The Future of Total War, Total Realism: A Vision

[GracchusTheGreat]

As a student of the history of the ancient world, and especially of its methods and the broader implications and effects of waging war, Rome: Total War and its premier modifications have been, quite literally, a moment of history. Never before has the infinite reach of a thousand-year era been captured and brought to life in a single place, that place being one's personal computer, in such a manner as I might call so 'realistically'. Essentially, man has read history since it was first written, but he has never played it.

But perhaps three years living in the world of Total War has spoiled me and left me wanting more. The best mods, RTR and EB, have delivered all one could in imagine in an aestethically 'real' ancient environment, yet both have suffered, though not by any fault of their creators, by a profound lack of 'realism' in the area of 'realism'. Allow me to explain. The maps are accurate. The soldiers look exactly as they did two millennia ago. The key players then are the key players we can now play. Wonders. Cities. Provinces. Events. Reforms.

Within the tragically limited R:TW engine, the creators of RTR and EB have managed to forge the closest thing a game can claim to 'historical realism', and they are to be commended.

But what I propose here is not a critique of either mod, but a vision for what a truly history Total War game should be in the future.

To summarize, recreating the "details" is only the beginning. The grand payout lies in capturing the "dynamics" as best as possible, and dynamics is best described as the constant flux of limits and possibilities.

The first thing to go would be unit stats. Next, command stars. The only quantifiable values in the ancient world was gold, which was only one facet of the broader phenomenon of wealth.

Next, the concept of single units all together. A battlefield was and remains the single most chaotic atmosphere on earth. Considering this, most soldiers simply charged or ran. The best were not the best because their defense was 30 and had "excellent morale" but because they had the least bit of awareness over the broader fight and could react, dynamically. Hannibal beat the Romans at Cannae not with elite units with gold chevons but with soldiers who knew what was happening at every moment because he was there and because he had welded them into an 'army'. The Romans simply charged. I envision a game in which Cannae can be simulated without tricks.

In pondering the dynamics of battle, I always find myself going back to the account of the battle of Raphia, one which has been simulated more than once on various mods. Again it seems to come down to unit types and chevrons, and then carefully maneauvering with utmost attention to detail. Bollocks. At Raphia, the spear-points of two empires clashed, they didn't run around jockeying for position. It wasn't the superior attack/def of the Seleucid Silver Shields which won the day, but the sudden appearance of the divine-looking King Ptolemy and his shining royal cavalry which turned them to immediate flight. Nevermind that the battle was being won on another flank. I envision a game where each soldier is a single man standing in a certain place, not a quanitity to be processed through an algorithm. Those Silver Shields believed their own king a god as well as the enemy. I imagine a game that integrates cultural beliefs such as that into the fabric of battle.

More to come later....Comments appreciated for now

[AngryTitusPullo]

Well, the normal total war game can be view or play like the general (us, player) have gps location on each and every units on battlefield, which is neither realistic nor historic in ancient battlefields.

There are options within the game engine however of only controlling the general (and let the AI handle the rest) and also to limit the view only to the general's view.

That's more a challenge and as close as we can come up (within the engine game limitation) of how ancient battlefiled were view.

The ancient source of battle mostly come from the generals (or his ancillaries) account anyway so that it technically more correct if we want to apply it to the game...

[Darviathar]

That's not the account of Raphia I'm familiar with. I'm reading a book called "Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age". From what I recall, Antiochus the Great lost the battle in the same fashion that the Seleucids usually lost big battles; Leading a cavalry charge and getting too far ahead from the crisis point of the battle.

I think the kind of game I'm really looking for is something like Hearts of Iron/Europa Universalis in the Hellenistic/Roman era. I love the battles of Rome total war, but the engine for this game simply isn't capable of giving us something much more realistic than what we've seen so far.

[Herpes]

Computers need math, games need computers, RTW is a game.

Therefore RTW will always be mechanical at its core.

[Juvenal]

We may think we want a realistic simulation of Republican Rome - but what we actually want is a game with some realistic elements.

For instance, we don't want to spend 250 actual years playing through to the time of Augustus. We also don't want to spend a whole day playing each battle (well I don't).

RTW (and consequently RTR and EB also) is a compromise. It allows you to conquer an empire, but this means that campaign movement can never be realistic without reducing the period covered by the game to just a few years. It allows you the manage an economy - but it has to be a drastically simplified economy or you would never have time for any battles. Finally it allows you to play battles, but gives you much more control and information than any real general would have. This is because we are not real generals, we mostly want to play our battles from multiple viewpoints (any takers for a campaign that ends if your general dies?).

I think we need to think more about what realism we actually do want, rather than talking about realism as a self-evidently good thing (like Motherhood and Apple Pie).

For instance, unit cohesion. M2TW has less unit cohesion than RTW. I am sure this is realistic - if you commit several units to battle, they can become very scattered in the melee and you effectively lose control of them. I find this quite frustrating. I may eventually get used to it, but it is bound to turn a lot of players off the game.

Another point is morale. EB (and RTR?) has raised morale for everyone, so that units stand and take much higher casualties than historically. Unfortunately having realistically low morale gives the player an unbalancing advantage - being able to execute perfect flanking manoevres and hammer-anvil combinations. If players were willing to use General-Cam and AI control, it would probably be OK to reduce morale to Vaniilla levels again. But how many people actually want to play this way?

[khshayathiya]

I would never allow AI to control my units. Because, forgive the truism, it is stupid. Generals on real battlefields could rely more often than not on officers to obey the pre-established plan. While I saw that happen in a game (I think it was Rainbow 6), I don't see it implemented in the TW series. So, in choosing between two evils - complete awareness of the general and incredibly idiotic army, I choose the former.

[Inkompetent]

Some elements I could wish for that could be implemented in the battle-part of the game, since it usually only takes a couple of weeks of real time, is the detailed maneuvering of armies close to each other, and to choose the moment of attack. Could almost be a mini-game in itself to try to find exploits in the enemy's defense and to play with the personality of the enemy general and his forces. However this would need extensive work from the developers to be any good, and thus I don't think we'll see this part anytime soon in a game the scale of the Total War series.

One thing that also would be more interesting would be the slower struggle for control in areas occupied by people that live and fight like the gauls, iberians and so on, that means that by winning over one opponent you have far from crushed the resistance in the region. Civil wars and internal power struggles on that to make things more random if nothing else.

Then something that really would make battles more interesting: Fog of war.
I don't want to see all my enemy's troops. If I can't guess where he is I shouldn't know. Making out exact troop sort can be hard even as close as 300m, and how could I possibly see what troops he is moving behind his lines unless they are more elevated than those in front of them?


But too much realism kills a game. There is a level where it becomes dull, but when it comes to games depicting ancient warfare I haven't seen a game on the far side of the accepted realism limit yet.

[Aliksander]

I understand where the original poster is coming from. But, from thinking long and hard on the subject, I could only come up with a single solution for what we envision as the perfect game: a sort of simulation like Star Trek's Holodecks, where you actually ARE a character among millions of indiviually controlled characters in a completely dynamic and realistic environment utilizing computor technology that can't even be fathomed of yet. Sadly, this will not be realized in our lifetimes (I think). But it's nice to dream.

[khshayathiya]

Sadly, this will not be realized in our lifetimes (I think). But it's nice to dream.

I got my first computer some 10 years ago and the first game I played was "Heretic". O, tempora! I can't even begin to imagine the possibilities offered by computers in by 2017, let alone by 2027. I have every intention to hang around and see.

[Juvenal]

Ah - what irony. I still remember being blown away by the awesome 3D technology of Doom and Heretic.

When I was younger, I learned a little about ray-tracing and rendering. There was so much processing required that I didn't expect to ever see real-time 3D rendering.

Then Doom appeared - wow, 3D in real time! It made most existing games obsolete overnight...

Back on-topic. Even though RTW has broken away from the previous RTS formula of real-time economy and battles running in parallel, I still think it rather falls between two stools. The campaign game scale is just too far away from the battle scale.

As Inkompetent mentioned, the campaign game would fit better as an actual campaign simulator showing the manoevring of armies, and dropping the economy all together. We could then have realistic movement rates and battles that fit better into the campaign scale. For example, reinforcements could be available with delays proportional to their distance from the the battle.

Changing the campaign scale would also solve the problem of terrain scaling. The battle map represents one tile on the campaign map - but in RTW the campaign scale is such that one tile represents many times the distance portrayed on the battle map. This leads to a clash between campaign and battle-map terrain features.

To sum up my thoughts, I think RTW is too ambitious. It covers a lot of ground thinly. I would like to see something with a narrower focus but more depth. Why have a strategic economy game? Many other games do this better. It is battles that are the heart of RTW, and the campaign game should be closer to the battle time and space scales in order to better support the battle experience.

Actually, some modders have already moved it in this direction, take a look at the Crusades mod.

[Inkompetent]

One option to actually get more of this maneuvering would be to make the game more like Hearts of Iron - the game has to go real-time. Then we can maneuver and react to the opponents' armies before they are several months of marching away, and simply by allowing a good range of game speeds one can keep control over both big and small areas without losing the grasp of what is happening.

Heck, even allowing lots of different ways of attacking like in HoI would be nice, so that you can make the armies destroy infrastructure (roads and bridges), attack the supplies (burn farms and massacre villages/towns supplying the enemy with resources), do harassing skirmish fights only, in the degree possible, and so on.
This would greatly improve the possibility for economic warfare, or for smaller and worse geared armies to wear down a bigger one.

Morale and religion should have a bigger effect too imho, so that morale carries on from between battles, so winning makes your units have good morale, and losing/retreating from/before battles should lower it.
Different omens and so on and the religious piety of the commander should have an effect on the troops as well, just as military traits do now.

[kalkwerk]

One option to actually get more of this maneuvering would be to make the game more like Hearts of Iron - the game has to go real-time.

Then there could be no battles?

Morale and religion should have a bigger effect too imho, so that morale carries on from between battles, so winning makes your units have good morale, and losing/retreating from/before battles should lower it.
Different omens and so on and the religious piety of the commander should have an effect on the troops as well, just as military traits do now.

This is already in to some extent via traits - especially in EB.

[Inkompetent]

Oh, there could easily be battles when playing real-time. Since the battles as we know them in Total War are only fought during the course of some hours (if we take the 1:10 unit scale reference and thus assume there is a 1:10 time relativity too) it wouldn't really make a difference if the strategy map is paused during battles.

This would work to get multiple battles fought "simultaneously", even if we of course will suffer a bit from not having seamless reinforcements system and so on it could be a nice compromise.

[Solaris]

What is ultimately holding true realism are the constraints of technology. Imagine what it'd be like, commanding 200, 000 men on a computer.

Maybe in 5-10 years.

[Darviathar]

We may think we want a realistic simulation of Republican Rome - but what we actually want is a game with some realistic elements.

For instance, we don't want to spend 250 actual years playing through to the time of Augustus. We also don't want to spend a whole day playing each battle (well I don't).

RTW (and consequently RTR and EB also) is a compromise. It allows you to conquer an empire, but this means that campaign movement can never be realistic without reducing the period covered by the game to just a few years. It allows you the manage an economy - but it has to be a drastically simplified economy or you would never have time for any battles. Finally it allows you to play battles, but gives you much more control and information than any real general would have. This is because we are not real generals, we mostly want to play our battles from multiple viewpoints (any takers for a campaign that ends if your general dies?).

I think we need to think more about what realism we actually do want, rather than talking about realism as a self-evidently good thing (like Motherhood and Apple Pie).

For instance, unit cohesion. M2TW has less unit cohesion than RTW. I am sure this is realistic - if you commit several units to battle, they can become very scattered in the melee and you effectively lose control of them. I find this quite frustrating. I may eventually get used to it, but it is bound to turn a lot of players off the game.

Another point is morale. EB (and RTR?) has raised morale for everyone, so that units stand and take much higher casualties than historically. Unfortunately having realistically low morale gives the player an unbalancing advantage - being able to execute perfect flanking manoevres and hammer-anvil combinations. If players were willing to use General-Cam and AI control, it would probably be OK to reduce morale to Vaniilla levels again. But how many people actually want to play this way?

I've thought a lot about the Pax Romana and how it could be reflected in a RTR game. I know it isn't possible (due to the limit of factions) , but I wish there was a way to play a campaign in the original time period, establish your empire, and then try to continue it through the time period of Barbarian Invasion, against the new factions. The Pax Romana would obviously interrrupt that. In game terms, there simply wouldn't be anyone to fight, or anything to do. Again, Rome Total War just isn't the type of game that is going to be able to reflect that. I rarely EVER buy a new computer game these days without knowing about it in advance, but I recently picked up a game called "Great Invasions". It reflects the period of time from 350 (right before the start of Barbarian invasion) to 1066 (right before the start of Medieval Total War 2). The prospect of trying to save the Western Roman Empire (intact, not as a rump-state) was too tempting, and I bought it "blind". I *think* it *could* be a good game, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to play the damn thing. The documentation is just awful; I've tried playing the tutorial, following it step by step, and discovered that the info in the tutorial doesn't reflect what is actually present in the game. I've had it a month, and simply cannot force myself to sit down and take the time to learn to play it. It has too many annoying features, such as the need to reboot the game if you wish to start over. There is no "exit to menu" key.

This is the type of game I'd love to play, starting in 280 BC and continuing forward. I'd love to see a Roman game that reflected not only the Marian and Augustan reforms, but the need to reform the legions into the types reflected in Barbarian Invasion. Basically, I'd like to run Roman civilization from start until the point where it wasn't possible to keep it together any longer.

[I Am Herenow]

One option to actually get more of this maneuvering would be to make the game more like Hearts of Iron - the game has to go real-time. Then we can maneuver and react to the opponents' armies before they are several months of marching away, and simply by allowing a good range of game speeds one can keep control over both big and small areas without losing the grasp of what is happening.

Heck, even allowing lots of different ways of attacking like in HoI would be nice, so that you can make the armies destroy infrastructure (roads and bridges), attack the supplies (burn farms and massacre villages/towns supplying the enemy with resources), do harassing skirmish fights only, in the degree possible, and so on.
This would greatly improve the possibility for economic warfare, or for smaller and worse geared armies to wear down a bigger one.

Morale and religion should have a bigger effect too imho, so that morale carries on from between battles, so winning makes your units have good morale, and losing/retreating from/before battles should lower it.
Different omens and so on and the religious piety of the commander should have an effect on the troops as well, just as military traits do now.

So you guys want a real-time campaign map as well? You'd probably go nuts trying to manage 100 things at once - getting all the diplomats to explore something, checking they haven't been blocked by something, getting spies and assassins to go where you want them (and in M2, princesses, priests and merchants too); making sure your cities are building something, producing a troop if necessary, paying you enough money and happy; and then, obviously, you have to move your armies around the campaign map.


Then if you add in more realistic battles (that take place whilst your diplomats move around etc.), restricted camera, morale, logistics, maybe even real-time building (so incorporate Sim City or Civ Sity or whatever it is into TW) and control of a particular soldier in a battle (ala Spartan Total Warrior), you'd need 10 arms, an IQ of 300 and a supercomputer to play this game. Either that, or you're going to have to leave 95% of your empire to AI automanagement - although I suppose this is more realistic, as the Roman Emperor wouldn't know about the detailed situation in North Africa, unless he was there - or care, probably.

[kalkwerk]

Well the idea is nice meant, although theres a lot of micromanagment in HOI or EU, I think thats exactly what a lot of players would like to see. With good designed autofunctions such a concept can work well too. But Ive got problems with how its going to work with real time + epic battles. This hasnt been implemented in any game i know of, so it would really be a future vision.

[numerosdecimus]

Either that, or you're going to have to leave 95% of your empire to AI automanagement - although I suppose this is more realistic, as the Roman Emperor wouldn't know about the detailed situation in North Africa, unless he was there - or care, probably.

That's why some of the best emperors were the ons who most travelled. That the example of all of the "Five good Emperors".

[I Am Herenow]

Indeed, so would you in fact support an RTS in the future of such complexity that it would have to be mostly managed by AI, or managed by a team of players?

[EmperorCharles]

Two things I want to see most are amore detailed political situation. You need to engage in the roman politics gain power and winning elections. Some of your faction’s armies would be controlled by AI and others by yourself.

Another thing would be a mutiny player campaign map. Obviously you can’t have too many people or it would take forever to get a few turns done but one or two friends who would actually think about their moves would be more of a challenge.