Wrong. All wrong!
Troy is very similar to this. You don’t even pick a faction, you pick a HERO who leads a faction. Each HERO has his own special epic quest with steps lifted from mythology, as well as a special ability on the strategic layer that affects how you plan your expansion. (I was playing Odysseus and he can have his spies build recruitment stations in enemy cities so he can recruit units while in enemy territory, the sneaky bastard.) They also have special abilities on the tactical layer, more regular ones powered by RAGE (get it, menin aeide thea etc.) and your ultimate super sayian kaio ken technique called ARISTEIA. It’s like they designed this just for me right?
But no. It sucks. Your faction hero can’t die, of course, because everything about the structure of the game hangs on his unique identity. So if you lose he just gets “wounded” and comes back a few turns later. But you know, sometimes your Alexander the Great, victor of a hundred battles, is hanging out on his horse during a quick siege of some minor outlying town and takes a fucking arrow through the throat. It’s not all epic stories of noble tragedy, this history stuff.
I guess that’s what I resent: TW’s slow and purposeful stride away from simulationism. I do not WANT to hit a button on my general’s portrait that instantly raises a unit’s melee attack by 25% or whatever, because that shit is videogamey and stupid. To what purpose is this effort to depict Achilles’ great feats of strength if they are rendered six pixels high while I am trying to manage a chariot charge or shepherd my slingers away from a unit of enemy axemen? Actually in the tactics battles the heroes are ironically the least important units on the field, in terms of player attention; they are insanely durable and you just make sure they’re in the middle of the biggest fighting so you can trigger their abilities at opportune times. No consideration of formation or maneuver.
I hate, hate, hate the way armies are attached to heroes, or leaders. Recruit a leader, who then recruits an army. Can’t make like three units just to bolster a garrison, or a little seven-unit strike force to sneak around and take undefended towns in the enemies’ back lines. Supporting just two armies is an early-midgame move in Troy. Where’s the strategy in that?
If you’re going to give so much primacy to individual people and their superpowers - subject them to little rpg-lite games of leveling up and equipment acquisition - you might as well just make Homeric Final Fantasy Tactics. I’d play the shit out of Homeric Final Fantasy Tactics!
Look, if Creative Assembly made a game that actually attempted to simulate the real historical circumstances of the Warring States period I would love it. I want to know what ancient Chinese combat was like! But if they’re going to do it Romancing of the Three Kingdoms style I may as well just play fuckin Dynasty Warriors.
This is amplified by the pieces of the simulation that are exactly the same and haven’t been fixed in like, 15 years and 10 games. The game still has no idea how to have units interact with fortified walls. There’s still the problem where if you send your men to chase down a fleeing unit, the front rank of your guys will bump in the rearmost fleeing guy and all instantly stop and try to fight him, rather than swarming through the fleeing enemy (non-)formation to cut them all down. This kind of stuff was charming, or at least forgivable when there was so much else to like. Now it’s the straw that broke the horse’s back.
tl;dr I need my Total War games to take their cues from Thucydides, not Homer.
