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 Overread wrote:
Isn't that deal purely to bring their game formally to the Chinese market? I can't see how it could blowback on CA and change their process or such. The only thing it might result in is if the sales there are REALLY good they might make more asian themed games?

Issue is censorship of China is now in full swing, considering that Netease has to answer to the chinese government.
It's also described by a chinese mate of mine as EA but 10 times worse.

Yeah but they've not merged companies nor entered into a buy-out deal. It's purely CA using them as a means to enter the market. The only changes to the game would likely come as changes to the game to be released in China; not the global market game. Considering the size of the potential market this is a viable option to take since that market alone could outsize many western markets.

As for EA they've really not done all that much "EVIL" as of late and their current greatest evil is paid lootboxes; which honestly ALL of the big names are involved with to various degrees (though I think UBI takes the lead with having experience boosters and item boosters in a singleplayer game in Assassin's Creed)

 Overread wrote:
Yeah but they've not merged companies nor entered into a buy-out deal. It's purely CA using them as a means to enter the market. The only changes to the game would likely come as changes to the game to be released in China; not the global market game. Considering the size of the potential market this is a viable option to take since that market alone could outsize many western markets.

As for EA they've really not done all that much "EVIL" as of late and their current greatest evil is paid lootboxes; which honestly ALL of the big names are involved with to various degrees (though I think UBI takes the lead with having experience boosters and item boosters in a singleplayer game in Assassin's Creed)

?!?
The censorship allready affected the rest of the world by threat of nuking fan sites using and or promoting certain mods?

Apex legends event? (called hunt for the whales by their own community there? XD)
BioWare dissolving more or less.
BF5 Basically nail in the Coffin of the franchise.

I think you’re overblowing it a bit.

If it’s like prior deals companies have made to enter China “proper” NetEase will be doing most of the garbage itself and handling the rollout but only in China where they have the distribution rights.

While a lot of websites have been getting nuked with draconian rule changes by Tencent or Perfect World buying stakes in them or their service providers (reddit being the most famous example) that doesn’t seem to be the kind of deal CA made with NetEase.

Yeah, so far as I can tell this is strictly a standard distribution setup into the Peoples Republic of China, which has those obnoxious rules requiring you to have a native company as the distributor. Or in other words, it's the same as any other non-MMO game. I'm not sure why someone would think there was anything bad about it.

The article I read did have one item that caused me a bit of trepidation. But it was the announcement of CA's upcoming "Total War: Elysium", which looks like it'll basically be Total War meets Hearthstone. i.e. famous historical generals gather in an inn and play a card game.

The only thing it might result in is if the sales there are REALLY good they might make more asian themed games?

Of course, we've had Asian-themed games since the very first Total War game (*cough*Shogun*cough*). But more of them would definitely be welcome. This move would be specifically aimed at Chinese- themed games (and there's a lot of history to mine there), as no other asian video game market has the protectionist controls that the PRC's market does.

Worst case scenario is they make a Chinese version of any games they release so they can tap into the Chinese market.

 Overread wrote:
Isn't that deal purely to bring their game formally to the Chinese market?

Yes.

I can't see how it could blowback on CA and change their process or such. The only thing it might result in is if the sales there are REALLY good they might make more asian themed games?

Well, there is a subset of CA... well, customers, not fans... that really love their conspiracy theories. And making a lot of noise and review bombs over trivial topics.
This is one of those 'obvious' signs of the apocalypse they like to shout about.

Nevermind that it won't affect anyone outside the Chinese market, just 'rabble rabble rabble.'

Oh yes I've seen the anti-CA fanbase madness. Some drawn from the "Medieval 3" fangroup who refuse to like any game that isn't Medieval 3 being released; the anti-fantasy group who lamented the end of TW games and historical games when CA made Warhammer; the anti-women group who went all kinds of crazy when CA dared to add women to Rome 2. Oh and the Norsca group who spent ages complaining about "where's Norsca" in Warhamer 2 even though CA had been very clear that Norsca broke and they had to remake them.

 Overread wrote:
Oh yes I've seen the anti-CA fanbase madness. Some drawn from the "Medieval 3" fangroup who refuse to like any game that isn't Medieval 3 being released; the anti-fantasy group who lamented the end of TW games and historical games when CA made Warhammer; the anti-women group who went all kinds of crazy when CA dared to add women to Rome 2. Oh and the Norsca group who spent ages complaining about "where's Norsca" in Warhamer 2 even though CA had been very clear that Norsca broke and they had to remake them.

Strawman is strawman

I am in neither group, i am mostly just what you'd call an disgruntled Veteran, (altough i really , like really liked WHTW mostly because childhood dream and it was well done, except sieges, sieges still suck....)


I however also have not forgotten the launch or momentary state of ETW, Rome II (which had the audacity at release to call itself a game), and thrones which is just in shambles.
I am merely pointing out that they partnernering with NetEase is atleast for alot of asian customers not really acceptable.

As for CA's community managemant. It ain't the brightest now isn't it

I find at least the Warhammer TW AI attacks walls in sieges. In many of the earlier games they'd rarely actually come at the walls. I've seen the Medieval one abandon its siege gear and rank and file up. Which honestly is neat fun now and then, but not every time darn it.

Heck I got into Rome 2 recently and the number of times the AI would just keep running away in the 3D battles. It never gained anything, it just kept going "I'm going to lose this possibly - run away a few steps and rank up again". Which is more frustraiting to play against. The Warhammer AI is far more "OK so I don't care win or lose I'm either going to hold the line or charge!"

 Overread wrote:
I find at least the Warhammer TW AI attacks walls in sieges. In many of the earlier games they'd rarely actually come at the walls. I've seen the Medieval one abandon its siege gear and rank and file up. Which honestly is neat fun now and then, but not every time darn it.

Heck I got into Rome 2 recently and the number of times the AI would just keep running away in the 3D battles. It never gained anything, it just kept going "I'm going to lose this possibly - run away a few steps and rank up again". Which is more frustraiting to play against. The Warhammer AI is far more "OK so I don't care win or lose I'm either going to hold the line or charge!"

Well it isn't really ok, The AI got the bumrush retardation codeing from Attila, and in sieges it can't even fall back anymore, yet still keepds half the army in reserve and does not contest the walls after the base reserves there are depleted.
Infact especially the Bretonian AI in my last siege played great. It stacked so many units around one oppening that Malagor got 621 kills with the basic lore of the beast spell upgraded and overcast.
It did not sally out to kill my archers, it did not counter fire with it's archers .

In a way the only thing i can say about sieges that they at First glance seem improved, mostly due to the fact that the AI can't manouvre within it.
Otoh as a Veteran well, let's just say i didn't expect much sooo

I also still like the Empires great internal politics. Leaving you with two options:
A: Start a Civil war and force them under your rule.
B: Be everyones babysitter and go to Sylvania and be stuck there in that gak hole whilest also needing to defend all the other Empire minors, which still rather would shoot you then let you help them.

Honestly I'm really hoping that Blizzards AI work trickles down into other developers. Far as I can see RTS tends to push current AI to its limit for games and most of the developers are not pushing it like the Starcraft 2 AI is. I'ts possibly the most well rounded of AI today - whilst a lot of other games still seem to have made very little overt progress with game AI.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I'm really hoping that Blizzards AI work trickles down into other developers. Far as I can see RTS tends to push current AI to its limit for games and most of the developers are not pushing it like the Starcraft 2 AI is. I'ts possibly the most well rounded of AI today - whilst a lot of other games still seem to have made very little overt progress with game AI.

Not Really likely, considering Actibliz atm is more concerned with nickle and diming it wouldn't be unlikely for them to demand massive amounts of licensing.

Yeah but at least it would be there to work its way out into the market.

 Overread wrote:
Yeah but at least it would be there to work its way out into the market.

Also true.
And I wouldn't be opposed to it

The next DLC has been announced. Mandate of Heaven will be released on January 16th, and will start just before the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Link to the FAQ is here - https://www.totalwar.com/blog/total-war-three-kingdoms-mandate-of-heaven-faq/

There will also be some free additions to the core game, including a rebalance pass and a new warlord - Tao Qian.

Tao Qian was the governor of Xu Province. Cao Cao's father was traveling through Xu Province when some of Tao Qian's soldiers robbed and murdered him. Cao Cao attacked Xu Province in revenge, and Tao Qian asked for help from his allies. A couple of them responded, including Liu Bei. Cao Cao's forces ran out of supplies before he could take the capitol, and he was forced to retreat. Tao Qian ultimately died of natural causes, and control of the province was handed to Liu Bei.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
More info here - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1154760/Total_War_THREE_KINGDOMS__Mandate_of_Heaven/


Of particular note -

One new warlord for the main campaign, but only if you own the DLC (in addition to the free one mentioned in my previous post). And for the first time, you'll be able to play as the sitting emperor, and try to resolidify power over your country.

While the familiar faces will be limited at first, events during the game will reintroduce some of the missing ones.

I just want the barbarian factions added :(

There will be a new patch for the core game when the new campaign is released. Details are here -

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/total-war-three-kingdoms-patch-1-4-0-mandate-of-heaven/?fbclid=IwAR3EVf6AVU6xiuNTVCqFHtvD2Ga3Gpz7lk4rHd1i-eJjocIRyX9Qbg4aiDc

Items of note -

Four individuals have been made legendary heroes. All have ties to the Han. Diao Chan is one of them.

There's a new free warlord being released even for those who don't purchase the DLC. You'll need to download him, however, and the patch notes have a link to the Steam page where you can do this.

The patch has a lot of rebalancing changes, and a few new items including a new anti-unit siege weapon (because trebuchets weren't nasty enough). Militia units got across the board downgrades. And there are new deployable defensive battlefield features.

Playing as Sun Jian, after almost exlusively playing northern factions (Gongsun Zan, Dhong Zhou and the bandit lady with the axes).

I think someone mentioned it earlier in this thread at the games release (maybe Lordofhats?) that the south is empty. Me playing the northern factions where I can't throw a shoe without hitting 8 claimants to the throne didn't really pay any mind to it. Then I went back to WH2 for a long while and forgot about it until this week.

Now with this Sun Jian campaign, I'm just marching from one deserted town to the next, with a few Han settlements putting up token resistance. Its kind of boring and really makes me think for the first time that this game is incomplete. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game a lot once I got used to it, and this patch added a lot of fun stuff, but its an entirely different play experience down south. Probably intentional, as I guess South China was a war torn backwater at this point in history? Could've at least added some generic bandit factions to make things interesting.

And I haven't even touched the 2 campaign DLC's that they added, though I do like the new feature where you can choose the timeline. Dong Zhou looking less... festively plump in the years before the main campaign was pretty funny. The rest seem to be all the same character model though.

Yeah, I keep revisiting 3k after each dlc, but I have a hard time getting into it. The technical and diplomacy improvements are great, but the campaigns...

You can either build freely in a vacuum, or you're completely surrounded by factions that can and will turn on you at any time. I don't enjoy either playstyle that much, or that the leaders are dangerous mostly because they have artifact-tier weapons from the start (or not, as the case may be). The weapons make a bigger difference than they do in warhammer, which seems ironic to me.

Something about its whole design ethos just feels "cluttered" to me. More so than the other TW games (Granted comparing them all to something as visually streamlined as Medieval 2 they ALL come up short for ease of visual information on the grand campaign map).

Granted part of the issue is I keep getting distracted playing Warhammer TW

 Overread wrote:
Something about its whole design ethos just feels "cluttered" to me. More so than the other TW games (Granted comparing them all to something as visually streamlined as Medieval 2 they ALL come up short for ease of visual information on the grand campaign map).

"Cluttered" is exactly what comes to mind when I look at 3K's technology tree. The cherry blossom tree(I think thats what it is) graphic gets distracting once you get deep into a branch with overlapping tech. Cool concept, but dial it down a bit.

One thing that I liked in this most recent 3K patch is that it gave us an "option" (quotes because I'm not going back to how it was originally) to change the unit cards. Instead of some generic, barely visible mannequin holding that units highlighted chosen armament, its now legit rendered artwork, so you know exactly what you are getting. It was such a weird design decision and I'm surprised it took so long to change it.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:

Granted part of the issue is I keep getting distracted playing Warhammer TW

If/When Ogre Kingdoms DLC drops, I've tapped out on TW2. Think I have over 1000 hours in that game. But a chunk of that is me walking away during the AI's turn or just doing a chore when its finally my turn.

 nels1031 wrote:

 Overread wrote:

Granted part of the issue is I keep getting distracted playing Warhammer TW

If/When Ogre Kingdoms DLC drops, I've tapped out on TW2. Think I have over 1000 hours in that game. But a chunk of that is me walking away during the AI's turn or just doing a chore when its finally my turn.

Have you played since the last patch? When they released the new Undead Pirates I noticed a long while back that they always took their turns a lot faster than the other races and they've basically built on that and done it to all the races. The speed update is honestly fantastic and makes a massive difference in turn times. It's made Mortal Realms a lot more fun to play.

 Overread wrote:

 nels1031 wrote:

 Overread wrote:

Granted part of the issue is I keep getting distracted playing Warhammer TW

If/When Ogre Kingdoms DLC drops, I've tapped out on TW2. Think I have over 1000 hours in that game. But a chunk of that is me walking away during the AI's turn or just doing a chore when its finally my turn.

Have you played since the last patch? When they released the new Undead Pirates I noticed a long while back that they always took their turns a lot faster than the other races and they've basically built on that and done it to all the races. The speed update is honestly fantastic and makes a massive difference in turn times. It's made Mortal Realms a lot more fun to play.

Yeah, I saw it. The most recent content with Malus Darkblade and The Deathmaster is the patch where they added the decreased turn time algorithm. And yeah its night and day difference early and mid game. Once you explore a bit more of the map with trade routes and such, it bogs down again, but never at the level it was pre-patch. I'm more just bored with the game overall, having played it to exhaustion.

 Overread wrote:
Something about its whole design ethos just feels "cluttered" to me. More so than the other TW games (Granted comparing them all to something as visually streamlined as Medieval 2 they ALL come up short for ease of visual information on the grand campaign map).

That's true too. I hate the event messages in the little bubbles that I have to click to read and right click to dismiss (and can't get them back if I want to double check something). I miss Warhammer's log, where I can just mouse over to read and they don't go away.

But yeah, I've spent more time on Warhammer 2 post Mandate of Heaven than 3K, which says something about my interest level.

nels1031 wrote:If/When Ogre Kingdoms DLC drops, I've tapped out on TW2.

This is 100% not happening.
There are one or two more DLC drops for tw2 (at least one will update orcs and goblins, there may not be a second), but they announced very firmly that there would be no more factions in TW2.
At the moment the most likely thing is an O&G vs high elves dlc, since they've gone on records with an update for them, and of the tw2 base races, high elves have the fewest legendary lords.

The game really needs the nanman to be added. They could fill out the south and make it less empty.

I'm actually a bit surprised. They've had two campaign DLCs so far, but haven't released any faction DLC since the Yellow Turban DLC - which was available at launch. There have been new warlords; both of the campaign DLCs pretty much required this (and two new warlords were just added to the base campaign). But they haven't released a DLC that's exclusively devoted to mixing up the base campaign with new warlords or factions.

Eumerin wrote:
I'm actually a bit surprised. They've had two campaign DLCs so far, but haven't released any faction DLC since the Yellow Turban DLC - which was available at launch. There have been new warlords; both of the campaign DLCs pretty much required this (and two new warlords were just added to the base campaign). But they haven't released a DLC that's exclusively devoted to mixing up the base campaign with new warlords or factions.

Some of the youtubers who play have commented on this, especially for Eight Princes. While the character models were new, the behaviors were just copied from the base game. So one of the princes used Yuan Shao's AI, another used Liu Bei's, etc, etc. It was basically fighting over the same places with the same people, just different skins and names.

The south definitely needs to be filled out with some sort of challenge, not just open expansion areas. And/or doing something with the northern invasion and trade routes, and using a different map (bascially cutting out the south for more challenging stuff up north).

The south was empty in all of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, as well. Sun Jian gets an early game boost if he stays out of the conflicts happening in the center map. More recent RotK games have tried to mitigate this, not by adding warlords or barbarian tribes into the south, but by drastically reducing the number of officers and vassals Sun Jian can recruit in the early game. I think the reason for this decision is down to the novel not giving any indication that anybody was down there apart from Sun Jian, and the developers don't want to invent new characters (although that didn't stop them from adding Lu Bu's fictional daughter into the last game). It may be that, historically, there isn't much information on who was active in the south of China at that time, either. I'm not sure of the reasons, but I am sue that an empty southern map isn't unique to Total War. But hey, at least it gives new players an area to start out where they can expand their power base and learn the ropes, prior to getting Cao Cao all up in their grill.

squidhills wrote:
although that didn't stop them from adding Lu Bu's fictional daughter into the last game

Just a quick note - Lu Bu's daughter isn't fictional. While her name isn't known, and she wouldn't have been a fierce warrior as depicted in Dynasty Warriors, he did have at least one daughter. He attempted to use her to cement an alliance with Yuan Shu by marrying her into Shu's family. But Shu didn't trust Lu Bu and ultimately declined the offer.

AFAIK, nothing else is known about her.


As for the southern part of the map -

While it wasn't as heavily populated as northern (particularly north-eastern) China, there were still people there. At least two warlords - Liu Yao and Shi Xie were apparently based in the south. The former was active in the fighting, but died of an illness shortly after defeating a rebellious general. The latter was fairly passive (he was about as far as you could possibly get from the capitol, and was content to be left alone to do as he pleased) and apparently ended up joining the Kingdom of Wu. There was also at least one prominent non-Han tribe active in the region. The Shanyue tended to live by pillaging their Han neighbors whenever they had the chance. Wu eventually pacified them through a combination of carrot (promised rewards if they joined) and starvation (making it impossible for the Shanyue to pillage food from the Han harvests).