Total War Grand Master Collection Rundown

[RogueIce]

So, for about $40 from the Humble Store while it lasts, how could I say no? Of all the games, I only actually own RTW/BI anyway, so this was a great chance to complete my collection. But...how do they hold up, SDN? Well, this is what I come to you for to find out! Plus anyone else who's interested can benefit from this as well, I imagine.

NOTE: Please, please, please don't tell me to "get this mod" or "it's way better with that mod" and so on. I'm interested in finding out how the vanilla games play, and I can always mess with mods later. I have a couple questions on that front, but I'll aim it at specific mods later on down the line; right now I'd like to focus on the vanilla games.

Rome: Total War w/Barbarian Invasion
So this is the one I own, and I love it to death. Sure Rome II is out now, but this game is a fucking classic and it's tons of fun painting the world red. And then there's the BI expansion, which is rather different but no less fun.

Rome: Total War Alexander
This focuses on the namesake, obviously, but I heard it's not like a typical Grand Campaign but more like a smaller scale scripted thing? I dunno, but I have it now so whatever.

Medieval 2: Total War
So I've never played this, though it interests me. Thoughts?

Medieval 2: Total War Kingdoms
From what I understand this is just a series of campaigns rather than one new Grand Campaign such as BI?

Empire: Total War
Ah, the ambitious one yet riddled with bugs at launch. But in a fully patched vanilla state, how is it today? Stable? Playable? Any glaring annoyances that remain?

Napoleon: Total War
An "expansion" to ETW, though concentrating on Europe. From what I heard, it's what ETW should have been, had CA not cut and run.

Total War: Shogun 2 + Fall of the Samurai
I've heard great things about this one, especially the expansion. Alas my computer only meets the minimum specifications, but that should let me play with it a bit. Plus it's Steam, so I can always just download it again when I get a better rig. I also have all the DLC except the Blood Pack, but for two bucks I might as well get that, too.

And the extra games I got along with it, just for completeness:

Total War Battles: Shogun

Viking: Battle for Asgard

So SDN, please impart your wisdom upon me! Thanks!

[The Vortex Empire]

Medieval II is pretty great, has a lot of refinements over Rome. The Kingdoms Expansion campaigns are decent enough, but I never really got into them compared to the Grand Campaign. I couldn't stand Empire or Napoleon since every battle was the exact same boring thing and every faction's roster was pretty much identical. Not a fan of gunpowder. Shogun II and FotS are both pretty good, and Rome II is fun as well.

Unfortunately everything after Medieval II is way less moddable.

[streetad]

If you enjoyed Rome, you'll definitely enjoy Medieval 2. It's basically the same game with more varied units (no exploding pigs though), the pope telling you what you can't do instead of the Senate, and some extra options with merchants and priests etc. The Kingdoms campaigns are all interesting enough for a playthrough or two but tend to play out the same way each time.

Not really got around to playing any of the others.

[born in shadow]

Viking: Battle for Asgard is a pretty bland beat-em-up. Sort of a poor man's God of War. It has biggish battles which can be neat to look at, but not so much fun to play.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Medieval 2 is, as others have said, essentially a refinement of the Rome model. I experienced some issues with it in some of the unit behavior and migraine-inducing nerf to cavalry charges, but other than that it is everything Rome was with a Middle Ages flair. Kingdoms adds some mini-campaigns which may or may not be interesting to you.

Empire had a lot of issues when it came out, but they've been mostly fixed. A few balance and AI issues in vanilla can detract from the fun when unmodded (and like you, I prefer vanilla wherever possible, so take that under consideration), such as artillery being bizarrely ineffectual. Lining up your men and exchanging muskets volleys before bayonet charging is a blast, though; even with Rome 2's release I kept an (DarthMod, granted) Empire install on my hard drive.

Napoleon pissed me off, not because it was bad, but because it was what Empire should have been. All the lingering issues of Empire were fixed, but never included in Empire itself and instead packaged in this standalone quasi-expansion under the guise of a new title and with a smaller series of mini-campaigns. It makes some mechanical changes to the campaign play which show up in more refined versions in later titles, but the battles are essentially the same as Empire albeit with better unit behavior and a ca. 1800 skin instead of 1750.

Never bothered to get Shogun, due to being pissed off with Sega/CA.

Rome 2 is... a mixed bag. A lot of excellent ideas, refinements, and new features. Mixed in with a gigantic shit-ton of problems. My system, which ran Empire/Napoleon at max settings (plus performance-hurting mods with increased unit sizes and added VFX) perfectly fine, could not run Rome 2 at its lowest settings in a playable state. Many optimization patches improved things somewhat, but the game still chugged sometimes. I have a new system now, and it runs Rome 2 fine (mostly), but brace yourself for technical issues. Like Empire, patches have cleaned up the game for the most part, and it is an interesting game underneath the problems. It is the most historically-authentic TW by far, ditching the gamey-ness of Rome 1 almost entirely (insofar as a game can and still be a game, anyway). Its non-Roman factions are very well fleshed out, and many are still getting DLCs to further beef them up and make them interesting to play as.

The campaign is, by this point, very different from Rome 1, and in most respects, better. You don't have to painstakingly retrain every single unit that's lost a man, for example. There are a few downsides compared to Rome 1, unfortunately. General management is easy but somewhat simplistic, and they tend to die just as soon as they've gotten a little experience due to the campaign's time scale. The family tree, the Senate and its politics are inexplicably absent, replaced by a byzantine and obtuse political faction system.

[Metahive]

Medieval 2 has one of the most annoying mechanics of the whole series, the effin' Pope's constant peacemaking. Basically, if you as a catholic faction wage war on another catholic faction, within two turns the Pope will ask you to stop making war for X number of turns. If you continue fighting before that time limit is up, you'll lose standing with the pope and eventually be excommunicated which means increased unhappiness and the occasional crusade targeting one of your cities. Even if you rig the papal elections to get one of your own priest on the Chair of Peter or even conquer Rome, this will not change. So you wage war for two turns, wait for a while, then continue, then wait again etc. The only thing that helps is a certain trait that an excommunicated ruler develops over time which eliminates the unhappiness penalty, but the goddamn' crusades barreling your way are still a nuisance.

This turned me completely off the game.

[xthetenth]

They never fixed the problem in Medieval II where occupying a city peacefully was counted as doing that and then also applied the code for razing it from Rome (commenting is hard yo), thereby pissing everyone around you off, did they?

[Dr. Trainwreck]

I generally lol at any game that needs a total overhaul mod to be worthwhile.

Which means that I scoff at Creative Assembly and shit all over Paradox, to begin with. I already gave money, I shouldn't have to download gigabytes of shit lest I rage-yank my tithairs out.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The main problem with the TW series has been the complexity creep, IMO. Rome TW was probably the best of the series, but it already went too far with long lists of traits for each individual general, diplomat, etc. Who wants to keep track of all that garbage? Each successive game added more unnecessary complexity that detracted from the main draws of the series, especially ETW with its micromanagement of every town, mine, port, and trade route. The first Shogun and Medieval had the perfect amount of strategic complexity for a TW game, as far as I'm concerned. Every addition after that was a mistake that took the series farther away from its core appeal.

[ray245]

The main problem with the TW series has been the complexity creep, IMO. Rome TW was probably the best of the series, but it already went too far with long lists of traits for each individual general, diplomat, etc. Who wants to keep track of all that garbage? Each successive game added more unnecessary complexity that detracted from the main draws of the series, especially ETW with its micromanagement of every town, mine, port, and trade route. The first Shogun and Medieval had the perfect amount of strategic complexity for a TW game, as far as I'm concerned. Every addition after that was a mistake that took the series farther away from its core appeal.

While traits might not be useful to some, they can really help to let players be immersed in their campaign. It can give some amount of personalities to the generals and royal family.

There are fans that actually felt that the newer games are actually less complex than the earlier games, so I think not everyone shares your opinion that the games are becoming more complex.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

It depends on how you define "complex". Normal people mean 'huge amounts of shit to do'. Insufferable neckbeards mean 'shitty game needs forty clicks to do everything with no automation'. I think you're talking about the latter.

[Purple]

Insufferable neckbeards mean 'shitty game needs forty clicks to do everything with no automation'. I think you're talking about the latter.

Those are two completely different problems you have there. Both of whom cause a lot of problems. One is bad UI design that forces you to do everything in multiple steps. The other is the existence of automation that takes away from the gameplay experience.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Automation should be easy to implement. It's just the option of delegating something to the computer, paired with having an actual AI in lieu of four variables written by monkeys on barbiturates. I fail to see how it will cut into gameplay.

[RogueIce]

I will say ETW is a lot more complex than RTW. Even M2TW has a bit of a learning curve, mostly with those damned new agents.

But ETW...man oh man. Talk about your jump in complexity. And I don't even get console commands anymore to have fun with fuckoff huge elephants or whatever because I guess "real gamers" never ever use cheats in fucking single player because that would be a crime against nature or something.

You know what the TW series needs, though? That "cycle to unit that hasn't moved" thing Civ has been doing since forever now. For real. I don't know how many agents and even a few armies that have sat around doing nothing for decades because I simply forgot they were there, especially after coming back to a save game I haven't played in awhile. Seriously CA, get on that shit.

[Purple]

Automation should be easy to implement. It's just the option of delegating something to the computer, paired with having an actual AI in lieu of four variables written by monkeys on barbiturates. I fail to see how it will cut into gameplay.

Because every time you delegate a task to the computer you remove that task from your self. And this by definition is cutting into gameplay. But that's not really the point here. What is the point is the following.

I have newer once seen a game where the player has too much to do. Now what I have seen is games where the player has to do the wrong things. The thing that makes people feel like games are too complicated is usually due to bad UI design that forces the player to do a lot of meaningless work rather than making actual choices. In particular, the major problem is related to accesing the options he needs to and collecting the information he needs to make said choices. Be that by having to go into menus, decipher tables, keep hand written notes or reports or manually check on stuff.

Take for example Civilization IV. Great game overall. But the one annoying thing about it is that there is no indicator for when a city grows. So you have to work (and let me tell you with large empires across multiple continents it is work) to keep track of when this happens. You have to manually go through each and every city each and every turn. And that can get tedious after a while. A simple popup message at the beginning of each turn would perfectly solve this. But that's an UI issue, not an automation one.

The bottom line is that it is always bad to have the AI making choices for you. That objectively takes away from the game. But the game needs to be set up so that the path to those choices and the information you need to make them is as streamlined as possible so that you don't induce fake difficulty through padding. And that's where many games fail.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

You are right about the UI, but not when it comes to automation. When I think in the context of a TW game, 'gameplay' consists of moving my stacks around, stomping enemies and getting shit done. Having to check on my cities and having to make the same decision ten times in a row manually is 'tedious shit'. Playing a 4X game until I get a bigass empire, cooling off, and then continuing from a savegame is mentally impossible for me. So you see, for me, the option to automate some chores doesn't take anything away from playing the game.

[Purple]

You are right about the UI, but not when it comes to automation. When I think in the context of a TW game, 'gameplay' consists of moving my stacks around, stomping enemies and getting shit done. Having to check on my cities and having to make the same decision ten times in a row manually is 'tedious shit'. Playing a 4X game until I get a bigass empire, cooling off, and then continuing from a savegame is mentally impossible for me. So you see, for me, the option to automate some chores doesn't take anything away from playing the game.

Here is a thought experiment. Imagine that instead of having to check every city and make decisions for them the game offered to, at the end of each turn take you to a special screen where all the cities are lined up in a table. Next to each city name you have basic information about them and a list of messages saying what if anything changed this turn. And you have the option of clicking each of them to do your stuff. Now add a shift+click function to select multiple cities and issue orders en mass. This is pure UI design without any automation.

How would you feel about such a feature?

(As a programer I am genuinely interested in this beyond just this thread as this is basically market research for me.)

[Phillip Hone]

I'm not sure giving orders en mass would be helpful with a Total War game, because even if you are making pretty mundane decisions, you usually aren't building the same thing in every city.

The rest of the premise (some sort of city command screen) is very appealing to me.

I think it'd be nice if you couldn't govern every city yourself, and instead had to select from a pool of governor characters. In this case judgements about their loyalties and managing abilities would play a huge roll in the game. Here, however, you run into the problem of the AI still being lackluster, which might make the AI governors range from "cautious idiot" to "aggressive idiot."

[Kinyo]

I'm not sure giving orders en mass would be helpful with a Total War game, because even if you are making pretty mundane decisions, you usually aren't building the same thing in every city.

Sir I would like to introduce you to my Medieval: Total War tactic:

1) Check construction levels in provinces
2) Work out what is needed to bring all provinces to the same level
3) Implement plan
4) Build army
5) Capture new lands
6) Repeat steps 1-5

This would leave me with "blocks" of provinces at similar levels and with similar production abilities which I could use to produce a pre-determined army within about 2-4 turns depending on the composition.

Was this necessary? No. Was it an efficient use of the turns available? Hell no. Did I do it anyway? I certainly did. Did I defeat the AI? Quite comfortably at times.