Comments on: The Games Of Christmas: December 19th

By: luminosity

luminosity — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:23:55 +0000

I loved the new strategy map in E:TW. Research, towns, more provinces, trading ports, gentlemen, diplomacy, all seemed massively more complicated, but in a manageable way, and it was really fun getting a working empire up from the first stages, till you’re a massive world power with a huge economy chruning out armies every turn.

But the battles. Naval battles were almost impossible to understand. Sometimes you’d board a ship, and 100 invaders would be slaughtered by 20 defenders. Or ships would take one shot, no damage but their morale would go. And I never really did understand how I was supposed to use them to attack. It felt too hard to make an impact, and far to hard to learn what to do.

And the land battles were worse. Super over powered native american units? Or having a few thousand gunman line up in two lines and fire at each other, random chance deciding whose morale broke first and fled? Any time I tried to do something remotely different or interesting it would make me lose. I managed to smash even massive armies in M2, on hardest, so I don’t think it’s my command chops but.. maybe? But even if I suck, there’s no excuse for battles being so damn boring. I ended up just auto resolving everything and sticking to strategic planning.

Ick.

By: luminosity

luminosity — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:06:57 +0000

After a few false starts I ended up playing as England. I didn’t notice the lack of naval invasions, possibly because me, Spain and France were busy tussling over America. I kinda figured it was concentrating its forces there. Everyone else was too afraid to declare war on me. I can see how reviewers could miss it.

By: Tim Ward

Tim Ward — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:16:57 +0000

The lack of invasions was far from the only AI problem reviewers should have spotted. The major one was that in the first iteration of the game, the AI controlled Empires literally didn’t do anything. They declare war on you, then they just sat there. My first campaign as Great Britain, I don’t think my cities were attacked even once or if they were attacked you could count the number of times on one hand.

By: Andrew Dunn

Andrew Dunn — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:32:31 +0000

No, it doesn’t! It has entirely separate units called things like Feudal Knights and Dismounted Feudal Knights.

By: bookwormat

bookwormat — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:11:24 +0000

@Ziv ‘Design’ is a very generic word, and it is used in many different aspects of software development. You need to design the Game, the software architecture, the APIs, the User Interface, your work processes etc..

It seems to me that Empire has a badly designed AI architecture, as well as very bad designed process management. The game design in Empire I like a lot, except that they somehow thought the community does not play an important part in it.

By: The Sombrero Kid

The Sombrero Kid — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:09:38 +0000

the total war games get worse (i still thouroughly enjoy them) with every installment, shogun was totally focused, with every installment games take longer and battles become harder to understand, this coming from someone whose played them all, can you imagine what a new comer thinks.

Trying to introduce my girlfriend to medieval 2 was a disaster, so much goes unexplained and all the units seem to do the same thing, they should drill right down to focus on a few locales and a small set of clearly defined varied units.

By: Ziv

Ziv — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:27:40 +0000

“a great work of game-design hamstrung by production problems and design failures”
ho is that possible? can you elaborate? how can a game be well designed and has design failures?

By: Fumarole

Fumarole — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:24:45 +0000

Medieval 2 has knights that can opt to fight mounted or on foot.

By: Eschatos

Eschatos — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:50:43 +0000

Why the fuck can’t they do hotseat campaign multiplayer? The only thing they’d need to do different from what it is now is make battles only auto-resolve. Not even remotely difficult.

By: Collic

Collic — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:11:18 +0000

My experience with Empire was the opposite of yours. On release I couldn’t actually play it all. It would lock up my computer on the logo intros requiring hard restarts.

My essential problem with Empire is that it didn’t deliver what *I* expected of a total war game, having been a long-standing fan of the series. In contrast, Bioshock (I did love system shock 2, and no, nothing can match up to it) was pretty much as advertised – although the whole ‘moral choices’ aspect turned out to be pretty inconsequential.

I shouldn’t generalise by saying one game was broken and not another, since all games have problems, but my experience with Empire was the worst I’d had with any game for a long time, and my issues with it went deeper than 0-day technical issues.

By: jalf

jalf — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:59:55 +0000

You mean that Bioshock worked *for you* at release. Certainly not for everyone.
It had, and still has, mouse issues that makes it virtually unplayable on some systems.

It crashed on my computer when it was released.

ETW worked when I bought it at release. It was fun to play, despite its flaws.

By: Ozzie

Ozzie — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:19:29 +0000

Oops, sorry for the replay failure. :-/ Shouldn’t have been nested…
…anyway, thanks for the answers! So I guess Medieval is still worth a look then…