What next for Total War?

[edmundblack]

There have been hints that a new Total War game is "in the works", but as yet no clues as to the era or what it would contain. So far they've done:

Shogun
Shogun: Mongol Invastion
Medieval
Medieval: Viking Invasion
Rome (awesome game)
Rome: Barbarian Invasion
Rome: Alexander
Medieval 2
Medieval 2: Kingdoms
Empire
Empire: Napoleon
Shogun 2
Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai.

So what next? I'd be wary of them redoing Rome, because it'd really be going over old ground again. Medieval and Shogun 2 work because it's moved away from the fairly flat game it was into 3d like Rome was and has only gotten shinier and more polished as they've gone on. If they did redo Rome, they'd have to do it more like the fantastic Total Realism mod that was fan-made (far more expansive and diverse, more akin to the real world settlements and politics at the time). But if they did, it'd still be Rome. Surely there's other places they could go to?

Empire was OK, but is the weakest of the lot to be fair. It was OK if you managed to get your economy working quite quickly, otherwise you'd struggle. It is nice not having to put up with the Pope getting in the way all the time, and no damned Hordes overpowering half the map in the blink of an eye however! I did find the way that technological advances were dealt with was OK, but a little clunky at times. It is better than the "build this, get that straight away" method as you've got to think between military/economy/enlightenment. But your armies were pretty much as good as they needed to be once you had Canister Shot and 12lb mobile cannonry supported by massed ranks of Line Infantry (and as that happened very early on, not much point going beyond that). At least with Rome and Medival there was always another different and cool unit to get hold of, one that'd beat face like nothing else. Urban Cohort and Zwei Handers ftw!

Now, I think China might be a good place to visit, particularly the earliest era of it when it was yet to become China and was instead a large area of warring factions. Personally, I think the smaller games work better than the world-wide campaigns as there's more locations to deal with in a smaller area which increases the tactical decisions that have to be made instead of walking a huge army into France, taking Paris and therefore having the entire country: Kingdoms is a good example of the smaller game that works better than the main campaign. I do think that Shogun is more like a Civilisation game than a Total War game. I know that in order to conduct a campaign, more than military might has to be thought of, but it seems to me that it's more about farm land and trade routes than dealing with your opponents.

Anyway: I'll throw it out there - what would folks like to see in any forthcoming Total War game?

[Brother-Captain Sharp]

You forgot Shogun 2: Rise of the Samurai.

I'd like a look at China. There are some interesting time periods that could have lots of individual flavor. If not China, the Far East in general could work. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia; all those countries used to be split along tribal and provincial lines. However, they may not line up time-wise for a full game.

[Coldfire]

So I saw this post on my phone while at work, meaning I couldn't reply immediatly. Since I had nothing much to do today, I basically spent two hours thinking about this. So forgive me if this ends up being a bit longer than is neccesary.

Let me preface all this by saying that I fell this series, for all it does right, has a bad habit of "horozontal progress". Each iteration of the series expands a little on this system or that, but has little in the way of real innovation. I'm not saying each game has to reinvent the wheel, but it would be nice to see some major changes. The addition of naval battles for instance. That was a fantastic addition to the series that added a whole new element of gameplay. I'm only bringing this up so my final point in this post is better understood.

Now then, as far as geographical region, I would have to say Greece. There are a number of reasons I feel this place would be a good fit. First is that it offers a unique geography. I know very little of ancient Chinese history. In fact, if it wasn't in the movie Red Cliff, I probobly don't know it. But regardless, I don't think the actual layout of the area would be very well suited. Europe and the Medeteranian offers a lot of possibilities for multiple lanes of attack. Japan switched things up by allowing you to literally attack anywhere at any time, given you had the ships to do so. But China? Seems to me it would just be a brick of land with some lakes and mountains in the middle. Nothing to interesting. Greece on the other hand could offer something new. All the total war games (Shogun excluded) have had greece in them, but never in it's entirety. It has always been like three islands and the mainland. Not much there. But if the game focused on it exclusivly, it could go into great detail. Shogun 2 showed that even a smaller area can seem just as packed if you go into enough detail. And given the vast number of islands, it seems like, geographically at least, Greece is perfect for this.

As for time period, I would say classical Greece. That is to say, around the time of the first Peloponnesian War, immediatly prior to the rise of Macedon. Specifically, I would say immediatly following Athens failed invasion of Sicilly. First and foremost, it offers a time period that features a plethora of small factions battling for control. Obviously a neccesity in any Total War game. However, once again I think this time period in particular offers something unique. This period was marked by a three way war between Thebes, Sparta and a revitalized Athens, the biggest powers at the time. There were any number of other city states however, all of which had to decide where they stood in this larger war. Alliances constantly swtiched around, even among the big three. Whenever one got too powerfull, the other two would temporarily ally to put them down. This was all egged on by Persia. In the wake of Marathon and Salamis, the Persian empire basically gave up on a straight up invasion of Greece. Instead they decided it was easier to just throw money at all of them and watch them kill each other. This I feel offers a fantastic backdrop for the introduction of a sort of "off-screen faction". No city state had the power to take on Persia. So they don't need to be on the map. However, they could be included in the diplomacy area of the game. At the time, the Persians basically funded any city state who went to war, especially with Athens. So the game could include a system whereby you may not have the resources to go to war yet, but you know that if you do, Persia may help fund the effort. It woudl certainly create a lot of new possibilities.

The game could also, at the appropriate year, introduce Phillip II and his Macedonian army. Not unlike the inclusion of the Mongols in.... Medieval 2 was it? I don't remember, one of those. However, in that game, the Mongols were basically rebels. There was no diplomacy. There were no options. You either fought them or died. The introduction of Phillips army brings a whole new level to the idea. Each faction would have to decide whether they wanted to support Phillip in his campaign (probobly to betray him later) or to face his technically superior army in open battle. This seguays nicely into the first of two major gameplay changes I feel the series could use.

The first is a serious expansion of the population and support level systems. Right now, the entire population of a city is boiled down to a smily face or a frowny face. Really? After 12 years of Total War games, we're still stuck on a kindergarden view of happyness? Come on, it's time to expand that. Now, I realize that the series is a war game, not a civilization game. That's why things like this always take a back seat. But I feel that, given the right direction, the population of cities can be integrated into a nations war machine in a much more involved way. For instance, as it stands, we still pull entire bricks of soldiers out of our ass. Doesn't matter how many men have been slaughtered, how desperate a town is, how underpopulated a faction may be. They can still generate the same number of men. How about a system where by rather than clicking a button and getting a brick, you basically "start recruiting". When you do, you start seeing the number of available recruits go up. The rate at which they join can be affected by any number of things, such as recent military exploits of your faction and general feeling towards it's policies. You could even have to decide when to form these recruits into an actual unit, and how big to make it. There's limitless possibilities there. Now if it sounds like that doesn't work in turn based systems very well, it's because it probobly wouldn't. Which leads me to the main point here.

Switch it to a pausable real time campaign map.

Now now, put down your pitchforks and torches and think about this. I'm talking about transitioning to a system which plays out in real time but which you can pause at any point. What does a turn based game like Total War offer that a pure real time one like Starcraft does not. Obviously it's the ability to seriously consider every decision you make. Not to mention the fact that you micromanage a whole empire, which takes forever. Neither of those things can be done effectivly in real time. However, a real time game you can pause is another story. You can stop the game at any point for as long as you want. You can take a week to figure out what your next move is, just like in a turn based game. You can spend all day going through every last menue for every single town to micro-manage their taxes. You have all the benefits of a turn based system. But there are limits to a purely turn based system. Limits I fear we've just grown to accept as "the norm".

How many times has this happened? You place an army strategically near a pass so that any approaching enemy army can be intercepted before it gets lost in the heart of your empire. You hit that all powerfull end turn button, only to watch in horrer as some army that was only just outside your field of view goes flying past your well placed army, bypassing it entirely. Now you have to pull them back to intercept the enemy, leaving them out of place and creating a gap for more enemy armies to slip through. I don't know how many times this has happened to me. Now imagine that scenario in real time. You tell your army to move to that spot, so they start marching. You watch as their flag slowly shifts across the map. As you get close however, you notice an enemy army moving towards you. So you redirect your forces to intercept, and battle is joined and you defeat them, sending them back through the pass. So rather than having all your men give the enemy a wave and a kind word as they pass, you can have them march up and block the way.

That same logic can be applied to a dozen different scenarios in the Total War games. Having your sieging army react to oncoming enemy reinforcements for instance. Do you stay in position, keeping the city besieged but getting stuck between two armies? Do you ride out to meet the reinforcements half way, but risk letting troops out of the city? Do you split your army up, at the risk of having both overwhelmed? Do you pull the whole force back, avoiding total destruction? There are any number of possibilities.

I realize that this is a radical change to one of the fundamentals of the game, and would take an extreme amount of work to be done properly. But I truly feel that it could be done, and once it was, that the series would be elevated to new heights. As I said in the beginning, I don't expect every iteration of the series to reinvent itself. But I do expect forward progress from time to time. I love the Total War games, and I always will. I've bought every game and expansion that's come out since I first got a copy of Medieval all those years ago (Fall of the Samurai excluded, haven't gotten around to it yet). So I'll continue to buy them, no matter what. But I want to see it grow. I want to see the concept expanded. I feel like pure turn based games in this fashion are something of a relic of a time when technology dictated that it be so. Now, we have the capability to do so much more. And I can't see a single benefit to staying with this antiquated system, fun though it is.

So yea, I think that's it.

*prepares to be crucified for being a heretic*

[edmundblack]

*prepares to be crucified for being a heretic*

*ties Coldfire to a steak instead and gets out the marshmallows*

Not sure about focussing soley on Greece. Whilst it's rich in history, it's also a fairly small area of the world. It could work a-la Shogun, but I personally like the bigger map encompassing more area, especially if there's more cities and settlements in there to think about.

I agree that it needs a bit of a kick up the arse in general, get back to more about being a Wargame rather than a civilisation style game. If I want civ, I'll get and play civ. But civ isn't Total War, and Total War is what I like because I like the strategy elements of fighting realistic style battles with hundreds of soldiers. Whilst I do see the point to building up your civilisation in order to progress financially and therefore technologically, I do think that it's got a little too far with Empire and especially Shogun. Getting back to basics would be good, and then having effective and interesting methods of progressing through the game/series thereafter.

I'd like a look at China. There are some interesting time periods that could have lots of individual flavor. If not China, the Far East in general could work. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia; all those countries used to be split along tribal and provincial lines. However, they may not line up time-wise for a full game.

Oi you, get out of my head!

[Coldfire]

Forgot to mention another thing.

One of the defining features of ancient war was chosing the battleground. As it stands, we still dont do this. The best we can do is stand near a mountain or a forest, but that's it. Once you go into the battle itself, it's a crapshoot. Imagine if you were able to legitimatly choose where to fight. Having to send out scouts to survey the land. DEciding whether you wanted to position your army on top of a ridge or with a river on two sides. This was one of the most important aspects of warfare and it's largely missing from the game.

Forgive the truncated post. Iphone typing is a bitch.

[Ghostmaker]

Switch it to a pausable real time campaign map.

I like a lot of what you say here. It is something of an annoyance when you think your army is perfectly placed, only to find out that it unequivocally is not when some army comes riding in through that one pass you didn't know existed. I think somehow making the map more real-time would be excellent. The only problem I see with this is it would be extremely difficult with such a large map to keep an eye on everything happening at once, which could end up being more annoying that having something happening between turns.

And, as a final note, I owe a lot to the Total War series for giving me a sound understanding of history. As a student of history I have lost count of the amount of times I have relied, either partially or solely, on something I have gleaned from playing a Total War game. Just today in fact, the lecturer referenced Jesuit priests in Japan during the Sengoku Jidai. Where did I know that? Playing Shogun many years ago

[Arateus]

hhmm..I've been playing Total War games since I was a wee child-literally, one of my first games ever played was the original Shogun at age....err...7 or so? And I've noted the progressions through the games.
I think that Medieval 2 was the pinnacle of pure Total War, before it moved to Administration: Total War. Rome was great and everything, but at the end of the day the mechanics or the game were quite simple to beat...An easy game, basically. I love it, and still do, but playing it nowadays I just get quite bored quite fast.

I've not been able to get into any of the newer Total Wars because they just don't feel the same for me- I miss the times before they took elements of Imperial Glory and made it into Total War-Imperial Era..I mean, Empire and Imperial Glory are quite similar in the way of research and whatnot. It just wasn't as fun, in my opinion.
I'd love to see a return to the more purer mechanics found in Medieval 2, if only because it works easily once you know the basics-get farming, trade routes, markets, then military and you don't go bankrupt.

But returning wholly just won't work, I don't think. Coldfire mentioned a real time map-basically the battles but as a giant map.That would work, my reasoning being that it works perfectly in the battles. Oh no, the Mongols have broken a different gate in the castle? Pause, re-order units, unpause. It would be interesting to see the game focused somewhere it hasn't been before, but leaving out all the horrific complications found in Shogun and Empire. Mainly, Not enough food? You lose. Not enough religion? foreigners take your people from you with the power of
Christ.
Barr the foreigners? Get bombed. It was a great deal of things to worry about at once while trying to conquer Japan..So I think a simpler yet altered game mechanic-real time map, more cities (as said above, conquering Paris and you own the heartland of France makes no sense) and somewhere as of yet unvisited-perhaps an Asia:Total war?

[edmundblack]

^ All that, I agree with. There's scope for China: Total War perhaps, but whatever they do, less RPG, more TW! Balancing the economy is and always has been very "Total War", and is as much part of the game as the battles. Once you get that sorted, you're fine.

One thing I didn't like in MedievalII was the Mongols and Timurids. If you were playing one of the Eastern factions, you had little to no hope of withstanding their advance. They'd turn up and help themselves to your Empire and you could do nothing. The only army I found that'd reliable take on the Mongols was the English, and even then you'd have to deploy the "Massive Troll" tactics (you know what I mean: longbowmen behind the gates/breaches with deployed stakes, cannon towers, mortars and plenty of reinforcements once the battle has been won). Hardly fair, but then the Horde armies are hardly fair either! If we were to get China/Asia: Total War, then the Mongols would still be a part of that. If the balance was made better, then it'd be not so bad to face them.

Oh, and I didn't like how the Pope would get in the way of any advances you tried to make in Europe, but leave your enemies to waltz around however they pleased. Oddly enough, the best thing in Europe to happen is getting Excommunicated - at least that way you could attack whenever you liked!

[Arateus]

The Mongols are quite easy to handle with basic units! At least in my experience, anyway.
Just a matter of arranging some militia spearmen in a half hexagon around the gatehouse, with another unit of spearmen behind each of them. The front rank sandwiches the brunt of the cavalry charge and corrals them, then the other spearmen join, then your cavalry (one unit to a street) join in if they start to break you. Only a matter of breaking the units, not eradicating them. They just keep flying at you every turn until they take your one castle but are left with one army. The Timurids, on the other hand? They..They scare me...

[edmundblack]

Oh, they can be dealt with sure. But you'll lose most of the defending army most likely, especially if you're playing as the Byzantines or Turks. Even the Egyptians will suffer greatly (historically accurate too). At least the English can take them head on and leave with most of their forces, the Milanese and Venetians too (use Standards for blocking gap, trololololololol etc). In open field battle though - both are nigh-on unstoppable. At least with Barbarian Invasion, if you had enough Comitatenses you could could beat whatever they threw at you. Those guys are tanks! The only thing the Timurids have which are a pain is the Elephants. The rest is pretty sub-standard.

[Baragash]

The other bonus to a Greek-based one would be an expansion based on the Greek myths.

[edmundblack]

Now that would be awesome. It would be a game in and of itself, perhaps not quite within the remit of Total War, but certainly could make for a great game.

[Tahaal]

I am a LUDICROUSLY huge fan of the Total War games. I started in Medieval, played Rome, Medieval 2, Empire and Napolean. Of those, Empire was my favorite. Why? The sheer scale of the conflicts. I felt more like I was managing the conquest of an empire in that game. It has it's issues, sure, but the great mods made for it help make it into the ultimate war game, in my opinion.

As for the future of the series, I have two opinions:

1. What most likely will happen- Victorian Age: Total War and then Rome 2: Total War. All of the advancements they've made in FotS point towards the Victorian age, and I feel it's the lastest era of warfare Total War can pull off (before WW1 and the massive fronts and hundreds of thousands of troops make a mockery of any attempt at the Real Time battle engine). They could have a scenario for the American Civil War (a truly defining war in terms of warfare, but not suitable for a whole game since there are really only 2 factions and no diplomacy), Crimerian Warfare (where the world first experienced what WWI would become) and ect.

Rome is generally everyone's favorite of the series, and it just makes sense for them to remake it. People would buy it, hands down. This is how I could see Ancient Greece getting a campaign; most likely as a DLC or expansion.

2. What I would like to see- Anyone remember Rise of Nations? Remember it's sequel, Rise of Legends? Yeah, something like that in a Total War game.

[marshall larkin]

Rome 2. Nuff said.

Although i'd like to see world war 1 total war but can't imagine it'd be that similar!

[edmundblack]

Ariiiise!!!

What next for Total War? Rome II, Total War. That's what.

http://www.totalwar.com/en_gb/romeII/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...-JUhBvJc&gl=GB

(live action trailer of the opening sequence, but nothing of gameplay).

Here's hoping it's less admin and more on empire building and fighting armies like it should be. Don't want to get bogged down in the minutia of quality of harvests or having a pretty flower bed outside of Ravenna. Give some armies, give me some territories to conquer and I'll be happy, with realism of units and areas in the countries (realism here is great, realism in the tedium of running an empire is not). Of course, knowing how Total War works, even on the lowest settings it'll far outstrip the capabilities of my computer and there'll be a zillion things you have to take care of before you can even train a single unit to do some fighting.

But still: Total War.

[Coldfire]

Ahem

In fairness though, it's not exactly the most revealing of thread titles.