Medieval Total War 2!

[Snotty]

I enjoyed STW and MTW, but the unit limit + reinforcements system frustrated me the most with the combat side of the game

[DrSpike]

To be fair that has evolved a bit from STW, which out of the box had a poor system.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Jamski
Actually, I was kinda hoping for Napoleon Total War

With sea battles.

[Jamski]

Originally posted by General Ludd


With sea battles.

HELL YES DAMN STRAIGHT

[DrSpike]

Just with no steam ships.

[Grumbold]

I've enjoyed the TW series and each new game has developed the genre a little. Unfortunately (for us) they stay resolutely commercial in keeping the battles relatively small scale and simple.

I can see why they didn't want to go Napoleonic. The timespan would make the economic side hard to handle and there would be a lot of pressure to make the army sizes larger. The combat system would need to change considerably with the dominance of gunpowder units. Accurately depicting the relative quality of the different national troops might be a serious bone of contention too.

[Cyclotron]

I'm not sure the smaller scale has to do with "commercial" anything. Each unit in RTW keeps track of its own experience, hit points, etcetera - they are all individual items. It's quite a bit of work to render so many, and keep track of them all, especially with graphics getting better every iteration. If gamers expected STW-type graphics today, maybe RTW could have gotten away with tens of thousands of men on a side.

As for adding gunpowder, MTW2 seems to be heading towards an actual use of it (as opposed to MTW1 gunpowder units, which sucked, and were meant to suck). MTW2 appears to be extending the era long past the fall of Constantinople; the original stopped there.

[Grumbold]

Tracking the stats is pretty trivial, but I accept that graphics has a cost. I don't think they needed to go as far as they did with RTW since I never zoom in that close unless the walls hindering camera angles forces me to.

The first important use of musketeers was in 1530 when Francis I organized units of arquebusiers or matchlock musketeers in the French army, so the gunpowder units of MTW2 ought to be pretty ineffective still. There will be culverins, bombards and mortars for sieges but they played no effective part in engagements due to their poor aim and terrible rate of fire.

[Stuie]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Just with no steam ships.

[DrSpike]

/me bows.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Grumbold
Tracking the stats is pretty trivial, but I accept that graphics has a cost. I don't think they needed to go as far as they did with RTW since I never zoom in that close unless the walls hindering camera angles forces me to.

Maybe this misses the point of mass combat, but I liked to see the handful of soldiers fighting on the walltop in close detail.

The first important use of musketeers was in 1530 when Francis I organized units of arquebusiers or matchlock musketeers in the French army, so the gunpowder units of MTW2 ought to be pretty ineffective still. There will be culverins, bombards and mortars for sieges but they played no effective part in engagements due to their poor aim and terrible rate of fire.

Well, seeing as the scenario ends in 1530, whereas the original MTW ended in 1453... That's nearly 100 years of improvement on gunpowder, even if they're still not at the stage of pike and musket dominating warfare. Gunpowder warfare in MTW was basically useless; I don't know about anyone else, but I never built arquebusiers or handgunners - far, far too crappy. Arbalests were much better, and had pavises too.

[UnOrthOdOx]

I'ld rather see a Shogun 2 myself. IMO the series has gone downhill since Shogun.

[DrSpike]

Well, not really. The series has undeniably advanced in all aspects, unless you are a huge fan of the Japanese setting or something.

It is fair to say though that in terms of comparisons with what went before Shogun was the biggest advance.

[Kinjiru]

Just read an article in PC Gamer today about this title.

Now, PC Gamer is defintely known for overhyping things, but they made some interesting claims. Or rather the guy they interviewed made some claims...

1) Units are much more highly modeled, graphically. Supposedly, their armor starts off very shiny and will get beaten up, dingy, etc over time.
And each unit will have loads in combat animations to choose from. The example cited was kicking off a corpse in order to remove a sword that had been used to run through the poor fellow.

I'm not so sure about this claim, given that they are using the same engine as R:TW, albeit, with some tweaks.


2) The units will truly act as individuals. Meaning each unit will independently assess the overall situation to decide what to do (i.e. panic and break, or get a morale boost).

While the devs may claim this, how do they really know that is what is going on? Perhaps it all still works the old way, where each stack of units is treated as a single entity for these kinds of calculations - and the devs are just having a case of wishful thinking.


Now, I hope these claims are proven true, as I love the series. But, I am taking them with some very large grains of salt...

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Kinjiru
Just read an article in PC Gamer today about this title.

Now, PC Gamer is defintely known for overhyping things, but they made some interesting claims. Or rather the guy they interviewed made some claims...

1) Units are much more highly modeled, graphically. Supposedly, their armor starts off very shiny and will get beaten up, dingy, etc over time.
And each unit will have loads in combat animations to choose from. The example cited was kicking off a corpse in order to remove a sword that had been used to run through the poor fellow.

Sounds like background fluff to me.