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 Kroem wrote:
I fail to understand why people are arguing that paying extra money for day 1 DLC that could have been in the game at launch is a good thing lol!
Admittedly it isn't the worst practice that the game industry has right now, but it is still definitely not customer friendly.

I think I'll wait a couple years to pick this game up, when I can get the whole game with all the factions for a tenner in some sale.

The argument is that the total price of the game at launch is estimated to be a value greater than the market would like; therefore they discount the core game and add an optional side bit of content as launch DLC. This is evident by how many complain about "launch DLC" and the "total price of the game". By doing launch DLC the developers give gamers the option to have some content later, if they so wish, whilst keeping the core content of the game at a lower value.

CA tends to do ok with this because what they partition off as DLC is typically races/factions in a game which already has quite a wide array of factions to start with. They got in a bit more hot water with Warhammer and Chaos not just because of how key Chaos are in the lore and in their own game, but also because the game launched with way fewer factions than most TW fans were used too (even though in most TW games the majority of factions are just reskins with minor alterations)

Eg:
Full game £40
Game with Launch DLC £30 + £10

If the developer did away with the launch DLC then they'd be charging you the first price and everyone would complain; so they charge at the lower price where only a portion complain. It's the lesser of two evils.


Where launch DLC is bad is when developers partition off key game content (or perceived to be). Eg if CA partitioned off siege battles to its own DLC. That is where launch DLC is very bad practice. Another angle is if the amount of launch DLC is excessive - for example if they were to have 10 factions as launch DLC, each in their own DLC packet, and each priced at £10*


*Interestingly tihs is basically what they've done for TW Warhammer. However they staggered it by having several released in blocks as stand alone games; by having one or two free army additions and by adding campaigns and free DLC along the way. But in general you are paying around £10 for a faction (which is honestly what one would have paid back in the "golden era"; in fact back in the Golden Era your average expansion pack was closer to £15 each and many times you wouldn't get a new RTS army, you'd get a couple of units added to each existing army.

I do see where you're coming from, and agree this is about changes to games basic pricing strategy.

Assuming value based pricing which everyone uses nowadays, I contend that the percieved value of an AAA game is roughly £50 almost regardless of the level of content (once a certain content threshold has been reached).
In the old days you would continue adding content after this threshold to maximise sales.

At some point someone realised that instead of continueing to add content, they should make the minimum content necessary to hit the percieved value of £50.
Then anything extra you charge for as DLC or add to pre-order bonuses to increase percieved value.

So to use your example, where we used to pay £40 for everything, now we pay £40 + £10 for everything.

I get that it isn't a deal breaker for most people and that's cool. But as any sales or purchasing person will tell you, we should always be pushing for a better price, more value for money better service etc. rather than being happy about paying more!

It's the same lie with "But we didn't hike the price, it's always remained 60$ forever, we need these (insert DLC cut content, microtransactions, Gamblingboxes) "

Even it it is remotely not true, you see the new DLC's are each 15$ each and the main price is 60$ and they cut up the game into tiny weeny bits.
Before that we got expansion sets, liteerally another half or third of a game, no we pay slighlty less for the "expansion kits" but atleast 5 times.

Not Online!!! wrote:
It's the same lie with "But we didn't hike the price, it's always remained 60$ forever, we need these (insert DLC cut content, microtransactions, Gamblingboxes) "

Even it it is remotely not true, you see the new DLC's are each 15$ each and the main price is 60$ and they cut up the game into tiny weeny bits.
Before that we got expansion sets, liteerally another half or third of a game, no we pay slighlty less for the "expansion kits" but atleast 5 times.

Once you account for inflation, many games are cheaper now than they ever have been, even with that kind of stuff factored in.

For instance, in 1997 Final Fantasy VII cost $50. That $50 in 1997 equates to around $75 in 2017. But Final Fantasy XV didn't cost $75 did it? It cost $60, and cost a hell of a lot more to make than FF7 did. So game budgets have massively increased whilst the effective cost of the retail product has decreased. You need to account for that double whammy to your revenue (starting further away from breaking even and each individual sale moving you less close to breaking even) through increased sales or selling extra content or both.

 Kroem wrote:
I do see where you're coming from, and agree this is about changes to games basic pricing strategy.

Assuming value based pricing which everyone uses nowadays, I contend that the percieved value of an AAA game is roughly £50 almost regardless of the level of content (once a certain content threshold has been reached).
In the old days you would continue adding content after this threshold to maximise sales.

Yes... and no.

In the real old days, they had "expansion packs". Buy a game, it does well in early post-release sales, and the publisher okays the creation and release of an expansion pack that retails for somewhere between $20-$30US. Wing Commander was the first game that I can think of off the top of my head that did this, though I'm likely forgetting one or two of them. The Shareware games made by companies like Apogee were a variation on this. You download Commander Keene episode 1 for free. You like the game play. So you buy the other five episodes. This is how we first got Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.

Then the internet started to become more available to the public, and we had "free patches" that you could download off of whatever site the company had posted them on. This was later expanded to include free minor additions for some games. Buy a game, and the developers will continue to throw the occasional bone to the players. Though not everyone participated in this, and it was typically limited to certain developers (who got goodwill from the public for it).

You still see that from time to time (for instance, the TW:WH games had the FLC releases), though it's nowhere near as widespread as it used to be.

I suspect that the turning point was with the release of games that were "free", and were funded exclusively by micro-transactions. You play the game, you like the game, you want to play more of it, and you spend a few bucks to do so. And some people apparently end up spending truly ridiculous sums of money on those games.

The modern DLC is likely inspired by what those games offer. People balk at paying an extra $30 to add something new to their game. But many of those same people will be quite wiling to spend $50 if they do it in $5 chunks.

The "Free Day One" DLC is a variant of this, again based on human psychology. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that if Creative Assembly were to include the Day One DLC Warlords in their release as part of the basic package - i.e. a count of 14 warlords instead of 11 - even without a price increase, then they'd probably have fewer sales than they do by offering the Yellow Turban warlords as "free for the first week only".


Edit - Since I mentioned Wing Commander above...

If I remember my details correctly (and it's been a while, so I might be misremembering), then the first Wing Commander expansion pack was actually intended to be a form of "Day One Extra". Obviously you couldn't download it (download speeds were far too slow at the time). But I remember reading that the initial intention behind it had been to offer the expansion pack to the first X players who bought the game. So if you bought the game right after it went on sale, you'd be able to get the extra dozen or so missions included in the expansion pack. And then the game became a smash hit, and Origin Systems realized that it would be a much smarter move to out the expansion pack into general release.

This is interesting...

Sima Yi was head of the Yi family. The Sima family ultimately supplanted the Cao family and took over the Kingdom of Wei, and then defeated both the Kingdom of Shu and the Kingdom of Wu, reuniting China and establishing the (short-lived) Jin Dynasty. So Sima Yi is a pretty important person. However, he was only eleven years old when Luoyang was destroyed, and the game starts not long after that important event. As a result, I didn't think that Sima Yi would be in the game - or at least not in the launch version with the "Dong Zhuo's still alive" start.

And yet, Creative Assembly just released a poster for him.

Very interesting...


For those unfamiliar with him -

Sima Yi was a brilliant strategist who was recruited by Cao Cao. He loyally served first Cao Cao, and later Cao Pi (who deposed the last emperor of the Han Dynasty, and established himself as the first emperor of the Wei Dynasty). Unfortunately, Cao Pi died after just a short reign, and the following generations of the Cao family weren't nearly as talented as their predecessors. More and more responsibility devolved down to Sima Yi, and his two sons, Sima Shi and Sima Zhao. By the time Sima Yi retired, he and his family were effectively running the Kingdom of Wei. Sima Shi died not long afterwards due to a combination of a head wound and illness, leaving the family to Sima Zhao. Sima Zhao was widely expected to depose the sitting Cao emperor. But less than two years after successfully conquering the Kingdom of Shu, Sima Zhao died in 265. Zhao's heir, Sima Yan, deposed the sitting Wei Emperor just a few months later, and took the throne himself.

Unfortunately, Sima Yan's attempts to avoid the problems that led to the overthrow of the Wei Dynasty ultimately backfired. His heir, Emperor Hui, was mentally incompetent. Between Hui's mental issues, and the problems created by Yan's actions, the unified empire created by the Sima family collapsed. The Jin Dynasty relocated to the southern part of the country, establishing what is now known as the Eastern Jin. Meanwhile, the northern portion of the country fragmented, and became consumed by the 16 Kingdoms period.

Spies and Subterfuge! I'm liking this concept.

It would be nice to see a game push some new ideas on diplomacy and spy craft in the 4x realm. Talk about a part of the genre that’s been stagnant for as long as I’ve been alive. At least CA seems to be giving a good stab at it.

That is a cool concept. Being unsure of whether those skilled generals and administrators you have recruited are really on your side seems like a great little addition to make it feel like allegiances are in flux (as was often the case during history).

 LordofHats wrote:
It would be nice to see a game push some new ideas on diplomacy and spy craft in the 4x realm. Talk about a part of the genre that’s been stagnant for as long as I’ve been alive. At least CA seems to be giving a good stab at it.

That's certainly true. I'm always a little relieved when a 4x game reveals they don't have an espionage system (rather than having the typical bad one), and that's more than a little sad.

Knights of Honour had a system whereby you could set a spy to infiltrate an enemy faction and they could wind up a general of an army and yes you could tell them to turn and steal an army that way.

My main issue with spies in many 4* games is that they end up too powerful. Being able to kill heroes or generals that have taken 100 turns to level up is a BIG hit to any player; being able to wipe out armies or shut down big cities etc..... Those are big game changing effects when spies should be more subtle; focused on buffing or debuffing and information gathering. At least in my view they should be a subtle means to change the course of war not a sudden big game changer.



Though the worst was in Haegemony where you only had a fleet of around 8 or so ships and perhaps 3 or so mobile space stations. A high level spy could blow any one of them up fairly easily. So you could easily end up in a situation where spies were tearing you apart with little chance of recovery.

 LordofHats wrote:
At least CA seems to be giving a good stab at it.

And if CA gaks the bed on it, they'll have hopefully given the modding community a means to fix/refine it.

 Overread wrote:

My main issue with spies in many 4* games is that they end up too powerful. Being able to kill heroes or generals that have taken 100 turns to level up is a BIG hit to any player; being able to wipe out armies or shut down big cities etc..... Those are big game changing effects when spies should be more subtle; focused on buffing or debuffing and information gathering. At least in my view they should be a subtle means to change the course of war not a sudden big game changer.

One of my worst Total War moments came about because of espionage, and something that I had no real control over. I was playing the Spanish Peninsula scenario as the British in Napoleon: Total War, and had been chasing the French all over the place, slowly pushing them out of Spain.

And then an assassin killed Wellington, which was an instant lose condition. All of my hard work immediately went down the drain. Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed. And I've soured on espionage in general ever since then. Pulling that sort of a dramatic thing off in real life is a *lot* more difficult than it typically is in the games.

This new system looks pretty good, as its based around the characters who are doing the rest of the work in the game. So instead of the situation that we have in the Warhammer games where every turn your army once again has to deal with a hero attempting to perform an incredibly unlikely action against you (while you yourself are unable to effectively respond to those attacks since your assassination hero is busy chasing down the Chaos heroes that are corrupting your lands), you're instead focused on trying to second guess the true loyalties of your subordinates.

Eumerin wrote:

 Overread wrote:

My main issue with spies in many 4* games is that they end up too powerful. Being able to kill heroes or generals that have taken 100 turns to level up is a BIG hit to any player; being able to wipe out armies or shut down big cities etc..... Those are big game changing effects when spies should be more subtle; focused on buffing or debuffing and information gathering. At least in my view they should be a subtle means to change the course of war not a sudden big game changer.

One of my worst Total War moments came about because of espionage, and something that I had no real control over. I was playing the Spanish Peninsula scenario as the British in Napoleon: Total War, and had been chasing the French all over the place, slowly pushing them out of Spain.

And then an assassin killed Wellington, which was an instant lose condition. All of my hard work immediately went down the drain. Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed. And I've soured on espionage in general ever since then. Pulling that sort of a dramatic thing off in real life is a *lot* more difficult than it typically is in the games.

This new system looks pretty good, as its based around the characters who are doing the rest of the work in the game. So instead of the situation that we have in the Warhammer games where every turn your army once again has to deal with a hero attempting to perform an incredibly unlikely action against you (while you yourself are unable to effectively respond to those attacks since your assassination hero is busy chasing down the Chaos heroes that are corrupting your lands), you're instead focused on trying to second guess the true loyalties of your subordinates.

Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, some popes, etc would like a word with you.
But i agree Agent spam, especially AI one is annoying as feth, not to mention that the AI has better chances then the player, so long you are not Safe scumming.

Thing is when Kennedy was assassinated the world didn't end - the game kept going. Plus the way TW game work losing a heroic high level leader mid to late game can be quite a crippling blow; because often you don't have all that many.

It feels more fair to most players when its death in a battle and you can always have another go at it. But death to a spy (where reloading just has the AI make the same moves over and over) is really painful because there's very little you can do to stop it.


I'd like to see spies move away from assassinating generals and instead shift into the political system more. There's more room there for spies to do things - perhaps kill an npc noble to start destabilizing alliance blocks or reinforce your own etc... I think if they went there it would be possible to have them in their own arena where they can kill, spy, plot and scheme without it directly affecting your armies.

Of course TW has always had fairly light diplomacy and I think that's delibrate. The game is built around the 3D battles not around diplomatic and dynastic choices such as, say, Crusader Kings 2. Mixing the two is tricky - add too much of both and it can be so much that it overwhelms many a player. CK2 has very casual combat but very detailed diplomacy; TW is the total opposite with far more detailed battles and childishly simple diplomacy.

 Overread wrote:
Thing is when Kennedy was assassinated the world didn't end - the game kept going. Plus the way TW game work losing a heroic high level leader mid to late game can be quite a crippling blow; because often you don't have all that many.

It feels more fair to most players when its death in a battle and you can always have another go at it. But death to a spy (where reloading just has the AI make the same moves over and over) is really painful because there's very little you can do to stop it.


I'd like to see spies move away from assassinating generals and instead shift into the political system more. There's more room there for spies to do things - perhaps kill an npc noble to start destabilizing alliance blocks or reinforce your own etc... I think if they went there it would be possible to have them in their own arena where they can kill, spy, plot and scheme without it directly affecting your armies.

Of course TW has always had fairly light diplomacy and I think that's delibrate. The game is built around the 3D battles not around diplomatic and dynastic choices such as, say, Crusader Kings 2. Mixing the two is tricky - add too much of both and it can be so much that it overwhelms many a player. CK2 has very casual combat but very detailed diplomacy; TW is the total opposite with far more detailed battles and childishly simple diplomacy.

That would require to innovate for ca which we have seen, that they are neither capable nor willingly to do ever since the start of the dumbing down cycle with rome II onwards.

I also fully expect them to further feth up diplomacy.
Yes i am aware of the supposed "IMPROVEMENTS" but i belive it when I see it working.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, some popes, etc would like a word with you.
But i agree Agent spam, especially AI one is annoying as feth, not to mention that the AI has better chances then the player, so long you are not Safe scumming.

Kennedy and Lincoln were both killed by essentially random individuals who held grudges against them, and not by actions of an opposing country (well, depending on whether or not you believe any of the various conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death). And both assassins were caught almost immediately. The same was the case with President Garfield, and was almost the case with President Reagan. And again, in all four of those cases, the suspect was caught fairly quickly. The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, probably the single most significant assassination in history, was the work of a small group of individuals with no attachment to anyone else (and came very close to failing). So we can see that assassinations in the real world tend more toward the "random event" sort of thing than actual manipulation by hostile powers.

That's not to say that Total War-style assassins haven't sometimes played roles in the real world. The assassination of Trotsky would pretty much fit the bill. The recent polonium-based actions of certain Russian agents in Great Britain would be another example. The famous attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb had backing, albeit internal to Germany. More than one Russian Tsar met his end at the hands of an organized group of Russian revolutionaries who weren't happy with how "slowly" the current reformist Tsar was in liberalizing Russian society at the time (and invariably ended up bringing in a new Tsar who promptly rolled back many of those reforms in the name of security). Groups in the Middle East have used suicide bombers to take out high value individuals (the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was killed literally just before the US intervention by a suicide group pretending to be a news camera crew).

So it is possible to have a TW-style assassin in the real world. But it's pretty rare. And the assassins involved almost always get caught afterwards.

So it seems that the AI is even more chromosomes shorter then before.....

Some specific players had access to a build of the game. Ultra unit size was 30 cav max, 18 units maximum in a army, down from 20.
And sieges, god the SIEGES....

Not Online!!! wrote:
So it seems that the AI is even more chromosomes shorter then before.....

Some specific players had access to a build of the game. Ultra unit size was 30 cav max, 18 units maximum in a army, down from 20.
And sieges, god the SIEGES....

Isn't 30 cavalry in a unit standard for Total War? Or am I misremembering?

The army size was already known, and I believe is mentioned earlier in this thread. Each general can lead up to six units, and you can have three generals in an army.

I haven't heard or seen anything from CA on the sieges (though it's possible that there's something out there that I just haven't looked at), so no comment on that.

I had seen the latest Arch's review based on other play tester's brief playthroughs, AI is dumber than a brick would be a compliment to their AI, siege is ugh, you should just see it for yourself, I'm not pre ordering this even though it was on my wish list, am gonna wait and see.

 Big Mac wrote:
I had seen the latest Arch's review based on other play tester's brief playthroughs, AI is dumber than a brick would be a compliment to their AI, siege is ugh, you should just see it for yourself, I'm not pre ordering this even though it was on my wish list, am gonna wait and see.

If rome 2 is anything to go by, or the phases of Treehitler the almighty everchosen, then yes, don't preorder

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Big Mac wrote:
I had seen the latest Arch's review based on other play tester's brief playthroughs, AI is dumber than a brick would be a compliment to their AI, siege is ugh, you should just see it for yourself, I'm not pre ordering this even though it was on my wish list, am gonna wait and see.

If rome 2 is anything to go by, or the phases of Treehitler the almighty everchosen, then yes, don't preorder

'Treehitler the almighty everchosen?' Ok then.


@Big Mac- I'd suggest watching other playtesters playthroughs/commentary rather than a review by someone who's only seen them.

Sieges look like a decent return to the more complex sieges of the historical games, with the full settlement and choice of attack angles.
AI looks pretty typical, not much to say there.


Pre-ordering is, as with everything digital, completely pointless.

'Treehitler the almighty everchosen?' Ok then.

Yes Durthu, don't you remember warhammer total war release of the wood elves, were he literally would wipe out any bretonian and imperial faction before even Archaon get's involved?

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/5i9hrn/orion_is_an_ass_and_a_hypocrite/

And from 1d4chan:
"Tree Hitler - Nickname given to Durthu, because on top of spectacularly pissed off and hateful diplomacy dialogue, Durthu would not only militarize and become powerful quickly, he had a tendency to invade Not-France typically wiping them out and the Empire before setting sights on the Dwarfs and proceeding to attack the rest of the non-evil Old World. Instead of being an isolationist tree, Durthu became an aggressive dictator, destroying half of the Old World before the Warriors of Chaos even showed up, which made them seem like the paltry relief force to the tree devastation, but instead of fighting each other, they would often form a non-aggression pact and even ally with each other. It is perhaps accurate to lore, as Durthu is one of the last ancient Treemen, hates anything not from Athel Loren and is tormented by forest spirits reminding him that he has failed to protect the forest and his friends from the outside world. "

Not Online!!! wrote:

'Treehitler the almighty everchosen?' Ok then.

Yes Durthu, don't you remember warhammer total war release of the wood elves, were he literally would wipe out any bretonian and imperial faction before even Archaon get's involved?

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/5i9hrn/orion_is_an_ass_and_a_hypocrite/

And from 1d4chan:
"Tree Hitler - Nickname given to Durthu, because on top of spectacularly pissed off and hateful diplomacy dialogue, Durthu would not only militarize and become powerful quickly, he had a tendency to invade Not-France typically wiping them out and the Empire before setting sights on the Dwarfs and proceeding to attack the rest of the non-evil Old World. Instead of being an isolationist tree, Durthu became an aggressive dictator, destroying half of the Old World before the Warriors of Chaos even showed up, which made them seem like the paltry relief force to the tree devastation, but instead of fighting each other, they would often form a non-aggression pact and even ally with each other. It is perhaps accurate to lore, as Durthu is one of the last ancient Treemen, hates anything not from Athel Loren and is tormented by forest spirits reminding him that he has failed to protect the forest and his friends from the outside world. "

Eh, still not as good as Civ Gandhi.

Gandhi wrote:Greetings from M. Gandhi, ruler and king of the Indians... Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

Granted nuclear ghandi isn't supposed to be isolationistic unlike durthu.


Edit, actually what with the supposed improvements of ai dickplomacy i'd like imagine nuclear ghandis and treehilters will show up in bigger numbers.

That's sad to hear.

Hopefully it's better by release, or quickly fixed. Worse comes to worse the Total War modding community has a decent track record with fixing and improving the AI in the series.

Eumerin wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
So it seems that the AI is even more chromosomes shorter then before.....

Some specific players had access to a build of the game. Ultra unit size was 30 cav max, 18 units maximum in a army, down from 20.
And sieges, god the SIEGES....

Isn't 30 cavalry in a unit standard for Total War? Or am I misremembering?

The army size was already known, and I believe is mentioned earlier in this thread. Each general can lead up to six units, and you can have three generals in an army.

I haven't heard or seen anything from CA on the sieges (though it's possible that there's something out there that I just haven't looked at), so no comment on that.

30 cavalry was usually the standard size. But you had the option to increase the number to somewhere between 60 for an elite cavalry unit, and 120ish for a infantry unit. In Total Warhammer some units could be 150 dudes.

I'm not going to be happy if unit size is hard capped between 30 and 50. Tiny units like that are so dumb when you are trying to have grand scale battles.

I understand why the tiny unit sizes are an option, for people with lower quality PCs, but having it be the only option is dumb.

It might be a choice based on the era. Actual combat cavalry were not common in that period. Now if Infantry units were in the range of 100 to 150 I'd consider it to be lame. Massive infantry formations were hallmarks of the period.

Infantry units are 120.
'Formation' depends on how you're defining terms.
Commander + 6 units of 120 is a formation of 721 bodies, so a single army can be 2163 men.

{Not sure if commanders get a bodyguard unit in historical mode, in which case this may be higher in the other mode of play}
In at least one of the siege battles I've seen, town commanders at least can sometimes be units. [Many a True Nerd's video, when he takes Taishan]


As far as options go, there isn't any word one way or the other on adjusting unit sizes the way you can in Warhammer.

What does shock me though is how the AI behaved in some sieges, completely passive, like rome II passive as in not reacting at all.

Then there is the one battle of someone against a yellow turban rebellion army, which he literally won with taking nearly 0 casualities.

Granted this was a preview build that was at the time some months old but still....


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
It might be a choice based on the era. Actual combat cavalry were not common in that period. Now if Infantry units were in the range of 100 to 150 I'd consider it to be lame. Massive infantry formations were hallmarks of the period.

I will admit that if they did it because of that then i would not be miffed.

but frankly what concerns me more is the fact that an army now only can hold 18 units.
down from 20 that doesn't bode well in my opinion.