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those warhammer total war games seem really cool to me but extremely unapproachable. I guess if I was more of a war gamer I would know what sorts of knowledge to shift to the background and move into the foreground of my awareness. but Iâm not, so launching the game and clicking start campaign only to be greeted by THISâŚ
just overwhelms me and I have to close the game. And I know itâs not even that much, which is sort of the worst part of it. If this were a tabletop thing, I feel like I could process it a bit better.
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KARL FRANZ
SUMMON THE ELECTOR COUNTS
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The real key is not even knowing what these abilities do but how good they are relative to the internal âmetaâ of the game which is literally impossible to tell from screens like these. You just pick a guy that seems cool and start playing.
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yeah you really donât have to worry too much about how to play unless youâre on Very Hard
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iâve assumed this to be the case. I just need to do some bare minimum research to learn whatever the meta is for tw games, because no one I know is playing these or games like them and I donât get the benefit of walking in as a newbie with someone there to explain a little bit about things. just feels very uphill!
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Imo the joy of 4x and adjacent games is figuring that stuff out yourself and failing a lot on the way up, and the quality of such a game, to me, is how easy it is to tell why you fucked up vs the game hiding important modifiers from you in ways that are not practically discoverable. This is a huge time investment of course because 4x games are never fast.
The best way to get tutorialized ime is to watch LPs of expert players, but then also ime you run the risk of learning too much and there being no point in playing any more.
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cool framing of things. thanks cuba. iâll go in with an attitude close to this next time I try.
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total war especially all the ones after shotgun 2 really specialize in the illusion of needing real tactics and strategy. itâs not field of glory 2. because as cuba alluded to the way theyâve shifted to hero units and abilities and all this videogame bullshit means you just need to figure out the games meta now instead which is why playing total war on the highest difficulty is a complete chore. if youre good at the game its not unrealistic to demolish a huge chunk of the enemys army and rout them simply by cycle charging with your general and their bodyguards likke its dynasty warriors. and of course all this would be fine if the strategic layer wasnât complete ass but that ship sailed around Rome 2, or if Iâm being exceptionally grognardy, with the original Rome.
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the total war warhammer games go even harder on hero unit bullshit, it made me question why I ever liked a total war game in the first place
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all that info that came out about the first romes development and how it was a near disaster honestly explains a lot about the trajectory of the series. it seems like they had to fight really hard for it to be good and then lost the fight around rome 2 where management just fully committed to making most of the game smoke and mirrors down to almost all of the REAL GAMEPLAY WE PROMISE trailers being totally fake lol. I like empire but you can tell thatâs where the cracks really started to show too, when they started splitting the dev team.
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as someone who is never attracted to RTS games, even I am suspicious about this companyâs design priorities as I find myself going ooh and ahh to the spectacle of the total warhammer games in spite of my taste for the genre. like, what compromises have they made to appeal to someone like me in this way? what youâre all saying is filling in the context around that question 
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yeah if your read of total war is ânearly all spectacleâ already congratulations you never need to play another second to figure out what theyâre all about. i mean sometimes we like spectacle but itâs tiring. stuff like this is why I ended up playing old man strategy games like advanced sqaud leader and its 80000 offshoots because itâs really unexciting in presentation but I feel way more deeply satisfied exploiting those game mechanics than I do in total war. when the ââexploitââ is âtake advantage of the enemy being able to fire at only one target a turn by baiting their fire and then using suppression to close into meleeâ it at least feels like an approximation of real strategy, and it feels less videogamey because I understand the logic behind that rule (it would be really hard to shift volume of fire to a new target when youâre busy engaging whatâs in front of you. this is also why I like close combat and combat mission, because they take into account human factors like that) as opposed to like âoh no my death fireball that can wipe out 150 men at once is on cooldown!!!â
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I have a letâs play thread on here of Troy Total War if you want to get an idea how a modern one (roughly, post-Shogun 2) plays on the âleast videogamey goofy stuffâ mode. My understanding of the licensed/non-historical games is you canât really avoid the videogamey goofy stuff no matter how hard you try. I had a lot of fun with Troy, but who knows how much of that is just because of my irrepressible Hellenophilia.
If you want the Real Good Total War Experience youâre looking at old games, Rome, Medieval 2 or Empire depending on what kinds of things you like. All of which are seriously missing actual quality of life features (as opposed to miserable âquality of lifeâ features) that make them a bit of a chore these days.
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i canât believe you told him to play empire but not napoleon (yes it has a smaller scope but itâs better than empire in basically every way) or shogun 2!!! you wanna talk about quality of life thatâs the best balanced one between the old and modern styles cuz itâs new enough to not be archaic but itâs right before they threw everything out the window. it also still looks really pretty for a what, 2012 game? I will say though everyone loves the boshin war expansion and goes on and on about it but you have to be prepared for some deeply one sided shit because gatling guns and ironclads are hilarious and obviously unbalanced. I always tell people to start with vanilla shogun 2 because of that
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I have Napolean and Shogun 2 in my library already!
I bet I would be similarly susceptible. Will look up your posts to get a taste.
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if you play napoleon or shogun 2 you also get to experience naval battles which are amazingly ill-thought out and often take like 4x as long as a land battle so naturally they got rid of them entirely. except in shogun 2 fots where you can get advanced western ironclads and completely obliterate wooden ships with exploding shot lol
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I just donât find the unit comps of medieval Japan to be particularly interesting and also harbor bitterness towards it as The Beginning of the End.
As for Napoleon vs Empire I just think Empireâs virtue is that it is the Biggest One and gets points for scale alone.
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Shogun 2 has amazing ashigaru spearmen you can humiliate samurai with and thatâs worth it alone
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more like total snore 
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