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Anyone on Rome: Total War?
- Thread starter nasher168
- Start date
Rome Total War is pretty good but I like better Medival Total War I or Shogun Total War.
I don't think that it is fair to clasify the Tottal War games as RTS. Althought real time strategy is an acurate description, it is a loaded term. It represens genre of games slike Star Craft or CnC, that may be more apropriate to describe as unreal time strategy, because activities like building a civilisation and recruteing an army happen at the same time scales as maneuvering the army and geting it sloughtered.
A more acurate cassification for the TW games is tactical war-games. And in some aspects it cames close to combat simulation.
However Rome Total War makes a step back in the realism department, compared to it's predecessor Medival Total War I. Not only in tactical aspect - in the real time battles, but also in the strategic part of the game - the turn based campaign.
In MTW I the strategic map is devided to a number of provinces and each army can move only to a neighboring province in one turn, regardles of the size of the province. In RTW the armies have a number of move-points and they have to phisicaly cross the distance to the rival armies or towns in order to do battle. You may say the latter aproach gives more stretegic depth, but you will be wrong. In MTW I when you are attacked you have three options : to fight, to retreat to the castele(then you wil be besieged), or to abbandon the province. In RTW if you are in range of an enemy army during their turn, then you have no choice but to fight. You have a formal option to retreat, but your army will retreat like one step bacward, and if the enemy army have some movepoints left it can attack you again in the same turn and then you dont have the option of retreat.
So basicly in RTW you can't choose when to fight and when not to, and that destroyes the strategic depth. It is still exiteing to play because of the tactical depth in the real time battles, and because of the massive armies involved.
I don't think that it is fair to clasify the Tottal War games as RTS. Althought real time strategy is an acurate description, it is a loaded term. It represens genre of games slike Star Craft or CnC, that may be more apropriate to describe as unreal time strategy, because activities like building a civilisation and recruteing an army happen at the same time scales as maneuvering the army and geting it sloughtered.
A more acurate cassification for the TW games is tactical war-games. And in some aspects it cames close to combat simulation.
However Rome Total War makes a step back in the realism department, compared to it's predecessor Medival Total War I. Not only in tactical aspect - in the real time battles, but also in the strategic part of the game - the turn based campaign.
In MTW I the strategic map is devided to a number of provinces and each army can move only to a neighboring province in one turn, regardles of the size of the province. In RTW the armies have a number of move-points and they have to phisicaly cross the distance to the rival armies or towns in order to do battle. You may say the latter aproach gives more stretegic depth, but you will be wrong. In MTW I when you are attacked you have three options : to fight, to retreat to the castele(then you wil be besieged), or to abbandon the province. In RTW if you are in range of an enemy army during their turn, then you have no choice but to fight. You have a formal option to retreat, but your army will retreat like one step bacward, and if the enemy army have some movepoints left it can attack you again in the same turn and then you dont have the option of retreat.
So basicly in RTW you can't choose when to fight and when not to, and that destroyes the strategic depth. It is still exiteing to play because of the tactical depth in the real time battles, and because of the massive armies involved.
australopithecus
Active Member
There was a show on UK TV a few years ago called Battle Commanders where teams re-enacted famous battles to see if they could change the outcome and I'm pretty sure they used the RTW for it. It's worth a look on youtube, it's pretty entertaining.
MarkAntony
New Member
Yep, played it to death. Online I go by this name, if anyone fancies a battle or two?
patduckles
New Member
i thought it was called time commanders, also they did use the same game engine as rome that was the biggest selling point of romeaustralopithecus said:
australopithecus
Active Member
patduckles said:
My bad, it was Time Commanders and I have no idea why I typed battle. I may be going senile.
patduckles
New Member
i'm slightly disappointed with the battle system in medieval 2 its just missing something that rome had.
MarkAntony
New Member
In M2TW heavy cavalry is far too cheap and the fact that they have infinite lances reders the game useless. Any army is a knight spam. Ctrl+A, double right click, win fight.
The main thing about the Med 2 battles that makes it not as good as Rome is that the units move realistically. It makes for more challenging gameplay and all that, but it means that tactics count for bugger all. tactics are useless when faced against a sledgehammer of an army, whilst in Rome, you could win using tactics even when heavily outnumbered.