Quote Originally Posted by Carl Jung was right View Post
Let me explain. Rome II had a problem. The unit animations looked great, sure, but the overall battle handled like garbage. Unit formations tended to blob hideously, performance would randomly drop and units would generally bug out, behaving in bizarre ways. It wasn't of course always terrible, but more often than not it interfered with logically controlling the movement of your units. Many patches later the problem wasn't entirely fixed, however it became much less of an issue in Attila. Some mods remove most synced animations entirely (for instance you don't see much of them in the highly acclaimed DeI overhaul) in order to improve the overall flow of the battle. But that was sort of like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as one of the best advantages of the new engine was its promise to deliver highly cinematic and immersive battle visuals. Otherwise we'd all be just play EB and RSII for R:TW.

The reason for this is that for all the complexity, it's just impossible for the TW game engine to both provide seamlessly integrated cinematic looking animations and tactically sensible flow of battle. Blame CA devs or just the lack of computing power of modern technology in the face of a complex engineering challenge, the result is that you either have cake or eat it.

Warhammer TW largely bypassed this problem by absolving the engine from having to render lockstep choreographed animations. The animations are much simpler, more akin to earlier TW titles and in game elements are generally handled as a single whole units rather than to provide a subtle illusion of an individual soldier by soldier basis. This is both a merit and fault of the game. It's good in the sense that player control and micromanagement becomes largely seamless, it's bad because it gives off the impression of a product of excessive streamlining, somewhat akin to a chewing gum that tastes too much like a latex condom. That's why you feel a natural revulsion to animations looking awkward, in fact I'd vouch it isn't so much the animations being the problem, but rather the feel of fighting a battle where abstract numerical blobs representing single units fight as opposed to thousands of men and monsters.

I would say Rome 2 was buggy but Attila IMO had smooth formation fighting as well as good death/brutal animations. I loved watching the barbarians chop arms off of roman soldiers only to have them scream and grab their severed limb falling down. That never happens in warhammer. It brought a sense of humanity to the field in you actually felt bad about your guys.

MT2ROCKS has a good point. It is easier to make animations for human beings then it is for giants/trolls and such so I understand why they did not do it. But as the zebra pointed out it is not the normal hack and slash animations but the large leaping attacks and the spinning axe swings that make it kinda silly.