this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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The new total war games. I find myself returning to medieval 2 every once in a while. The charm is just gone from the newer ones. The spectacle of the Warhammer games does a little bit, but it still feels so hollow.
My issue with going back to old TW, is that while I will agree that there are certain things that feel better about how it plays, and settlements feel like actual places instead of just production hubs; almost every faction feels basically identical in how they play with only the most marginal possible variations in roster. This is less true in Rome 1 of course, but it's especially so in Med2, and Shogun 2, even though I do still like both those games.
TWWH, I believe, is for all it's flaws a genuine advancement in design, because it gave CA license to experiment with hard asymmetries between faction rosters & campaign mechanics.
I guess it's completely reversed for me. Modern day settlements feel like stale Lego bricks, I don't enjoy the limited number of building spots, or how each settlement is more or less locked in to specific buildings by default. I guess I really just miss how governors gained traits by being in a town, governors having to be in towns for good profit and growth (miss the non-abstracted growth too) and I miss their traits actually mattering
That's the part of it that I'm agreeing with you on, though.
Oh okay, I guess I misunderstood something.
The series peak for me is Rome: Total Realism 7. The zoomed in Mediterranean map, having to balance your family members' political and military careers, the way integration of conquered territory was modeled
. I think Empire: Total War's lukewarm reception scared CA away from doing "realistic" combat, since Napoleon and later Shogun 2 both introduced a bunch of "special abilities" that made things really video game-y - but IMO if they had done a deep dive into realism, overhauled siege warfare and enemy AI, and scaled everything up to full historical battle sizes, they could have kept the series' charm instead of going full fantasy which is what they did (fukken three Warhammer games? Really?).
Oh my god Rome: Total Realism ate my entire 2008