Questions before purchasing - Chasing Armies and Cheating AI

[Switz]

I am not a fan of pretty much everything after Rome 2. Have not tried WH though. I had plans to sit TOB out as well, but is it time to give TW a shot again?

For my personal reasons I was really disappointed with how TW went:
- Very demanding on PC
- Very long wait times for game start, turns and in/out of battles
- Having to chase Armies all over map even if you beat the army inside a city they are defending (migrating)
- March stances
- Confusing political system
- Campaign AI cheating like a mofo!!!


Sure, other areas too, but these have utterly turned me off from TW which is a shame, I used to live and breathe for these games, by far used to be my favorite games to play. I've put in 300 hours in Rome 2 and Attila...trying everything I could to force myself to like them. End up barely getting any sort of love for them during that time.

Can someone who has played TOB let me know which of my areas I did not like in the other games are still present in TOB for me so I can make a decision whether to buy or not. I've tried watching streamers so I know some things remain but it was hard to see wht all remained.

[The Noble Duke Of York]

I only played an hour last night but let me try an answer this.

I found it ran better than Attila on my old 3570k and gtx 970 (Ultra) and it looked beautiful.

Still a long time for game to start and turns to happen.

Armies still rout all over the place on the siege maps.

March stances are simplified. You can extend your units range and speed with upgrades to your general through adding more quartermaster's.

There is a family tree and nobles you have to keep happy and content or they rebel or join other factions. It's a similar set-up to Attila in politics.

The most annoying cheat given the AI in all previous games was they got an enormous pile of gold at the start of the game so after turn one a full stack army usually arrived in your territory. CA have taken that out with this game. "An army marches on it's stomach." You have to increase your food production to increase your troops and if you don't you cannot recruit. The AI is hampered by this as well so I didn't see a full stack of enemies immediately after the first turn (so annoying).

Watch the vids of Lionheartx on youtube.

[TriathNanEilean]

Watch the vids of Lionheartx on youtube.

I'll second that suggestion, and as a bonus his voice is pleasant to listen to!


I'm enjoying ToB more than I did Attila at the same one day stage. I've been playing the Rome 2 Divide et Impera (DeI) mod for the last 2 months after a few years away from Total War. Is ToB as good as DeI? Well, I prefer long battles so DeI scores there - but ToB isn't the worst TW game in that respect; my first full stacks on both sides battle took 23 mins according to the timer. Music good in ToB. UI not too bad but needs work e.g. to inspect characters' info you often need to click through multiple screens, back and forwards, so they could be linked together better. No agents is a plus for ToB IMHO.

Annoying things so far are: chasing down routing enemy units has the old bug where your chasing unit will kill a few, then stop. If you want to kill more you have to order them to attack again (and repeat this multiple times). The Empire:TW minor settlements are back and already I'm getting fed up with them. The idea is good but too often I'm chasing down the AI from settlement to settlement (or vice versa). Just now the last small stack of an almost destroyed enemy faction took 2 settlements of mine. While I was dealing with the enemy army an ally came past and retook the settlements and now I've lost them for good unless I back stab the ally. Really frustrating. I see modders have already produced one with standing garrisons in minor settlements - I do hope that improves things.

So would I recommend ToB? Jury still out. I'd say it's above average for a TW game at release (but that isn't a very high bar to reach).

[PointOfViewGun]

Annoying things so far are: chasing down routing enemy units has the old bug where your chasing unit will kill a few, then stop. If you want to kill more you have to order them to attack again (and repeat this multiple times).

Does this happen when the guard mode is off?

[zoner16]

Does this happen when the guard mode is off?

It's happened a couple times during sieges with guard mode off. Not during field battles though.

[Brusilov]

I played a campaign as Dublin yesterday and one point I was chasing an enemy army around the mountain range to the south of Dublin. We did a circle and a half around that mountain range before they ran off and got taken out by another enemy faction (one of my allies).

My laptop (with a Nvidia 650M so it's showing it's age) was struggling with loading battles. Once I'm in a battle it seems to run higher unit sizes than Warhammer II but it takes forever to load in a battle. I miss my desktop a lot (it's in storage along with most of my other toys).

TW games always cheat for the AI by the way. I have seen the AI field just mustered field armies and they gain replenishment while 'on the go'.

I think the thing to do is to keep a small army (max six units) around in you home territory for the 'raids'. Quite often they only consist of a new general (well, at times),

I presume the name for Dublin in-game is Norsk rther than Gaelic? I know license plaetes in Dublin have baile atha cliath on them.

[TriathNanEilean]

Does this happen when the guard mode is off?

Thanks, both for the clue to the problem and for pointing out my mistake so diplomatically.

I had ticked the game-wide-all-units options for disabling skirmish mode and enabling guard mode on first start-up on Thursday, then had forgotten I'd done that. I'm so used to guard-mode being off (especially for cavalry) that I never considered it. The chasing routed stragglers problem goes away for me when I turn off guard mode (in all battles so far at least).

If only the game-wide setting was limited to melee infantry that would be more useful.

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

I am not a fan of pretty much everything after Rome 2. Have not tried WH though. I had plans to sit TOB out as well, but is it time to give TW a shot again?

For my personal reasons I was really disappointed with how TW went:
- Very demanding on PC
- Very long wait times for game start, turns and in/out of battles

Well, Warscape (because it's still Warscape with a modified code) is an outdated engine. Plus it's badly written. It's heavily based on CPU's performance and rarely uses the our powerful GPUs.
That's why most people having issues and especially with Attila's version of Warscape, since it was an optimization disaster. One of the biggest issue was the animations (heavy and problematic) implementation and that's why CA removed most animations in Warhammer. As a result we have less stuttering and fewer hangs with.
Most people believe that a game's performance is only measured with fps, but that's not true as you could have a game running at 60fps and constantly dropping at 20. That's only one example of Warscape's issues. I could write a book about it, but that'll be quite boring for you.