A Plea to CA for a new engine instead of a soon next Total War game. DX12 may deal the cards anew for Rome 2.

[alQamar]

thanks I still hope we can attract more people here and disurb them from their epic campaign games to wake up this game is actually technically in severe danger failing the test of time. (current and future hardware)

[General Maximus]

How is the optimization now, mate? Shogun II can run on very high and ultra smoothly on most ranges of PCs, with hardly any lags except when the battle is raging on.

Optimization on this engine is something that I am taking with mixed view.

[alQamar]

Optimisation happened for all presets below extreme preset so far. However patch 7 still not solved the 1v1 battles instead of unit battles like shown in the YouTube I linked here today.

[alQamar]

here is the November update according to the stats.

[jamreal18]

Maybe, we'll have new engine for the next game...

[alQamar]

For my own standards a maybe in this case means nothing. The more we see about the comparison to Rome 1, it has become a prerequisite before I would consider to buy any future TW game.

[alQamar]

Hello everyone,

I've made a summary about the possible and existing 64bit OS share across the Steam Community for December 2013. In the last 4 weeks it seem a portion of customers with low end rigs seemed to join Steam, as the portion of those that could not upgrade to a 64bit OS for free or do not a reasonable amout of system RAM to do this, grew.




I guess we have got new users because Steam now offers a lot of indy games, that have comparable low requirements.

[Sidious]

I don't know if this has been brought up yet...but why would CA focus their resources on a new engine instead of a new game? No studio is going to spend their time and money without the end goal of selling a product.

(Obviously Epic Games is a different story since they profit by licencing the Unreal Engine, but CA is not making their engine commercially available therefore theres no real reason to spend the next couple years on a engine, instead of a product which they will sell.)

The only way CA would pour resources into a new engine is if there is a game coming out that requires it (basically why warscape was made...to power Empire TW).

[Evan MF]

I don't know if this has been brought up yet...but why would CA focus their resources on a new engine instead of a new game? No studio is going to spend their time and money without the end goal of selling a product.

(Obviously Epic Games is a different story since they profit by licencing the Unreal Engine, but CA is not making their engine commercially available therefore theres no real reason to spend the next couple years on a engine, instead of a product which they will sell.)

The only way CA would pour resources into a new engine is if there is a game coming out that requires it (basically why warscape was made...to power Empire TW).

Well Warscape games are getting stale and I think CA can sense feeling that in the community. If they are intending to innovate in any major way they will have to go for a new engine, be it better particle physics, battle scale, more elaborate animation sequences, optimised for greater memory (I recall CA saying that they have just about reached a memory cap with Warscape, with regard to animations). There also comes a point where the architecture has been tinkered with, layered upon and rehashed so many times that it gets inefficient to keep working with it and it being worth it in the long-run to start from scratch again. Now is the time and if they don't seize it their franchise will be in deep trouble.

[Sidious]

I get that they will eventually have to create a new engine, but it will be for a new game- like how warscape was made to power Empire.

Where as the OP is asking that they create and focus on a new engine but not a new game. (which they wont do, financially it doesn't make sense).

I still don't think theres any limitations to WarScape when it comes to BAI, poor BAI is a result of poor programming- you don't need an entire new engine to fix that.

Reworking everything and making a new engine from the ground up is a lot of work and theres a lot of room to make mistakes- I bet in the future we will all complain abour Warscape 2.0

[alQamar]

Thats a good point Sidious, and yes I personally think at a launch of possible Warscape 2.0 we might wish to have the old back or complaining about even other bugs and limits it has.
Certainly no one else but CA has so much experience to take the correct decision. Still I disagree that the warscape engine in its current state is just a sum of bugs and poor programming. You might have a sight on it when you compare Shogun 2 vanilla and Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai then comparing it to Rome 2 to notice this engine is made for Empire and muskets, line infantry battles. Especially if we talk about massively decreased performance issues during melee fights.

[Aenima]

I assumed it went without saying that the desire for a new engine was that it be used with the next game.

[General Maximus]

A heavily modified Warscape, with large-scale alterations from what we have seen previously AS WELL AS sticking to the good old formula, might do great.

But I don't see it coming any soon. Warscape has fundamental problems, like no changable capitals for example (alongside distance-to-capital penalty which prevented overextention). Pathfinding is....so horrible that it is not even worth talking about it. Buildings in sieges are just cosmetic pieces which represent nothing from the campaign map, unlike the old engine which represented campaign buildings in all aspects, most of them being destructible in battles too.

I think 1v1 animations can be changed, but Warscape still has a lot of major flaws. It is an engine with a good side, but it's bad side is SO large that it takes over all the good that it offers.

SEGA's spam of false marketing, and CA's own incompetence in making the games playable, and then trying to hurl out DLCs and hoping that people will buy them in a heavy rush like braindead sheeps, firing experienced devs and recruiting clueless noobs, and allowing our dear ex-EA employee Tim Heaton reign over them, etc etc only worsens the problems.

[Tim_Ward]

Warscape has fundamental problems, like no changable capitals for example (alongside distance-to-capital penalty which prevented overextention).

Why do people think no changable capital cities is a problem of the game engine?

[General Maximus]

Why do people think no changable capital cities is a problem of the game engine?

If it isn't, why hasn't it been fixed till yet?

Problems that exist in every game of some engine, whether or not they are engine's problems, would be considered engine problems by the people unless they are proven otherwise.

[Wicked Moose]

Why do people think no changable capital cities is a problem of the game engine?

I used to think of a 'game engine' as something mythical that does everything you can do in the game. Probably a lot of people think something like that, as I'd say most people don't really understand what exactly an engine is. Neither do I to be honest

The only things I think I know about engine limitations is that warscape is restricted to 32-bit, multicore CPU's are utilized to a certain extent (I thought R2 was rather multithreaded?), and the old engine of R1 and Med2 had the restrictions of 250 men per unit, 20 units per army and x amount of campaign factions and regions.

Actually, if CA went back to the engine used for medieval 2, removed the limits on factions/units/regions, added the replenishment system, added recruitment by the general etc, I'd be quite happy. I wouldn't even miss naval battles in the beginning, seeing how rome 2 raped them imo...
Unfortunately this is not going to happen, and though I would vote for a new total war engine I'm not sure what new 'improvements' I would expect, as I'm not too delighted with the direction CA has taken lately with Rome 2.

[Evan MF]

Why do people think no changable capital cities is a problem of the game engine?

I recall a CA dev actually saying that it was an engine issue. (might have been Lusted) You have to remember that it has a lot more effects than simply putting a 'capital' icon above a city, it affects AI decision-making, public order mechanics, trade mechanics etc. It may just be too complex for them to efficiently tinker with in Warscape.

[Franky235]

I recall a CA dev actually saying that it was an engine issue. (might have been Lusted) You have to remember that it has a lot more effects than simply putting a 'capital' icon above a city, it affects AI decision-making, public order mechanics, trade mechanics etc. It may just be too complex for them to efficiently tinker with in Warscape.

And thats all because your capital change automatically if you loose your original one
It's not a problem as developer to create a button to do the same

[jamreal18]

If the new engine appears, what will happen to Rome 2?

Will roman era be stuck with its current engine?... this era is the first one I wished to receive the new engine... how sad...

[AngryTitusPullo]

If the new engine appears, what will happen to Rome 2?

Will roman era be stuck with its current engine?... this era is the first one I wished to receive the new engine... how sad...

New engine will only be for a new game. Rome 2 expansions/DLC will still use the current engine though as it happened in previous games it will be further optimized and upgraded.