things in this video so I don't see why he's any less analytical. More emotional, sure, and that's what is probably putting a lot of people off, but downplaying his critiques is just dishonest.
Yeah i think the WORST "devastating charge with no real effect" was in Zarchovichs video about how to make the most of chariots. Runs a chariot down the ENTIRE unit one side to the other, their are soldiers scattered EVERYWHERE and yet they all just get back up like they got hit with a stiff breeze. Why CA didn't give line infantry bayonets in FOTS is beyond me, just PORT the bayonets from Empire, polish them up and give them the spear animations Yari Kachi have. Hell in Empire to FOTS you could FOLLOW the arrows, bullets, cannonballs to their target with the INSERT CAM, and it gave you a FPS view of the battle from your soldiers prospective. Its funny, the only thing that seems to improve are the GRAPHICS, for comparison Shogun 2 is like....16GB, WARHAMMER 3 is OVER 100 GB! But the actual ANIMATIONS (interestingly they have moved away from the SYNICED kill animations and back to something similar to Rome 1), FORMATIONS (or lack their of) and PROJECTILES (especially the projectiles) all look AWFUL. If you PAUSE the game after Archers, Gunman or artillery FIRE in Shogun 2 and Empire you can SEE the arrows, bullets and cannonballs in MIDAIR, fully rendered and everything. In Warhammer if you PAUSE and look at the Projectiles, its just a WHITE STREAK attached to a voxel Dimond that looks like it belongs IN MINECRAFT! (maybe its just my Graphics settings BUT STILL) But yeah, Total War has become ALOT less Immersive over the years. Its just been boiled down to PRETTY GRAPHICS and NUMBERS.
One thing you didn't brought up that bugs me the most starting with Shogun 2 is the gamification of the faction management aspect. In Rome 1 and Medieval 2 everything is made to make you feel like you are building an empire. You follow your family throughout the years, you chose how you want to organise your empire, what troops to garrison, what to build and where. With shogun 2 you start to get arbitrary limits and rules on everything, in Rome 2 with the provinces edict mechanic you can't even chose how you want to expand. You have to hold the entire arbitrary regions to optimise your output and you can't even chose which town you want to develop since capital cities are pre-determined. I thought we were supposed to have fun with history. And beware not to invade a city before the AI invested it's growth unlock into it or you'll be wasting quite a lot of time unlocking the next building.
You say that, but the freedom of Rome lead to a lot of gamification too. Choosing your capital in the middle of nowhere just to minimize the order penalty? Recruiting/moving/disbanding units to move population around? Moving your army out to town, gifting to enemy then march in+execute to get rid of squalor in one turn for free? All very exploitable game mechanics in Rome.
@@henkrpe3249 No game is perfect and whatever you play you'll always be able to exploit game mechanics in one way or another. What you are describing is freedom to use those mechanics that way. Freedom you don't have in newer games. No concept of population, replaced by a broken growth system. Shallow characters, army tied to general, extreme limits on number of generals/army, extreme limits on settlement development. Limits that don't make sense in universe. It would be like praising the removal of the physics system from a potential Half-life sequel because it allowed you fly and clip through walls in the previous game. Sure the absence of a system removes its potential for exploit, but you also forgo gameplay depth.
@@Rubafix989 I would say the growth system in wh is a lot less broken than the growth system in Rome. Mainly because you can't level up a city to stage 5 by just disbanding troops there. Less interesting sure, of course, but more broken? No way. Limits on not being able to make every single city a huge level 5 settlement also makes sense. Less fun and less sandbox yeah, but much more realistic. Also, what wh lacks in genealogy it makes up for in standard RPG stuff like items and spells. Sure, you can't "breed traits" into generals anymore but you get spell trees, stat items and on-use items. Tbh character progression is one of the things wh does well...
I often come back to Medieval 2 and Empire. Played and finished Troy campaign. Apart from nice graphics there was nothing I liked about it. P.S. Resources system instead of just money was interesting though.
Before 3K even released I was on the official forums asking how exactly it made sense that units without shields could be affected by the '-100% Missile Block Chance' of the excuse of a spear-wall ability that was being implemented. What were they blocking missiles with to begin with?
Shogun 2 and prior were peak Creative Assembly. There's a dev studio that I used to really like, held in great esteem, was DICE. Interestingly both studios had their peak around the same years. The 2000s and early 2010s were great, but have slid into a worse and worse state. That's a lot of time if you think about it. More than enough time for the old school talent that made their better games to move on to other places or even retire. DICE and Creative Assembly of course still exist. In name only though. But the talent that made their better games are gone, I bet. As for infantry formations and how it really only worked if the formation had integrity, yes, even old school Rome 1 did it right. The Phalanx units were OP as hell from the front... IF they were properly set, in formation. They'll hold back and cut apart anything that comes after them from the front, even Roman heavy infantry or the best heavy cavalry charges. But if you can stick your charge in while the Phalanx is not properly set, then the situation is in doubt for the Phalanx. The Testudo would provide its vaunted protection only once the formation was actually together in the Testudo formation. There was no magic button for an immediate stat boost, cheap immunity. Your units have to be properly set up to carry it out first.
Jim Ansel CA's Founder left in 2005, and right after that we got Medieval 2 which already had visible cracks in its gameplay (charges being more janky, pikes being more janky, matched combat was featured for the first time, 2-handed weapons issues); and I don't think that is a coincidence. Ansell was unique in the world of CEO's as he had a strong technical background and was even quoted as saying he would rather see the company close than release a bad game. 4 years later we got Empire's botched release. And right around that time we also had the acquisition by SEGA. With these pieces in place it was only a matter of time till this turned out how it did.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I have to respectfully disagree regarding Empire. You can tell there was so much more there that they wanted to do, but didn't take the time to fix. If they had more time to fix the issues and cut the giant diamond in the rough they already had, Empire would have been the best game to come out of CA, before or after. Its a fundamentally good but still fatally flawed game.
I don't mind them simplifying things for the sake of a fantasy game that's going to have a vastly more unique unit roster than anything you would see in a historical game (barring maybe medieval 2?) It's just that the warhammer games were so damn popular I can easy see CA thinking that they don't need to worry about making battles plausible anymore for their historical releases.
Thinking it's just a fantasy game is a mistake. Realistic formations are a key aspect of Warhammer Fantasy, the tabletop game. TWWH is really not a good Warhammer game nor Total War game. It's just a flashy spectacle. Like a movie or something. In actual Warhammer, most leader units do* have extra hitpoints, but they can't tank multiple repeated direct hits from musketballs like TWWH, for example.
@@cole8834but you have to change things for a RTS. In tatble top it's easy to keep track of where your units are at all times. In a RTS you don't want your general dying if you look away for 5 seconds
@@zeropoint216 In older games Generals would be apart of a unit of say, 40 men, and the general himself could have traits that specifically increased or decreased the generals individual hitpoints. Since he is apart of a unit, and not an individual general by himself, it was more realistic and engaging. I dont understand how in the newer titles they left that behind in favor of individual general tanks.. it seems to me that CA is following a pattern in the gaming industry; "brighter colors, hollow games." focused on making the games look nice rather than the actual gameplay...
@@zeropoint216 The only time the general would die in 5 seconds is usually due to a stray artillery shot that managed to hit that model. The game was very generous for the general model not to be the first to die in the first charge if they were on horse back.
The one thing that really killed it for me was healthbars. Yes, of course the units in Rome, Medieval, Shogun etc had hidden healthbars, but it really sold the impression of particular models fighting it out with each other. Now it's just a blob fighting a blob until a number gets low enough. The spectacle is gone, the magic is gone. And I think they cemented it with removal of model-to-model combat and duel animations, now the models are just waving their weapons vaguely at each other.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I think what cannot be overlooked in this case is how Total War battles effectively changed from a singleplayer spectacle into a competitive multiplayer oriented "match", where AI simply takes the role of another player. And there is no place for relative randomness of a 1hp / model system in a competitive game, because it would result in a tirade of complaining how a high tier unit can take considerable losses at a hand of a basic unit. This degree of randomness gave the game a touch of realism, where even a heavily armed praetorian would not be able to solo tank a dozen peasants. And a shift from this pushed battles into the arcade territory, where actual combat doesn't really matter any more and it's all in the statcards.
@@mrorome5064 Yeah but that's focusing on tactics while ignoring the strategic and operational layer: how do you avoid involving your high quality units in fights that are not worth their time or the casualties? It's why its wasteful to use guns against levy infantry when there are higher quality armored targets around, for example. The "random" aspect will only punish you for not putting in the effort to give your units favorable fights. But of course that would pressure the player into actually thinking which we can't do.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Yup. It's all been dumbed down to the point where the best tactic is literally just cheesing the AI or making doomstacks of the current meta high tier unit because stats go brrr. I think you could just look at any video from LegendOfTotalWar to see what's wrong with the current battle system.
The weakened volume of guns in later games seem to be from an obscure pandering to children playing their games. Hence we have less ear breaking booms. Take a look at shooters like Red Orchestra and Insurgency where weaponfire and explosions are terrifyingly loud that conveys the violence of the guns. Now take a look at the Modern Warfare series and how toned done the sounds are to accomodate the extended playing time of vulnerable youth. I can attest that I have some mild hearing loss after years of fighting through virtual Stalingrad and Iwo Jima.
I don't think it's because game devs are "pandering to the weak children of today", it's probably more people don't like loud noises and don't know or care that guns are loud. Also, it's not a flex to talk about how video games gave you mild hearing loss.
He showed the dwarves, which are overall an old faction. The sound design of the total warhammer 3 factions is extremely good. Hell, even in total warhammer 2, take the vampire coast as an example, their sound design is fantastic and they're a gunpowder focused faction.
@Grayble's Gringus CA has literally, never, ever, been a top of the line developer that puts out solid content without flaws. Empire total war? Unplayable until 6 patches later. Rome 2 at launch? Don't even make me laugh. This is literally just more of the same.
@Grayble's Gringus It's even worse when you realize they have an entire reddit of sycophants who would suck them off for taking a dump right on their heads. "They are worked so hard, poor poor CA, they are just victims of mean fans who will never be satisfied" that is the mentality of the reddit. This is almost the mentality of all new games coming out, which is why they all keep getting worse and worse each year.
@@generals.patton546 Dude it's Reddit, what did you expect. All of them are commie groomer pedos who hate free speech. Ofc they like being Stockholm syndromed.
CA have a bad habit of cutting the Gordian Knot when it comes to technical challenges. They'll simply remove glitchy features instead of trying to get them working as intended. Also, is it just me or have they never again managed to get terrain textures looking as good as they did in Empire/Napoleon? Those games had a sort of intermediate texture between the overall colour of the terrain and the close-up texture. It gave the terrain a lot more visual structure and variety at medium distances. Large stretches of open ground look flat and bland in the newer games by comparison.
It's not just the terrain, soldiers in 3K especially look a lot more like pastel drawings than actual 3D models, even up close. CA either over stylizes their games (3K, Troy, WH) or makes them dull and bland (Attila). 3K somehow manages to do both, with colorless unit cards and cartoon-ish looking soldiers, and I don't mean the good type of cartoon. All the games from RTW to FotS all perfectly managed to showcase graphical fidelity for their time while keeping strong sense of style, whereas the newer games are designed by people who think style and function are mutually exclusive.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I was never a big fan of Shogun's plasticky-looking character models and its terrain is a noticeable step backwards visually from Empire/Napoleon, but its overall style was definitely a lot more coherent than newer titles.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs finally somebody aprecciates the battle maps in napoleon. They looked wonderfull and were actually huge with interesting design features to a point where a 4v4 linebattle spanning the entire map was fun and engaging
I came into this video somewhat angry and wanting to disregard it but when I watched the whole thing I ended up agreeing with every single point you brought up. Great job on this ine
This bird is not infuriated at all, I see. But yeah thanks my dude. It's great to know that I put together an argument that can convince someone who may be skeptical of the conclusion. I look forward to making more of these.
I’m honestly suprised there aren’t more total war games featuring the Napoleonic wars,American Civil war,and Franco Prussian war. Hell a game featuring the mass battles of WW1 would be cool.
For me its that Line infantry battles with guns are Hella boring in my opinion. Unit one stands in Front of unit 2 Shoots untill enemy flees or ammo is Empty And the defender is mostly in advantage because who shots first wins mostly if the units are not miles away from strength
@@pascalheinrich3990tell me you've never played a gunpowder TW without telling me. You can't win at NTW or ETW or FOTS by just standing in a line and shooting. Unless your on easy or some shit....... Ok you can win in ETW because the AI will freak out and start death shuffling infront of your perfectly straight line.
The irony of the health bar being introduced in latter Total War games is that there was a Total War-esque game released in 2003 with that aspect: Praetorians. It got an HD version released in 2020 as far as I know but I am still playing with the original version.
I agree with 99% of what you said, but surely comparing a desolate desert from three kingdoms to a grassy hilly area in shogun 2 is a bit disingenuous. I'm a huge shogun 2 fan (I have close to 500 hours and I haven't touched total war since warhammer 2 after having all the previous games) and I agree with all your stuff but that kinda caught me off guard. Great content! Keep it up.
look at the depth of the image itself, specifically the soldiers up close in relation to the terrain further off in the background. And even desert/snow terrain in older Total War games had plenty of granularity in the textures. Sand =\ lacking in detail.
every TW game since rome 2 has had their maps look like desolate deserts. I didn't even realize that he was playing in a desert until I looked at your comment. Even load up a mission battle in WH2 and look at the ground, its a flat texture with no depth, there are just a lot of good looking props scattered about the map. The maps are all just flat textures that look horrible especially vs NTW or S2's maps.
I still get an "oh shit" moment whenever a cav unit strikes into one of my foot units in Med 2 and I see their numbers halve in 5 seconds. What an amazing game.
Totally agree. The UI of games after FotS is shocking. Playing as Otomo in Shogun 2, your point about firearms rings true. You want your matchlocks firing and breaking the enemy before they close in so you need to know who's firing and when. There are times when your guys just idle cause its Total War so you have to reposition and focus on that and get your guys doing what they're TRAINED to do which takes your focus away from other units. That segment on Three Kingdoms LITERALLY justifies piracy. You CANNOT look at that segment of Total War Three Kingdoms, a later release from CA and say "Yeah THAT deserves money" you simply can't. It's been a while but I remember playing Rome 2 and Warhammer 1 and the AI had this habit of moving full stack armies within each others zone so you couldn't attack one without dealing with their reinforcements. So you'd have limited resources and couldn't raise a second full stack army to deal with random minor faction who has one settlement and 2 full stack armies idling and doing nothing. Thats when I took a break from Total War
When they implemented health bars, they turned all formations into single entity units. Regardless of how many individual models are used to represent a formation onscreen, it doesn't matter because individual soldiers don't exist anymore, and that is what turned Total War into a glorified Warcraft.
no that is not how it works if out of a big unit 1 models gets hit by a lot of missiles only that exact model looses hp the others remain untouched. I can only say that with absolute certainty for warhammer and Rome 2 but I doub't that's a thing that would have ever worked differently.
@@freaki0734 A) I don’t think you’re correct and B) even if you are correct that means individual models are still tanking damage that should be killing them. Any individual model should not be able to take multiple musket shots and keep fighting, just like infantry that gets thrown 30m by a cavalry charge shouldn’t be getting back up and returning to the formation like nothing happened.
@@Freesorin837 I am very very sure that I am correct. In warhammer (all parts) you can easily test this by targeting a cheap infantry unit with spell like shem's burning gaze or fireball. Since the spell only targets parts of the unit you would expect only the models near the impact to die which is what you see 100% of the time. In rome 2 you will have to take my word for it since I doubt you would find the kind of watching competetive replays and zooming into any dodge of precursor javelins on slow mo I did easily replicated on youtube. But I guess you could maybe replicate that against the AI yourself as well if you wanted. just a lot less clear cut than the spell thing. Granted they could do some trickery that only applies for high bursts of damage but that does not seem logical, and more complicated than just coding the health onto the models. I disagree honestly. A hitpoint system such as warhammer and Rome 2 have is strictly somewhat less realistic but for one: It allows for much more in depth unit design. and also small injuries wearing you down would also be an important factor on the battlefield. The 10th Volley of sling stones will see a higher percentage of men go down than the first one, due to small injuries adding up and maybe even armor and shields taking damage. I feel like for optimal realism you'd have to blend the two systems to where you either introduce crit chance into a healtpoint system and crits are fairly common representing the fact that a large parts of fighters going down is a case of if you got injured you are out. while maintaing the wearing down aspect, this would maybe even expand upon the depth in unit design where you could have heavy weapons like hallberds have a higher crit chance than lets say sling stones which will be more likely to just bruise you. or you could introduce more half and quarter hp hits into a 1hp system with again the chance to full hit warrying by weapon. Feel like the first would be best there but they would turn out pretty similar I guess. this I would of course not recomment for a fantasy game as things there are meant to be a bit more ridicoulous.
In Rome 2 I had a siege battle where 1 arrow from a tower hit my general's bodyguard and the only guy who died was the general (guy who got hit by the arrow) this is certainly not true for the older games
Tell me you don't know the in depth mechanics of the newer games without telling me directly lmao. Also no health bars would mean the competitive total war scene would not exists as well as it does now
The unit colors is the same for each faction in newer tw games when looked from a far distance. In rome 1 you knew that the white guys are the chartaginiams, reds juli, green brutti, yellow egypt and so on. Noe all of them are dark color, greyish
12:55 you can go into descr editor settings to prevent disappearing corpses on low detail, I had to do this in Napoleon total war on medium graphics back in the day, but I don't know if that feature persists in the later titles. still a stupid feature they implemented by default either way
As I say in pretty much every TW video, I feel like things started going downhill after the killing of town management after Empire introduced the super limited building slots. And then later games adding the ridiculous projectile lines.
I always always said there should’ve been a volly fire option. Like with fire at will it should be able to be toggled one and off, when on they fire when enemy is in range, and everyone has to reload before firing in mass Same for firing by rank.
I like the way you laid all your points out, really well thought through and delivered well too, bonus points for not turning it to a poop throwing contest too. On the point of sound design I totally agree with you and I personally think the sound design of firearms in the WH series is a little anaemic, especially when you compare it to the overall sound design of the games. In my own personal experience I've not put many hours into any of the Historical TW's since Shogun 2, Id have honestly probably put the series down if it wasn't for the WH series, which I love despite its misgivings.
We definitely need reload animations. I just lost my main army because I didn't see that my mortars weren't firing. Not on my command or on fire at will. I spent two more games trying to get them to work but the games just buggy with ranged units.
you are in for some of the best gaming out there. I recommend you go all in on the highest difficulty for your first try, just to see how punishing it can be.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Noted! Any specific faction I should play as first? Have played the tutorials, so I have a minor grasp on the controls and whatnot
it's perfectly fair. And for the record I did include comparisons with Medieval 2, a game that is very much not centered about line warfare, either. The setting of a game is completely superficial thing on its own; all I care about is how the different elements interact with one another.
The Scale thing is the biggest issue i have with the newer games since Rome 2. I mean in Medieval times having just 2000 men on the Field is pretty ok seeing how the armys usually werent that large. but calling 2500 men a Legion in Rome 2? UEBS2 Shows that a lot of entities are possible. I just hope some other developer takes up the idea with battles like these and improves it.
Shogun 2 had you fighting the 3-stack Ikko-Ikki with 12,000 men...we were really on the cusp of something truly great. Imagine a Total War game that used the power of modern day Intel / AMD 8-cores and higher CPU's with over 5Ghz clock speeds to give us true-to-life battle scales. Instead CA uses the increased power of new hardware to compensate for their continued poor optimization. 3K straight up would not launch on Windows 11 using a 12th gen Intel CPU. And Napoleon still doesn't work on 12th gen. And even when 3K did work, it was a system hog so much so that tech channels used it as a torture benchmark. And then Warhammer 3 released in the state that it did, running like crap. And all this despite features being removed, visual downgrades, and the scale of battles remaining stagnant and in some cases regressing.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I agree wholeheartedly with you. Went back to M2, and honestly, the unit graphics hold up really well, and each unit feels like an individual fighting on its own, in a bigger unit. While in WH, its simply 1 unit, there arent any individuals, unless its an individual unit, in which case the animations are just shockwaves.. theres just no impact in it, no depth, it all just feels surface level compared to previous games. So youd have to ask, whats the point making the units look good, raising all these system requirements... if at the end of the day, i can go back to a game 14 years old and still compare how it looks and play ... just keep those graphics, and raise the scale 10x or something.. Instead of giving me a campaign map that bogs down my 12gb vram enough that i cant have anything on a 2nd monitor, and changing graphics doesnt actually change that. Another aspect that you didnt touch on in the video, that i actually think have a big part in the decline of it all, is that "Multiplayer" started becoming a thing, and was growing with each game, and with multiplayer, comes the need for "balancing" and "ease of use", and "UI clutter", to make it easier to game it in multi. In singleplayer, things can be unbalanced, as long as its not broken, but when you take multiplayer into account, things have to be "fully balanced", which means they have to keep the game simple, and gameyfy formations, skills, abilities, units, just to make them work in the game, instead of work like it would realistically work. *(Why they balance multiplaer and singleplayer together in the same is beyond me, Shogun 2 had separate entities in the pack folders for single and custom/mp, expand on that... but anytime CA comes with a new good feature, they remove it for the next game... then come with new features for that.. that are removes for the next... and in the end, we make no progress from the older entries. PS, im not against multiplayer at all, by all means include it! But dont let it be at the expense of the game it could be.
I mean you can just go into the preferences script and change the "campaign unit multiplier" value. It's done the same in pretty much every TW game up to shogun 2 (I havn't tried it in WH) I know its a cheap hack but CA will never increase unit scale.
The lack of realism in a lot of Total Warhammer's effects is incredibly disappointing as a huge Warhammer fan, who collects multiple armies for the tabletop game. Warhammer Fantasy is usually supposed to be on the rather low (as in low in fantastical elements) end of dark fantasy, but Total Warhammer not only pumps up the fantastical elements, but also makes it far less realistic and gritty in appearance. Of all the games to have a highly atmospheric appearance, you'd think Total Warhammer would be one. Edit: Hell, the handgunner MODELS have multiple arm options for reloading. So why don't they reload in the biggest Total War trilogy?
I've never been into the Warhammer universe that much but I have read enough of the lore and TT roles to know that things like terrain, line of sight, reloading, formations actually matter quite a lot. It's shocking to see some people say "well these are historical features and Warhammer is fantasy where they need to keep true to the lore" as if 1) the execs at CA care so much about being faithful to the lore, and 2) reading the Warhammer wiki for 5 minutes will show you that counter-argument is wrong.
Dude, I remember when I was a kid, the first time I played Shogun 2 after having only played Rome 1. It was the first time I had experienced using gunpowder units, I loved the intensity of the gunshots and the first time I had a ship blow up in front of the camera the insanely loud sound of the explosion scared the absolute SHIT out of me lmao.
It's actually incredible how you have to install a mod probably made by some dude in his mom's basement to have reload animations CA couldn't bother making in Warhammer.
@@diegosrvin4332 Sorry if that came out wrong, that was meant to empathize how some players with nothing but their PC can do better than a big compagny like CA.
Creative Assembly, among many other companies, are comitting what I believe should be called fanbase betrayal. Their early success was based on the fact that they delivered good products that catered to a, more or less, specific playerbase or personality. At such a stage, the company doesn't owe anyone anything in particular, but what matters is what they do what that money and their brand. People have expectations and those should always be acknowledged. To take a name, a series, and transform it to something else simply to attract more people and make more bucks is outright wrong. That's exploitation of those who supported the earlier releases. They don't owe those people a sequel, but the name of the series has a distinctive identity and to change that identity but sell it as the same is to screw over those who supported it before. Creative Assembly is doing this with the Total War series. It was always about the realism and depth and details. About meaningful choices. If CA wants to create titles that are not as advanced, then they should make a new series to tell people, this is not the same, if you prefer the other then expect something different here. To use Total War is saying they want the old fans to support them, that these are successor games. But that is just not the case. The name and identity of the series is lost when they reformat everything to be less realistic and more simplistic. They have betrayed the original fanbase by using their support and profit to make something different that will attract more people, yet is still called the same name. They don't care about those people who liked what they were doing before, now they have a popular name and that can be exploited to attract new people despite the product being completely different.
And this is without even mentioning the absolute insanity of rushed projects and mismanaged developments. False promises and lack of support/updates/fixes.
They didn't get more fans, both ETW and Rome 2 heavily damaged the franchise's profitability (and it has never fully recovered). Rome 2 had 120,000 launch day players, something no other TW game managed until 3K in 2019, which was killed less than 2 years later.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I think it should be safe to say that Rome 2 sold well despite the recieved failure, and it did so because of the name and expectations alone. But so much was changed fundamentally that the identity of Total War was put into question moving forward. The Total War Warhammer seies has defintively garnered a pretty significant player and fanbase, but to call thoise games Total War is just so wrong. The titles since and including Rome 2 have done nothing to hold the torch up as high as Rome and Medieval 2 did. Shogun 2 did a good job, though some things could have been better, Empire; maybe the same more or less. Everything after is just miles away from casting the same meaning of the name Total War.
I am replaying R:TW now and I have nothing, but praise for it's design language. You can tell about unit capabilities just by listening, hoe soldiers talk and look. Infamous sparabara spearmen wear baggy clothing and short spear; they look, like they will run the second they see an enemy, and they do. Celtic and Germanic warbands are formed in loose ranks and issue insults and talk in growæing voice. They are s good fighters, but obviously brash and undisciplined. The more visible armor legionarries wear, the more dangerous they are. They answer in short, no-nonsence sentences. They are obviously very dangerous. Elephants are loud and bellowing, their mass and sound alone tells you they might be as mych danger to you, as to the enemy. This is both designers and VA win, if you ask me.
One thing I dislike the most about the latest games is the hero system. On one side I kind of understand that it may fit a fictional setting but having played the older games it just seems very out of place and annoying.
You absolutely nailed it with this video. I never thought about this at all, but it explains so much... I never realized while playing the likes of Empire, Shogun 2, Medieval 2, or Rome 1 how I could just play the game and not having to read anything because the design was so intuitive. You are right, you could just look at a unit and instantly knew what was up... nowadays it feels like you have 10 of the same units with slightly different stats that don't mean anything to me anyway...
Someone may have already stated it but you could have mentioned the lack of officers and banner-men in newer total wars specifically the Warhammer franchise. Almost all total wars had them even Rome II but they were abandoned for no apparent reason in the Warhammer games. I find it hilariously ironic because from what I have heard, banner-man and officers are a significant part of the Warhammer tabletop game. Also, you could tell in earlier total wars like Rome I that a unit was less disciplined due to not having an officer or banner-man. At the end of the day, it shows that total war will cut corners just to do a little less work.
In Shogun 2, I noticed recently that when ordering a Yari Ashigaru into spear wall leads the officer to get into the 2nd/3rd rank, to prevent him dying when getting charged. Just a bit of attention to detail we don't get anymore.
Unfortunately I'm not well-versed enough in music to give any comments beyond "listen to this and see how much more impactful this is" I let the difference in music speak for itself at 2:50 Starting with Rome 2 TW music is robbed of almost all its bass
And let's not even mention the ridiculously Arcady campaign map, with corridors and gigantic cities. Compared to open maps of the old TW games these new maps feel so claustrophobic.
At least in Total Warhammer 3 having corridors and other limiting terrain features on the campaign map isn't just necessary but also adds some depth to things. Having to plan ahead, using game mechanics and using/avoiding ambushes is far more engaging than just having a flat open map with the occasional mountain.
I don't understand "rule of cool" argument. Medievial 2 battles makes my blood pumping, while Empire males me sleep when my cavalry charge stops and just threatens that they'll use their goddamn weapons.
The "rule of cool" argument probably stems from a complete lack of knowledge or experience in the older titles, just assumptions. That or most people never had a decent speaker setup to really see the shocking difference. If I play Shogun 2 or Battlefield 1 in my spare time I play using my speakers and my entire room vibrates at drums and explosions. I never had that with a title like Warhammer. All of the sound effects and music are so tinny that it sounds like compressed garbage. That's not even getting into the visuals.
You have to remember that TWW has some design pointers from the tabletop. If I remember correctly Gunners never had an issue firing over each other. I used to play Lizardmen and Tomb kings so my memory might be a bit hazy, but the artillery and gunnery was never intended to be realistic. You could always tell a table of an actual military tabletop apartment from WHF just the way units were placed.
Which is a reasonable design point in that context. However, I would wager far more Total War players were introduced to Warhammer by the games then Tabletop players were introduced to Total War by the games. Having basic tenets of the design language change with no official warning or acknowledgment is a poor surprise after paying full price for the game.
@@pretzelbomb6105 Most people who play warhammer has played total war, at least from what I gathered from the table top games in my city. Total war is a war game at heart alot more than rts' like age of empires.
@@Laucron I keep getting the sense that a large chunk of WH TW players have very little to no knowledge of the lore the games are based off of. Read the wiki for 3 minutes and you'll find out just how much is left out of the games.
Warhammer truly fucked up everything for everyone. I grew bored of criticizing total war to the WH fanboy mob on reddit. WH fans took over my hobby and forever changed my favorite games franchise of all time by making these new shitty games super popular. Now there is no incentive to go back and get it right. Videos like this need to exist. Maybe if enough disserters speak sense something will be done (altho i doubt it). Thanks for the vid. Good work
They might not look all that impressive though imo it was more so that the lack of health pools meant that the men who got launched in the air actually died, giving the impression the cav charge was way more impactful. Also meant that units would rout faster because of the fast kills from a good charge.
Cav charges in total wars never looked good imo but there's a differance between watching your cav decimate the enemy and watching your cav decimate the enmy but then all of them just stand back up like its nothing and only having 5 kills. Or in the case of attila most of the times just straight up stopped by infantry like hitting a brick wall.
they look bad because the games is fucking 20 years old. On a mechanical level you can cleary see massive casuallties, with acceleration, mass and imapct playing huge roles in the fight, while in TWW you see 5 casuallties on a charge and enemies going flying 20 meters from cav that had a charge space of 2 meters.
Great video, I do agree with most of your points. I do however, love Warhammer Total war as well but your reflection between Med 2’s sound / visual effects over Warhammers really does hit home.
You're wrong about that last point near the end, the newer games didn't abandon good gameplay for the rule of cool, they abandoned anything that requires a lot of effort (money) and is difficult to implement for whatever is extremely efficient to produce while having a high return. Anything related to physics, pathfinding or AI is always half assed and every possible development shortcut is taken. The real and sad reason that gunpowder/artillery etc work the way they do in warhammer isn't that they had to dumb it down for the casuals, it's that getting the 3D soldiers in a unit to behave coherently when executing countermarch, do the reload animations in time without having them clip into movement, and obey player commands while doing all that is actually really fucking hard. Same thing for line of sight, cover physics for troops on walls or barricades and so on for every aspect of gameplay that is labor intensive and prone to fuckups. Letting missile units ignore own collision wouldn't be that big of a deal if it was genuinely a gameplay decision made to accommodate the setting - in empire/napoleon/shogun the gunpowder weapons completely warp the balance of the entire battlefield, they are either utilized well - positioned in long lines and on favorable terrain while protected and supported by appropriate units depending on the game in question, in which case they will annihilate anything, or they are utilized poorly in which case they will eat dick and get stomped by 10x cheaper militia. This is good and correct for a historical game built around those mechanics, but having gunpowder monopolize a warhammer game the way monsters and magic does would be super dumb because that's not what the setting is about. But let's face it, nobody at CA made that decision on any such basis - instead a lead programmer looked at a spreadsheet listing features and dev time each would take up and decided 'eh fuck it, instead of doing all that complicated shit for one type of unit that's used by like five out of thirty factions we will eventually do, instead we'll just have them shoot through own models and never reload, nobody will have time to look at those animations anyhow'. Same for line of sight and obstruction: why bother doing the hard work of having the wall mechanics be up to par with say S2 when we can just let everything that's not a gun just arc their shots and hit anything hidden behind a piece of terrain or a battlement or another unit with plunging fire, and we'll have bullet physics work like actual crossbow bolts so super obviously scuffed stuff that people would complain about doesn't occur, and so on and on for every such feature. Instead they sink all of their development resources into new campaign mechanics and new races and units and whatnot, and granted they do a very good job with those, but damn son if you expect your customers to pay for that much DLC that is so trivial and efficient for you to produce, shouldn't the base game that acts as a platform for sales of said DLC be in pristine condition where everything moves like clockwork? The stupid thing is that they are absolutely willing to push this shit to the point that AFTER having cut a bunch of stuff for the sake of development, whether each cut was justified or not, they STILL can't get to the bare minimum level where all the things (or at least most of the major ones) they did retain/include work properly.
Very well-written level-headed response, and I agree it does seem they just gave up trying to make things work. Gunpowder in WH is such a missed opportunity for truly interesting gameplay, imagine the implications of gunpowder being super effective at countering flying entities. Any potential for good combat is squandered in those games, making them all the more tragic. In a game like Shogun 2 you can intentionally destroy your own fortifications so that the rubble and debris kills enemy soldiers; imagine if the same applied to monsters in WH, where a tumbling corpse can cause massive collateral to both friend and foe.
I only got to watch this video for a minute but the struggle to tell when your guns are firing is a mood. I’m all for downloading mods to fill a game out I don’t expect the developers to nail everything but when it’s basic stuff and you have to add so many mods it lowers the performance of the gameplay it’s beyond frustrating
Been a hardcore fan since the first total war. I grew up playing them religiously for so many years, even Rome 2 I was hooked ( thankfully many patches have made it more enjoyable) but since the Warhammer series it has lost that passion. I keep trying to pick it back up but it just never sticks. I definitely feel what you're saying in this video. The corner cutting steals that immersion for me too much to get back into them fully again for the last few titles.
You just need to fire up Medieval 2 and hear that imposing menu theme choir and then boot up something like WH2 with its tinny sound effects and non existent soundtrack to notice something has changed.
Great video I totally agree. I have every TW game and still have my original Shogun Total War disc's. The failing attention to detail is probably why I find myself playing Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai the most. it was still possible to beat a high tier army with a low tier army with skill. The latest WH games are all down to veterancy death stacks... I remember seeing an article for Rome TW when it came out (I think it was in PC gamer mag) showing a huge siege battle with units sizes of what looked to be over 1000men per unit and around 30 or so units visible in the limited angle of the picture. I always wanted to play that battle but even mods have failed to do it justice. On a side note I Hate Troy eco system. scratch that I just hate Troy...
You're busy hating Troy meanwhile the rest of us forgot it exists. Also I have such fond memories of Shogun 2 back in 2012 fighting the 3-stack Ikko Ikki army with over 10k men, I had so much hope for what the future would bring us lol...
Those massive armies are always teased in the trailers. Even the Shogun 2 teaser video that showed a battle had like massive, massive armies of dudes on the screen. It never lived up to that.
I generally agree with the point of this video, but I also feel like you're overlooking a lot of things that were cheap/felt bad in shogun 2. Units had little to no variety in them in Shogun 2, both visually and functionally, Yari ashigaru dropped their spears in lieu of katanas at every possible intervals, castles were terrible visually and gameplay wise, diplomacy meant nothing,.. etc. I think CA has always been lazy, except now they are also being lazy with the basic gameplay mechancis that they had nailed with previous entries, which is why it sticks out. They regressed, somehow.
Shogun 2 has better unit variety than every TW game since, does Rome in Rome 2 having 14 melee units that share mostly the same stats count as "variety?" Especially when the AI gets ridiculous bonuses to melee and morale that it marginalizes melee infantry, leading to cavalry, ranged and single entity spam in later games? WH has a lot of units but you the majority of them are almost never worth recruiting they may as well not exist. I never implied Shogun 2 is perfect, but the fact that we have only seen regression since then is embarassing. I would much rather have a roster of 10 units that are distinct from one another than 100 copy-paste units of which only 20 are worth bringing. Useless clutter that also coincidentally makes for easy DLC fodder.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 have you played Warhammer? Saying 90% of the units are useless or redundant is just patently false, you can pretty much make any unit in wh have its use, with the exception of a few outliers per faction.
@@Haunterthe1st yes and that's where I got the clips from WH utilized in my video. In one of my previous videos I showcased a combat test with the express purpose of showcasing how terrible melee infantry are in WH thanks to difficulty modifiers; with 2 armies of equal size and quality, my units routed despite surrounding the enemy and despite having a major uphill advantage. It is no secret even among those positive towards WH that melee infantry are a poor investment, only worth getting to pin down enemy units so your ranged units and lord can do all the real damage. And considering how many melee infantry units are in WH, they do indeed count for a significant portion of the roster.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 The issue is that while that small roster is distinct, in the late game, only 4-5 are worth bringing. Naginata Samurai, Bow samurai, Great Guard if you can get them, european cannons and matchlocks if you want to larp and pretend they are useful. The AI will spam Samurai units and the game will be ass in that lategame period. It completely throws away any historical immersion. Japanese armies of the time were much more diverse and me needing extensive modding to get to an acceptable point of balance:realism will always be a stain on shogun 2. It's a fantastic total war game, arguably the best, but it's also CA's biggest compromise between streamlining and quality content.
Regarding 23:40, the idea is that the long dense weapon formations keep the enemy physically away, making it more difficult to reach and hit the soldiers. As a stat it has been incorporated into evasion. In terms of missile fire vulnerability, a tighter packed formation will be easier to hit as there will be less space to dodge or block the missiles.
This should be modeled by the physics and shape of the formation itself. In Rome 1 phalanx wasn't just magic stat buff, the advantage was having a dense wall of pikes outranging all other melee weapons. Soldiers would have to find a way through the wall. Slapping a 10% modifier instead is not only less interesting, it also opens up potential to abuse it because you no longer have to bother to ensure your formation is in good order. You can see this stat stacking stupidity in how Testudo offers full protection to missiles even when the men are dispersed.
@@cem174you need to play rome 1 Phalanx does not confer a stat modifier on units the actual formation makes it harder to enemies to get into melee range of the phalanx. All modern TW games accomplish through stat buffs what the older games did through realistic movement and formations.
Empire will be forever my favourite total war game, despite how buggy it is, it's quite enjoyable, a remember falling in love with watching replays of battles I fought with the music. the Music was quite amazing, the rising intensity and the difference in specific battles on the music, made it feel like if you changed a few settings enough, it felt like you were watching an actual movie. Empire: II would probably the best total war game ever if it's made.
Agree except about Empire 2, no chance at all that it will be good seeing how incapable CA is off depicting guns properly. It will just be another rehash of Rome 2 with an 18th-century paint job.
Lol. Empire had a terrible soundtrack. It started the whole trend of Total War having dull soundtracks, with Shogun 2 maybe being the exception. Also, Empire was an awful, bland, buggy mess that you couldn't play without mods. I have 400 hours in it, and that's only because it's the only game of it's kind. I mostly dumped it for NTW, a great game especially with NTW3, which only suffers from having a limited scope. It's what Empire should've been.
amazing work... i never thought about it that way in terms of the delivered of information. And you know why... because it was conveyed so clear and natural.
the first total war game i played was shogun 2 when it went free on steam for a couple days, played it a little, couldn't get into it and dropped it, i'm pretty sure it's a mix of being overwhelmed, not being used to a whole lot of strategy games at the time, and just having other games to play Didn't actually get into it until warhammer 2 (around warden and the paunch update i believe), which i did drop as well at first (even refunded it), but eventually came back and properly learned it, and have been playing consistently ever since Having watched the video, it reminds me of something like Fallout 1, 2 and NV versus Fallout 4, where the franchise just dumbed down the deep mechanics of the former ones for the sake of appealing to a wider audience in the latter. Except with total war i am apparently the wider audience member now, even going back and playing shogun 2, i just have way more fun in warhammer 2 and 3, and it's arcadeyness? Not sure what word i would use to describe the difference between them Regardless, a lot of the complaints in the video are valid and having things like better weapons sounds and smoke would be an addition i would not complain about if it were to be added to WH. Hopefully you veterans fans eventually get a game that scratch that itch of a deeper, better designed game, i know what it's like to be on that end lol Also, thoughts on the warhammer 3 sounds? It's an upgrade over 1 and 2 i'd say
Yeah it's sad how it went downhill. I tried Warhammer, but I just didn't enjoy it. I miss armies not needing general, now everything is 20 stack, you don't see small armies roaming around. Garrisons are huge, so even for city without army, you have to bring full stack, unlike in Empire, where it was small garrison to help you in battle, but alone useless. Also it's such a shame they removed individual villages that you can raid. I returned to Total war games recently cause I like the battles, but for few years I switched to paradox games which have much more developed and in depth mechanics. Like when I started playing Hearts of Iron, every update they added new mechanics, logistics, supply lines, etc. Now it's completely different game, granted you have to buy dlcs, but atleast they don't charge you for being able to play specific nation. Total war games on the other hand didn't evolve at all. Like I watch youtube documentaries about wars in past, and I always feel disappointed I can't mimick them in Total war, because they just don't bother. Like for example having bigger maps, so that reinforcing armies will have to get there physically, so you could send your army to intercept them. Maybe changing the siegies, so that in one battle you could capture first wall defences. The battle would end, but sieging on map would continue, this time defenders would only be holding in keep and with half of their supplies. Or having scout units and having to use them to learn where enemy is, where are his reinforcements coming from. Maybe supply lines, so that enemy would cut your acces to your territory forcing you to pillage to survive and be slower. Add on top of that all things you said, they just didn't do anything for a decade other than make new 3d models. They are just asset company.
The larger the settlement the more rounds of siege battles rather than a one time defeat everyone dies its over. The more casualties you inflict in each round the less you face the next battle. I think this mechanic would still function properly with the 1 year turn based time frame too
There is sooooo much you could do with the warfare of the past, sadly ca is just an assembly without the creativity. But it has been like that for 10 yeats and wont change sadly.
The reason TW:WH has cheap attention to detail is because it isnt a period sim. When you're recreating a period of actual human history you need to pay some level of attention to the details to make it believable. But in a game thats silly magic and wizards and dragons realism just kind of goes out the window and so attention to little details become less important since you're already having to suspend your disbelief for all the other silly shit.
If Third Age, a mod, can bring to life the races of Tolkien's universe, spanning Orcs, Dwarves, Men, Elves, etc. then there is no reason that same care can't be demonstrated by an AAA studio with all its resources and talent. I don't agree with the insinuation that fantasy is inherently more difficult or that it should be held to a lower standard.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 That's not what I said at all. I said it becomes less important overall because a lack of attention to detail is generally less jarring or disturbing in an already silly environment.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 And further more now that I think about it, this narrative you tell yourself of the plucky modder who somehow outperforms the incompetent corporation of hundreds is erroneous for a number of reasons, chiefly being: 1) The person who made the third age mod didn't do it all alone. His work was built on the shoulders of giants without which his 'mod' would have never been possible. 2) The development pipelines for a hobby modder and a corporate team delivering a commercial product to market are VASTLY different from each other to the point of it being ridiculous to even try to compare them. A modder 'working alone' doesn't have to compromise on the final vision for the product with other people, and also doesn't have to deliver his product on a set time table. He just works on it when he has time until he's done, oftentimes over the course of years or even decades!
every single total war game since Medieval 2 has been lower in quality than its predecessor. The biggest issue is the fact the unit collision is so broken, that charging has become ridiculously bad.
I can't wait for the next total war title where guns including artillery don't make any sound, don't reload, don't have muzzle flash and make no smoke puffs.
I pick TW because I want to see grown ups hack each other in wars. Nowadays, either the battles end so quick or it is so micro intensive that I don't have the chance to do that.
@@zeropoint216 It's not up to modders to fix core design issues while the developers twiddle their thumbs. I would much rather modders focus on creating things like total conversions instead of being forced to fix the base game.
I started off with Rome 2, then I went back for Napoleon and Empire, and then I played WH. I saw so many people crying and complaining that Shogun2 FOTS is the best, and every game afterwards lost the plot. I got FOTS and honestly sorta true. I still like WH because using single units, monster units, and magic is really fun, but historical TW games is just a completely different experience. (3k and troy are abominations because they try to bridge the gap between fantasy and historical, but they just end up failing at both).
I feel like this problem has more to do with how much more varied content games like Warhammer has. In Empire and Napoleon Guns were the main type of units so it makes sense that they would put alot of effort of making it seem realistic. In Warhamer 1 and 2 (I haven't played 3) there are only 7 gunpowder units so it makes sense they wouldn't put much detail it.
That doesn't explain why Medieval 2 or the Shogun 2 base game handled their guns well, despite them being very melee-centric and very much not centered on guns. Medieval 2 had spears, pikes, light melee cavalry, heavy melee cavalry, horse archers, mounted gunners, ballista, catapults, trebuchets, cannons, war elephants, plenty of "variety" and yet it handled most of them very well.
Am I the only one who really likes Rome 2? Well, at least with mods. But tbh, Total War is one of the game series that no matter how good or bad the vanilla experience is, they really start to shine with mods.
If I disregard the battle map for a bit, what really irks me is the strategy map. The AI is dumb. Now, I know that it is not really AI, just a bunch of scripts. Still, you can script in a way that makes the world interesting. Why can't there be a couple of race behaviors? Order races trying to consolidate holdings and then defend them at all costs, Chaos races either raiding and sacking or straight up going for the jugular while the odd choices (Vampire Counts f.e.) having special behavior? Why can't the AI make interesting choices? Why can't CA build the campaings and race traits in a way that promotes interaction? All the races are the same thing, just different stats, unit skins, UI and a minigame in the menu. There is no real difference between playing the Orcs and the Dark Elves, even though lore-wise they have massively different vibes.
Because that level of differentiation would require time, effort, direction, testing aka things that CA can't be bothered to do. They couldn't even release WH3 in a working state.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Fair enough I guess. I mean it all really comes down to CA being too obtusely corporate to deliver at least a good product. Seen that a thousand times before and will be a never ending story. Explains why the modern games are just soulless. In theory it has all the makings of a Total War game, but it is just a checklist of the stuff it should have.
It blew my child mind in medieval 2 when you upgraded your units weapons or armour in the overworld map it would physically change the look of your units on the battle map, such as upgrading your peasant levies to gold rated armour, they'd be wearing plate armour, whereas units with no armour would have no armour in battle.
Not to mention the music changed depending on how hectic the battle becomes.
To me it was destroying buildings in a siege, would make them broken even in the map
Warhammer mod for Medieval 2 has this supercharged, with 4 or 5 different models depending on the armor level for some units. It is beautiful.
yep video title is misleading. it's not total war, it's only total war warhammer, three kingdoms, and troy. fantasy games for the lowest common denominator
@@cagneybillingsley2165 so, all of the new total war games? Gee, wonder if that indicates something
@@cagneybillingsley2165 Misleading? Title very clearly implies I'll be talking about the state of the series presently, which means the focus on newer games...
The continual downgrade of guns in Total War is saddening to me because gun lines are so much fun
When Empire of all games is a positive point of comparison you know how far we've fallen.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I was just gonna bitch about that as the diehard Medieval II fanboy that I am. Still, Empire had... something.
Lines in general are usually pretty fun ;`)
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 That game REALLY needs a remake/remaster, just give the BATTLE AI some modern AI and the game WONT SUCK! Also add in all that stuff thats STASHED in the files that they never used, cus that shit is cool.
Heck look at some of the MODS that have come out for Empire lately. PEOPLE LOVE that kind of warfare, Order amongst the CHAOS of battle. Warhammer just feels Chaotic and sometimes i just go "dude WTF why are you losing in melee? Why are you dying so fast?"
Also ya know, add in all the little touches from Napoleon and/or FoTS. Like repairing your SHIPS mid battle.
compare melee unit duel visuals from rome 2 to - Shogun 2 to Warhammer, there are 10 minute kill compilations from shogun and rome
A small missed opportunity was the simple visual language of knights dropping their lances in Medieval 2 when given enough room to charge, activating a "mode" of sorts where the charge was much more devastating than if the unit is told to charge but doesn't have enough room to build up momentum. This property is also specific to knights and lancer units, normal cavalry don't do this, even if they do build up momentum and the momentum is still factored into their charge.
Something hidden too is that the weight of the horse adds to the unit's mass in Medieval 2, but this factor is hidden from the player even though it affects the efficacy of the charge. In general there are light horses, warhorses, barded horses, and plated horses, each of which have more mass than before and which is different from the raw attack stat possessed by the unit.
It's not really hidden--not in M2TW, anyway: the horses themselves give you a sense of what to expect. Which is a really nice touch: a classic version of "show, don't tell".
@@Albukhshi It's never insinuated by the game itself at any point that the armor on the horses does anything more than be a part of the armor stat. And because the attack stat factors into the equation, it's a muddy thing you only really learn by digging through the files as there isn't any evidence that it exists within the game
@@darkfireslide
I'm referring to the mass, not the attack or armor. Should have clarified on that. Sorry.
To clarify: while the mass is actually coded in descr_mounts.txt, you still get a sense of what the horse can do mass wise from what you see on the battlemap: the destriers the knights ride are better at slamming into the target than, say, the ponies that a Turkish horse archer has. That's the sort of thing I was trying (ineptly) to explain.
It's naturally not as precise as reading it from the text file, but it gives you the right idea.
As to the armor: for cavalry that is indeed merged with the soldier's armor, under the primary_armor (secondary armor is for elephant units, for example). For attack, the export_descr_unit.txt suggests that the horse's attack is part of the secondary weapon entry, but the game itself contradicts that.
Agree, even arcadey games like AoE IV has this lance drop system which they recover over time. TW's direction is indeed wrong lately..
Sadly, it's just the charge bonus giving the cav extra attack. Mass only affects how much the inf are launched in the air, but armour DOES play a huge role in how much cav dies on the charge when charging into heavy inf which is abandoned in future titles for some reason in favour of charge reflect only given to spear/polearm units.
The problem is that TW just has no competition.
There is just nothing like it an with all it's flaws there is still no other game that comes even close to the overall quality in what it is doing.
Hmm… as a code monkey trying to shift from working in regular tech to game dev, I sense an opportunity…
Wise words
Here’s hoping for 🤞
No serious competition anyway. We had a few games that have a campaign map and similar style large scale combat. But yea, nothing quite close to the quality CA makes
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 Which others came the closest?
More than anything, these videos prove that the engine used since 2009 has never been up to the task. It might have started out with optimism, but I think time and time again, it's been a constant let down. Even the "good" games that use the engine have flaw after flaw you can pick out.
I think it has less to do with the engine and more to do with a clear shift in design direction and priorities. Recall that the last "good" engine was adopted before CA was acquired by SEGA; Medieval 2 was already showing signs of what was to come despite reusing Rome 1's engine (cavalry vs cavalry combat being awkward, pikes being weird, projectile physics not as tight as Rome 1, and the introduction of matched combat animations).
Even if CA never moved to the TW3 Engine I still think we would see a decline in quality.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 No doubt I'd agree with your take; I just look at it as more of a "perfect storm" of the engine change and corporate design change really taking things down. You mentioning pikes in Medieval 2 just gave me some horrible flashbacks...it was such a confusing change considering how they worked in Rome 2.
Shogun 2 and FotS was excellent. It's not just the engine.
@@LordVader1094 I know I'm an outlier here, But my personal Total War experience was-
Rome 1- childhood "wow" seeing my cousin play, into owning and playing it for hours and hours, becoming a fan, adding mods, etc.
Barbarian Invasion- spending even more hours exploring this world lost to history, inspiring a lot of research as I found out about the times surrounding the fall of Rome.
Empire- Loving the game idea but it was too frustrating to run on my budget machine, so I never got to really play it until it was years out of date
Shogun 2- Wait, what happened? Nothing feels right here, the combat isn't satisfying, the formations dont hold, the country management sucks... theres all these new features the game is advertising, from animations to AI and politics, but I can access any of it I'm too busy micromanaging this massive swarm I'm supposed to call an army, and this headache I'm supposed to call a nation.
Rome 2- Okay. Return to greatness, finally, and they said they fixed it up. ...This feels... empty and wrong. It looks better, but its opaque, and uninteresting. Formations still dont hold. Okay... I guess I'm done with TW. I'll just play M&B.
@@ClockworkAnomaly "Combat isn't satisfying for Shogun 2". I 100% disagree on that, combat is so damn satisfying.
I'm also really sad about just how much harder it is to mod newer Total War games. There are more total conversion mods for Medieval II and Rome, than for all the games after them combined.
And, just a coincidence, Empire was the first game to have unit pack DLC's.
There's another aspect of the flags in Med 2 that I love. I don't know if later games have this, but in Med 2, for every point of experience, the unit will get a small, extra, triangular flag. You can literally know how much EXP a unit has JUST BY LOOKING AT IT.
i know this exists in shogun 2 and FotS, ill have to see Empire and NTW.
I love the warhammer entries. I play them alot. But Rome, Medieval 2 and most of all, Shogun 2, will forever be the goats of the series to me. I liked Shogun 1, since it was the game that got me into the total war series, but as of today, nostalgia isn't strong enough to overcome the graphics :P
medieval 2's campaign map is a lot worse than later titles but the units still look absolutely great imo
I rebooted up Attila the other day and was shocked to see how bad the graphics were lol...
@@JohnSmith-bs9ym not to mention it also runs like crap, Total War games have no right to be system hogs with how they look mediocre at best.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 it does indeed run like garbage for what it us
@@calebbarnhouse496 I'm sorry but Yari Wall is not some magic win button. Anything that hits their flank will cause the unit to break and the AI on very hard difficulty regularly flanks them.
And once you reach turn 10 and start fighting Samurai units with experience you will need to support your Yari with your own cavalry and specialist units.
Not to mention they get shredded by archers.
"Yari Ashigaru spam" is a 2011 meme.
It’s the fine details that make the “modern” total war games substantially worse than MED 2 or Shogun 2. One specific detail is that in MED 2 if you have crossbows and you put infantry in front they will not fire if they do not have an angle. Additionally if they do fire you are likely to kill more of your own men than the enemies. Angles are huge in Med 2 your archers being placed to get just the right angle on their shots could be the difference from winning a battle to doing absolutely nothing.
Similar thing with shogun 2 and empire. In those games in order for all the lines to fire they needed line of sight, so the back rows of the unit could fire because they had other soldiers in front of them. If you wanted them to fire you needed to have them kneel, but in Warhammer everyone in the unit fires regardless of if there's a friendly infront of them or not. Having a unit on a hill was such and advantage in older games cause every single soldier in the unit had line of sight on the enemy.
@@gtassa01 not to mention this new system means you have no issue concentrating firepower in one area, just bunch your gun units in columns.
One another cool thing I noticed in Med 2 recently is how you can extend your ranged units' range EXTENSIVELY (like even twice or thrice) by putting them in a position where they will have line of sight and the trajectory to hit their target (for example a reversed slope or a hill). I really love when games take terrain into account and this is one of the best ways to do that.
While I really enjoy Warhammer 2 and 3, I'm sad that cavalry is so useless there. After a charge, they ragdoll infantry without dealing any substantial dagame, then in a fight they usually end up losing more health than the infantry before they can disengage.
Another thing I don't like is the lack of navy. Not even naval battles, but simply the navy itself. In older games you had to plan an entire logistic operation in order to move your troops across the sea. Now you just move your army into water and they conjure up a ship out of thin air. This is disappointing, especially considering that Warhammer has a couple of naval-focused factions, like Norsca, Vampire Coast, High Elves with their maritime empire and Dark Elves with their Black Arks.
So yeah, cavalry and navy are my two biggest problems in Warhammer. Other than that, I'm fine with the rest of the changes.
The way naval stats were so poorly conveyed in Empire completely doomed the idea from its inception sadly :(
I feel like if you rag doll a group of infantry its really easy to finish that group off. I do understand what your saying but if you break an infantry line and they go flying most of the time you can wipe that unit out quickly.
well the naval part is somewhat mor understandable... beyond diversity Warhammer just includes some factions that dont know what a boat is. Be ist Beastmen, most of chaos or even woodelves
@@iandevine3063 yeah people talk about this in competitive warhammer 3. Just breaking the line is good because the time it takes to reform is time you can use to deal free damage.
i think one reason why they didnt add the whole naval system to the warhammer games is that those feel like theyre supposed to be more accessible for a broader variety of players. A little bit like comparing an arcade racing game to a sim one.
I think your critique of the degradation of Total War would probably get more fans to agree with you
As much as Volound is correct , he sadly has a reputation with outsiders for being a cynical boomer
You have a more analytical with your critiques , thus you'll probably get more nods than "DON'T CARE , LOOKS GOOD"
Volound has no credibility he killed his yt channel by raging at kids in the comments. CA blacklisted him cuz he is actually toxic not because he made valid points.
@@rodsquad5764 pretty petty reason to be against someone
@@TheManeymon Signing petitions to a company that blacklisted you based on your personality is the textbook definition of petty lol
he made hours long videos basically showing the same things in this video so I don't see why he's any less analytical. More emotional, sure, and that's what is probably putting a lot of people off, but downplaying his critiques is just dishonest.
@@Goodmanperson55 my bad
Yeah i think the WORST "devastating charge with no real effect" was in Zarchovichs video about how to make the most of chariots. Runs a chariot down the ENTIRE unit one side to the other, their are soldiers scattered EVERYWHERE and yet they all just get back up like they got hit with a stiff breeze. Why CA didn't give line infantry bayonets in FOTS is beyond me, just PORT the bayonets from Empire, polish them up and give them the spear animations Yari Kachi have.
Hell in Empire to FOTS you could FOLLOW the arrows, bullets, cannonballs to their target with the INSERT CAM, and it gave you a FPS view of the battle from your soldiers prospective. Its funny, the only thing that seems to improve are the GRAPHICS, for comparison Shogun 2 is like....16GB, WARHAMMER 3 is OVER 100 GB! But the actual ANIMATIONS (interestingly they have moved away from the SYNICED kill animations and back to something similar to Rome 1), FORMATIONS (or lack their of) and PROJECTILES (especially the projectiles) all look AWFUL.
If you PAUSE the game after Archers, Gunman or artillery FIRE in Shogun 2 and Empire you can SEE the arrows, bullets and cannonballs in MIDAIR, fully rendered and everything. In Warhammer if you PAUSE and look at the Projectiles, its just a WHITE STREAK attached to a voxel Dimond that looks like it belongs IN MINECRAFT! (maybe its just my Graphics settings BUT STILL)
But yeah, Total War has become ALOT less Immersive over the years. Its just been boiled down to PRETTY GRAPHICS and NUMBERS.
this is the worst fucking capitalization i have ever seen
@@richardvlasek2445 oh my "I"s. ya i never bother.
@@jaywerner8415 yet you BOTHER capitalizing other RANDOM words in each SENTENCE.
@@zeropoint216 for empisis. I dont know any typing commands, to make hte words look diffrent. so i just capitalize it.
The graphics are a downgrade from warhammer 2
The game is so blurry it hurts my eyes
One thing you didn't brought up that bugs me the most starting with Shogun 2 is the gamification of the faction management aspect. In Rome 1 and Medieval 2 everything is made to make you feel like you are building an empire. You follow your family throughout the years, you chose how you want to organise your empire, what troops to garrison, what to build and where.
With shogun 2 you start to get arbitrary limits and rules on everything, in Rome 2 with the provinces edict mechanic you can't even chose how you want to expand. You have to hold the entire arbitrary regions to optimise your output and you can't even chose which town you want to develop since capital cities are pre-determined. I thought we were supposed to have fun with history. And beware not to invade a city before the AI invested it's growth unlock into it or you'll be wasting quite a lot of time unlocking the next building.
Yep. It's one of most frustrating things, I want to conquer the world, and instead the game tries to slow me down
You say that, but the freedom of Rome lead to a lot of gamification too. Choosing your capital in the middle of nowhere just to minimize the order penalty? Recruiting/moving/disbanding units to move population around? Moving your army out to town, gifting to enemy then march in+execute to get rid of squalor in one turn for free? All very exploitable game mechanics in Rome.
@@henkrpe3249 No game is perfect and whatever you play you'll always be able to exploit game mechanics in one way or another. What you are describing is freedom to use those mechanics that way. Freedom you don't have in newer games. No concept of population, replaced by a broken growth system. Shallow characters, army tied to general, extreme limits on number of generals/army, extreme limits on settlement development. Limits that don't make sense in universe.
It would be like praising the removal of the physics system from a potential Half-life sequel because it allowed you fly and clip through walls in the previous game. Sure the absence of a system removes its potential for exploit, but you also forgo gameplay depth.
@@Rubafix989 I would say the growth system in wh is a lot less broken than the growth system in Rome. Mainly because you can't level up a city to stage 5 by just disbanding troops there. Less interesting sure, of course, but more broken? No way.
Limits on not being able to make every single city a huge level 5 settlement also makes sense. Less fun and less sandbox yeah, but much more realistic.
Also, what wh lacks in genealogy it makes up for in standard RPG stuff like items and spells. Sure, you can't "breed traits" into generals anymore but you get spell trees, stat items and on-use items. Tbh character progression is one of the things wh does well...
@@henkrpe3249 stat stacking on a lord so he can defeat entire units or armies is far from engaging
And here I am playing Total War Napoleon with passion to this day😀
"My enemies are many..."
I often come back to Medieval 2 and Empire. Played and finished Troy campaign. Apart from nice graphics there was nothing I liked about it.
P.S. Resources system instead of just money was interesting though.
Before 3K even released I was on the official forums asking how exactly it made sense that units without shields could be affected by the '-100% Missile Block Chance' of the excuse of a spear-wall ability that was being implemented. What were they blocking missiles with to begin with?
dont ask, just consume products and get excited for next products
Shogun 2 and prior were peak Creative Assembly. There's a dev studio that I used to really like, held in great esteem, was DICE. Interestingly both studios had their peak around the same years. The 2000s and early 2010s were great, but have slid into a worse and worse state. That's a lot of time if you think about it. More than enough time for the old school talent that made their better games to move on to other places or even retire.
DICE and Creative Assembly of course still exist. In name only though. But the talent that made their better games are gone, I bet.
As for infantry formations and how it really only worked if the formation had integrity, yes, even old school Rome 1 did it right. The Phalanx units were OP as hell from the front... IF they were properly set, in formation. They'll hold back and cut apart anything that comes after them from the front, even Roman heavy infantry or the best heavy cavalry charges. But if you can stick your charge in while the Phalanx is not properly set, then the situation is in doubt for the Phalanx.
The Testudo would provide its vaunted protection only once the formation was actually together in the Testudo formation.
There was no magic button for an immediate stat boost, cheap immunity. Your units have to be properly set up to carry it out first.
Jim Ansel CA's Founder left in 2005, and right after that we got Medieval 2 which already had visible cracks in its gameplay (charges being more janky, pikes being more janky, matched combat was featured for the first time, 2-handed weapons issues); and I don't think that is a coincidence.
Ansell was unique in the world of CEO's as he had a strong technical background and was even quoted as saying he would rather see the company close than release a bad game. 4 years later we got Empire's botched release.
And right around that time we also had the acquisition by SEGA. With these pieces in place it was only a matter of time till this turned out how it did.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I have to respectfully disagree regarding Empire. You can tell there was so much more there that they wanted to do, but didn't take the time to fix.
If they had more time to fix the issues and cut the giant diamond in the rough they already had, Empire would have been the best game to come out of CA, before or after.
Its a fundamentally good but still fatally flawed game.
I don't mind them simplifying things for the sake of a fantasy game that's going to have a vastly more unique unit roster than anything you would see in a historical game (barring maybe medieval 2?) It's just that the warhammer games were so damn popular I can easy see CA thinking that they don't need to worry about making battles plausible anymore for their historical releases.
Thinking it's just a fantasy game is a mistake. Realistic formations are a key aspect of Warhammer Fantasy, the tabletop game. TWWH is really not a good Warhammer game nor Total War game. It's just a flashy spectacle. Like a movie or something. In actual Warhammer, most leader units do* have extra hitpoints, but they can't tank multiple repeated direct hits from musketballs like TWWH, for example.
@@cole8834but you have to change things for a RTS. In tatble top it's easy to keep track of where your units are at all times. In a RTS you don't want your general dying if you look away for 5 seconds
@@zeropoint216 people could manage this in old total wars like empire Napoleon and shogun 2
@@zeropoint216 In older games Generals would be apart of a unit of say, 40 men, and the general himself could have traits that specifically increased or decreased the generals individual hitpoints. Since he is apart of a unit, and not an individual general by himself, it was more realistic and engaging. I dont understand how in the newer titles they left that behind in favor of individual general tanks.. it seems to me that CA is following a pattern in the gaming industry; "brighter colors, hollow games." focused on making the games look nice rather than the actual gameplay...
@@zeropoint216 The only time the general would die in 5 seconds is usually due to a stray artillery shot that managed to hit that model. The game was very generous for the general model not to be the first to die in the first charge if they were on horse back.
When Total war fights started to feel like it was about doing damage to a health bar instead of a War it really failed :/
The one thing that really killed it for me was healthbars. Yes, of course the units in Rome, Medieval, Shogun etc had hidden healthbars, but it really sold the impression of particular models fighting it out with each other. Now it's just a blob fighting a blob until a number gets low enough. The spectacle is gone, the magic is gone. And I think they cemented it with removal of model-to-model combat and duel animations, now the models are just waving their weapons vaguely at each other.
The damage done by healthbars is so great and all-encompassing that it merits its own video which I will be making.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I think what cannot be overlooked in this case is how Total War battles effectively changed from a singleplayer spectacle into a competitive multiplayer oriented "match", where AI simply takes the role of another player. And there is no place for relative randomness of a 1hp / model system in a competitive game, because it would result in a tirade of complaining how a high tier unit can take considerable losses at a hand of a basic unit. This degree of randomness gave the game a touch of realism, where even a heavily armed praetorian would not be able to solo tank a dozen peasants. And a shift from this pushed battles into the arcade territory, where actual combat doesn't really matter any more and it's all in the statcards.
@@mrorome5064 Yeah but that's focusing on tactics while ignoring the strategic and operational layer: how do you avoid involving your high quality units in fights that are not worth their time or the casualties?
It's why its wasteful to use guns against levy infantry when there are higher quality armored targets around, for example.
The "random" aspect will only punish you for not putting in the effort to give your units favorable fights.
But of course that would pressure the player into actually thinking which we can't do.
@@mrorome5064 good example of same realistic approach is men of war series in comparison to health bar, more sporty-arcady, company of heroes
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Yup. It's all been dumbed down to the point where the best tactic is literally just cheesing the AI or making doomstacks of the current meta high tier unit because stats go brrr. I think you could just look at any video from LegendOfTotalWar to see what's wrong with the current battle system.
I like how you're using the bayonet mod for Shogun 2 fall of the samurai. I cannot fathom why CA didn't make that standard.
Because technically bayonets werent common in the Boshin war
Medieval 2’s guns’ sounds still terrifies me- in a good way
And that's how it should be. A reminder that soldiers of the time felt that way about these new weapons.
The weakened volume of guns in later games seem to be from an obscure pandering to children playing their games. Hence we have less ear breaking booms.
Take a look at shooters like Red Orchestra and Insurgency where weaponfire and explosions are terrifyingly loud that conveys the violence of the guns.
Now take a look at the Modern Warfare series and how toned done the sounds are to accomodate the extended playing time of vulnerable youth.
I can attest that I have some mild hearing loss after years of fighting through virtual Stalingrad and Iwo Jima.
This comment is golden. I always felt this altho i never seen anyone or have myself put it into words.
After 7 years of playing ro2-rs1 I still get jump-scared at times by the "you got head-shotted" sound. Sound design for those games was insane.
I don't think it's because game devs are "pandering to the weak children of today", it's probably more people don't like loud noises and don't know or care that guns are loud. Also, it's not a flex to talk about how video games gave you mild hearing loss.
I think some units in TWW have good sounds, leadbelchers sound great and so do grand cannons
He showed the dwarves, which are overall an old faction. The sound design of the total warhammer 3 factions is extremely good. Hell, even in total warhammer 2, take the vampire coast as an example, their sound design is fantastic and they're a gunpowder focused faction.
Leadbelchers are mid at best, man
CA has definitely been stretched hard and their best talent are all working on different projects.
@Grayble's Gringus CA has literally, never, ever, been a top of the line developer that puts out solid content without flaws. Empire total war? Unplayable until 6 patches later. Rome 2 at launch? Don't even make me laugh. This is literally just more of the same.
@Grayble's Gringus It's even worse when you realize they have an entire reddit of sycophants who would suck them off for taking a dump right on their heads. "They are worked so hard, poor poor CA, they are just victims of mean fans who will never be satisfied" that is the mentality of the reddit. This is almost the mentality of all new games coming out, which is why they all keep getting worse and worse each year.
@@generals.patton546 Dude it's Reddit, what did you expect. All of them are commie groomer pedos who hate free speech. Ofc they like being Stockholm syndromed.
You've explained so well in this and other vids why 3K felt off and the game was repellent instead of immersive.
CA have a bad habit of cutting the Gordian Knot when it comes to technical challenges. They'll simply remove glitchy features instead of trying to get them working as intended.
Also, is it just me or have they never again managed to get terrain textures looking as good as they did in Empire/Napoleon?
Those games had a sort of intermediate texture between the overall colour of the terrain and the close-up texture. It gave the terrain a lot more visual structure and variety at medium distances. Large stretches of open ground look flat and bland in the newer games by comparison.
It's not just the terrain, soldiers in 3K especially look a lot more like pastel drawings than actual 3D models, even up close. CA either over stylizes their games (3K, Troy, WH) or makes them dull and bland (Attila). 3K somehow manages to do both, with colorless unit cards and cartoon-ish looking soldiers, and I don't mean the good type of cartoon.
All the games from RTW to FotS all perfectly managed to showcase graphical fidelity for their time while keeping strong sense of style, whereas the newer games are designed by people who think style and function are mutually exclusive.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I was never a big fan of Shogun's plasticky-looking character models and its terrain is a noticeable step backwards visually from Empire/Napoleon, but its overall style was definitely a lot more coherent than newer titles.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs finally somebody aprecciates the battle maps in napoleon. They looked wonderfull and were actually huge with interesting design features to a point where a 4v4 linebattle spanning the entire map was fun and engaging
MTW2 was better tho
Yes! Napoleon has always had my favorite maps, in terms of the layout and also just the look of them
I came into this video somewhat angry and wanting to disregard it but when I watched the whole thing I ended up agreeing with every single point you brought up. Great job on this ine
This bird is not infuriated at all, I see.
But yeah thanks my dude. It's great to know that I put together an argument that can convince someone who may be skeptical of the conclusion.
I look forward to making more of these.
I’m honestly suprised there aren’t more total war games featuring the Napoleonic wars,American Civil war,and Franco Prussian war. Hell a game featuring the mass battles of WW1 would be cool.
Probably due to poor sales/player numbers for empire and napoleon so hard to justify the development to corporate.
For me its that Line infantry battles with guns are Hella boring in my opinion. Unit one stands in Front of unit 2 Shoots untill enemy flees or ammo is Empty And the defender is mostly in advantage because who shots first wins mostly if the units are not miles away from strength
I've found a good Great War mod for Napoleon and there some barebones Civil War stuff for Shogun 2.
@@pascalheinrich3990tell me you've never played a gunpowder TW without telling me.
You can't win at NTW or ETW or FOTS by just standing in a line and shooting. Unless your on easy or some shit....... Ok you can win in ETW because the AI will freak out and start death shuffling infront of your perfectly straight line.
The irony of the health bar being introduced in latter Total War games is that there was a Total War-esque game released in 2003 with that aspect: Praetorians. It got an HD version released in 2020 as far as I know but I am still playing with the original version.
I agree with 99% of what you said, but surely comparing a desolate desert from three kingdoms to a grassy hilly area in shogun 2 is a bit disingenuous. I'm a huge shogun 2 fan (I have close to 500 hours and I haven't touched total war since warhammer 2 after having all the previous games) and I agree with all your stuff but that kinda caught me off guard. Great content! Keep it up.
look at the depth of the image itself, specifically the soldiers up close in relation to the terrain further off in the background. And even desert/snow terrain in older Total War games had plenty of granularity in the textures. Sand =\ lacking in detail.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 totally fair, but I'd just use similar terrain in future for a better comparison
every TW game since rome 2 has had their maps look like desolate deserts. I didn't even realize that he was playing in a desert until I looked at your comment. Even load up a mission battle in WH2 and look at the ground, its a flat texture with no depth, there are just a lot of good looking props scattered about the map.
The maps are all just flat textures that look horrible especially vs NTW or S2's maps.
@@nilloc93 main problem with 3k for me is the units in the desert maps are just black blobs because of the lighting.
@tellyheadlol4258 the lighting in 3k and warhammer in general is attocious
I still get an "oh shit" moment whenever a cav unit strikes into one of my foot units in Med 2 and I see their numbers halve in 5 seconds. What an amazing game.
Totally agree. The UI of games after FotS is shocking. Playing as Otomo in Shogun 2, your point about firearms rings true. You want your matchlocks firing and breaking the enemy before they close in so you need to know who's firing and when. There are times when your guys just idle cause its Total War so you have to reposition and focus on that and get your guys doing what they're TRAINED to do which takes your focus away from other units. That segment on Three Kingdoms LITERALLY justifies piracy. You CANNOT look at that segment of Total War Three Kingdoms, a later release from CA and say "Yeah THAT deserves money" you simply can't.
It's been a while but I remember playing Rome 2 and Warhammer 1 and the AI had this habit of moving full stack armies within each others zone so you couldn't attack one without dealing with their reinforcements. So you'd have limited resources and couldn't raise a second full stack army to deal with random minor faction who has one settlement and 2 full stack armies idling and doing nothing. Thats when I took a break from Total War
When they implemented health bars, they turned all formations into single entity units. Regardless of how many individual models are used to represent a formation onscreen, it doesn't matter because individual soldiers don't exist anymore, and that is what turned Total War into a glorified Warcraft.
no that is not how it works if out of a big unit 1 models gets hit by a lot of missiles only that exact model looses hp the others remain untouched. I can only say that with absolute certainty for warhammer and Rome 2 but I doub't that's a thing that would have ever worked differently.
@@freaki0734 A) I don’t think you’re correct and B) even if you are correct that means individual models are still tanking damage that should be killing them. Any individual model should not be able to take multiple musket shots and keep fighting, just like infantry that gets thrown 30m by a cavalry charge shouldn’t be getting back up and returning to the formation like nothing happened.
@@Freesorin837 I am very very sure that I am correct.
In warhammer (all parts) you can easily test this by targeting a cheap infantry unit with spell like shem's burning gaze or fireball. Since the spell only targets parts of the unit you would expect only the models near the impact to die which is what you see 100% of the time.
In rome 2 you will have to take my word for it since I doubt you would find the kind of watching competetive replays and zooming into any dodge of precursor javelins on slow mo I did easily replicated on youtube.
But I guess you could maybe replicate that against the AI yourself as well if you wanted. just a lot less clear cut than the spell thing.
Granted they could do some trickery that only applies for high bursts of damage but that does not seem logical, and more complicated than just coding the health onto the models.
I disagree honestly. A hitpoint system such as warhammer and Rome 2 have is strictly somewhat less realistic but for one:
It allows for much more in depth unit design.
and also small injuries wearing you down would also be an important factor on the battlefield. The 10th Volley of sling stones will see a higher percentage of men go down than the first one, due to small injuries adding up and maybe even armor and shields taking damage.
I feel like for optimal realism you'd have to blend the two systems to where you either introduce crit chance into a healtpoint system and crits are fairly common representing the fact that a large parts of fighters going down is a case of if you got injured you are out. while maintaing the wearing down aspect, this would maybe even expand upon the depth in unit design where you could have heavy weapons like hallberds have a higher crit chance than lets say sling stones which will be more likely to just bruise you.
or you could introduce more half and quarter hp hits into a 1hp system with again the chance to full hit warrying by weapon.
Feel like the first would be best there but they would turn out pretty similar I guess.
this I would of course not recomment for a fantasy game as things there are meant to be a bit more ridicoulous.
In Rome 2 I had a siege battle where 1 arrow from a tower hit my general's bodyguard and the only guy who died was the general (guy who got hit by the arrow) this is certainly not true for the older games
Tell me you don't know the in depth mechanics of the newer games without telling me directly lmao.
Also no health bars would mean the competitive total war scene would not exists as well as it does now
The unit colors is the same for each faction in newer tw games when looked from a far distance. In rome 1 you knew that the white guys are the chartaginiams, reds juli, green brutti, yellow egypt and so on. Noe all of them are dark color, greyish
You can see that on full display in Attila most of all: ua-cam.com/video/gh0GSKX2AzY/v-deo.html
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.” - From Futurama 'god'
Really is a wonderful way to describe this.
8:25 i fucking died with the Obama Clan 🤣
12:55 you can go into descr editor settings to prevent disappearing corpses on low detail, I had to do this in Napoleon total war on medium graphics back in the day, but I don't know if that feature persists in the later titles. still a stupid feature they implemented by default either way
The 1v1 fights in Shogun 2 will always be my favorite part of any Total War and i'll never understand why they never came back.
As I say in pretty much every TW video, I feel like things started going downhill after the killing of town management after Empire introduced the super limited building slots. And then later games adding the ridiculous projectile lines.
I always always said there should’ve been a volly fire option. Like with fire at will it should be able to be toggled one and off, when on they fire when enemy is in range, and everyone has to reload before firing in mass
Same for firing by rank.
I like the way you laid all your points out, really well thought through and delivered well too, bonus points for not turning it to a poop throwing contest too. On the point of sound design I totally agree with you and I personally think the sound design of firearms in the WH series is a little anaemic, especially when you compare it to the overall sound design of the games. In my own personal experience I've not put many hours into any of the Historical TW's since Shogun 2, Id have honestly probably put the series down if it wasn't for the WH series, which I love despite its misgivings.
We definitely need reload animations. I just lost my main army because I didn't see that my mortars weren't firing. Not on my command or on fire at will. I spent two more games trying to get them to work but the games just buggy with ranged units.
Just picked up the Definitive Edition of Shogun 2, containing FotS, and after all these videos I am EXTREMELY excited!
you are in for some of the best gaming out there.
I recommend you go all in on the highest difficulty for your first try, just to see how punishing it can be.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Noted! Any specific faction I should play as first? Have played the tutorials, so I have a minor grasp on the controls and whatnot
super easy start: Shimazu or Chosokabe
intense opening and likely death for a first-timer: Oda
btw if you need help you can hop in here: discord.gg/W4vn46EAqf
It isn’t fair to compare a game all about line warfare to others that are FAR different
it's perfectly fair. And for the record I did include comparisons with Medieval 2, a game that is very much not centered about line warfare, either.
The setting of a game is completely superficial thing on its own; all I care about is how the different elements interact with one another.
To be fair, Total War was always the scrub historical strategy game to AOE's superstar. There's a reason Warhammer made the series cool.
The modern games, especially Warhammer 3, look so cartoonish..
The Scale thing is the biggest issue i have with the newer games since Rome 2. I mean in Medieval times having just 2000 men on the Field is pretty ok seeing how the armys usually werent that large. but calling 2500 men a Legion in Rome 2? UEBS2 Shows that a lot of entities are possible. I just hope some other developer takes up the idea with battles like these and improves it.
Shogun 2 had you fighting the 3-stack Ikko-Ikki with 12,000 men...we were really on the cusp of something truly great.
Imagine a Total War game that used the power of modern day Intel / AMD 8-cores and higher CPU's with over 5Ghz clock speeds to give us true-to-life battle scales.
Instead CA uses the increased power of new hardware to compensate for their continued poor optimization. 3K straight up would not launch on Windows 11 using a 12th gen Intel CPU. And Napoleon still doesn't work on 12th gen. And even when 3K did work, it was a system hog so much so that tech channels used it as a torture benchmark. And then Warhammer 3 released in the state that it did, running like crap.
And all this despite features being removed, visual downgrades, and the scale of battles remaining stagnant and in some cases regressing.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I agree wholeheartedly with you. Went back to M2, and honestly, the unit graphics hold up really well, and each unit feels like an individual fighting on its own, in a bigger unit. While in WH, its simply 1 unit, there arent any individuals, unless its an individual unit, in which case the animations are just shockwaves.. theres just no impact in it, no depth, it all just feels surface level compared to previous games.
So youd have to ask, whats the point making the units look good, raising all these system requirements... if at the end of the day, i can go back to a game 14 years old and still compare how it looks and play ... just keep those graphics, and raise the scale 10x or something.. Instead of giving me a campaign map that bogs down my 12gb vram enough that i cant have anything on a 2nd monitor, and changing graphics doesnt actually change that.
Another aspect that you didnt touch on in the video, that i actually think have a big part in the decline of it all, is that "Multiplayer" started becoming a thing, and was growing with each game, and with multiplayer, comes the need for "balancing" and "ease of use", and "UI clutter", to make it easier to game it in multi. In singleplayer, things can be unbalanced, as long as its not broken, but when you take multiplayer into account, things have to be "fully balanced", which means they have to keep the game simple, and gameyfy formations, skills, abilities, units, just to make them work in the game, instead of work like it would realistically work.
*(Why they balance multiplaer and singleplayer together in the same is beyond me, Shogun 2 had separate entities in the pack folders for single and custom/mp, expand on that... but anytime CA comes with a new good feature, they remove it for the next game... then come with new features for that.. that are removes for the next... and in the end, we make no progress from the older entries.
PS, im not against multiplayer at all, by all means include it! But dont let it be at the expense of the game it could be.
Really agree with what you both say here
I mean you can just go into the preferences script and change the "campaign unit multiplier" value. It's done the same in pretty much every TW game up to shogun 2
(I havn't tried it in WH)
I know its a cheap hack but CA will never increase unit scale.
The lack of realism in a lot of Total Warhammer's effects is incredibly disappointing as a huge Warhammer fan, who collects multiple armies for the tabletop game. Warhammer Fantasy is usually supposed to be on the rather low (as in low in fantastical elements) end of dark fantasy, but Total Warhammer not only pumps up the fantastical elements, but also makes it far less realistic and gritty in appearance. Of all the games to have a highly atmospheric appearance, you'd think Total Warhammer would be one.
Edit: Hell, the handgunner MODELS have multiple arm options for reloading. So why don't they reload in the biggest Total War trilogy?
I've never been into the Warhammer universe that much but I have read enough of the lore and TT roles to know that things like terrain, line of sight, reloading, formations actually matter quite a lot.
It's shocking to see some people say "well these are historical features and Warhammer is fantasy where they need to keep true to the lore" as if 1) the execs at CA care so much about being faithful to the lore, and 2) reading the Warhammer wiki for 5 minutes will show you that counter-argument is wrong.
Dude, I remember when I was a kid, the first time I played Shogun 2 after having only played Rome 1. It was the first time I had experienced using gunpowder units, I loved the intensity of the gunshots and the first time I had a ship blow up in front of the camera the insanely loud sound of the explosion scared the absolute SHIT out of me lmao.
Shogun 2 menu buttons are enough to scare me if I have my speakers too high.
It's actually incredible how you have to install a mod probably made by some dude in his mom's basement to have reload animations CA couldn't bother making in Warhammer.
And it's even more absurd when you realize this is something they already did and went out of their way to remove it.
Same with unit formations. Or that modders even made fricking airships, while CA isn't even willing to make normal ships/naval warfare
Lmao but why throw shade at the modders with the basement, they're doing nice work and most of the time for free
@@diegosrvin4332 Sorry if that came out wrong, that was meant to empathize how some players with nothing but their PC can do better than a big compagny like CA.
Creative Assembly, among many other companies, are comitting what I believe should be called fanbase betrayal. Their early success was based on the fact that they delivered good products that catered to a, more or less, specific playerbase or personality. At such a stage, the company doesn't owe anyone anything in particular, but what matters is what they do what that money and their brand. People have expectations and those should always be acknowledged.
To take a name, a series, and transform it to something else simply to attract more people and make more bucks is outright wrong. That's exploitation of those who supported the earlier releases. They don't owe those people a sequel, but the name of the series has a distinctive identity and to change that identity but sell it as the same is to screw over those who supported it before.
Creative Assembly is doing this with the Total War series. It was always about the realism and depth and details. About meaningful choices. If CA wants to create titles that are not as advanced, then they should make a new series to tell people, this is not the same, if you prefer the other then expect something different here. To use Total War is saying they want the old fans to support them, that these are successor games. But that is just not the case. The name and identity of the series is lost when they reformat everything to be less realistic and more simplistic.
They have betrayed the original fanbase by using their support and profit to make something different that will attract more people, yet is still called the same name. They don't care about those people who liked what they were doing before, now they have a popular name and that can be exploited to attract new people despite the product being completely different.
And this is without even mentioning the absolute insanity of rushed projects and mismanaged developments. False promises and lack of support/updates/fixes.
They didn't get more fans, both ETW and Rome 2 heavily damaged the franchise's profitability (and it has never fully recovered). Rome 2 had 120,000 launch day players, something no other TW game managed until 3K in 2019, which was killed less than 2 years later.
Hello from Total war Cat
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I think it should be safe to say that Rome 2 sold well despite the recieved failure, and it did so because of the name and expectations alone. But so much was changed fundamentally that the identity of Total War was put into question moving forward. The Total War Warhammer seies has defintively garnered a pretty significant player and fanbase, but to call thoise games Total War is just so wrong. The titles since and including Rome 2 have done nothing to hold the torch up as high as Rome and Medieval 2 did. Shogun 2 did a good job, though some things could have been better, Empire; maybe the same more or less. Everything after is just miles away from casting the same meaning of the name Total War.
@@dmmoof742 hello my man, hope you enjoyed the video.
I am replaying R:TW now and I have nothing, but praise for it's design language. You can tell about unit capabilities just by listening, hoe soldiers talk and look. Infamous sparabara spearmen wear baggy clothing and short spear; they look, like they will run the second they see an enemy, and they do. Celtic and Germanic warbands are formed in loose ranks and issue insults and talk in growæing voice. They are s good fighters, but obviously brash and undisciplined. The more visible armor legionarries wear, the more dangerous they are. They answer in short, no-nonsence sentences. They are obviously very dangerous. Elephants are loud and bellowing, their mass and sound alone tells you they might be as mych danger to you, as to the enemy. This is both designers and VA win, if you ask me.
One thing I dislike the most about the latest games is the hero system. On one side I kind of understand that it may fit a fictional setting but having played the older games it just seems very out of place and annoying.
You absolutely nailed it with this video. I never thought about this at all, but it explains so much... I never realized while playing the likes of Empire, Shogun 2, Medieval 2, or Rome 1 how I could just play the game and not having to read anything because the design was so intuitive. You are right, you could just look at a unit and instantly knew what was up... nowadays it feels like you have 10 of the same units with slightly different stats that don't mean anything to me anyway...
Someone may have already stated it but you could have mentioned the lack of officers and banner-men in newer total wars specifically the Warhammer franchise. Almost all total wars had them even Rome II but they were abandoned for no apparent reason in the Warhammer games. I find it hilariously ironic because from what I have heard, banner-man and officers are a significant part of the Warhammer tabletop game. Also, you could tell in earlier total wars like Rome I that a unit was less disciplined due to not having an officer or banner-man. At the end of the day, it shows that total war will cut corners just to do a little less work.
In Shogun 2, I noticed recently that when ordering a Yari Ashigaru into spear wall leads the officer to get into the 2nd/3rd rank, to prevent him dying when getting charged. Just a bit of attention to detail we don't get anymore.
a non issue
stuff like the "oh you get 15 points more of this if you use formation" is why I stopped playing Total War and went to FoG2
Can’t believe you didn’t mention the downgrade in music quality.
Like yeah Richard Beddow you’re alright but Jeff Van Dyck was the goat.
Unfortunately I'm not well-versed enough in music to give any comments beyond "listen to this and see how much more impactful this is"
I let the difference in music speak for itself at 2:50
Starting with Rome 2 TW music is robbed of almost all its bass
Excellent video! A lot of great game design lessons within.
And let's not even mention the ridiculously Arcady campaign map, with corridors and gigantic cities. Compared to open maps of the old TW games these new maps feel so claustrophobic.
At least in Total Warhammer 3 having corridors and other limiting terrain features on the campaign map isn't just necessary but also adds some depth to things. Having to plan ahead, using game mechanics and using/avoiding ambushes is far more engaging than just having a flat open map with the occasional mountain.
first
Putinist loser. Cool job being a traitor to your own country. What a disappointment to your own family.
The biggest downgrade is the music.
The Rome remake is what finally broke me. It was so horribly done I haven't bought a Total War product since
I don't understand "rule of cool" argument. Medievial 2 battles makes my blood pumping, while Empire males me sleep when my cavalry charge stops and just threatens that they'll use their goddamn weapons.
The "rule of cool" argument probably stems from a complete lack of knowledge or experience in the older titles, just assumptions.
That or most people never had a decent speaker setup to really see the shocking difference. If I play Shogun 2 or Battlefield 1 in my spare time I play using my speakers and my entire room vibrates at drums and explosions. I never had that with a title like Warhammer. All of the sound effects and music are so tinny that it sounds like compressed garbage.
That's not even getting into the visuals.
And yet, Warhammer II is by far the most fun of all.
just listening to the sound effects and music from rome and medieval 2 makes me want to go back and play them again
You have to remember that TWW has some design pointers from the tabletop. If I remember correctly Gunners never had an issue firing over each other. I used to play Lizardmen and Tomb kings so my memory might be a bit hazy, but the artillery and gunnery was never intended to be realistic. You could always tell a table of an actual military tabletop apartment from WHF just the way units were placed.
Which is a reasonable design point in that context. However, I would wager far more Total War players were introduced to Warhammer by the games then Tabletop players were introduced to Total War by the games. Having basic tenets of the design language change with no official warning or acknowledgment is a poor surprise after paying full price for the game.
@@pretzelbomb6105 Most people who play warhammer has played total war, at least from what I gathered from the table top games in my city. Total war is a war game at heart alot more than rts' like age of empires.
The whole gimmick of the empire is pike and shot man, you can't have people shooting through their mates' hearts
@@Laucron I keep getting the sense that a large chunk of WH TW players have very little to no knowledge of the lore the games are based off of. Read the wiki for 3 minutes and you'll find out just how much is left out of the games.
Warhammer truly fucked up everything for everyone. I grew bored of criticizing total war to the WH fanboy mob on reddit. WH fans took over my hobby and forever changed my favorite games franchise of all time by making these new shitty games super popular. Now there is no incentive to go back and get it right. Videos like this need to exist. Maybe if enough disserters speak sense something will be done (altho i doubt it). Thanks for the vid. Good work
I fail to see how the older cav charges were good, they all look very bad to me.
They might not look all that impressive though imo it was more so that the lack of health pools meant that the men who got launched in the air actually died, giving the impression the cav charge was way more impactful. Also meant that units would rout faster because of the fast kills from a good charge.
Cav charges in total wars never looked good imo but there's a differance between watching your cav decimate the enemy and watching your cav decimate the enmy but then all of them just stand back up like its nothing and only having 5 kills. Or in the case of attila most of the times just straight up stopped by infantry like hitting a brick wall.
they look bad because the games is fucking 20 years old. On a mechanical level you can cleary see massive casuallties, with acceleration, mass and imapct playing huge roles in the fight, while in TWW you see 5 casuallties on a charge and enemies going flying 20 meters from cav that had a charge space of 2 meters.
yeah it must be said that graphical fidelity and design language are two very, very different things.
14:43 medieval 2 total war had the BEST CAVALRY CHARGES. I even say better than Rome 1!
Great video, I do agree with most of your points. I do however, love Warhammer Total war as well but your reflection between Med 2’s sound / visual effects over Warhammers really does hit home.
Yup, this is why I do my best to include ample video evidence, it's easy enough for me to say it, but I'd rather you see it for yourself.
You're wrong about that last point near the end, the newer games didn't abandon good gameplay for the rule of cool, they abandoned anything that requires a lot of effort (money) and is difficult to implement for whatever is extremely efficient to produce while having a high return. Anything related to physics, pathfinding or AI is always half assed and every possible development shortcut is taken. The real and sad reason that gunpowder/artillery etc work the way they do in warhammer isn't that they had to dumb it down for the casuals, it's that getting the 3D soldiers in a unit to behave coherently when executing countermarch, do the reload animations in time without having them clip into movement, and obey player commands while doing all that is actually really fucking hard. Same thing for line of sight, cover physics for troops on walls or barricades and so on for every aspect of gameplay that is labor intensive and prone to fuckups. Letting missile units ignore own collision wouldn't be that big of a deal if it was genuinely a gameplay decision made to accommodate the setting - in empire/napoleon/shogun the gunpowder weapons completely warp the balance of the entire battlefield, they are either utilized well - positioned in long lines and on favorable terrain while protected and supported by appropriate units depending on the game in question, in which case they will annihilate anything, or they are utilized poorly in which case they will eat dick and get stomped by 10x cheaper militia. This is good and correct for a historical game built around those mechanics, but having gunpowder monopolize a warhammer game the way monsters and magic does would be super dumb because that's not what the setting is about.
But let's face it, nobody at CA made that decision on any such basis - instead a lead programmer looked at a spreadsheet listing features and dev time each would take up and decided 'eh fuck it, instead of doing all that complicated shit for one type of unit that's used by like five out of thirty factions we will eventually do, instead we'll just have them shoot through own models and never reload, nobody will have time to look at those animations anyhow'. Same for line of sight and obstruction: why bother doing the hard work of having the wall mechanics be up to par with say S2 when we can just let everything that's not a gun just arc their shots and hit anything hidden behind a piece of terrain or a battlement or another unit with plunging fire, and we'll have bullet physics work like actual crossbow bolts so super obviously scuffed stuff that people would complain about doesn't occur, and so on and on for every such feature.
Instead they sink all of their development resources into new campaign mechanics and new races and units and whatnot, and granted they do a very good job with those, but damn son if you expect your customers to pay for that much DLC that is so trivial and efficient for you to produce, shouldn't the base game that acts as a platform for sales of said DLC be in pristine condition where everything moves like clockwork? The stupid thing is that they are absolutely willing to push this shit to the point that AFTER having cut a bunch of stuff for the sake of development, whether each cut was justified or not, they STILL can't get to the bare minimum level where all the things (or at least most of the major ones) they did retain/include work properly.
Very well-written level-headed response, and I agree it does seem they just gave up trying to make things work.
Gunpowder in WH is such a missed opportunity for truly interesting gameplay, imagine the implications of gunpowder being super effective at countering flying entities. Any potential for good combat is squandered in those games, making them all the more tragic.
In a game like Shogun 2 you can intentionally destroy your own fortifications so that the rubble and debris kills enemy soldiers; imagine if the same applied to monsters in WH, where a tumbling corpse can cause massive collateral to both friend and foe.
Monsters can kill units on their death fall, it just don’t do that much damage and in a very small area.
The real total war fan doesn't want a game to play, he wants a battle to fight.
Yes, the whole point of this is to immerse you into forgetting you are playing a game.
My god mode kholek suneater always looks for a battle to fight.
actually i never liked to fight the battles, just loved the music and the atmosphere, just used autocalc in rome 1 med 1 and med 2.
I only got to watch this video for a minute but the struggle to tell when your guns are firing is a mood. I’m all for downloading mods to fill a game out I don’t expect the developers to nail everything but when it’s basic stuff and you have to add so many mods it lowers the performance of the gameplay it’s beyond frustrating
Been a hardcore fan since the first total war. I grew up playing them religiously for so many years, even Rome 2 I was hooked ( thankfully many patches have made it more enjoyable) but since the Warhammer series it has lost that passion. I keep trying to pick it back up but it just never sticks. I definitely feel what you're saying in this video. The corner cutting steals that immersion for me too much to get back into them fully again for the last few titles.
You just need to fire up Medieval 2 and hear that imposing menu theme choir and then boot up something like WH2 with its tinny sound effects and non existent soundtrack to notice something has changed.
Great video I totally agree. I have every TW game and still have my original Shogun Total War disc's. The failing attention to detail is probably why I find myself playing Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai the most. it was still possible to beat a high tier army with a low tier army with skill. The latest WH games are all down to veterancy death stacks...
I remember seeing an article for Rome TW when it came out (I think it was in PC gamer mag) showing a huge siege battle with units sizes of what looked to be over 1000men per unit and around 30 or so units visible in the limited angle of the picture. I always wanted to play that battle but even mods have failed to do it justice.
On a side note I Hate Troy eco system. scratch that I just hate Troy...
You're busy hating Troy meanwhile the rest of us forgot it exists.
Also I have such fond memories of Shogun 2 back in 2012 fighting the 3-stack Ikko Ikki army with over 10k men, I had so much hope for what the future would bring us lol...
Those massive armies are always teased in the trailers. Even the Shogun 2 teaser video that showed a battle had like massive, massive armies of dudes on the screen. It never lived up to that.
Just goes to show the impression it nade... as for forgoten total was games. Atila the trash and a few more.
Seeing you have a playthrough of Metro I can understand your recent passion for digetic UI
Crossbow bolt at arcing angle is funny
Skavens slingers can arc their shots over wall is just ridiculous
😂😂
I generally agree with the point of this video, but I also feel like you're overlooking a lot of things that were cheap/felt bad in shogun 2. Units had little to no variety in them in Shogun 2, both visually and functionally, Yari ashigaru dropped their spears in lieu of katanas at every possible intervals, castles were terrible visually and gameplay wise, diplomacy meant nothing,.. etc. I think CA has always been lazy, except now they are also being lazy with the basic gameplay mechancis that they had nailed with previous entries, which is why it sticks out. They regressed, somehow.
Shogun 2 has better unit variety than every TW game since, does Rome in Rome 2 having 14 melee units that share mostly the same stats count as "variety?" Especially when the AI gets ridiculous bonuses to melee and morale that it marginalizes melee infantry, leading to cavalry, ranged and single entity spam in later games?
WH has a lot of units but you the majority of them are almost never worth recruiting they may as well not exist.
I never implied Shogun 2 is perfect, but the fact that we have only seen regression since then is embarassing.
I would much rather have a roster of 10 units that are distinct from one another than 100 copy-paste units of which only 20 are worth bringing. Useless clutter that also coincidentally makes for easy DLC fodder.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 have you played Warhammer? Saying 90% of the units are useless or redundant is just patently false, you can pretty much make any unit in wh have its use, with the exception of a few outliers per faction.
@@Haunterthe1st yes and that's where I got the clips from WH utilized in my video.
In one of my previous videos I showcased a combat test with the express purpose of showcasing how terrible melee infantry are in WH thanks to difficulty modifiers; with 2 armies of equal size and quality, my units routed despite surrounding the enemy and despite having a major uphill advantage.
It is no secret even among those positive towards WH that melee infantry are a poor investment, only worth getting to pin down enemy units so your ranged units and lord can do all the real damage.
And considering how many melee infantry units are in WH, they do indeed count for a significant portion of the roster.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 well I mostly play multiplayer/H2H campaigns, and almost every unit for the factions I play religiously have a use.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 The issue is that while that small roster is distinct, in the late game, only 4-5 are worth bringing. Naginata Samurai, Bow samurai, Great Guard if you can get them, european cannons and matchlocks if you want to larp and pretend they are useful. The AI will spam Samurai units and the game will be ass in that lategame period. It completely throws away any historical immersion. Japanese armies of the time were much more diverse and me needing extensive modding to get to an acceptable point of balance:realism will always be a stain on shogun 2. It's a fantastic total war game, arguably the best, but it's also CA's biggest compromise between streamlining and quality content.
Regarding 23:40, the idea is that the long dense weapon formations keep the enemy physically away, making it more difficult to reach and hit the soldiers. As a stat it has been incorporated into evasion. In terms of missile fire vulnerability, a tighter packed formation will be easier to hit as there will be less space to dodge or block the missiles.
This should be modeled by the physics and shape of the formation itself.
In Rome 1 phalanx wasn't just magic stat buff, the advantage was having a dense wall of pikes outranging all other melee weapons. Soldiers would have to find a way through the wall.
Slapping a 10% modifier instead is not only less interesting, it also opens up potential to abuse it because you no longer have to bother to ensure your formation is in good order.
You can see this stat stacking stupidity in how Testudo offers full protection to missiles even when the men are dispersed.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 It would be better if the visuals matched the stat modifier.
@@cem174you need to play rome 1
Phalanx does not confer a stat modifier on units the actual formation makes it harder to enemies to get into melee range of the phalanx.
All modern TW games accomplish through stat buffs what the older games did through realistic movement and formations.
I think you and Volound would really understand each other well. I'm glad there are some people out there who still analyse these games properly.
>"my introduction to Total War was Empire"
>tfw original Shogun player
God i feel old as fuck.
Same feeling when I realize Shogun 2 is more than 10 years old.
Also name checks out
I miss the immersion of not only hearing the opposing general was killed but getting to see where he fell
and then the advisor's comments being context sensitive based on the cultures of the 2 factions
Empire will be forever my favourite total war game, despite how buggy it is, it's quite enjoyable, a remember falling in love with watching replays of battles I fought with the music. the Music was quite amazing, the rising intensity and the difference in specific battles on the music, made it feel like if you changed a few settings enough, it felt like you were watching an actual movie. Empire: II would probably the best total war game ever if it's made.
Agree except about Empire 2, no chance at all that it will be good seeing how incapable CA is off depicting guns properly.
It will just be another rehash of Rome 2 with an 18th-century paint job.
Lol. Empire had a terrible soundtrack. It started the whole trend of Total War having dull soundtracks, with Shogun 2 maybe being the exception. Also, Empire was an awful, bland, buggy mess that you couldn't play without mods. I have 400 hours in it, and that's only because it's the only game of it's kind. I mostly dumped it for NTW, a great game especially with NTW3, which only suffers from having a limited scope. It's what Empire should've been.
Love Medival II for their cav charge. Love shogun 2 for the aesthetics, love warhammer 3 for immortal empire Sandbox.
Keep up with this content.
It's even better than what Volound does. Cause he doesn't bother with production
Volund's got a gnarlier accent tho
Volound is also an incredibly abrasive person, so not hearing his diatribes and name-calling is instantly an improvement.
@@EmanGameplay yeah, this reminds me of earlier Volound, when he had actual points to make, instead of just being obnoxious and borderline paranoid.
@@EmanGameplay truue
Volound also supports Putin's war against Ukraine. The only people that should listen to him work in mental wards.
amazing work... i never thought about it that way in terms of the delivered of information.
And you know why... because it was conveyed so clear and natural.
Yes I only started to think about this after trying to play some of these newer games and things never felt "right."
the first total war game i played was shogun 2 when it went free on steam for a couple days, played it a little, couldn't get into it and dropped it, i'm pretty sure it's a mix of being overwhelmed, not being used to a whole lot of strategy games at the time, and just having other games to play
Didn't actually get into it until warhammer 2 (around warden and the paunch update i believe), which i did drop as well at first (even refunded it), but eventually came back and properly learned it, and have been playing consistently ever since
Having watched the video, it reminds me of something like Fallout 1, 2 and NV versus Fallout 4, where the franchise just dumbed down the deep mechanics of the former ones for the sake of appealing to a wider audience in the latter. Except with total war i am apparently the wider audience member now, even going back and playing shogun 2, i just have way more fun in warhammer 2 and 3, and it's arcadeyness? Not sure what word i would use to describe the difference between them
Regardless, a lot of the complaints in the video are valid and having things like better weapons sounds and smoke would be an addition i would not complain about if it were to be added to WH. Hopefully you veterans fans eventually get a game that scratch that itch of a deeper, better designed game, i know what it's like to be on that end lol
Also, thoughts on the warhammer 3 sounds? It's an upgrade over 1 and 2 i'd say
Lol I love the complete lack of physics knowledge on the arrow volleys
Yeah it's sad how it went downhill. I tried Warhammer, but I just didn't enjoy it. I miss armies not needing general, now everything is 20 stack, you don't see small armies roaming around. Garrisons are huge, so even for city without army, you have to bring full stack, unlike in Empire, where it was small garrison to help you in battle, but alone useless. Also it's such a shame they removed individual villages that you can raid. I returned to Total war games recently cause I like the battles, but for few years I switched to paradox games which have much more developed and in depth mechanics. Like when I started playing Hearts of Iron, every update they added new mechanics, logistics, supply lines, etc. Now it's completely different game, granted you have to buy dlcs, but atleast they don't charge you for being able to play specific nation.
Total war games on the other hand didn't evolve at all. Like I watch youtube documentaries about wars in past, and I always feel disappointed I can't mimick them in Total war, because they just don't bother. Like for example having bigger maps, so that reinforcing armies will have to get there physically, so you could send your army to intercept them. Maybe changing the siegies, so that in one battle you could capture first wall defences. The battle would end, but sieging on map would continue, this time defenders would only be holding in keep and with half of their supplies. Or having scout units and having to use them to learn where enemy is, where are his reinforcements coming from. Maybe supply lines, so that enemy would cut your acces to your territory forcing you to pillage to survive and be slower. Add on top of that all things you said, they just didn't do anything for a decade other than make new 3d models. They are just asset company.
The larger the settlement the more rounds of siege battles rather than a one time defeat everyone dies its over. The more casualties you inflict in each round the less you face the next battle. I think this mechanic would still function properly with the 1 year turn based time frame too
There is sooooo much you could do with the warfare of the past, sadly ca is just an assembly without the creativity. But it has been like that for 10 yeats and wont change sadly.
The reason TW:WH has cheap attention to detail is because it isnt a period sim. When you're recreating a period of actual human history you need to pay some level of attention to the details to make it believable. But in a game thats silly magic and wizards and dragons realism just kind of goes out the window and so attention to little details become less important since you're already having to suspend your disbelief for all the other silly shit.
If Third Age, a mod, can bring to life the races of Tolkien's universe, spanning Orcs, Dwarves, Men, Elves, etc. then there is no reason that same care can't be demonstrated by an AAA studio with all its resources and talent.
I don't agree with the insinuation that fantasy is inherently more difficult or that it should be held to a lower standard.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 That's not what I said at all. I said it becomes less important overall because a lack of attention to detail is generally less jarring or disturbing in an already silly environment.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 And further more now that I think about it, this narrative you tell yourself of the plucky modder who somehow outperforms the incompetent corporation of hundreds is erroneous for a number of reasons, chiefly being:
1) The person who made the third age mod didn't do it all alone. His work was built on the shoulders of giants without which his 'mod' would have never been possible.
2) The development pipelines for a hobby modder and a corporate team delivering a commercial product to market are VASTLY different from each other to the point of it being ridiculous to even try to compare them. A modder 'working alone' doesn't have to compromise on the final vision for the product with other people, and also doesn't have to deliver his product on a set time table. He just works on it when he has time until he's done, oftentimes over the course of years or even decades!
Thank you for making long form analysis. Long man good.
I am not the true Longman, you can call me that when I'm running 9 hour streams weekly ;)
Long gas mask man is good
every single total war game since Medieval 2 has been lower in quality than its predecessor. The biggest issue is the fact the unit collision is so broken, that charging has become ridiculously bad.
guys there is a mod called etw2 mod. the graphics and rosters are up to modern 100x better than vanilla with mix of paradox feature.
I can't wait for the next total war title where guns including artillery don't make any sound, don't reload, don't have muzzle flash and make no smoke puffs.
And I can't wait to see fanboys perform mental gymnastics to justify the changes.
Remember in older games when frontally charging a gun line was pretty much suicide?
I pick TW because I want to see grown ups hack each other in wars. Nowadays, either the battles end so quick or it is so micro intensive that I don't have the chance to do that.
there's a mod to fix that
@@zeropoint216 It's not up to modders to fix core design issues while the developers twiddle their thumbs.
I would much rather modders focus on creating things like total conversions instead of being forced to fix the base game.
I started off with Rome 2, then I went back for Napoleon and Empire, and then I played WH. I saw so many people crying and complaining that Shogun2 FOTS is the best, and every game afterwards lost the plot. I got FOTS and honestly sorta true.
I still like WH because using single units, monster units, and magic is really fun, but historical TW games is just a completely different experience. (3k and troy are abominations because they try to bridge the gap between fantasy and historical, but they just end up failing at both).
I feel like this problem has more to do with how much more varied content games like Warhammer has.
In Empire and Napoleon Guns were the main type of units so it makes sense that they would put alot of effort of making it seem realistic.
In Warhamer 1 and 2 (I haven't played 3) there are only 7 gunpowder units so it makes sense they wouldn't put much detail it.
That doesn't explain why Medieval 2 or the Shogun 2 base game handled their guns well, despite them being very melee-centric and very much not centered on guns.
Medieval 2 had spears, pikes, light melee cavalry, heavy melee cavalry, horse archers, mounted gunners, ballista, catapults, trebuchets, cannons, war elephants, plenty of "variety" and yet it handled most of them very well.
Am I the only one who really likes Rome 2? Well, at least with mods. But tbh, Total War is one of the game series that no matter how good or bad the vanilla experience is, they really start to shine with mods.
I honestly enjoyed Rome 2 quite a bit. Just needed a few years worth of patches and DEI
If I disregard the battle map for a bit, what really irks me is the strategy map.
The AI is dumb. Now, I know that it is not really AI, just a bunch of scripts. Still, you can script in a way that makes the world interesting. Why can't there be a couple of race behaviors? Order races trying to consolidate holdings and then defend them at all costs, Chaos races either raiding and sacking or straight up going for the jugular while the odd choices (Vampire Counts f.e.) having special behavior? Why can't the AI make interesting choices? Why can't CA build the campaings and race traits in a way that promotes interaction?
All the races are the same thing, just different stats, unit skins, UI and a minigame in the menu. There is no real difference between playing the Orcs and the Dark Elves, even though lore-wise they have massively different vibes.
Because that level of differentiation would require time, effort, direction, testing aka things that CA can't be bothered to do.
They couldn't even release WH3 in a working state.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Fair enough I guess. I mean it all really comes down to CA being too obtusely corporate to deliver at least a good product. Seen that a thousand times before and will be a never ending story. Explains why the modern games are just soulless. In theory it has all the makings of a Total War game, but it is just a checklist of the stuff it should have.