Beyond the BAI: What motivated you to push for a better ETW?

[hellas1]

Hi all,

I wanted to get a gist (For CA to view also) as to why we REALLY ed about ETW so much beyond the:

-BAI
-Broken Sieges & hook ropes
-Etc.


I, for one, really do love the TW concept even though each release seemed to be "undone" in the fullest sense of the word. THIS caused me to post regarding a game series that I really don't want to see die out!

Comments?
hellas1

[rubenandthejets]

I was disappointed that many of the features from the previous titles were left out. Each game seemed to add a new layer of immersion ( eg family trees, merchants ) and while ETW added a lot of new stuff I missed a lot of stuff left out. The amount of left over bits and pieces implies a lot of these old features were planned and then dropped ( or that CA left a lot of messy old code tucked away in the program ).

I really missed the connection between the campaign and battle maps-apparently ambushing isn't the done thing, even in the Americas, in this time period.

The most worrying thing is how difficult it is to mod ETW. It's been nearly a year since release and very little progress has been made on map and model mods.
I saw the trade theaters and thought it would be about a month before someone added the East Asia and the Phillipines, new native factions and cities in Indonesia and Brazil etc etc.

This new "locked down, auto updated, DLC " style took a lot of the potential for this game away-let's face it, most TW titles are OK or even a bit lame as vanilla versions, but with a few mods they really shine. It's one of the main reasons why I'm holding off on NTW.

[gargarensi]

I miss the bonuses generals use to provide. Not only this, the usefulness of generals has pretty much diminished now that we can recruit one immediately. It ticks me off when they show off "new" features like weather affected terrain, or general bonuses (We DID have them in M2TW) Not to mention the multiplayer campaign that was promised to us for ETW and was 9 months late. On top of this, sieges are absolutely DREADFUL and broken. sieges in Medieval and Rome were incredibly epic and easily one of the best aspects of the game, too bad now we have ninja musketeers

[Venset]

I miss the feature, when your units are completely surrounded and are routing, instead of routing they fight to the death because there is nowhere for them to escape.

[Humble Warrior]

Hi all,


I, for one, really do love the TW concept even though each release seemed to be "undone" in the fullest sense of the word. THIS caused me to post regarding a game series that I really don't want to see die out!

Comments?
hellas1

Pretty much the same for me. Ever since I first heard and played Shogun, I loved the realistic morale system, strategic then tactical turns and how it used realistic real war principles.

ETW and CA screwed all that. I`ve just about given up all hope that it will ever go back to its roots now. Really, I`m almost done, just waiting to see what happens with NTW which will be the first TW i`ve EVER boycotted.

[Lord Nova]

Well I pushed around 1.3-1.4 but left cause I felt it was pointless. It seems however lots of people stuck around so good for them.

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to see ETW fixed

1- It has a lot of potential with the time period, campaign theaters, naval battles

2- I felt that it wasn't better the Medieval2 or Rome and I mean the vanilla versions of those games. I went back and played some vanilla campaigns and enjoyed myself even with historical inaccuracies cause the gameplay was solid and fun.

3- Empire with the BAI bugs, CAI never making peace, and hundreds of other little annoying bugs basically make the game not fun.

Right now playing ETW is like strategy blue balls. I'll give an example: In a Prussian campaign the British landed on my soil. I thought "Amazing, not only is it a full stack of mostly line infantry, cannon, cavalry but the CAI picked a region I had lightly defended but was important" so I now get all excited for the awsome battle that will occur which would have been History Channel worthy. I was expecting a foe that could match me in reload speed and we would finally see which nation had the best linemen. What I fought however was a mess of 2 seperate melee blobs on opposite ends of my line and only ONE British regiment was firing into the center of my line while the rest blobed on my flanks. Needless to say I won with barely 100 casualties while the British suffered over 1500 on Hard battle difficulty. Now not only would this NEVER happen in Rome or Medieval 2 (odds are I would have won but it would have been fun and I would have suffered more realistic losses) but also in Rome and Medieval2 the AI would have retreated the 2nd time I engaged, odds are back to it's own ship. The CAI in ETW doesn't ever retreat so it stands it's ground against overwhelming forces of the same Army it couldn't beat when it outnumbered it by 20%.

Lets face it CAI in Total war games starting with Rome have been bad and the naval invasion the British did was something I would rarely see in RTW or MTW2 and I will compliment them on that. That being said the main reason any of us here play Total War games are the battles on the battle map. There are plenty of other good strategy games that are campaign and much better then anything in a total war title, the problem is none have realtime epic battles like Total War does. With the BAI at it's current state, it feels like all the fun from the title is instantly sapped out of it and what I get is a very very pretty game on max settings but with no substance to back it up.

[irish437]

Needs the following:

AI retreat on campaign map
Better diplomacy
More naval invasions/troop support in colonial regions
AI making peace when it is in a losing situation.

[General_Meevious]

I was upset when I discovered that the game was missing many details present in past games that were actually more pertinent to Empire's era; speeches, royal generals and naval invasions all seemed necessary to me for the game to be enjoyable, but while common sense, prior to release, dictated that they would return, they were not, to my knowledge, advertised, so I can blame only myself for having moderate expectations. The same goes for the ridiculous amount of ctd triggers and other inane bugs.

Having just left home and moved overseas, I was looking forward to the multiplayer campaign... which had been heavily advertised. In my country, it is a breach of consumer rights to advertise features of your product and never deliver them, so I set about protesting. I soon discovered that CA also hadn't made good on its promise of "the most modable TW game ever"; a bigger blow to the series, though slightly less offensive to the Fair Trade Act.

Around nine months later, CA delivered a multiplayer campaign beta. It is completely unplayable due to a plethora of bugs, but hey, they didn't give any oath that it would be enjoyable - to my knowledge, the law that protects people from going to the supermarket, selecting a tomato at random and discovering it's 40% lead doesn't have a software counterpart.

The petition for mod support, however, rages on and this is certainly the TW game that needs it most.