R2TW is too conquest-oriented

[qqsuen]

R2TW (actually, the whole TW franchise) has been too conquest oriented, here’s the explanation:

I’ve started my Pontus campaign a week ago and now my nation can rival the historical Pontus Kingdom with control over the entire Asia Minor as well as the Caucasus and Black Sea coast. It’s no doubt that my nation is indeed a mighty regional power but yet I’m frustrated by the fact that, even if I just want to ‘win’ by cultural or economic victory, I still have to make my nation another Roman Empire and to conquer numerous provinces just to get trade or to spread culture (and there’s a land control target for cultural and economic victory as well), let alone military victory that you have to basically take over the whole Europe with hundreds of units to achieve.

Why must I be an empire to ‘win’? Can’t I just expand a bit, and then focus on internal economy construction and diplomacy rather than mindless conquest and expansion?

Some may ask: ‘why bothering yourself with the so-called “victory condition”, just play in the way you like.’ I hope so, but the fact is that R2TW is too much an empire building game than a nation building game. You don’t really have much to do except for war. The social and economic system is so simple that you lack any control over your country economy except for building a trade port or temple. The complex social condition (religion, race, social class, education level, political belief .etc) IRL is simplified into a ’Public Order’ value that you as well have not too much options to manage except for garrison or building temples.

Therefore, if you don’t try to attack everyone and get a battle or two every turn, but instead try to focusing on managing your countries first, you will have nothing to do other than clicking on a few buttons to build stuff and end the turn forever. Yes you may research all the techs and upgrade your cities to the max, but you will have nothing to do during the long ass researching time, plus the maximum buildings slot for cities is limited, so your Great Rome is no different to another 6-slots tiny barbarian city.

I don’t really like this empire-dominant campaign system, it eliminates the possibility to play (and maintain as) for fun as small-medium nations. When I heard of the Greek city states pack, I was thinking about places like Singapore, a small, independent nation with a small but elite military for self-defence, which seek to dominate the economy and culture of the region through peaceful manner like trading, diplomacy and religion mission. But no, instead you still spam armys and conquer everyone you see (sooner or later) as an Empire like Rome.

Not only does the overly simplified economic, political and social system forced you to expand, but the diplomacy suck also. Every countries deal with you based solely on how strong you are and ignoring other important factors. No one will give you a damn if you ask for trade agreement as the small Athena and they will just suck Rome’s dick when you try to form a Defensive league between all small Hellenistic countries to defend against Rome’s invasion. There’s as well no advance diplomatic options like triple alliance, secret alliance and inter-countries marriage (succession of realms) etc that enable player to use diplomacy to their bigger advantage.


I’m not asking for a system as complex as that of Paradox’s Victoria 2 or EU4, but CA please, in the next TW game, at least give players more options to strength their nations other than endless war. Sometime we will like to spend time thinking about a way to resolve the trade dispute with our neighbour or internal racial conflict that conquering the others. As well as enabling more play style as different countries for us to experience. When I play as Iceni, I just want to repel invader from Britain and defend our culture, and to build a wealthy yet peaceful medium size trading nation as Pontus. Don’t make everyone just Roman in different colours, thank you.

[daelin4]

Rome2 is more conquest-oriented simply because so many features that gave earlier TW games more depth in noncombat areas were chopped off. But yes I agree, to use the phrase "well it's Total War!" will inevitably doom the franchise because there's only so much you can do in such a game that is limited to fighting battles, killing enemies and taking over stuff.

I think at this point, games like Eu4 and whatever have already shown their competitive edge because TW as been shying increasing from this arena. What CA should have realize was that this would push Total War into those areas and compete with these games even more directly. But I can't help that CA is just too reactionary and too short-sighted to appreciate such things.

[Zenky]

TW always been about conquest , not sure why you play the series ....

[Fluke]

I would love to see more options when it comes to victory conditions. In fact, a tool that would allow modders and/or customers to create custom victory conditions would add so much to any Total War game. I too get tired of having to capture so much of the map. How about some more focused, thoughtful victory conditions based on one's faction and game length desire? How about an interesting one such as capture all 19 provinces that are home to a Wonder? We could all come up with some fun victory conditions to challenge ourselves and keep the game, especially the late game, from being so repetitive and tedious.

[SirRobin]

In MTW2 you could choose between "short" and "long" campaigns. In the long campaigns, you have to conquer a lot of land, and usually hold Jerusalem, to win. I usually prefer the short campaigns, where you only have to hold around 15 territories and knock out some key rivals to claim victory.

Sounds like a shame if that system didn't get carried over to Rome II.

[Castel]

I was at first curious and interested when i heard about economic and cultural victory conditions but in the end it's just BS and the only thing you can do is conquest.

Well, that never was a series of games who allows anything too deep anyway, just funny little battles. But beside that, simplistic economy, simplistic diplomacy, simplistic cultural and civil development and really, really simplistic military logistic.

[Maelbox]

Rome 2 campaigns are empty as hell. It's the downside that comes with having such a huge focus on battles. If you want to play good campaign game play, you definitely do not go anywhere near Total War: you go to Paradox because they focus entirely on campaign play and use a RTS system which is far superior (but difficult to create). They make CAI that actually works.

Total War campaigns are there for one purpose: to carry you to the next battle, so quite rightly they focus entirely on conquest and completely eliminate / half-bake any political and diplomatic game play.

But we can hope one day a business will make a Paradox RTS campaign as well as RTS battles like Total War and the Total War brand will lose a lot of value and force them to actually innovate instead of just adding prettier graphics.

[Kambe]

Too long didn't read. Its called Total War for a reason.

[T-Duke]

Agree with the op. I hope victory conditions can be modded and remodulated...

[gord96]

I get what the OP is saying. I myself have always found I lose interest in a campaign when I expand too much for whatever reason. I always enjoy the start of a campaign when my domain is small and early mid when you have grabbed a few provinces. But that's total war for better or worse. It just doesn't have the diplomatic engine to allow for small to medium nations to have much fun.

One Total War experience I found that did do a decent job at this was Stainless Steel with the BGR V mod. It takes so much effort just to survive as a small nation and with somewhat realistic recruiting limits and supply, that half the fun is just maintaining what you have.

Really enjoying Rome 2 though. Trying to have a small expansion campaign as Athens. Don't want to conquer more the Greece. Other then that just raids and police actions, etc.

[Castel]

Stupidest post i have seen in a long time Kambe. Congratz.

[karamazovmm]

I too wish for a better economical and political system. Its really easy to have a good economy, granted its more difficult due to squalor than it was before. The political system is too undeveloped based majority on conquest and some random events that have higher probability to appear when you have either power or not

the problem with that is that this game and the fan base won't accept it. just read the responses here

[adrastea]

Compared with the previous iterations of the series, it's getting better.

[AngryTitusPullo]

I think having alliance (military/defensive) and also creating satrapy/client state with the faction owning the provinces also counted ? Or this does not count towards victory condition ? Maybe having too much money (I'm now having nearly 200k with full 9 armies and 6 fleets as Parthia) and can use the money to 'bribe' the faction into alliances ?

[HusKatten]

I was happy to see the disappearance of trade nodes, but very disturbed to find out that they were not replaced with a new trading feature. I've not experienced the "chopping off of feature"-argument until now. International trading is a consequence of conquest rather than of active trading or diplomacy.

maybe new features will be introduced later on.

[Kinjo]

With the lose of the diplomacy give/trade region feature it really narrows the scope of choice and forces you to play a certain way. NTW had the best diplomacy options to date imo, hopefully CA can expand diplomacy a bit more because it is just not cutting it. If CA was to add 2 diplomacy options (annex vassals and give/trade regions) it would open up a lot more opportunities and give you the gameplay tools to properly mange them. I really would like to be able to give land to client states or if I recover lost land from an ally be able to give it back to them because allies and vassals count towards your victory conditions! I just hate when CA adds great features and stripes them out for whatever reason. I get where the op is coming from especially since the short campaign option was removed.

[Twido]

I wholeheartedly agree with the OP for a number of reasons.

Firstly, to echo another poster, when my empire gets too big I start to lose interest. Partially because it just adds bureaucracy, but mostly because it becomes obvious that I have already won but it is going to take a long long time satisfying whatever the victory conditions are.

Secondly, and most importantly for me, I like to play these games maintaining a certain moral standard. The problem with this is that it gets in the way of conquest based victory conditions; it is hard to take over half the world in a nice kind and benevolent way!

The first medieval total war had a much better system for testing your morality; when capturing a province, the easiest option was to slaughter the populous to prevent rebellion (this had an suitably horrible sound effect). But if you wanted to maintain the moral standard you would have to peacefully occupy the province and manage a population that was much more likely to rebel or cause trouble. For some crazy reason RTW2 has this backwards, peacefully occupying is the safe option whereas killing everyone makes them more likely to rebel; no morel dilemmas anymore.

If I could give one additional feature the total war franchise it would be that on completion of the game (win ore lose), it would tell you how you would be thought of in history. Of cause this would mean that the game would have to give you some meaningful choices to make.

Finally I would like to mention the cultural victory option in MTW 1. This was flawed but still better than RTW 2; most victory points were gained by holding home provinces, this allowed you to play in a much more defensive manor if you so wished. I will admit they could have done much more with this system, but my most enjoyable total war campaign to date was trying to win as Aragon by holding onto the Iberian peninsula. It stayed fun to the end because some other kingdoms were also holding their areas making the end game tense.

So to give some credit, at least RTW 2 has some options for victory even if they could be better.

[Amur_Tiger]

Rome 2 campaigns are empty as hell. It's the downside that comes with having such a huge focus on battles. If you want to play good campaign game play, you definitely do not go anywhere near Total War: you go to Paradox because they focus entirely on campaign play and use a RTS system which is far superior (but difficult to create). They make CAI that actually works.

Total War campaigns are there for one purpose: to carry you to the next battle, so quite rightly they focus entirely on conquest and completely eliminate / half-bake any political and diplomatic game play.

But we can hope one day a business will make a Paradox RTS campaign as well as RTS battles like Total War and the Total War brand will lose a lot of value and force them to actually innovate instead of just adding prettier graphics.

I flat-out don't agree with RTS being clearly better for strategic level campaigns, while I won't say that turn-based is necessarily better they definitely both offer advantages and disadvantages. Also it's worth noting that Paradox games take place on a puzzle piece map where you're either on one part of the map or another instead of an open grid which leaves many more possibilities and as a consequence many more ways for the AI to make a mistake.

Finally I don't think Total War games are incapable of providing an effective and challenging campaign, the Shogun 2 campaigns managed right out of the box and mods to previous total wars certainly got them there. I've played Paradox games and I like ( some of ) them but I really think people are deluded if they think Paradox would have an easy time tackling the challenges of both building an engine capable of handling the major elements of a total war game and then making an AI powerful enough to navigate it. CA could have done a better job then they did with Rome 2 but don't let that disguise the fact that while CA could have done a better job is no guarantee that someone else with little experience with this type of game from a technical perspective could.

[Riekopo]

I agree with the OP completely. I've been playing Total War since Shogun 1 and I have grown older and more mature. When I was younger the game was plenty complex and deep, but now I find it lacking especially compared to games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. Rome 2 is especially horrifying because they removed features and depth when I want it to have much more. They did add economic and cultural victories, but they are practically the same as the conquest victory.

[HigoChumbo]

Shogun 2 was a tiny little bit better in this aspect, but i still hope it will get A LOT closer to the Paradox style sooner than later (i just don't see it happening, it would be like asking an arcade shooter aimed for the casual masses such as Call of Duty to become a realistic military simulator for niche hardcore -whiny- audience).


It would be lovely if we had to really strugle some times to even keep our nation alive. In my last Europa Univeralis game playing as Burgundy i was only able to conquest all of France (for those who don't know EU map is the entire world) in the 400 years of campaign. And i had a blast doing it, i went from merelly surving the juggernauts (France, Spain and Austria) in the 1500 to becoming the top 1 military power allied with Britain in the 1700 to joining a huge coalition to destroy the Massive Empire Austria created out ofnowhere by reuniting the entire Holy Roman Empire under their rule...

It's far from take one city, rush to the next until you paint the whole map red as TW has -almost- always been.