What I Expect

[HigoChumbo]

I disagree. Preordering can be a well used tool to improve the game before release. Rome2 is not a good example of this potential practice, but I think Warhammer will. They are patching the game since they gave a copy to youtubers, maybe this patches are paid with pre-ordering money.

CA is not an indie company, they have truckloads of resources, and a juggernaut like SEGA backing them. At this point, I believe that the only reason for pre-orders to exist is to appease investors with early "interest indicators", since I don't think big companies really need the extra income 6 months in advance. (I would have normally also added that they are used to sell games before reviews, but since CA has had the guts to lift the review NDAs a week before release, you won't see me criticising them there, they deserve their due credit for that).

[Renown]

Well checking back in after a day or two off the forums.

Game is nearly EXACTLY what I expected. Fun, but not overly so. Some strange strange additions to the vanilla base of this game make it nearly unplayable without even basic mods on day one.

Kind of disgusting actually, but... eh..

As to more 'mod support then ever' that's a complete joke coming from someone who obviously never modded a campaign map in any of these games. Mod support for models/units/buildings is not what I consider mod support. I've modded every single TW game out there. The mods we are receiving now are vastly less complicated and comprehensive then what I built using "No mod tools whatsoever" because the base level of access to these games have changed.

Secondly, don't blame that on Games workshop because it was like that for Shogun 2, Empire, Napoleon, Rome 2, and Attila. That's what we call a "pattern" - that's where something happens more then once in some sort of order, this order? Related to CA ( the game structure for M2TW was already fairly set hence why that game was so accessible).


As to the workshops and early access for patches for some modders... great? Just a shame this is so necessary because I remember the day when TWs were released on day one and were playable... not some super-fast speed kill frenzy with no difficulty... I've little to no respect for the current wave of embedded modders because frankly a lot of what they do should have been unnecessary.

Some of my favorite bugs in this game so far?

Really loved the one time I had an enemy army spawn behind me in my besieged settlement, that was FUN. Also love the catapults with the orcs going circles around my troops forever. Or the hero that gets knocked down and can't get back up.

My favorite so far was when I built a building as a Dwarf to reduce vampiric corruption and had it DOUBLE the intake because of a mistake in the file (that I fixed personally...) yeah, that was shocking when two turns later the vamps had buffs in my territory.

The base version of this game is nearly unplayable... combat is over before you get a chance to appreciate it, let alone see it. (making that Ant's comment truly applicable to this game in the critical reviews).

I DO enjoy some aspects, and am liking the siege battles (FOR THE DWARFS) more then I thought I would, though I've not had a chance to play too much of it.

We will see if we get access to campaign tools (or hell, don't give me tools - seriously I'm able to mod these things with out all the bells and whistles. I still prefer to do my m2tw modding in notepad++ rather then some stupid unit editor. Give me an extractor for your files and that's all, and let me edit the campaign map.

If you can't do it for this, at least give it to me for Attila... then Rise of Mordor will actually stand a chance of being playable!

[raistlinmajere8]

Holy crap no wonder this website is dead.

This place has turned into an utter bastion of cynicism and hatred.

Why you people continue to even care about Total War is beyond me, clearly anything CA creates will never appease you people, ever.

[Aurelius Silvanus Tacitus]

Holy crap no wonder this website is dead.

This place has turned into an utter bastion of cynicism and hatred.

Why you people continue to even care about Total War is beyond me, clearly anything CA creates will never appease you people, ever.

I think that cynicism and hatred is quite justified, since the SEGA/CA bussiness model resembles more and more that of crooks. As for why we care, well there are NO other games that let your have both a campaign map and real time battles. If there was I would have abbandoned ship when Rome 2 came out but seems I'm stuck to this series.

[Arimahn]

Holy crap no wonder this website is dead.

This place has turned into an utter bastion of cynicism and hatred.

Why you people continue to even care about Total War is beyond me, clearly anything CA creates will never appease you people, ever.

People will flock to communities that line up with their general attitude. If you want a Happy-Special-Fun-Super time you can go to Reddit or the official forums, where criticism is frowned upon.

I personally would rather have an honest, if somewhat negative, discussion. This is coming from somebody who bought the game despite the criticism and with the debacle of R2 fresh in his mind.

[Skowdey]

People will flock to communities that line up with their general attitude. If you want a Happy-Special-Fun-Super time you can go to Reddit or the official forums, where criticism is frowned upon.

I personally would rather have an honest, if somewhat negative, discussion. This is coming from somebody who bought the game despite the criticism and with the debacle of R2 fresh in his mind.

Look, I get Reddit is a hugbox. But people are saying that battles are UNPLAYABLE because the battle time is too fast, and complaining that there are no mods after 2 days. This forum is a place for cynical weirdo users and hypersensitive mods

[Aurelius Silvanus Tacitus]

Look, I get Reddit is a hugbox. But people are saying that battles are UNPLAYABLE because the battle time is too fast, and complaining that there are no mods after 2 days. This forum is a place for cynical weirdo users and hypersensitive mods

As I said, TW is the only series that offers both a TBs campaign and RTS battles. For many people there is literally no place to go. Also, I do think that many here atualy like the series but are dissapointed in how it went downhill or how CA/SEGA treats us. A spurred loyalist is a dangerous person after all.

And I saw your posts, I don't think that going into ad-hominem attacks solvs issues.

And if battle times are too fast, it is unplayable, (especialy on legendary where you can't pause): you cannot pause every 2 seconds and if I wanted to test my APM I would play Starcraft II instead.

[SKSlave]

Holy crap no wonder this website is dead.

This place has turned into an utter bastion of cynicism and hatred.

Why you people continue to even care about Total War is beyond me, clearly anything CA creates will never appease you people, ever.

People like you are why this website is dead.

I remember years ago when this website was probably the largest, most active Total War community going. People usually got along. People shared mods, ideas, screenshots, campaign stories and people discussed upcoming games how they wanted.

CA started releasing crappier and crappier games. Rome 2 was the killing blow for many, most realising the Warscape engine was just never going to produce an exceptional Total War game. Attila was just reskinned Rome II with glossier paint and a few tweaks. The underlying Warscape problems STILL persist from 2009. And here we are at Warhammer, seven years after Warscape's debut, and what do you know... The same problems still exist.

I mean, just look at how self-righteous your little "anything CA makes with never appease you ever" rant is. If you're happy with an increasingly stale series that never innovates and just churns out repetitive, buggy garbage, fine. You can play it all you want. Doesn't mean anyone else is.

[Arimahn]

Look, I get Reddit is a hugbox. But people are saying that battles are UNPLAYABLE because the battle time is too fast, and complaining that there are no mods after 2 days. This forum is a place for cynical weirdo users and hypersensitive mods

The complaint about fast battles has SOME merit and there's already a mod that's supposed to slow them down. Different forums just have different cultures. Personally I just ignore those complaints, just like I ignore the BALKAN STRONK people that pop up from time to time (A nonissue with WH thankfully).

[Collateral_dmg]

Holy crap no wonder this website is dead.

This place has turned into an utter bastion of cynicism and hatred.

Why you people continue to even care about Total War is beyond me, clearly anything CA creates will never appease you people, ever.

Yep, it died a long time ago. I remember the times actual CA staff were on here discussing the games and supporting the community. But these forums just got so toxic that they simply left and never came back. I don't remember the last time someone form CA posted here. Maybe they did, but they definitely didn't do it here, in the warhammer subforum.

Why should we hate anything? Can't we complain in a decent, respectful way, instead of hating and being so toxic? I guess that's what people today call 'criticism'. And especialy if this is a series that we love so much and don't want to see it go down. I just don't understand it. And saying that criticism on the official forums is 'frowned upon'? Give me a break. If you posted in a respectful way, decent of a human being, no one would say anything to you. They would even listen to you.

I'm not defending CA here. CA and SEGA have done enough damage to the series, but being so hateful will not help. I think CA are going in the right direction. They are really communicating with us and are being very transparent. This is a process that takes time, and people can't realize that. We can't have everything instantly. They created an engine that happens to be very hard to mod (I'm talking about the campaign map). They said this themselves. They also said that they will do everything they can to make it more accessable for moders in the future.

If you have so much experince moding their games why don't you try and communicate with CA? They really are listening, and are giving their best to help us out. I mean they even hired a moder! Just go on the official forums and speak your mind. But don't be rude and negative, of course you will get removed, these are official forums after all.

[Arimahn]

Call me desensitized but I simply don't care anymore if somebody feels the need to result to ad hominem crap. I achieved a sort of Zen-like inner calm about that sort of stuff. My only real concern at this point is whether or not you can voice your opinion, regardless of it being positive or negative. CA deserves mistrust when considering their recent quality and business practices. If anything, a positive comment from somebody who is generally distrustful and negative is worth more than praise from somebody who is much more lenient in the first place.

[Huberto]

This is a forum that is focused on mods, and as such this is a place where criticism and skepticism is going to thrive and that's a good thing. And it helps CA even if they've avoiding us.

I was just listening to Three Moves Ahead podcast that reviewed TW:WH (hosted by Rock Paper Shotgun contributor Rob Zacny, who reviewed WH for them). They had a WH table top gamer as a guest on the show. Everyone had negative thoughts and shared disappointments about the game. But everyone enjoyed parts of it as well and I think overall they were positive.

We should be able to have that kind of discussion here, and this is the place on the internet to have it.

So do we want this to be a place where we are free to express criticism that doesn't turn into flame wars? In other words, a place for grown-ups who like to discuss the games in depth and figure out how to make the games better through mods?

I think it's great that so many of us have been around for years now, and that plenty of our commentary can be jaded and cynical about TW and CA. There are lot's of other places to go if someone wants to express hype or be a fanboy.

Alot of the feedback we've provided over the years has helped CA imo, and I think it speaks well of us if CA is trying to drive fans to other sites and won't come on here.

But we can't be ALWAYS negative or ALWAYS positive, and we need to police ourselves and be respectful of each other.

*p.s. - if the numbers are down for visits to the site or the WH:TW portion of the forum, it may be because many of us aren't interested in WH and only care insofar as it's a TW game. But the numbers here are always going to be driven by mods.

[Markas]

Game is nearly EXACTLY what I expected. Fun, but not overly so. Some strange strange additions to the vanilla base of this game make it nearly unplayable without even basic mods on day one.

'The game is as much fun as my pre-conceived notion of how fun it would be!!'

Well imagine that.

And yeah, those on the more 'critical' spectrum have always had troubles not resulting to cheap personal insults. They don't often seem to have time to actually debate things rationally. The Modders especially went thread-crazy when the the limelight inexcusably shifted to the company that they are wholly reliant upon for their work.

[Dynamo11]

There's a reason this forum is a "bastion for cynicism" considering a lot of us were (and still are) banned from the official Total War forums after CA told us to collectively go ourselves after the Rome 2 debacle.

[Garbarsardar]

If you want to discuss CA's business practices there is a thread stickied in this subforum.
If you want to discuss TWC's policy "fascist moderators" etc, there is a dedicated forum and a thread.
If you want to discuss other fora, we cannot help.
If you want to criticize the game please do so, of course within the parameters of the ToS.
Adhere to the above and this thread will stay open.
Thanks,
Garb.

[Renown]

'The game is as much fun as my pre-conceived notion of how fun it would be!!'

Well imagine that.

And yeah, those on the more 'critical' spectrum have always had troubles not resulting to cheap personal insults. They don't often seem to have time to actually debate things rationally. The Modders especially went thread-crazy when the the limelight inexcusably shifted to the company that they are wholly reliant upon for their work.

Give me a break, my pre-conceived notion? That feels like an unsubtle dig at my opinion... I'm a fairly open-minded person. I had preconceived notions of this game from what I've read and witnessed... but as any historian will tell you... being aware of your bias isn't a bad thing. In fact it can help you focus on the issues that matter. I'm aware of my bias, and sometimes I can come away pleasantly surprised. E.G. I was not excited for Attila after R2TW but I found it much more enjoyable for a variety of reasons. I was aware of my bias going in, and adjusted my thoughts on the game accordingly.

Here, my bias was confirmed. Does that make me a bad person or my comments invalidated? No it doesn't, so I'm unsure of why you'd even feel the need to point that out.


Yet yeah, the moderators on this site changed to where friendly debate was encouraged to actively defending people who bait others into arguments... the modders on this site have changed from those who did their own original work to those who are overly reliant on others creating programs for them to access the game... then they say "thanks CA, and we have more mod support then ever..." while being completely ignorant on what came before.

The average poster on this site seems to have joined AFTER M2tw came out, meaning their entire experience here has been post-sega. Sad times.

I remember when arguments between Lusted and Darth resulted in additional ideas and great mods coming out. Both those dudes used to teach me how to script (as they focused on the mechanics of scripting and I focused on how those scripts could in-fact create a universe where you do more then conquer... you actually create your own story full of events and pop ups, and in-game lore sequences - Divide and Conquer was my baby, and it's taken a LOT of strides away from where I began it but you can still feel that it was at one point more about the story of your characters then the additional factions you get to play as.

It's a shame that people read my comments here and feel that I'm bashing their favorite game company.

It's also a shame that people feel that my 'preconceived notions' of what a TW game should be are invalid. Sorry. I do not feel that I'm "owed' anything by being a long-time/loyal customer and someone who has actually earned them money. Nor do I feel that just because they made it I have no right to have an opinion on their work and how it could be vastly improved.

[♘Top Hat Zebra]

Post-M2TW Total War games do have vastly more mod support from the company. This is inarguable. Medieval 2 had no mod support whatsoever, nor Rome, or either of the first pre-3D games.

Just because you could edit everything through bloody text files doesn't mean you had mod support.

Now you have tools. They could have not given us tools and just told us to go ourselves, so would you really prefer they go back to supporting mods like they did back then?



What part of, "These games are more complex" do you people not understand? You want to edit the campaign map? Yeah? Go teach CA how to make the tools, then, since obviously you must think either they are too dumb to do it themselves, or they're withholding it in some sort of anti-modding conspiracy.

Shogun 2 had map editing tools, and guess what? It turns out it's pretty bloody hard to edit the map in any meaningful way, even with tools, and pretty much nobody was willing to work for it. What did we get out of the map reprocessor? Some regions were turned into multiple regions, and we got a super barebones Korea. We're not working with text files anymore.

Im glad you mod Total War, that's great, the modding community is Total War's best aspect, but do you understand current Total War modding? You know it's limited, obviously, but do you understand why, or are you just shouting into the wind about how "THINGS USED TO BE BETTER BACK IN MY DAY!"?

If you don't understand why, then your complaints have no validity. If you do understand why, then why are you complaining in the first place?

You may as well complain about the hard-coded limits in pre-Empire games. Why aren't you calling Rome "Unplayable" due to it's speedy arcade vanilla battles, and it's lack of 40-unit stacks, or 600-man units?

[Abdülmecid I]

Post-M2TW Total War games do have vastly more mod support from the company. This is inarguable. Medieval 2 had no mod support whatsoever, nor Rome, or either of the first pre-3D games.

Not really. What is inarguable is that your definition of mod-support is very controversial. Mod-support doesn't consist solely of providing modding tools for the community, but also of making the original game files easily moddable, ideally without any tools provided from the company being necessary, just like in the case of the pre-Warscape titles of Total War. Even some obstacles were overridden thanks to modding tools created and distributed by the community itself. Point being that mod-support can perfectly be both direct and indirect and, at least, in my opinion, the indirect version seems to must have been much more helpful than the direct one, not to mention that the lack of the first is apparently the necessary requirement for the second to be given, as some sort of a substitute.

What part of, "These games are more complex" do you people not understand? You want to edit the campaign map? Yeah? Go teach CA how to make the tools, then, since obviously you must think either they are too dumb to do it themselves, or they're withholding it in some sort of anti-modding conspiracy.

Well, it could be said that CA has a perfectly valid motive for not releasing mapping tools, since such an initiative would run the risk of making mini-campaign DLCs, like WoS, CiG, Charlemagne and etc. much less popular. Anyway, you're probably right, since even CA has difficulties in editing the maps of their own games. For example, in Attila, the settlements of Asia Minor are still a bit bugged, as a result of the region system differences between Rome II and Attila.

[HigoChumbo]

~ Deleted a few posts. I'm sure you guys can discuss a topic without attacking other members. Also, four posts ago you were reminded to stay on-topic, so please, do so. ~