Two different campaign modes, in addition to the difficulties?

[alQamar]

Topic rules:
1. take your time and read the OP till the end, not only grabbing fragments.
2. no bashing on the streamlining or business practices of CA, use the linked thread instead
3. leave constructive comments why you would favor this idea or why you are not,
4. leaving more ideas how such a realism campaign mode could be enriched is appreciated. I will try to list the pros and ideas / cons in the OP over time.
5. discussing members, questioning their passion or gaming skill in TotalWar is not allowed
6. sharing this discussion to totalwar.com or other communities would be helpful.


Thank you for your understanding.
Thank you to baptistus for his idea.


Hi Total War fans,

what started as a simple discussion in the "CA Business Practice Complaint" thread, might end as a very favourable idea our TWC member baptistus raised.

First of all let me introduce you to the topic we discussed:
Certainly there is a lot of argue about whether the streamlining of Rome 2 is good for the franchise / series and the game. Some say this may be needed to attract a younger audience. Some players, even those which are "senior players / fans " of the total war franchise are ok with that circumstances, while some are certainly not. A lot of discussion about this streamlining itself already happened in this forum, as I know. This thread is not to discuss the streamlining topic itself again.


Some factors:
It is obvious enough and it have been stated many times by the gaming industry that strategy games (on PC platform) do have a hard standing in the world of gaming. They are typically used to be complex and hard to learn, or have a quite high learning curve.
From my own experience I have to say that I do not notice the younger people originally need a simplyfied gameplay to get in touch with TotalWar. In fact when I led Hemisphere Clan from 2004 to 2009, many if not the most players in Rome 1 multiplayer community were at the age of 12-16. I know this quite certainly at least for the clan I led it was obligatory to submit your birthday.

Targets:
Now I would like to ask you if the following idea baptistus had is actuallly favourable for you, too.
Based on the fact that there are two different modes for the battles in many Total War games (more arcade and realistic battles) you can setup in a custom battle, the question raised why we do not have two modes in the campaign, aswell.
Basically we discussed the idea of having two campaign modes in addition to the difficulty settings we have. This is usually something that is common in simulator based games, like flight simulators or prominent MMOs like War Thunder.
I do not like to discuss CA is turning their course, and stop streamlining the game, but to discuss if - in respect to a portion of players - TotalWar should not be also addressing the needs of people that love the challenging and complex part in strategy games. This may be a good course to balance the needs of some which still feel uncomfortable with the vanilla legendary campaign - missing more simulation content. Imho this circumstance is also a reason for the success of mods we have (like DeI), adding more complexity and realism to the game, isn't it?

For myself I would wish to have such a new feature and so I clearly had a reason to start this topic and the attached poll. It may be this thread would not change the way CA thinks about their own plans they have at all, however it would be nice to see what the community thinks about it. I would really like to see, if the anticipation generally favours this idea, to get also some lines of feedback from CA, how they see this particular idea from their point of view.

[baptistus]

It is the better way to make a lot of players happy.
It works fine on racing games and on flight simulators. Some players like to have a lot of help, other player like to have no help, but everybody are happy and choose the mode he like.
I give two simple example with Rome 2

-diplomacy :
-mode A: you have to send an agent before to be able to start diplomacy with a faction
-mode B: instant diplomacy

-transport ship:
-mode A: you have to wait one turn and it cost money
-mode B: instant transport ships with no cost

[alQamar]

I hope you thought about the diplomacy thing that you have to send out one agent to meet the other party first time, and not every time you want to initiate diplomacy, is that correct?


if we call the current campaign realism mode B and a more complex one B I would have this idea:

mode A: more settlements, more historical cities
mode B: the same amount we have now

mode A: ability to build defenses not only in the capital
mode B: the current system only the capital of a province can build defenses

mode A: transport ships have limited fighting abilities and are not able to sink warships by ramming
mode B: current transport ship behaviour

mode A: ability to exchange or gift regions
mode B: current diplomatic abilities

mode A: ressources are needed to build certain buildings or recruiting certain soldiers, you can use diplomacy to get access to ressources without fighting (Civ 5 style)
mode B: ressources are basically trading goods

mode A: abilities to manually recruiting and managing the garrison army. This comes handy if you have a lot of money, also respecting the limits you might have due to ressources
mode B: garrison units and strenght is binded to existing buildings

[GoTW Kubee]

I'd have a bunch of options which you could toggle on and off like in Paradox games rather than just two different modes (i.e. realism mode and arcade mode). So, for example, you'd be able to choose to have an AoR system for units, but turn off, say, attrition for armies in extreme weather conditions. This would allow people to tailor their campaign experience to their own personal preferences. The only problem would be balancing all the options and designing an AI capable of dealing with every different permutation.

I'm a bit uncertain though as to whether I'd prefer them to add all these options in or instead spend the time improving the AI.

[alQamar]

It is like that CA seems not to like a lot of options in the "options" menu, but I think your idea is very fair, too. Thank you for the example you added from the Paradox game.

[Petroniu]

Apart from all the old features that were removed/or replaced by new ones, the one thing I really dislike about Rome 2 is the new way victory conditions are done. I have never played long campaigns in TW games. I get bored after a while, especially since it is always weird minor factions that destroy major empires and become empires themselves just because there is no difference of power between the major and the minor ones.

My point is that I miss short campaigns. I would always love to focus on parts of the map and play it there with a specific faction with its specific fighting style and against its traditional enemies. I like to replay history they way I like it. I would always love to play Carthage because I could focus on conquering Africa, Italy and Spain. And that is all! Or I would like to play the Greek City States and just take out Macedon, Thrace, Rome and some of Asia Minor. If I wanted big empires, I would go for the Seleucids or Macedon and try to rebuild Alexander's empire. If I wanted to fight barbarians I would play Rome and with Rome I could take it further to the civil wars.

In Rome 2 you cannot focus on campaigns on parts of the map. You always need to conquer a lot of the map and you with 1 faction you get to fight everyone and that spoils the diversity because you learn to fight everyone in one campaign. That, for me at least, kind of spoils replayability.

[alQamar]

Got that and I can understand that the victory conditions are indeed based for conquering and needs you to play the game in a very big scale. Will be listed in the OP later on.

[PeonKing]

I said I don't favor a '2 campaign' method, but that's not because I don't want there to be diversity. I think it was one of the older Civs, but there could be an added 'advanced options' menu, that is a series of options you can choose from to modify how the game plays based on your play style.

A good example would be transport ships as Baptistus brought up, you could make it even 3 options.

Current System: Auto-transport ship, no cost besides movement points
Cost System: You can still automatically make transports, but they cost additional upkeep.
Escort System: Transports require a Naval Escort.


Another few other applicable I could see is allowing morale to be 'turned off' so your armies will never retreat, allowing seasons on or off, multiple tpy(1 year, 4 seasons, 12 months), torches (obviously.) Instead of making a campaign where it all plays one way or all plays the other, you should be able to pick and choose. For example, I may want the extra diplomacy options, but not the garrison option, if everything was independently toggable, this wouldn't be a problem. Honestly a lot of these toggles could completely screw the balance (IE: Like turning morale off, but some people may want to play that way) so if you could pick and choose what you want, you wouldn't have to deal with stuff that could throw the balance to out of whack for you.

[LestaT]

For me, just add the short campaign option. I don't know why as Baktria I have to own Italy (I know you can have them as client/ally) ?

That said, in all my Total War games I never played the short campaign option

[wangrin]

I like the idea.
In flight simulators but also in Histwar, you have option allowing you to adapt the difficulty/reality level.

I think that Histwar is a good example.
Histwar is a battle simulator that allow to choose battle options to create a more or less "real" situation.
You can see this here :



0:39 to

Some options :

• order : deferred Y/N
• transmission of orders : instantaneous / delivery time
• interception of orders : Y/N
• Ammunitions : limited amount / unlimited
• Visibility : FoW (fog of war) / unlimited
• etc.