I think the idea of transplanting the Total War mechanics into Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy universe has been around almost exactly as long as Total War itself has. And for good reason since the tabletop version of Warhammer involves models grouped into units precisely as Total War’s are, and also has most of the same core mechanics like unit type counters, flank attacks and morale; it seems like it’s practically a 1:1 fit that would be very hard to screw up. What a lot of people forget, though, is that it’s been tried before, and the main reason nobody really remembers Mark of Chaos (apart from the perfect intro) is because it wasn’t very good. It is possible to do Warhammer with Total War-esque mechanics and fail, so the Creative Assembly’s job is doubly difficult: not only do they have to get the gameplay right, but they also have to redeem themselves after the fuckup of Rome 2 by releasing it in a state that’s playable at launch.

After 25 hours with Total War: Warhammer, I am pleased to report they’ve succeeded on both counts. Mostly, anyway.

First let’s dispense with the elephant in the room that tends to start trumpeting mournfully when it comes to modern Total War games: Rome 2 was an absolute disaster and fully deserved the kicking it got three years ago. It was a technical and mechanical mess from start to finish and for the most part didn’t even qualify as a fully functioning game on launch. Given that, I was somewhat astounded to discover that Total Warhammer is probably the most stable Total War game I have played. Ever. I haven’t had a single crash, framerates are smooth even with thousands of men on the screen at once, both the strategic and battle map AI works like a charm and is actually threatening (to be fair the strategic map AI gets a lot of help, but I’ll talk about that later), and they’ve even managed to cage the eternal bugbear that’s plagued every Total War since the original Rome: no longer do you have to have a book handy for when you hit the “End Turn” button, as the AI factions whip through their turns in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of minutes. They’ve had three years and one additional game (Attila) to work on the engine, but that work has paid off: it almost never got in the way of my enjoying the game, and for a Total War game that’s high praise indeed.

Total War: Warhammer is the first Total War game to completely depart from its historical settings to embrace a made-up fantasy one; this is a treat in several ways, as it lets the Creative Assembly’s designers do things they simply haven’t been able to do before as they were held back by pesky restrictions such as the real world not actually having any vampires or giant spiders in it, and it’s also pleasant to see the return of the classic Warhammer Fantasy setting after Games Workshop dropped a nuke on it several years back¹. The particular part of the Warhammer setting that Total Warhammer picks for its campaign map is the Old World and surrounding territories, and the core of the Old World is the Empire, which is a fantasy version of the 15th century Holy Roman Empire; they don’t get any Landsknecht, but they do get Doppelsoldners (although they’re just called Greatswords here) complete with puffy hat, along with the best cavalry and artillery in the game. Surrounding the Empire are a bunch of other fantasy pastiches of historical and mythical civilizations: to the south-east there’s the Bretonnians, a faction based around the 12th century chivalric ideal of France spliced together with Arthurian legend; to the far south lie Tilea and Estalia, who are 14th century Italian city-states and medieval Spain respectively. To the north are a bunch of dick Viking northmen who just love to raid the Empire, and sandwiched between the Empire and the Chaos Wastes to the far north-east is Kislev, who are Poland + Russia circa Ivan the Terrible.

In Total Warhammer all of these factions — save for the Empire, which is a special case — are minor non-playable factions. Nevertheless they serve to provide a lot of flavour that I’ve found the strictly historical variants of Total War have lacked; with the possible exception of Medieval and the first Rome, most factions in Total War games are pretty much identical, with only a few special units to distinguish them from the competition. They certainly didn’t have anything like the character that the Warhammer races do; not all of them get their own unit trees (Bretonnia does, but the Norsemen use what looks like a variant of the Chaos units and Estalia simply steals the Empire’s) but their cities and provinces do at least have their own distinct appearances on the campaign map. It’s thanks largely to this that the campaign level of Warhammer avoids feeling like a simple reskin of Medieval or Rome despite this part of the game being the closest like-for-like matching between the two properties — the underlying mechanics are probably 90% Total War, but it still successfully captures the character of Warhammer.

This is massively helped along by an extremely clever thing Total Warhammer does: instead of giving you a choice between four indistinguishable Celtic factions or three identical Roman factions, it cuts the number of playable factions right down to just five. I’m a firm believer in the idea that a key part of good design is having the courage to cut features if they’re not working, since to retain them will merely dilute development effort; I’m also a firm believer that having 10+ playable factions in previous Total War games was a huge waste of time since most of them weren’t distinctive enough to merit separate playthroughs. The Warhammer universe certainly has enough races to support that approach if the CA had decided to do it again, but by choosing to limit their scope to the Old World they already cut out a couple of the more exotic factions like Lizardmen and Tomb Kings — as well as all variants of Elves, and the fact that it’s only just occurred to me now that they’re not in the game shows how much I missed them — and by making most of the factions in the Old World AI-only they’ve made a conscious decision to try and focus all of their effort on making the five that they do have as different as possible. That’s a decision that pays off in spades; usually I do just one or two playthroughs of a Total War game and then assume that I’ve seen most of what the game has to offer, but in Total Warhammer’s case I plan to eventually play all five because they each have their own distinctive playstyle and unit roster. And because these are different races rather than different nations those differences can be played up to the nines; instead of the enemy fielding a unit of cavalry that is identical to yours apart from wearing a slightly different pair of trousers, the enemy cavalry is instead a group of enraged green orcs on slavering warboars. Or classic medieval knights riding war gryphons. Or undead ghost horses. Doing this sort of thing properly takes a huge amount of time, which is why Total Warhammer’s choice to “only” have five playable factions is so smart: not only does it let them do it properly, but because they do it properly the replayability of the game is actually massively increased instead of the other way around.

So who are the playable races of Total Warhammer? Well, the “good” guys of the setting are the Empire and the Dwarfs. These are the races that, on the campaign map, play most like a traditional Total War faction; their gameplay is based around taking and holding settlements and teching up both your economy and your units. The Dwarfs occupy the mountain ranges to the south and south-west of the Empire and have the heaviest focus on economy and technology; their armies are completely without cavalry and their units don’t move very quickly, but they practically never break and even their missile troops have a reasonable level of close-combat ability. And because they are dwarfs they have a lot of missile troops; you can’t approach a dwarf battle line without exposing yourself to a massive gunline. Their actual close-combat troops are horrors to face, as a lot of them have specific traits that make them effective against precisely the sort of monstrous troop type that you’d hope would finally break their formation. It is possible to eventually break a Dwarf army, but you’re not going to manage it without paying an expensive price first. The Dwarfs form a natural barrier between the Empire and the Greenskin tribes (i.e. Orcs) further south, so the first hundred turns of a Dwarf game is probably going to be spent locked in a bitter war with their natural enemy.

The Empire themselves are an interesting-spin on bog-standard humans; they have the units you’d expect — swordsmen, spearmen, halberdiers, knights — as well as more specialised/powerful variants and war machines, but the Empire is more of a confederation of city-states than it is one monolithic entity and this is reflected on the campaign map: each of the 15-odd provinces of the Empire is split into its own sub-faction and the Empire starts the game in a state of civil war, so things can get pretty chaotic pretty quickly. If you’re playing the Empire you have to convince the other provinces to join with you — and the nice thing about this is that the victory conditions don’t care how you do it. You can try and conquer the entire thing, you can vassalise the other Empire lords or form military alliances with them, or — if you send them enough money first — you can send them an offer for Confederation, which if accepted will cause all of that lord’s provinces and armies to join you peacefully at the cost of a diplomatic penalty with any remaining Empire lords. The Empire has less of a focus on technology, and what technologies it does have are dependent on particular buildings existing in your provinces; the Empire’s thing is economy above all else, and if built right they can bring in truly ridiculous amounts of money if they can just unite the warring factions and smack down anyone trying to raid or sack their cities.

To the southeast of the Empire lies the twin provinces of Sylvania, which are home to the Vampire Counts: this isn’t quite your classic undead faction as they mostly rely on monstrous slavering bat-things to do most of their actual damage, with the zombies, skeletons etc being used as entirely disposable chaff to tie up enemy forces while you maneuver your damage dealers around into the enemy flanks or rear — zombie units do fuck all damage and will be lucky to get even a couple of kills in a fight, but if you field enough of them to cover the flanks (and because they’re so cheap you will be fielding enough of them) they’ll last long enough to let your other units do their thing. They’re basically the Peasants from Medieval, except made actually useful by two of the Vampire faction gimmicks. One is that undead units do not break. Ever. They’re soulless horrors animated by death magic, so they don’t have a proper morale value and therefore cannot be routed from the field. Instead their morale is used to gauge how strong the magic binding them together is; all of the things that would normally affect morale affect binding, and if an undead unit’s binding reaches critical levels they’ll start to crumble and disintegrate instead of running. This means that your cheap cannon fodder gets wiped out a lot but they’ll hold the line to the last zombie, and of course the nice thing about all of your troops being undead is that if you win the battle you’ve just created a big pool of new recruits; this is reflected in the other Vampire gimmick, which is their ability to immediately raise basic skeleton and zombie units without any build time — and if you do it at the site of a big battle and a commensurately large pile of corpses you get access to more advanced unit types.

Other units the Vampires have access to: ghouls, Grave Guard (essentially armoured skeletons that are actually good in a fight), ghost cavalry, Dire Wolves, and a lot of monstrous units, some of which fly. A word about monstrous units in Total Warhammer: every unit now has a displayed HP value, and instead of having 5000HP spread out amongst ninety spearmen the monsters have 5000-6000 HP concentrated into nine units – or just one. This makes them difficult to put down and they do a lot of damage (as well as often causing terror amongst units they’re facing) but they cost a lot in terms of upkeep and there’s a fair range of units that have specific Anti-Large traits such as the Empire Halberdiers, so it’s not a good idea to go all-in on monsters. Anyway, the final Vampire faction trait is that they spread Vampiric Corruption in territories they control. Vampiric Corruption is good for the Vampires and bad for everyone who isn’t the Vampires, as a high level of corruption will give any non-Vampire province a substantial penalty to Public Order, and raising the corruption level above 50% will also cause any mortal armies in that territory to suffer constant attrition. This means taking territories from the Vampires is super-difficult as even if you successfully storm a settlement you have to leave a large garrison force there to maintain order and purge the corruption, slowing down your advance. Unfortunately for the Vampires their Corruption works both ways; if the Vampires try to take a territory that has a low level of Vampiric Corruption it is them who will suffer the attrition and the public order penalty. This makes slow expansion the order of the day; you need to spend time raising the Corruption level of neighbouring provinces with agents and buildings before the undead hordes can move on.

I can’t speak much as to how the Orcs play; my playthroughs so far have been as the Empire and the Vampires, and so I haven’t had much contact with them. They seem to rely on strong characters and strength in numbers; their boar cavalry is also a massive pain the ass. As you’d expect, they’re advertised as having limited diplomacy and technology/economy options and they have to constantly fight other factions to maintain public order. Chaos on the other hand I have seen a lot of since they’re basically the big boss of the campaign. Chaos doesn’t have settlements and instead recycles the horde mechanic from Attila, where each army is a self-sufficient whole and can periodically encamp to replace losses and build new units. Since they have no use for settlements they’ll just raze any city they capture to the ground — in fact I’ve seen more city razings in Total Warhammer than I have every other Total War combined, since settlements now have a faction affinity. The Empire and Vampire Counts can take any “human” settlement (that includes humans under the thrall of the undead). The Dwarfs and the Orcs can take the underground settlements they both seem to love so much. However, Dwarfs cannot take and occupy Vampire Count settlements and vice versa; all they can do is sack them or raze them to the ground, which makes the latter the only effective way to put their economy behind permanently. The AI will raze any settlement it doesn’t have a use for. You’ll quickly find yourself doing it too, and the Old World soon begins to look like a complete wreck littered with burned-out ruins. Fortunately you can re-colonise a wrecked settlement if you’re of the right racial affinity, although you’ll have to rebuild it from scratch, and the AI will start to get in on this action in the late-game so things do get built back up again. It does smack of a slightly artificial way to get factions fighting their natural enemies over the settlements they can actually occupy — Orcs vs Dwarfs, Empire vs Vampire Counts — but it’s undeniably effective at doing that and promotes a lot of interesting tactical decisions as to how you extend your reach into territory that you can’t colonise. It’s also terrifying to see the northern cities  gradually crumble under the Chaos advance — in neither of my games have I managed to meet Kislev, as Kislev has been put to the torch by the Chaos hordes long before I can get an army up there. You can gauge how well they’re doing just by looking at the wreckage through the fog of war.

As befits the setting, Total Warhammer is far more character driven than any previous Total War game. Each faction gets a Legendary Lord to lead it — for the Empire it’s Emperor Karl Franz, for the Vampires it’s Vampire Lord Mannfred von Carstein — each with their own unique skill tree and set of quests. These quests are essentially scripted battles against a tough opponent; if you win you get an appropriately awesome piece of equipment that you can attach to your Lord to boost his stats. Armies must now be led by a Lord, and while you can recruit bog standard Lords at any time they become increasingly more expensive in terms of upkeep; factor in the considerable costs of unit upkeep at the same time and you’ll find yourself only being able to support two armies at most at the start of the game, leading to lots of tricky decisions about where to commit your forces; as the Empire I was very aware that sending an army to Averheim would leave me wide open to invasion by my mortal enemies in Middenland, should they decide to choose that moment to attack, while my game as the Vampire Counts had me razing a string of Orcish strongholds to create a buffer zone that would let me expand north without worrying about having to watch my back too much. Each faction sports the usual array of agents, and one of the great changes Total Warhammer makes is that these characters will fight alongside the armies they’re embedded into as hero units. All named characters get their own skill tree and inventory, and so you end up with these rather nice groups of heroes leading armies throughout the campaign — my main Empire army was led by Karl Franz, an Empire Captain called Ulric the Stickler who had his skill points split into training/recruiting units and being a sick close combat machine, and Jimothius the Warrior Priest who was tagging along for his healing/anti-attrition skills. Embedded characters do take up a unit slot so you’re not getting anything for free, but they’re well worth the investment as long as you don’t go overboard.

Unfortunately while agents do have a lot of awesome points now they also bring me to the first negative one I have with the game: anything about them that’s been introduced to tie in with the new Warhammer mechanics is usually a good idea, but unfortunately they’ve been built on top of the Rome 2 agent system which was an absolute shitshow, and when you get down to it Total Warhammer is no different. All agents have 8-10 different abilities. Some of them are passive. Some of them are active. Some only work in enemy provinces. Some only work in your provinces. Crucially, a lot of them seem to overlap, meaning it’s not always clear as to why I want e.g. a Witch Hunter over a Warrior Priest. Certainly everyone can assassinate everyone else, which means a return to the bad old days where the only answer to enemy agents is to spam an equal or greater number of agents of your own at them. The computer is absolutely shameless about how it cheats with agents; it will spawn them into existence despite not having the buildings required to recruit them and it will use them every single turn it can despite each active ability use having a price tag attached to it. The base chance of e.g. a sabotage ability succeeding is actually quite low now, but that doesn’t matter to the AI; it’ll just try again and again until it works. Even if you send in agents specialised in assassination to clean out AI agents it’ll take several turns of trying as this only raises the odds of success to around 30-35% — and even if you succeed this will only provide temporary respite as that 35% chance is split into 5% chance of assassination, 30% chance of wounding. I gave up trying to manage them when my Witch Hunter assassin got outright killed by NPC agents he’d only been able to wound. I don’t know who at the Creative Assembly still thinks this is a fun system to deal with because I haven’t seen a single person who agrees with them; it’s really telling that one of the first mods to appear for Total Warhammer is an “only passive agent abilities” mod, and I’d say it’s absolutely required if you want to save yourself a ton of annoyance on the campaign map.

I have similar problems with the campaign map army AI, in that it will simply run away if it doesn’t think it can win a battle. Since all armies have the same movement range, this means that you’ll only catch them if you have multiple armies working together to pin them down or you get lucky with an Ambush action. This behaviour is bearable when you’re fighting a faction that has settlements you can take and destroy in lieu of killing the actual army, but it’s a huge problem when you’re fighting Chaos (who don’t have settlements) or one of the raiding Norsca factions whose settlements are really difficult to even get to, let alone destroy. They’ll spawn multiple stacks and make hit-and-run attacks to raze settlements and you just won’t be able to bring them to battle, especially since you probably don’t have all that many armies to commit to the task. It’s immensely frustrating to chase a single Skarland stack across the entire length of the Empire knowing that the moment you stop it’ll just turn around and beeline for any settlement it thinks is vulnerable. It might be the smartest way for the AI to play these factions, but it is most decidedly not fun.

The worst thing about this is that Chaos are allied with the Norsca factions and they coordinate their attacks in scripted waves that turn up every 20-odd turns past turn 40. Ordinarily this would throw an interesting spanner in the works as the world gradually bands together to fight the Chaos threat (as you get big diplomatic bonuses while the invasion in ongoing); in practice it works out to tying up most of your armies playing kiss chase across the northern wastelands. The one epic battle with Chaos I had was the final invasion wave against four full stacks led by named heroes; I repelled them with five stacks of my own in a titanic battle that ended up as a Pyrrhic Victory and shattered my armies, and it was only by merging the survivor units that I got enough unit cohesion to hunt down the fleeing remnants of the enemy before they regrouped. I wish the entire invasion had been like that, rather than this weird gamey bullshit the campaign map AI turns it into.

It’s so weird to me that so many good decisions could be made in adapting the Warhammer IP to fit Total War (and vice versa) and yet these stupid pain points — some of which have been around since Rome 2 — make it through into the finished product. There’s some definite flab in the rest of the game, sure, but nothing that’s quite as detrimental to my enjoyment as how the campaign map AI abuses the fact that it is an AI and has infinite patience for all of this fiddly bullshit that drives a human player nuts. Still, it’s not enough to stop me from calling this the best Total War since Fall of the Samurai, and the only reason it’s “since” instead of “ever” is because they’re doing very different things; Total Warhammer is carving out space in a whole new area for the series and it’s doing it really really well, albeit with a few bumps and niggles along the way. There’s a vast amount of stuff I just haven’t talked about because this review is already at 4000 words, but I think probably the best compliment I can pay Total Warhammer is this: after I completed the campaign objectives as the Empire I kept on playing. I never do that with strategy games, but I did it here because I felt like there was still more to do and see in the game. I hadn’t been to Bretonnia. Hadn’t really fought the Greenskins. Wanted to battle my way into the snowy wastes of the north and burn all of the fucking Norsca settlements to the ground in revenge for all the hassle they gave me. And once I am done with the Empire game there’s still the Vampire Counts game to finish and the Dwarfs and Orcs to tackle. Each of them will show me a whole different facet of the game; 25 hours in and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That’s the Total War I know and (used to) love; flabby in some places and decidedly uneven in others, but engrossing nevertheless and something that scratches the strategic itch in a way that nothing else really can.

The post Thoughts: Total War – Warhammer appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

There’s a man sitting on a mountaintop just to the north of Pulpudeva. His name is Commios, and he’s one of the last dozen survivors of the Getae tribe. The war that destroyed his homeland was bloody and violent. Thousands died as the relentless march of the Athenian hoplites brought them closer and closer to the Getae capital, the near-limitless hordes of Thracian warriors charging heedlessly forward only to be threshed like so much wheat by the bristling spears of the impenetrable Greek phalanx. The three Getae cities were besieged and occupied; battle captives were either executed or pressed into slavery; and the encamped army brought plague with them that added to the death toll.   It was a war of extermination in all but name, and what survivors remained were all too happy to accept the yoke of Athens knowing the alternative. That is, all except for Commios and his friends, who fled the destruction of Malva to his remote and forbidding mountaintop where he could gaze down at what had once been the prize jewel of the Getae nation.

But that was thirty years ago. The Getae cities have been at peace for a generation; their filthy barbarian hovels have been pulled down and replaced by glittering Hellenic monuments, and Getae culture is nothing more than a near-forgotten memory. These provinces are now part of the Greek heartland; the victorious hoplite armies have moved on to a frontline that’s more than a hundred miles distant and the population have been assimilated into the Athenian people. This land is Athenian now. Nevertheless, every year Commios and his twelve buddies pack their bags and head down to the lowlands to take Pulpudeva under siege. It’s a ritual thing more than anything else since you can’t really cordon off a bustling city of thousands with thirteen guys, and the huge garrison army always chases them off having killed just six or seven of their number. Commios retreats to his mountaintop to lick his wounds, and then he’s back again the next year with another twelve warriors to make his umpteenth futile attempt to storm the walls.

There’s a perfect storm of bugs and poor design that combine to make Commios’ doomed one- (or thirteen-) man crusade possible. One of the changes Rome 2 makes to the Total War formula is that when a faction loses all of its cities its armies no longer simply scatter to the winds. Instead they’ll start to suffer attrition, giving them a limited amount of time to retake their lost cities before their soldiers all die of starvation or disease. Commios and his “army” do indeed have the red death’s head signifying attrition hovering over their stack on the campaign map, but it’s being counterbalanced by a strange bug (or possibly a feature) whereby Commios always restores his numbers back up to their original total of thirteen after a failed siege. That he survives the siege at all is down to shoddy autoresolve code¹ which doesn’t take unit quality into account when calculating losses (so it’s a straight numerical comparison even if your army is veteran heavy hoplites and their army is lightly-armoured skirmishing troops; don’t click that autoresolve button if you don’t want to lose half of your men to slingers that ordinarily wouldn’t even be able to penetrate a hoplite’s armour) and which also seems to ignore reinforcing armies.  Commios escapes every single time because the primary army in Pulpudeva isn’t the thousand-strong garrison army that would crush Commios and his men under sheer weight of slingshot before they ever made contact with a friendly unit, but is instead a single unit of bodyguard hoplites protecting the general I left there to take advantage of the free experience Commios offers up every turn.  Because there’s just one unit the autoresolve code only kills off a few of Commios’ buddies, and so he uses his free retreat move to get back to his mountain happy in the knowledge that he can do it all again next year.

Bugs and poor design. That’s Rome 2 summed up in four words and one lengthy anecdote; while good ideas do exist they’re swamped under the sheer weight of bugs, glitches, poor AI coding, utterly abysmal UI, awful communication and never-ending AI turns. Make no mistake, this is a disastrous release on par with Empire, and a rather depressing one after it appeared the Creative Assembly had put their slow climb out of that pit behind them with Fall of the Samurai. Rome 2 doesn’t even have the excuse that it’s the first implementation of firearms or naval combat or that it’s trying to juggle four different maps at once; while Rome does make many changes and “improvements” to Total War at the end of the day it’s still melee combat on a single campaign map, the simplest iteration of the formula possible and one which they already nailed over a decade ago when they released the first Shogun. There’s simply no excuse for them to have fucked it up again the way they have here.

Fucked it up they have, though, and so I’m faced with the rather daunting prospect of actually having to review the damn thing. It’s daunting because there is just so much wrong with this game, from fundamental flaws they’ll have to go back to the drawing board to fix to ideas which are good in concept but which are let down by unfailingly poor execution that’s going to require months of patching to get right. I can’t possibly deal with all of it in one review otherwise we’ll be here all day. I’ll just have to start with the campaign map – since eviscerating the battle AI is going to be comparatively simple, but it’s a little harder to identify where exactly things went wrong on the campaign map side of things and I want to get into it while I’m still fresh – and hope don’t run out of steam before I get to the end of what promises to be a mammoth piece of work.

There is no single issue with the campaign map that strikes me as a critical problem. There isn’t a single one of them – save perhaps the UI – that couldn’t be brought up to spec after a couple of months of patching and balancing. The critical problem that Romedoes have, unfortunately, is that there isn’t a single one of them. There’s about three or four dozen, and the pressure of having to deal with all of them at the same time is what shatters the flawed gem that Rome 2 could have been and scatters the pieces into a raging torrent of effluent where retrieving them is going to take a lot of effort.  Agents, armies, movement, diplomacy, technology, settlement growth, internal faction politics; you can name literally any aspect of the campaign map and be happy in the knowledge that the CA will have screwed it up in some way. The most frustrating thing about this is that the campaign map is where the hidden potential of Rome 2 shines through. There are changes that have been made – the technology and province systems in particular – that actually could have been excellent if they’d only been worked on a little more and brought over the line separating polished product from rushed prototype. Instead one is an annoyance and the other is probably the most critical flaw existing in this side of the game.

Settlements in Rome are now collected into groups of three or four and designated as provinces. Each province will have one capital settlement and two or three smaller settlements; each smaller settlement has four potential building slots and the capital has six. Building slots cannot be used until a settlement has enough growth surplus (a function of food, technologies and happiness) to expand. Happiness (or public order) is a province-wide value, and you also need food to support your higher-level cities, so the idea is that you centralise your industry in the capital settlement while the smaller settlements focus on public order buildings and agricultural improvements to keep the population fed and happy. It’s not a bad idea, and gives an immediate reason to take the final city in a province beyond “More settlements = good”; completing a province will allow you to maximise its output and pass edicts that give temporary bonuses to happiness or food or production or whatever. I certainly found it a bit more interesting to deal with than Shogun’s solitary cities. However, there’s a very good reason the province system doesn’t work, and it is to be found in the following image which will make anyone who played the original Rome shudder in revulsion:

Squalor. It’s back, and this time it’s even more ridiculous. As you upgrade your buildings to more advanced versions they will start to require food, which kind of makes sense (I guess you’re feeding the extra workers or something). They will also give you a public order penalty in the form of squalor, which also kind of makes sense since you’re building up the settlement and it’s more crowded. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this concept so far; you need public order and food producing buildings in order to support your high-level buildings. That’s fine. I can cope with that. What I can’t cope with – I can’t even get my head around – are the following two design decisions:

• High level public order buildings require food.
• High level food buildings also give you a squalor penalty.

This means that in order to get high public order you need more food. In order to get more food, you need public order to cancel out that squalor penalty. It’s an insane negative feedback loop where the numbers have been sketched on the back of an envelope and then input directly into the full game with absolutely no thought given to what this is going to do to the game’s internal economy. Once you crunch those numbers, you realise that all you’ll achieve by upgrading food and public order buildings to their highest level is that your public order building required to counteract the squalor produced by your food building will eat nearly all of the food produced by the food building, resulting in a net increase of about five food for an outlay of 100,000 gold.  By contrast a level one farm costs about 1,000 gold and will also produce five food.  That’s not an upgrade, that’s throwing money into a squalor black hole. Again.

I think the design idea behind this was that you have a bunch of low-level agricultural provinces supporting your high-level military-producing ones, which use all the food to support their public order buildings. If so, all I can say is that this is an immensely cack-handed way of going about it that at best renders high-level agricultural buildings and technologies utterly useless, and at worst sabotages the entire game because the campaign AI doesn’t understand that building those high-level food buildings will send it into a squalor death spiral. I’ve sent my spies into enemy territories only to discover that they have a public order rating of -100 and rebellion all over the place because the AI built a single level 4 farm and that was enough to completely screw the settlement. I’ve also seen AI armies starving in their home territories because they didn’t have enough food to support themselves.  Not only is it a shitty mechanic, but it’s one that the CA’s own game rejects as fundamentally broken. That it has made it through into a major release that has a ludicrous RRP of £45 on Steam is nothing short of astonishing.

The UI issue is probably the second most frustrating thing about the campaign. I don’t think anyone would claim that Shogun 2’s UI was a masterpiece of elegant design, but it was functional and it worked. It showed you all the information you needed in an easily-accessible form with relatively few clicks required. By contrast Rome 2’s UI is a triumph of idiocy, where critical game functions are hidden in tiny buttons at the bottom of the screen (which are so easily overlooked that they have to tell you when you’re clicking that “End Turn” button without levelling up a character or researching a technology)  and you have to click through six different tabs to access each set of ~10 technologies. I went ten hours without realising I could upgrade character skills on level up instead of picking new ones because the option was hidden in a popup. Every time I want a bit of detailed information I have to hover over something with the mouse and wait for a tooltip because there’s no way to access this information holistically – no province summary, no army summary, no nothing. The icons themselves – unit cards, buttons, you name it – are very stylised and carry no useful information whatsoever. In battles the old Current Unit Size/Max Unit Size ratio over each unit card is gone and has been replaced by a health bar which is spectacularly hard to read in the heat of the moment. Because you can now control 40 units in a battle the bar at the bottom of the screen where the unit cards live has now doubled in size, meaning it’s not so much at the bottom of the screen any more, it is the bottom half of the screen; you spend most of your battles peering over it at the tiny piece of screen real estate not obscured by the UI. It’s an absolute car crash of design, and one which is so baked into the game’s structure now that it’ll never be fixed outside of an expansion. A lot of the other problems with the campaign map can be fixed with some additional dev time, but this UI would still exist even if Rome 2 released six months from now in a more polished form. The best I can say about it is that you do get used to it after a while, although it makes the first couple of hours playing the game extra tortuous.

Already at 2,500 words and I haven’t even gotten into the battle AI yet. Speeding things up slightly: generals now have much less character thanks to the UI hiding progression trees and making it impossible to plan their evolution, not to mention family trees being completely absent from the game meaning your star general is, ultimately, just A Guy. Faction politics is never explained, ever; there was a significant period during my Athens campaign where I wasn’t sure which faction I was even supposed to be supporting, or what would happen if I let their support drop below whatever red line exists. I’m just not sure what that entire side of the game is for, since it doesn’t confer any real gameplay bonuses and seems to exist solely to make the player’s life more difficult. Agents are an incredibly spammy mess. Every agent type can assassinate every other agent type. Every agent can also convert enemy agents to your side, even if you’re currently at the cap for that particular agent type. So you see an enemy spy, and you send in your champion to kill the spy because that’s what the game says is good against spies, only for the spy to bribe your champion to defect. Then you get your own spy to bribe your champion back, and get a second champion to kill the spy; it’s a simple matter of weight of numbers, and if you lose early on any subsequent agents you send out will be immediately converted by the levelled up enemy agents – and they level up ridiculously quickly, once every three or four turns. Again, this is the sort of game balance I’d expect to see in a closed beta, not a full release for actual money. Then there’s the time the game takes to process AI turns, which starts at two minutes and spirals upwards from there as you uncover more of the map. I hope you have some other non-computer-based  form of entertainment to hand, because otherwise you’re going to spend a long, long time looking at the AI factions cycling through their turns while “playing” Rome 2.

And now we finally get to the battle AI, something which has always been a bit of a thorny issue for the Total War games but which seemed to reach a level of seeming competence with Shogun 2; at the very least you needed to play that game for a dozen hours or so in order to spot the cracks in its façade. Since they did okay with the melee-based Shogun you’d expect them to also produce something fairly competent for Rome, right?

Wrong.

It’s rare that a game fucks up so badly I feel the need to record, edit and post a video on Youtube to demonstrate just how fucked up it is, but Rome 2 clears that particular bar with aplomb. The battle AI is worse than useless. In that particular battle it immediately abandoned the twelve siege engines it had built and ran down to the nearest gate en masse. It then sent three units in to try to burn down the gate, except because it was raining they didn’t manage to finish the job before my huge garrison of slingers routed them. After this it didn’t have a clue; didn’t sent in more units to finish the job, didn’t try its luck at another gate, didn’t do anything except this bizarre dance outside my walls. Even when they do manage to burn the gate down they’ll just try to rush their entire army through it – missile units included – and if you have a mere two units of spear infantry to hold them in place while the gate drops boiling oil on their heads you’ve already won. The battle AI doesn’t understand siege engines or siege weapons, while the campaign AI abhors balanced forces and prefers to build entire stacks of slingers who are useless against heavy infantry thanks to their low armour penetration value. Morale values drop insanely quickly, so one army or the other will break within ten seconds of contact with the enemy force², and this makes it pathetically easy for a canny human player to annihilate thousands of men for little loss to themselves.

So you will never lose a siege battle in Rome 2. You’ll never lose an open field battle either, which are a different kettle of woe entirely;  the AI’s strategy on the attack is to simply run³ its men at yours and hope it has better unit composition (hint: it never does), like this is a game of conkers rather than a battle involving thousands of men. It doesn’t try to flank and because of its awful unit composition it never has any cavalry, and because it just comes straight for you and morale breaks so quickly by the time you launch your flanking attack the enemy army will already be routed and running.  On the defence it’ll just sit there inert while your slingers exhaust their ammo supplies and your heavy infantry moves in to mop up. If you’re besieging an enemy town it’ll at least put some slingers on the ramparts, but it’ll move them from side to side and never give them the chance to fire while your hoplites very slowly wheel their four sets of ladders up to the walls. I haven’t played many naval battles but from what I’ve seen both in person and in videos its similarly awful there. It’s just a complete and utter failure, and the only reason to fight battles in this particular iteration of Total War – a game which trades almost entirely on those tactical battles – is because the autoresolve code is so bad you can’t trust the computer to do it for you.

(Oh, and there was also that one open-field battle that inexplicably had a victory point sitting in the middle of it that I had to capture and hold, meaning that I couldn’t pick a good defensive location and had to stick all of troops in front of the Magic Forest because the game said it was important. Fortunately this display of design incompetence was outdone by a display of technical incompetence when the AI army tried to run through my lines to get to the point. I should really stress this: they didn’t try to attack me, they tried to run past me and got utterly slaughtered in the process. Unbelieveable.)

Before I wrap things up, I should also mention a problem that’s only comparatively minor, but which has potential to scupper the entire game in the long-run: certain unit types seem vastly, vastly overpowered. I’ve heard horror stories about the Praetorian Guard chewing up units of elite Cataphracts which charged them from the rear; my own personal experience is with the Athenian Hoplites, which aren’t quite that bad but which can be built from the very start of the game from a level 1 barracks. Maybe it’s because of the AI’s weird slinger addiction, but I’ve had battles where my hoplites have single-handedly killed 2,000 men while losing only 13 of their own. Enemy melee troops fare no better. Even elite heavy infantry can’t kill more than a dozen before being routed and annihilated. Hoplite phalanxes were certainly brutally effective during the Iron Age, but I’m fairly sure they weren’t this good.  If the CA ever manage to unfuck the game proper the next thing they’re going to have to look at is unit balancing, because I have a hard time believing this is working as intended.

Given this vast, vast quantity of evidence there’s only one conclusion to be drawn: Rome 2 is not a finished game. It’s a product that needs at least another six months of work before they can put it in a box and sell it. Having spent some time looking at game development from the inside now I have some sympathy with the CA and am hesitant to put the blame entirely on the rank and file there; they can make a good game, and will have been painfully aware that Rome in its current state is a broken mess. Reading Mike Simpson’s bleating about how Empire had to be released when it was because of release windows, though⁴, I wonder how they could have been so careless as to let it happen again. This isn’t a failure of design or programming, because those are things that tend to improve the more time they’re given. This is a failure of upper management to properly oversee the game and make sure there was enough time to get everything done. Rome 2 is the first move the CA have made away from the more focused battlefields of Napoleon, Shogun and FotS in half a decade and it’s painfully apparent they’ve spread themselves too thin; nearly everything in the game either hasn’t been fully thought through or has been implemented shoddily. They either needed to delay the game, or else have someone cut away the bloat relatively early on in the process before it consumed all of their man-hours. It would have been painful and we would have ended up with a smaller game, but it would have been worth it.

That neither of these things happened speaks both to particular failings of the higher-ups at the Creative Assembly, and a more general malaise afflicting PC gaming today. I don’t like that it’s acceptable for a well-known developer like the CA to put something like this in a box and sell it as their flagship project. I don’t like that they’ll go through the inevitable introspective blog posts and mea culpas and promise that they’ve learned their lessons this time around, honest, only to turn around and do the exact same thing a couple of years down the line. Usually I enjoy getting angry about bad games, but Rome 2 has simply made me depressed; this is becoming a trend now, and I expect to see more and more Rome 2s as game development becomes increasingly complex with more and more failure points, because the crucial thing here is that I can guarantee you – guarantee you – that Rome 2, broken as it is, has been the most profitable title the CA has put out in years.  For all their talent I think the Creative Assembly is becoming complacent thanks to having a monopoly on this particular slice of the market; they still have good ideas but they can’t be bothered to execute them properly. Unfortunately I don’t see any competitors on the horizon, and so their slide into corpulent senescence is only going to continue. The only thing I can do is not buy the next Total War game they release. After all, if it’s anything like Rome 2 I’ll hardly be missing out.

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Early spring, 1865: First battle of Buzen.

General Takamori’s army is pushing up the eastern coastline of Kyushu. He’s taken Hyuga and Bungo in a lightning campaign, and after weathering a harsh winter in Bungo his army has marched further northwards to take Buzen.

The Tsuwano, however, have other ideas. Buzen is garrisoned by 2600 men; mostly spear and musket levies, but they still outnumber Takamori’s small force of 1200 professional line infantry and sharpshooters by more than two to one. Takamori is forced into a desperate defensive action, where the attacking spear levies tie up the line infantry in close combat while the muskets pound, pound, pound away with massed fire. The line is close to buckling. Things are desperate enough that Takamori is forced into a course of action that Wellington would find displeasing: he orders his sharpshooters to start sniping at the enemy commander. Apparently unsettled by having five-sixths of his hatamoto gunned down in under thirty seconds, the opposing general flees taking most of his army with him. It’s a pyrrhic victory, however, as every unit that was on the main line of battle has come out of it completely gutted with less than half of its men remaining. Takamori is forced to withdraw from the siege and retreat back to Buzen to rest and rearm.

Late summer, 1865: Second battle of Buzen.

Takamori’s force has reinforced itself to a strength of 1800 and ventures back up the road towards Buzen. Unfortunately the Tsuwano have likewise reinforced; Takamori is now facing a gargantuan army of 4500 men. After crushing the Tsuwano fleet in a pitched naval battle around the straits of Hyuga Admiral Sukena is now in a position to provide Takamori with some naval fire support, but without explosive shells the salvos prove ineffective, killing barely fifty of the enemy. Takamori’s ground forces retreat from the battlefield without firing a shot.

Spring, 1866: Third battle of Buzen.

Takamori makes his third attempt to take Buzen, and this time he isn’t messing around. His army is now supported by cavalry and cannon; the supporting fleet of Admiral Sukena has doubled in size and is now equipped with explosive shells. The peasant levies of the Tsuwano are scattered by shot and shrapnel, and the fleeing survivors are put to the sword by sabre cavalry. After over a year of warfare, Buzen has fallen.

This little saga neatly sums up Fall of the Samurai. It’s an outstanding game, combining the best features of Shogun and Napoleon while adding not a few new elements itself, and one of the results is that cannon and fleets are no longer an interesting sideshow used for cracking forts and blockading ports. Instead they’re an absolutely essential part of your war machine, with combined arms being a practical necessity if you want to win battles against traditional samurai armed with sword and bow, never mind an opposing modern army. It’s the first time I’ve played a Total War where everything was so smoothly integrated. There’s nothing that feels vestigial or unnecessary; no merchants sitting on trade nodes for fifty years, no collection of generals languishing back at your capital because they’re too old to fight, no useless technologies you have to research before getting to the good stuff. Everything is streamlined. Everything is useful. Everything works.

It’s probably best to start by describing how the technology tree has changed, because it’s not really a tech tree any more – more of a collection of tech sticks. There’s still some interdependency between certain branches of development, but for the most part you’re able to skip straight to researching a line of technologies which gives you better guns or better farms without having to waste time improving your geisha first. Of course it’s not quite as simple as that; the main factor determining what you can and cannot research is no longer how many techs you’ve already got. Instead, your clan is assigned a modernisation level. You start out at modernisation level one, and by building modern buildings and researching modern techs you can increase it up to level four. Each new level grants you access to new tech branches as well as a research rate bonus, but it will also give you a clan-wide unhappiness penalty as your people resent the rapid changes to the way they live. It’s not massive, and I have to say it’s not something I particularly noticed when I was playing the game on Normal, but on Hard it does make a difference, with most of my heavily-policed cities teetering on the border between barely-contained surliness and outright revolt.

Making these changes to something which lies at the fundamental root of the game has had knock-on effects for how the rest of it plays. For example, as it is now possible to research a specific naval branch of the tech tree without faffing around researching pointier sticks first (or whatever), the naval arms race that so dominated late 19^th century Europe becomes a pressing concern in Japan as well. Fleets can now do much more on the campaign map; their cannon give them the ability to bombard enemy armies and province improvements inland as well as providing fire support to friendly armies that are in range. This makes a powerful fleet not just useful but practically indispensible — especially since the AI is now much better at using its own fleets to harass your provinces and land armies in your rear – and with researched techs giving you access to copper- and iron-plated ships, explosive and armour-piercing shells, and torpedoes, having the tech edge here can easily make all the difference between campaign victory or campaign defeat.

It helps that the Creative Assembly have really outdone themselves with the naval battles this time around. All of the ship models are absolutely gorgeous, from the adorable little gunboats to the numerous corvette classes to the hulking, brutal Kotetsu ironclad. The battles themselves are chaotic but satisfying; the mark of a good naval commander would be whether or not they can keep their fleet together and their fire focused. I can’t do this, and so my battles tended to start with my fleet splitting to try and catch the enemy fleet in a withering crossfire before devolving into a series of individual ship-to-ship melees punctuated by the odd spectacular explosion as somebody’s ammunition magazine ignited. The armour and ammunition really does make a difference, as well; while a copper-plated ship will still succumb to a concentrated barrage from three or four wooden ships, its extra armour will allow it to get into range to fire explosive shells that will set the wooden ships on fire, which spells doom for any ship that doesn’t drop everything and focus all of its efforts on putting the fire out. And of course the Kotetsus come with several gatling guns mounted on their central tower which can literally saw a wooden ship in half. The modern era and the rapid pace of development means that technology matters, more than it ever has before.

On land the dichotomy between modern versus traditional is a little less pronounced, although it does exist. While rifle-equipped infantry has the ranged firepower you’d expect, traditional samurai units armed with melee weapons are absolutely murderous in close combat. A basic peasant spear levy unit has the same melee stat as line infantry. One unit of yari kachi will effortlessly chew through and rout two units of line infantry without taking significant losses themselves. I started to dread defensive castle sieges against attacking samurai; while my guns would make the enemy forces pay dearly for climbing the walls, once they were inside the tables would turn and my rifle troops would be massacred. AI armies fielding traditional troops seek to close with you as quickly as possible to make the most of their melee advantage, and so battles really do become a matter of routing the enemy army before they rout you. If you just slug it out on a 1:1 basis then, sooner or later, you will lose.

As your technology level progresses, though, the basic advantage traditional units have begins to vanish. The higher levels of rifle-equipped troops such as Shogunate infantry or the Imperial Guard have a melee stat that equals or exceeds that of basic samurai kachi, and while the elite samurai troops remain pre-eminent in close combat it’s an advantage that is almost completely nullified by the advent of cannon. You start the game with the ability to build wooden cannon (yes, apparently these were a real thing) which are only good against fortifications, but you can tech up to Parrott guns and Armstrong guns – think classical 19^th century artillery pieces – which fire explosive shells as a matter of course but which also have a deadly shrapnel shell ability. Two or three batteries can easily tear the heart out of a charging samurai army, and when you add in the new naval bombardment ability – which scales in area of effect and number of shells fired with the number of ships in the supporting fleet — the amount of firepower you can concentrate into a single area becomes truly ridiculous. Finally there’s gatling guns, which are the holy grail at the end of the rifle tech branch, and which act as a kind of short-range Samurai-B-Gone. I can see traditional armies remaining viable throughout the game as long as they too utilised cannon and naval bombardments, but it would definitely be a harder option.

These improvements in battlefield technology and battlefield fighting are mirrored by numerous economical and political improvements on the empire map. By far the biggest one is that the original game’s Realm Divide mechanic that so infuriated me is dead and buried (or at least rendered entirely optional). Instead the country is split into pro-Imperial and pro-Shogunate provinces, and pro-Imperial and pro-Shogunate clans. Having the same allegiance as another clan gives you a big boost to your diplomatic relations with them; conversely a different allegiance will make them hate you. This has the effect of giving you some neighbours who will always – at least broadly – be on your side as fellow members of the pro-Shogun/Imperial bloc. The allegiances aren’t set in stone, and clans can switch allegiance from one side to another as the campaign progresses; having a nearby clan that you thought was loyal suddenly announce that they support the Shogun can really throw a spanner in the works. If you take a province from a clan which supports the other side you have to spend some time “convincing” the population to come around to your way of thinking (a process which can be sped up by the Ichin-Ishii/Shinsengumi police agents), and until you do that province will suffer a large happiness penalty. The fame bar is still present, and eventually you’ll take enough provinces that you’ll max it out. This is the point where the chips are down, the die is cast, and other such hoary old cliches. You’re given a choice; either you declare for the Shogun/Emperor, in which case the alliance of pro-Shogun clans will fight it out with the alliance of pro-Imperial clans for control of Japan, or you declare that you’re forming a Republic, which is basically Realm Divide redux and makes everyone hate you.

I find this to be a far more natural way of dealing with the political side of things, and it’s one that reflects the actual events of the day; the Boshin war was not fought between individual clans but rather individual factions. Unfortunately while it is certainly better than what we had before, it’s some way short of being ideal, with the biggest problem being that the Shogunate/Imperial struggle is largely out of your control. In my first game the Shogunate faction became pre-eminent without any intervention from myself, and I actually found it quite difficult to get the provinces needed for victory because everyone around me was pro-Shogun and thus showed up as Very Friendly in the diplomatic interface. In the second the Shogunate faction went even further and actually eradicated most of the pro-Imperial factions three years into the game, except this time I myself was pro-Imperial and found myself facing an uphill struggle through no fault of my own. Of course I didn’t have to live with this — I could have just switched my own allegiance to the winning side, but I think that would have been more than a little bit unsatisfying. So it’s a decent effort, CA, but it could do with a little more fine-tuning and refinement when you adapt it for your next title.

The last thing to talk about is agents. Thanks to the way agents levelled up in Shogun 2, and thanks to the way most of their abilities were active abilities requiring large sums of money to carry out, I found myself using just one super-ninja since only he had the experience to make the odds of success worth the investment of resources. Levelling up others would have required many failed assassination attempts and much wasted money, and while other agents could level up passively through boosting your town/province attributes the rate at which they did so was painfully slow. There was also the minor problem that any agents (or generals) who started out in middle age would eventually die from natural causes before the game was finished, making me less likely to invest time and effort levelling them up.

These are issues that I think have almost entirely disappeared from Fall of the Samurai. The game takes place over a much shorter 10-15 year period, meaning old age is a non-issue. The new agents – the secret policeman (combination monk/police/ninja), the geisha (monk/geisha) and the foreign veteran (some ninja attributes but mostly entirely new) – have new abilities, almost all of which are massively useful, and the passives are actually things you want them to be doing thanks to a much faster levelling system. For example, my spearhead army has all three agent types attached to it. The foreign veteran trains them on the march and makes reinforcement cheaper when they capture a town. The geisha boosts their morale. The secret policeman boosts their melee ability. Their individual skill trees give them further specific bonuses to the army as well. The north of my territory is littered with geisha and secret policemen, improving the productivity of my major money-producing towns and keeping the population loyal. The only reason I don’t have more foreign veterans is because I don’t have the trading port network to support them. All three types are immensely useful and I’ve maxed out the agent limit on each one because my empire can’t get by without them.

These improvements – and others – make Fall of the Samurai the Total War game I’ve always wanted to play. It all seems so much more fluid and natural than even the perfectly-serviceable Shogun 2. This being the CA, though, the game is not without its issues. Ship AI is bugged, with enemy fleets occasionally sailing into land en masse at full speed (I’d make more noise about this if it turned up more often and if hadn’t let me win a couple of crucial naval battles that looked hopeless). Coastal defence battles are also a bit iffy, with one of my fixed-position coastal batteries being situated just behind a small hill which blocked every shot they fired and rendered them utterly useless. Probably the biggest missed opportunity are the railways, though; as you’d expect they’re intended to speed up troop transport immensely, but the problem is the route the railway takes across Japan is fixed and will inevitably pass through a province controlled by an AI ally. You can negotiate military access with them which will let you use their railway, but this is a completely redundant feature because the AI never builds railways. This scuppers the entire idea of a railway network, as the best you can do with it is move your troops maybe two provinces before they have to disembark and continue the journey on foot. Hopefully they’ll fix that up in a patch; as it is it’s a tragic waste of one of the features I was most looking forward to.

Regardless of these niggles Fall of the Samurai is a tour de force achievement for the Creative Assembly. They’ve distilled everything good about Total War into one game, and they’ve succeeded in filtering out most of the bad at the same time. If you like Total War at all; if you abandoned the series after the debacle that was Empire and you’re convinced that it can’t do guns properly; even if you are a Jim, you owe it to yourself to get this game. I suspect it may be the most fun I have with a PC game this year, and I say that knowing that, after a rather slow start, 2012 is shaping up to be an absolute corker with Diablo III, Heart of the Swarm and a whole host of promising Kickstarter-funded indie games on the horizon. Despite their likely quality, Fall of the Samurai is so good it may end up eclipsing them all.

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Turns out there's more to managing an empire than just spamming markets everywhere. Who knew?

Okay, I admit it. I may have been a little too hard on Shogun 2.

A little under a year ago I wrote a little 2,500 word review of Shogun 2. While I recognised that it was the CA’s best game since Rome — achieved in part through taking all the good ideas they’d had in Napoleon and putting them in a game that went back to the series’ melee-based roots — this was mentioned in maybe a paragraph or two while the rest of the piece was spent laying into it because of its difficulty. I found playing the campaign on Normal to be something of a pushover, and so when I started my second one I bumped it up to Hard hoping for a bit more of a challenge, this being the setting where, in the past, I’ve found the ideal balance between “AI nations being more than bumps in the road” and “Hardcoded bonuses ensuring they can spawn terrifying doomstacks of elite troops on my borders every two turns”. What I wasn’t expecting was for the game to hit me with the kitchen sink.

Everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong. Every other clan hated my guts, with the inbuilt diplomatic penalties for being a human who dared to fight back when an AI clan attacked me making me think this was a tad unfair. I spent all fifty-seven turns at war. I was never fighting less than two clans at once. Single province clans would assault me with huge stacks of samurai, while I was stuck in a position where I couldn’t rebuild or upgrade or consolidate my position in any way but instead had to invest all my cash into never-ending waves of ashigaru to be thrown into the meat grinder. At first I actually enjoyed it. The tactical AI had raised its game and several battles came down to a knife-edge; it actually forced me to think about what I was doing for the first time rather than doing the old spearmen-into-centre-and-smash-everything-else-into-flanks trick. For the first time since Medieval 1 I felt like I deserved the victories I won.

Unfortunately this euphoria soon wore off to be replaced by a grinding sense of despondence. I’d been doing nothing but fight uneven battles with crappy soldiers for what seemed like forever. Surely I was going to run out of clans to fight soon. Surely. But every time I killed off a clan, two more declared war on me and assaulted me with fresh stacks of troops. Even worse, I couldn’t rely on some of the old Total War solutions to an unexpected war declaration. Relentless targeting of clan family members in an attempt to decapitate them and turn them into a rebel clan no longer worked; instead, the clans seemed to spawn an unlimited supply of new family members on demand. They also didn’t seem to have to run a functioning economy either, with ninja revealing clans that were running the maximum level of castle with only level 2 farms — not to mention the murky question of how they were actually paying for all those samurai that kept throwing themselves at my fortress walls. Eventually I realised that this state of eternal war would never end; the AI would just keep coming at me until I was dead, until I’d killed them all, or until I gave up. I didn’t fancy spending another thirty hours grinding my way down the length of Japan in the face of what I felt to be a deeply unfair setup, and so I gave up.

This is not my Oda campaign. You can tell by the way I'm fielding actual goddamn samurai.

Rise of the Samurai tempted me back at the end of the year. The CA have an unusually good track record of making DLC campaigns that are genuinely different and fun and reasonably priced, for all that they’re also guilty of gouging players with two-quid-for-a-unit-reskin shenanigans as well. I didn’t get too far into it at the time (although I got far enough to realise it’s well worth playing all the way through, and I’ll be doing that later), but I did notice a distinct reduction in the amount of bullshit I had to deal with. Was it just the DLC scenario, or had the CA actually toned things down and made their game playable on the harder difficulty settings? I thought about giving the main campaign another crack, but even though months had passed my original experience still left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t particularly want to go back.

Then, a couple of days ago, I read this insanely in-depth breakdown of how the strategic layer worked, and it completely changed my opinion of the game. It was much, much deeper than I’d given it credit for, and I realised that my Oda campaign had at least partly been a misery of my own making. I’d been doing the usual laissez-faire province management that Total War has — until now — let me get away with, and I’d completely misunderstood several critical aspects of the economy. Things like the correct use of agents, the distribution of economy buildings, fine-tuning the growth of a province’s wealth, the benefits of adopting Christianity — all of these were things I had pretty much ignored*. The guide convinced me to give the campaign another shot, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the CA genuinely had toned down the amount of bullshit I had to deal with. (Or maybe it was just because I wasn’t playing as the Oda this time). The AI still fields unusually good troops but a middling-size clan will have a couple of stacks of them at most. It doesn’t seem to get the troop building bonuses it did before, either, which gives decisive battles that shatter a clan’s military strength the kind of impact that they should have. And I’ve yet to see a single-province clan running a level four castle off of a level two farm. In short, the challenge — and there is still a significant amount of challenge, which goes to show how unnecessary all that stuff was in the first place — now stems almost entirely from the quality of the fearsome AI rather than a bunch of artificial handicaps fettering the player, which in my opinion makes the campaign a far more worthwhile experience.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm actually tremendously excited at the prospect of playing a Total War game set in the industrial age.

In fact I might go as far to say Shogun 2 is the best title in the series now — not to take anything away from the original Shogun and Medieval, but Shogun 2 has a decade of technical and mechanical advances to draw on that make it a genuine improvement. And it’s the first game since those two that feels like it’s a complete, well-rounded experience. It didn’t ship with any particularly crippling bugs that I experienced (unlike certain other AAA titles I could mention) and so the CA have been able to spend their time improving the actual gameplay, something that’s almost unheard of outside of indie gaming today. So well done, CA. I was wrong about your game, and the things I was right about you made an effort to fix. If it makes you feel any better, I’m definitely going to be buying Fall of the Samurai now.

*Except for using ninja in the aforementioned decapitation strike attempts.

The post Creative Assembly in “Fixing their game” shocker. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The more I play Shogun 2, the more I’m starting to think Total War games have a fundamental mechanical flaw. Yes, yes, we’ve all seen the botched attempts of the Rome-Medieval-Empire era – schizophrenic AI combined with a more fluid, realistic campaign map which in practice led to some infuriating gameplay tics – but with each of those games, the problem appeared to be specific to the game in question. Usually it was the CA’s crappy AI coding. In Empire’s case it was also a case of sprawling scope and the series first flirtation with the gunpowder era producing – aha – a serious misfire. But Shogun 2 is the first game to make me think that Total War games, in their current form, simply will not work.

How can this be possible? At first glance, Shogun 2 is, by the CA’s standards, nothing short of a triumph. Not only have they moved back to the easier-to-implement melee-based combat of the original games, but being set in Japan means that the grand campaign is smaller in scope. This is A Good Thing; I have trouble believing anybody enjoyed starting up Empire for the first time to find themselves presented with a six-province empire embedded in a 120-odd province map (or three). That’s too big for even seasoned veterans of the series to swallow, and so cutting it down not only makes the game more manageable but it also gives it an increased amount of focus, making the game personal again. Every army is valuable. Every general has to be used. There’s no stack of forgotten family members sitting in the capital in Shogun. As a grand strategy experience, Shogun regains much of the gravitas that Empire and Medieval 2 sorely lacked.

The return of melee-dominated combat is also a welcome shift back to the series’ roots. The cavalry-spears-swords-archers dynamic works well and is easy to understand – easy enough that the CA’s battle AI coders have finally pulled their heads out of their asses and produced something worthy of the name. In pitched field battles, the battle AI isn’t just competent, it’s downright threatening. It doesn’t hurt that the campaign AI fields balanced stacks of troops this time around (although it gets more than a little bit of help with this – more on that later), but the AI grasps the concepts of skirmishing, scouting and not sitting on a ridge being shot to pieces by a horde of archers.  It’s still pants-on-head stupid during siege battles, unfortunately, but I’ll take whatever I can get.

The economy has also been rejiggered a lot. In previous games it was something that took care of itself – I just built the odd farm and road network and left the game to get on with it, since that approach brought in enough money that I was never short. In Shogun, though, not only is money a lot harder to come by (unless you’re the Shimazu and happen to live next to all the trade nodes) but unit upkeep costs have been raised, with the result that it is now impossible to field more than two doomstacks of proper Samurai. On the face of it, this is a change that I endorse; previous Total War games got to the ludicrous point of having battles which involved five or six stacks at a time, and that was just on one portion of the front. Armies are no longer disposable entities, which again lends the campaign experience a lot of gravitas since having your prized shock army get mauled in a cataclysmic battle actually hurts.  Similarly, routing the enemy’s army should be a significant victory, since they shouldn’t have two more waiting just over the horizon. But this is the point where we come to Shogun’s fundamental flaw:

The campaign AI isn’t playing by the same rules as you.

Now, coding good AI isn’t a matter of programming something that’ll act like a human. Coding good AI is all about programming something which will appear to act like a human. Half-Life is the famous example of this, where the rudimentary Marine AI was cleverly disguised with a range of audio cues; having the Marines occasionally shout out that they were flanking the player created the perception in the player’s mind that that was what they were doing, when they were in fact moving around fairly randomly. There’s nothing wrong with coding AI which is fundamentally inhuman, which gets all sorts of advantages compared to the player in order to present a stronger challenge, as long as these advantages are low-key enough to be hidden. Sadly, the advantages given to the Shogun AI – the advantages that were necessary in order to make it a credible threat – are game-breaking.

Let’s go through them in no particular order:

1) The AI isn’t restricted by its economy. Basic example: higher level castles require food. Single province AI clans will happily run a tier four castle with a tier two farm. This means they should be dealing with food riots every single turn. They don’t. This adds insult to injury when the player takes the castle and gets plunged into food shortages that the AI didn’t have to deal with.

2) The AI isn’t restricted by its buildings. Oh, it’ll cheat those into existence as well, but I’ve seen more than one occurrence of an AI clan fielding units it didn’t have the capacity to build.

3) The AI isn’t restricted by its bank balance. It’ll spam those expensive high-level castles and buildings with wild abandon, as well as fielding multiple stacks of expensive professional samurai when it blatantly doesn’t have the economic capacity to support them.

4) The AI isn’t restricted by the basic game mechanic of having to physically build units. As in, it will happily spawn half-stacks out of nowhere under cover of the fog-of-war.

5) The AI isn’t playing to win. As bad as points 1 through 4 are, they are nowhere near as bad as this one. Civilization IV had AI that on higher difficulty levels cheated like there was no tomorrow, but it was at least playing with the same basic goals as you – - so if you turned wars off, it’d build the spaceship and win the game in 1800AD or something. This meant that the AI civilizations in the game were actual competitors to the player civilization. By comparison, the other clans in Shogun 2 are nothing more than speedbumps; obstacles placed in the player’s path to make it difficult (and at times downright infuriating) to make any headway.

Taken together, these flaws in the campaign AI take all the restored gravitas I described in the first half of this review and chuck it in the bin. When the Asai declare war on me, they’re not doing it because they see an opportunity to increase their power base to the point where they can claim the Shogunate. They’re doing it purely to make my life more difficult. I’m not one of numerous clans vying for dominance, I am instead a person thrown in a pit with a bunch of unfeeling machines whose only goal in the game is to pound on the squishy fleshling, and who get a hell of a lot of help in order to do so. This makes playing Shogun 2 on difficulty levels above Normal an exercise in pure masochism.

The problem is exacerbated by the Realm Divide mechanic. This attempts to replicate the cool idea of the civil war in Rome, with the critical difference being that in Rome you had time to build up a fairly large power base. In Shogun, not only do you have fewer armies to defend yourself thanks to the altered economy, but the Realm Divide event fires when you’ve taken less than a quarter of the provinces in the game and makes everyone else want to kill you, no matter what they thought of you before. This is just… well, from the very beginning of my Oda campaign I have never been at war with less than two clans at a time. Very often it was four, and at one point it went up to five before I wiped one of them off the map. I had been clawing and scraping my way to the top of the local pile of clans ever since the game started, I was just finally getting on top of things and looking forward to actually maybe spending some of my koku harvest on buildings to rejuvenate my war-ravaged empire rather than endless ranks of ashigaru, and then Realm Divide fired. It was at this point that I gave up.

Now, you might think it’d be a good idea to make some friends before the Realm Divide. It is possible to make allies who won’t immediately betray you when it fires (and of course vassals don’t have a choice). Unfortunately, because of the way diplomacy works in Shogun, the only way to make people like you is by giving them huge wodges of cash. And even if you do this, Realm Divide is a constant negative modifier that increases every turn. Eventually it’ll outweigh all your bribery money, and you’ll be at war with everyone.

This is awful. Awful, awful, awful. Every other clan in the game – every single one – is a clan that doesn’t care about winning, that can replace its troops and buildings at a whim, and that will declare war on you sooner or later.  As a final incidental point, all that stuff mentioned above makes it impossible to sit back and build your economy. When somebody declares war on you it’s a fair bet you’ll be at war with them, on and off, for the rest of the game – and even if not they’ll turn on you once Realm Divide comes up. This makes total annihilation of the clan in question the only valid response to a war declaration. Except, taking another clan’s territory will add a negative modifier to your diplomacy rating with other surrounding clans. This negative modifier will tip one of your neighbours into war, and then another, and so on, ad infinitum.

All this is a very lengthy way of saying that, in adding all the things that were apparently necessary to create a campaign AI that could present an actual credible threat to the player, the Creative Assembly broke their game to the point where it simply doesn’t work on Hard and above. This is why I say that Total War, as the concept currently stands, may be fundamentally broken; if this is what it takes to make the game challenging, if the only way to make it hard was to add layer after layer of shit to artificially boost the difficulty level, then that’s a challenge I don’t really want any part of. If an AI that can function without heavily weighting the game against the player is truly beyond the CA’s abilities then they need to adjust the basic game mechanics until such an AI drops back into the realm of the feasible. And that’s the end of it, really.

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