Total War Cities - Simcity style

[AngryTitusPullo]

With Total War you already have 2 games in 1, which are the real-time battles game and the turn-base strategy game. Now you want to add in a third ?

[Ravefothepeople]

As long as single player is not online only... Then my ghost won't haunt this earth. Note to self: build more police stations to recruit more hastati

[Slydessertfox]

First let's clear something up. Cities XL trumps Sim City anyway.

[Keesdechinees]

Please NO. Simcity is a much different game then a Total War game. Really each turn will take a hour or something to complete, cause you will need to make new roads and placing houses and other stuff. You will need to take care for the water supply and letting all the transmit go good. Did I already said NO?

[HigoChumbo]

Please NO. Simcity is a much different game then a Total War game. Really each turn will take a hour or something to complete, cause you will need to make new roads and placing houses and other stuff. You will need to take care for the water supply and letting all the transmit go good. Did I already said NO?

This is pretty much how the inside of my head looks right now:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Big Brown Bear]

I think the title of this thread was a mistake

[Serkelet]

I agree with you, Nicolasete, and I like some of the ideas you expose, but I have a pair of concerns:

- The scale. Making it full real time strategy AND making city building a bit more complex than it is now, would force to lower the scale of the game considerable. What I mean by it is lowering the number of regions, the cities, etc... I am not sure this is a good thing. Do we want another "build your base, spawn an army and kill the enemy base" strategy game? because this is sounding like that to me, only to a bit bigger scale. The point of the turn based system is being able to spawn as many regions on the map, as many cities and as many armies as the developers see fit, which is a lot, and still having epic one hour battles with big armies clashing, and being able to control everything quite effectively.

- In line with the previous point, wouldn't city building be too much focus taking for the player? Would the player be able to effectively manage his armies while at the same time building roads, walls, defenses, recruitment buildings, etc, in several cities, all of that in real time? Maybe for the best skilled of the players this would be a piece of cake, but I know most would have a hard time.

PS: I really am all on creativity and innovation in videogame market. I'm the first one defending in this forums any innovative idea CA comes up with. I started playing Shogun Total War in the first place because it was "different" from everything that was made until that point, and I would love to see Total War games exploring new environments. When CA released a poll asking the players what would they prefer for the next total war, they gave to choose between another Shogun, another Rome and a World War One game. I chose World War, because I wanted them to explore new areas. I know people went all conservative there and wanted to see the same old environments with more shinny graphics. Hell, I am very astounded by some people in this forum who say that they are hating the new Rome 2 features and that they would have prefered Rome 1 with better graphics...

My idea about the turn based system was along the lines of doing everybody their turn at the same time, semi real time, until all the actions and movement points are spent... Then the turn would finish when the last one would have clicked on "end turn". To make it manageable for the player, just slow down the movement of each army, fleet and agent, so you can react; introduce warnings "the enemy is getting inside our land!" with a map marker. Profit! I think it would be a step in the right direction.

But what you suggest sounds like completely changing the particular Total War genre, and actually feels like going backwards, rather than forward... Correct me if I'm wrong.

[HigoChumbo]

Well. I honestly think TW has 2 main appeals for the large audiences. One is the big set-piece battles. The other is the fact that you can conquer one province after the other until you have the entire map, and the reason why people like this is exactly the same reason why people play RPGs (you can consider provinces what an rpg player would consider "loot").

That said, most player (most casual players, which is most players) don't give a damn about the features or the complexity of the campaign. If they did they would be playing Paradox's games instead since they are much more in depth than TW. But they don't. So why would they rather play TW? most of those playesr don't like Paradox's games because they find them too complex. You then would say "it is because of battles". And to that i answer: the vast majority of the casual players that i know who play TW simulate battles.

So why then? Because the simple reason that making an empire big, getting province after province, no matter how easy it is, is satisfactory.


So ok, let's keep that part in. I see two options here. One would be to make 2 separate games (one TW as we know it already and one "build your base(s) spawn your army, kill the enemy base", as it were, as you say). Which would be more reasonable and easier. It would make the spacing between total war games longer (say 2013 rome2, 2015, total war spin off, 2017, medieval 3, for instance) so tw fanboys would rant, but who gives a hoot, they were going to complain the same if they changed TW to include new features... You can be constantly worried about a bunch of crybabies =)

The other option then could be a blend of the 2 systems. You could have fewer bigger regions in the regular campaign map (for instance, Hispania, Gaul, Italy etc), every one of them with a score (random number) of cities. Say 5 starting cities per faction. So to conquer one of those big regions, you would not fight a single pitched battle in a small battlefield like we do now, but you would load the Rise of Nations/AoE/B&W type map -to call it something-, and in that map you would have everything i explained in my other posts (city building, army maneuver, combat, etc).


Maybe you could have a minimap of the entire campaign (say Europe) to warn you about enemy armies approaching that region or other regions, and you could change from one region to the next as you wanted. Or maybe you would be forced to fight an entire "battle" over that map and you would conquer/lose whatever you managed in a certain ammount of time (say 40 minutes) or until certain modifiers are met (like running out of supplies or whatever).



There are obvioiusly complications to this that should be sorted in order to these concepts to work. But take into account that i am not trying to design a perfect game mechanic, I'm just writing random ideas and options/possible choices as they pop in my mind. Let the people who get paid for it worry about the details.


As for these features taking too much focus from the player, you could always limit the management of the empire/armies to your personal character (maybe a few generals/relatives as we have seen in previous games) and leave the rest to the AI. Now you say "the AI is dumb, it would botch everything". Well, to that I say 2 things: First, it would be fighting other equally dumb AIs, so it is pretty much even (and anyways, AI is getting pretty good in TW). And second... it is a pretty good way to emulate what Augustus (the player in this case) must have felt when they told him Varus (the AI) had lost 3 legions at Teutoburg Forest, ain't it? That way you would have to move to the most important theatres while trusting smaller matters to the AI. AI's ocassional failures could actually add some more flavour to the game.

[Serkelet]

Those are ideas, but understand that we may also challenge those ideas. Maybe not in the diminishing and unrespectful way some people here do, but... You know.

I think a lot of people would hate losing control of most of their Empire ceding it to the AI, doesn't matter how good or bad it is, or how balanced it is compared to the other AI players. Let's put for example the Varus experience. While it could be fun for some players, some would totally ragequit and not play again if they see three entire legions of their own faction completely wiped out because the AI made a bad decision. Just imagine how frustrating it would get for a player focusing on taking Egypt, having a hard time there, and suddenly a warning comes to him that there's trouble in his border with Germania. He gets there and discovers his borders almost unprotected and the Suebi raiding Gaul and getting dangerously close to Italy, because the AI wasted his legions garrisoned there... He would just abbandon the campaign, and, worst of all, he wouldn't even bother to play a new one, since his defeat was nothing of his actual fault; it was out of his control. He just won't play again because he feels he can do nothing to resolve such a mess.

Another problem I see: How much processing power would require to have a scaled map of Europe, even with way less cities, like one city per country, in real time and graphically acceptable, and still being able to change from zone to zone quick enough to react to every possible situation? Is it doable nowadays?

[Big Brown Bear]

OK now you're getting quite complex and I too, like Serkelet, worry about the actual possibility of being able to pull this off...

Anywayyyy, we're now talking about a completely hypothetical game that isn't in itself Total War, so we can save this for another day and another forum

[HigoChumbo]

I understand you. Sad times these in which people have to design their games with casual players in mind.

It's funny how people can understand the same thing in different ways. You (Serkelet) were writting your second paragraph as something to avoid, and i was reading it wattering my mouth thinking how fun that exact situation would be. Out of player control? Luck (dice rolls) plays a role in most games, a bit of luck is always welcome. You wont lose all your frontiers out of luck. If you do, its probably your fault and not the AI's, since you probably chose your garrison placement and quantity poorly.

Maybe the player wants to get involved in Egypt, but the fact that the Germans are a threat in the north he is just not able to since he has to deal with them Isn't that fun and realistc? We have got used to just spam armies and sent them to every corner of the world until we have conquered it all, but the realistic counterpart (trying to preserver your petty kindom) is also fun.

You could make survive and make the best possible empire the objetive rather than just conquering the entire map easily. In Paradox games, i have as much fun playing as Castille, France or the Holy Roman Empire and conquering half of Europe and America as i have trying to survive as good as I can with tiny kingdoms as Venice or Granada.



The best game i played last year was XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and part of the fun it brought was the Ironman saves and the fact that i actually lost my first campaign. Did i quite the campaign? No, i actually started another one thrilled by the prospect of having to actually think and be careful in order to survive. So some 13 year old ragequit after his first failed campaign, entered a forum and wrote "OMFG FIRAXIS R DA WORZT GAME DEVELOPERZ EVARRRRRRRRR!!!!"? what do i care? I understand that that audience is the main milkcow for the big companies, but for me? The more who quit the better, i don't like the games i play to be developed in order to apease 13 year old ragekids, tbh.


Now about the campaign map. My original idea (the one that tryed to include city-building) had no grand strategy (campaign) map. It was just a somewhat glorified hybrid of Civilization, Age of Empires and TW. Think of Rise of Nations in 3d with total war like battles, in a bigger-more realistic map (more spacing between cities with well done geographical features, like rivers, forests and mountains).

In that particular concept, there is no grand-campaign map (Europe if you will) involved. I only tryed to adapt it to a TW grand campaign map because you asked me how will that integrate into the bigger picture. So i doubt the technical limitations would be that big. B&W2 did something similar in a much smaller scale in 2005 and pcs could handle it just fine. I don't see how the much more resourceful CA couldn't make a much, much better&bigger game in, say 2015.



Now, Big Brown Bear, i don't think that what i have in mind is much more complex than the current TW. It is just different. To me, the biggest problem that i see for the hypothetical making of this game is that it would be slow-paced and probably apease a smaller, more hardcore audience, but it would be complex enough to require a good (big) company to make it. And we all know that big companies don't give a damn about the much smaller "hardore" (as it were) playerbase since they need to target large audiences in order to make money. And large audiences are mostly casual.

As for being off-topic. Well, i agree. I only brought this in because i don't think city-building would fit at all in the current TW campaign (unless you limit it to the capital or something like that, which would also be nice), so i explained a different approach in which it would fit better, in my opinion.