Spartan / Gates of Troy

[Arralen]

Does anyone know these games from http://www.slitherine.co.uk/ ?

Think there are some thing which could be borrowed for DOM3, e.g. usage of "squads". Sadly the extended (100turns!)"Gates of Troy"-Demo which is available from matrixgames gives me some graphics trouble during combat replay, so I can't check it out thorougly.

[Boron]

Do you know Rome Total war as well ?

I own only Rome total war but from the screenshots etc. the 2 games seem very similiar .
Spartan was just published 1/2 year or so earlier , so the graphic in rome is better .

I see now that they develop now legion 2 ... . The beta screenshots look worse then Rome total war though . If legion 2 is not strategically much deeper then RTW i guess this game will become a huge flop .

Anyone here on the board owns Rome total war as well as spartan ? Can they be compared ? If yes how would you rate Spartan compared to Rome total war ?

[Arralen]

I don't think you can compare those. RTW is made for the RTS crowd. Looks are great, gameplay is .. .

From what I have seen, Spartan/ Gates of Troy on the other hand bears great similarity to DOM: Turn-wise moving of armies between provinces, you set up you troops before battle, give them orders and get to watch the desaster when they're trying to follow them literally.

And it has an even more detailed economic model, which I think is a bit superfluous in a strategy game.

[Boron]

RTW has turn based strategy turns as well .
Only the battles are in real time but you can pause as often as you wish .

In RTW the movement part is even better because you don't move from province to province but you move on the strategic map .
An all cavalry army can then move the distance of about 1 province / turn while a slower army moves only about 60% of the speed of an all cavalry army .
This is modified by traits of your general , he can have force march traits which give extra movepoints .
You can do more then 1 battle / turn . Infantry armies can normally do about 2 battles / turn if enemies are near , cavalry armies because of better movement 3 battles / turn .
If you fight e.g. at a brigde you really fight at a brigde .
If multiple armies fight they all join the battlefield from the side they stood at the campaign map .

That is all a huge improvement compared to MTW .

If rome hadn't such bad AI it would be totally awesome imo .

Arralen said:
And it has an even more detailed economic model, which I think is a bit superfluous in a strategie game.

Do you know Victoria from paradox entertainment ?
If spartan has an as good economic model as Victoria i think i will buy spartan as well .

[PrinzMegaherz]

I'm a huge fan of the total war series, especially the second part, but I find rome to be extremely boring.
I got the feeling that the designers exchanged depth for graphics. Not a good trade if you ask me

[Boron]

PrinzMegaherz said:
I'm a huge fan of the total war series, especially the second part, but I find rome to be extremely boring.
I got the feeling that the designers exchanged depth for graphics. Not a good trade if you ask me

After 2-3 weeks of almost only playing rome i stopped too .
The problem is simply the ai though because otherwise it is deeper then MTW .

Since Rome is a SP only game bad ai hurts extremely . Maybe they fix it in the long announced patch a bit but i am sceptic .
It's a pity though because otherwise rome is exactly what i was looking for nice sp WC campaigns