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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2814 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.

I bought it because I was somehow led to believe that the Imperium of Man would make a good stand-in for the Total War: Thirty Years' War that I always wanted but never got. Well, to nobody's surprise, not even my own, I was sorely disappointed. I came from Total War: Shogun 2, itself a limited-but-agreeable entry in the series, and what I find with TW:WH3 is a giant mess of a game that I thoroughly hate. I have written a very long, very negative review on steam and I would have many negative things to say about the game if anyone cared to hear them.

I'd be interested to hear your criticisms. Personally it's one of the top 10 games I've ever played, and my only real criticisms are: (1) it has a sort of black box complexity that creates a high barrier to entry for new players, and (2) it's a bit buggier than I'd like.

See https://www.themotte.org/post/776/friday-fun-thread-for-december-1/165271?context=8#context .

I'd like to hear it! Negative criticism is fun to read.

One copy-pasted very negative and entirely subjective, making-no-attempt-at-fairness steam review that may or may not be mine coming up.

tl;dr: Heavily overrated, actually a mess.

Aesthetically it's ugly, garish, tasteless. Fans of the setting will be unable to notice this, but all that I see is random colors and nonsensical designs. The setting is shit and it's mildly depressing that CA/Sega made three installments for it instead of giving the Thirty Years' War a shot. But people like it and buy it and review it positively. People who hate history. People who watch superhero movies. People who are many, but have no taste.

As for the setting itself, what's even to be said? It's trash. Trashy trash. Worthless. Unsalvageable. Do you need an explanation why? Then stop reading, reading is not for you.

Mechanically, to be charitable, it's functional. It's also by far the least enjoyable Total War title I've played, and I've played most of them. The TW formula hasn't evolved at all, you're still playing the same basic game as back when, but now it has a bunch of Warhammer-related additional systems slathered on top that don't really add to what the game is actually about. The actual tactical battles are perfunctory, messy and poorly manageable, with none of the elegance and legibility the series had at its peak. The UI has degenerated as well and looks worse than ever. UX is unpleasant.

Strategy layer:

  • Armies now cannot exist without a leader, so no good leader with his full stack of twenty units followed by additional leaderless reinforcements - you will always have multiples of twenty units fighting multiples of twenty units.
  • Logistics, usually largely neglected in TW games, have been completely deleted. You can now just summon new units all over the map. Sure it costs some additional money to hire them, but that's a small price to pay for keeping your force behind enemy lines supplied with top-tier troops.
  • Attrition seems like a major issue, until you realize that you can completely negate it by just going a little slower, or by going a little faster and skipping past dangerous terrain.
  • Autoresolve is far too reliable. You're even told in advance which units of yours will be destroyed. Yes, this is how war works: Perfect information and predictability. Sun Tzu had no idea. You're almost always better off autoresolving a fight, which distributes damage almost evenly across your units, then recovering your losses within a turn or two, than to play a battle manually and risk losing entire units that you would then have to replace with raw recruits. What's more, the autoresolve formula doesn't seem to take unit composition into account at all, so battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor.
  • Winning a fight usually drowns you in pop-ups and TODOs. You found half a dozen magic items, your commanders gained five perks each from having fought a battle and having been the attackers and from the specific enemies they fought and from having been personally in combat, also your heroes would like you to distribute the skill points they just gained, oh and don't forget to check your inventory to see whether you can do some crafting with the items you found.
  • Quests. Yeah, this is what every strategy game needs: Quests. Quests so misplaced and irrelevant to the game at large that you can just let the relevant army teleport to the quest location. This alone should tell you how stupid an idea having quests in this game is.
  • Forget about large-scale geographic concerns in strategy, because random events will just teleport multiple enemy armies right into what you assumed to be the pacified heartland of your empire.
  • You can no longer raid trade routes. Yeah, that was far too intuitive, interesting and realistic. Instead of the practical limit on trade being your ability to protect it, which neatly interfaced with all other systems in the game, there is now simply a diplomatic penalty to new trade agreements based on how many you already have.

Tactical layer:

  • Do you remember when TW was about infantry, cavalry, and ranged troops, and a general being nearby to provide moral support? That was nice. You could apply a little real-world logic and make like Napoleon, outflanking, picking good terrain, maybe even threaten the enemy general, have little fights for valuable locations like hills or escarpments.
  • Now it's about Infantry, Cavalry, Ranged Troops, Flyers, Giants, Spellcasters, what items you have equipped and what active abilities you've levelled up and which of a million passive bonuses you have picked up during the campaign.
  • Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible. What, you don't like MOBAs? Get with the times, gramps.
  • Fuck your artillery because flying units will just bypass any defensive lines you have.
  • Spellcasters have no counterplay at all. Yeah they only get a few shots per fight, and it's more spectacle than effect. But given that and that you can't automate your own spellcasters, the entire existence of spellcasting is just a major annoyance on both ends and it doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the game at all. It's slapped-on and stupid and adds nothing of value to the game.
  • If terrain matters at all I haven't seen it do so.
  • Maps are tiny funnels on which you don't get to position and manoeuver, you just have the two forces crash into each other right from the start.
  • The option to automate some troops on demand, present in older TW titles, is still not back. Given that this game is micromanagement hell, I miss it sorely.

Eh. It's not worth going into the details of it. The Total War series has gone to shit.

I regret giving them money for this. Everyone who recommended this as "well if you want to play a strategy/tactics game set in renaissance Germany, just play this!" was wrong to do so and should feel bad about it.

...And now I want a game that is all about army logistics.

On the shallow but higher-production end, Hearts of Iron.

On the extremely crunchy and lower-tech end, Shadow Empire.

Hearts of Iron

Are you referring to Darkest Hour, 3, or 4?

Personally, I play 4. I would not be surprised if an older one delves way deeper into one or another logistical element.

The reason I feel it's worth mentioning, despite the many, many non-logistical elements to the game? Aircraft carriers. I'd been playing Endless Space 2 and especially Stellaris while complaining about the portrayal of carriers. Far too often, strike craft are treated as a glorified missile. The point of a real-world carrier isn't to shoot missiles at enemy capital ships. It's to project force via strikes, recon, and air superiority. I wanted my Stellaris carriers to be spaceborne bases, dominating their entire star system without ever having to show up on enemy scopes.

I'd also been playing Ashes of the Singularity and its far superior predecessor, Supreme Commander. At least those games tried to give aircraft radically different movement and constraints than land units! But they were still just big blobs of hit points, because they had to play nice with the existing RTS paradigm of bubble-shielded turrets and fog of war. They couldn't implement realistic force projection without breaking the assumptions that kept all the rest of the game functional.

So I started brainstorming a true logistics RTS. It needed supply depots and convoys, because aircraft benefit from a distributed attack surface rather than a single all-or-nothing megabase. It needed more robust intelligence gathering to allow decisive tactical advantages without disregarding all pretense of counterplay. It needed to model equipment and supplies and the effects of their absence on an army. In short, I wanted to focus on ways to pressure the enemy beyond the traditional method of "make all his hit points go away."

Then I tried HoI4. Supply centers and railways, check. Production and stockpiling of materiel, check. Aircraft that are actually modeled as flying missions rather than continuous close air support, CHECK. A naval game of cat and mouse that I didn't know I wanted. The game is janky as hell, and it doesn't always live up to the mechanics I'd like. But it's trying for something so different from a traditional RTS that I can't help but love it.

Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2 may qualify. This page describes the game's logistics system.

Thanks, that's quite interesting. I was more interested in pre-railroad warfare, though, back when they had armies and not fronts.

My God, that is a terrible review, especially since so many of the sins you ascribe to TWW began well before in the historical genre, like Rome 2 making generals mandatory for moving troops, or trade routes being abstracted away.

Fuck your artillery because flying units will just bypass any defensive lines you have.

Flying units like bats are meant to counter artillery for factions that lack it themselves. You handle it by focusing ranged units on them as they approach, or keeping cav ready in the backlines to sweep them away as soon as they land, or even dismounting the crews and running them away.

Spellcasters have no counterplay at all. Yeah they only get a few shots per fight, and it's more spectacle than effect. But given that and that you can't automate your own spellcasters, the entire existence of spellcasting is just a major annoyance on both ends and it doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the game at all. It's slapped-on and stupid and adds nothing of value to the game.

Aneurysm. You can:

  1. Shoot them with artillery
  2. Sic your own melee lords or heroes on them
  3. Counterspell them with magic missiles

Doesn't meaningfully interact?? If you can't see the utility of buffing up your own units, healing monsters and cav, turning your lord into a roided monster, or nuking the enemy..

If terrain matters at all I haven't seen it do so.

It very much does, because if you're not considering sightlines or elevation, then your gunpowder armies are useless.

Not to mention that there are serious elevation buffs, units that have a height differential above their enemies get a massive damage buff to their ranged or even melee attacks, and a damage reduction in turn.

My God, that is a terrible review, especially since so many of the sins you ascribe to TWW began well before in the historical genre, like Rome 2 making generals mandatory for moving troops, or trade routes being abstracted away.

Yes. I said that it was a very subjective review, and written from a perspective of one who last played Shogun 2, didn't I?

Flying units like bats are meant to counter artillery for factions that lack it themselves. You handle it by focusing ranged units on them as they approach, or keeping cav ready in the backlines to sweep them away as soon as they land, or even dismounting the crews and running them away.

Fair, I guess that's possible.

Aneurysm. You can [...] Doesn't meaningfully interact?? If you can't see the utility of buffing up your own units, healing monsters and cav, turning your lord into a roided monster, or nuking the enemy..

I stand by that. Yeah, magic sucks. It doesn't fit into the gameplay at all. It's completely bolted-on. Sure you can get gameplay advantages out of it, but there are no tactical interactions with it for both sides. The mage just snaps his fingers and a buff happens somewhere on the field, or damage is dealt. It's not like generals who need to balance risk and reward to inspire wavering troops, or artillery that needs to be carefully positioned and protected. It's one very tough unit that gets to apply buffs or AOE damage at extreme distances without needing to take any risks or requiring precise positioning. IMO you can tell how poorly it interfaces with the game at large by how strictly limited magic use is in applications per battle.

It very much does, because if you're not considering sightlines or elevation, then your gunpowder armies are useless. Not to mention that there are serious elevation buffs, units that have a height differential above their enemies get a massive damage buff to their ranged or even melee attacks, and a damage reduction in turn.

I admit, it was hyperbole. Yes terrain matters - but much less so than in earlier TW games, is my impression.

Since you're a fan of Shogun 2, would you agree that naval artillery bombardment, which I believe was in FOTS, has the same "drawbacks" as magic?

It's click a button and magic rocks fall, everyone dies.

It's still not true for magic in TWW3, because:

  1. Most spellcasters are squishy, they can easily get themselves killed by enemy single entity lords, heroes or monsters. Or if you miscast too many times.

  2. Magic offers a great deal of contextual utility. Let's say you're on the offensive against an enemy that doesn't want to budge. Send a mage up, dodging fire, and then launch a bombardment. That gets the AI to move and approach your own favorable position. Or during a siege, helping blast the defenders on walls before you attack. Or using a summoned disposable unit to stuff up an enemy advance, fortify your backlines, or simply tie down their high value units.

I can see many valid critiques of the way magic is handled, but it being of limited utility or not interacting with other systems is a head-scratcher for sure. The reason it's limited, especially by the mana pool, is because it's incredibly powerful if used sensibly.

At any rate, if you really want to get a pike-and-shot experience out of the game, get the Southern Realms mod, which adds something quasi-similar to the Italian city states in the late 1600s. If you restrict your opponents to other similar factions, the Empire or Bretonnia, you don't have to suspend your disbelief too much.

I feel like you would like Wargame Red Dragon somehow.

Aren't there Med II or Empire mods that would cover the Thirty Years War period, or at least its ethos?

I do! But I'm much too slow for the massive micromanagement required. I had fun in 10vs10s though. But in the end every lobby seemed to have been stacked by pubstompers.

As for mods, yeah, kinda, but most of them are eithwr fairly shoddy or they require playing through the preceding periods first only for the content to run out when the 30yW approaches.

I only play vs the AI, I stack up 4 very hard decks vs me and my 3 moderate allies and play horde defence basically.

Fair, my experience with mods (on Empire) was that they claim to fix the AI but it's just as bad as before plus there are twenty new units per faction. A poorly made game but the setting has this allure I've never managed to vanquish.

It feels like most of your criticisms boil down to "I wanted a historical game, not a fantasy game." Fair enough, but that's not a problem with the game itself. It's like saying you hated Fight Club because you expected a movie about professional boxing.

Also I think some of your statements are just plain wrong, like the idea that terrain doesn't matter or that "battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor." In my experience this is completely false, you will always outperform autoresolve if you play the battle manually, assuming you are remotely competent at the game. Or the statement "Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible." You understand you're meant to pause and unpause the battle, right?

It feels like most of your criticisms boil down to "I wanted a historical game, not a fantasy game."

Well, yes. I explicitly said so, didn't I?

Regarding autoresolve: I'll happily admit to not being very competent.

As for pausing, no, I wasn't aware. My insinct was that I'm meant to play im real-time.

Perhaps it's not the game for you, but if you ever decide to give it another shot I highly recommend playing combat more like a "turn-based" strategy game with regular pausing to issue orders to your troops, use spells and abilities, etc. Makes the game much more enjoyable and allows you to actually formulate strategy and tactics. I probably pause less than I did when I first started, but I'd say pausing 20-50 times per combat is pretty typical.

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