Spartan / Gates of Troy

[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

[deccan]

What is so bad about the AI in R:TW?

[Boron]

deccan said:
What is so bad about the AI in R:TW?

-It rarely uses its archers wise . Mostly it "abuses" them as light infantry and lets them rush towards you .
-If you are attacking the ai just stands still very often and you can encircle it or just kill it with archers/onagers .
-The ai is very stupid at town attacks with walls . If you open the gate and place a phalanx unit in the open gate it rushes towards the gate and gets slaughtered by burning oil , the archer towers , your archers and can't break your phalanx anyway .
-The ai often does suicide attacks with their general .
-The ai manages its reserves bad . Either it attacks only with very few units and has a way to big reserve or it just rushes with all it has towards you . It rarely does good flanking .

I could continue for ages .

If you play as a horse rider fraction it becomes ridiculous . You will suffer 90% of your casualities from friendly fire . The ai normally builds not many cavalry units .
Especially as Armenia it is extremely easy . You need no other unit than cataphract bowmen .
This is similiar with parthia and scythia as well .

If you play carthago or seleucids no matter what the ai does it can't beat an army consisting of 2 elephant units and 6-8 cavalry units . You don't even need to use all 20 stacks , 10 stacks are enough to beat all AI armies with minimal casualities .

You can even do with any nation an army consisting of only family members . Very rarely one of your family members is killed and their bodyguards replenish very very quick .


The problem is that if you want a somewhat hard game you have to take numidia and play on vh/vh .


I have big hopes though that the path will do wonders because in medieval total war i never encountered such big ai difficulties and found normal or hard difficulty enough .

[deccan]

Boron said:
-It rarely uses its archers wise . Mostly it "abuses" them as light infantry and lets them rush towards you .
-If you are attacking the ai just stands still very often and you can encircle it or just kill it with archers/onagers .

That's strange. In M:TW, the AI was smart enough to use archers as skirmishers and withdraw behind the lines of their heavy infantry if they get rushed, will frequently try to flank you and when on defense, will reconfigure their formations in response to your formation and movement.

I was thinking of getting it soon, but this puts me off. I may still get it anyway just for the cool graphics.

[Taqwus]

Hm. I did stop by an EB Games the other day, and noticed quite a few -used- copies of R:TW for sale. Huh. I've also gathered from the CSIPGS group that there are objections to some extremely bizarre units (head hurlers?), out-of-control population growth, and a poor tactical AI that wouldn't pose much of a problem at all if the battles weren't on hyperspeed, it seems.

I did own Shogun TW. Spiffy in some ways, but the developers largely ignored a number of bugs and design issues, and fell prey to following too many unrealistic "gamey" rules (superunits -- the Geishas; can only do one thing per province per turn e.g. train units or improve farmland; arbitrary battle timer where the offense *always* lost at the end regardless of the balance of power). It also had an AI that cheated -very- boldly and irritatingly when moving "simultaneously" but with exact knowledge of what your orders would be for that turn -- whereas the player could never get such information regardless of his investment in espionage. Overall, I got the impression during the post-release period that CA wanted to push out only minor patches, and then push out expansions and sequels, while ignoring complaints about the morale model or the absurd geishas or so forth. This is rather reminiscent of Paradox, which pushed out EU2 shortly after EU while leaving the latter with well-known issues such as AI ships blithely wandering the world without ever needing to return to port, and that fights wars poorly due to overly predictably fixating on particular provinces, and ignoring any weaknesses that the human player feels free to expose after noticing what target the AI's fixated on...

Some developers are pretty good at responding to player complaints. Illwinter's quite good at it, as is Malfador Machinations (Space Empires); the Battlefront people (Combat Mission) are as well -- those devs have to be, because many of the players are hard-core grognards that *will* notice if, say, a vehicle's armor thickness is even slightly off, and will drag out statistics and primary sources to debate the usage/availability of machine pistols and captured small arms... Firaxis isn't bad about it -- SMAC had a number of helpful fixes, and staff was actualy responsive, IIRC. Neither Paradox nor Creative Assembly strike me as being anywhere near as good about this.

[Boron]

Taqwus said:
Some developers are pretty good at responding to player complaints. Illwinter's quite good at it, as is Malfador Machinations (Space Empires); the Battlefront people (Combat Mission) are as well -- those devs have to be, because many of the players are hard-core grognards that *will* notice if, say, a vehicle's armor thickness is even slightly off, and will drag out statistics and primary sources to debate the usage/availability of machine pistols and captured small arms... Firaxis isn't bad about it -- SMAC had a number of helpful fixes, and staff was actualy responsive, IIRC. Neither Paradox nor Creative Assembly strike me as being anywhere near as good about this.

Paradox gives imo really damn good patch support : If you count the beta patches as well for eu 2 there are out already about 15 patches . Now it is at 1.08c and soon even 1.09 will be out .
And especially 1.08 changed many of eu2's game mechanics , e.g. inflation .

I own the combat mission series as well and enjoy it a lot . But the patch support is compared to paradox games worse imo :
You still can't mod armor + penetration details to your own liking . This way you can't include some new interesting special units like the "10,5 cm mittlerer panzerzerstörer or the maus panzer or the JS IV tank" e.g. .
You even can't change the weapons from infantry squads like an experimentary squad with only k44 sturmgewehren etc. .
And for CMB2B e.g. there are only 3 patches out afaik .

You are correct that the ai in Eu 2 or HOI is not really good . But in combat mission e.g. it is similiar as well .
You can make a trap with wire e.g. and then kill most of the enemy infantry with cheap 81 mm mortar artillery and similiar .
But given the complexity of eu 2 or hoi or victoria they run now very well . A ctd happens only in ages .

With CA i fully agree . They give only 1-2 minor patches per game in average . Still their games are very good though

deccan said:

That's strange. In M:TW, the AI was smart enough to use archers as skirmishers and withdraw behind the lines of their heavy infantry if they get rushed, will frequently try to flank you and when on defense, will reconfigure their formations in response to your formation and movement.

I was thinking of getting it soon, but this puts me off. I may still get it anyway just for the cool graphics.

Get rome .
Soon there will be a patch which is in development for about 2 months already .
CA said that they try to fix as many balance / ai issues as possible .

The bad ai is my only gripe i have with RTW .
The battles are really cineastic and fun .
A hint if you buy it : Your first action is to turn unit size on huge because as standard it is on standard :
On huge the units have 4x as many men , this makes the battles look really good ( a urban cohort e.g. has 160 men on huge compared to 40 on standard and 80 on large ) .

I really enjoy the huge battles . Especially cavalry and elephant charges are nicely animated .
I ordered today battle for middleearth as well and am tensed to see if it is graphically even better then rome .