The Total War Community

[Fahnat]

You guys are amazing!

Your probably one of the best communities that exist out there; making so great mods that would put the actual creators that get paid to make this games to shame. It is a shame that they always try to restrict the community by not allow them to mess with the new games; probably thinking that it will ruin their future profit; but by doing it i think that those who like total war will start to dwindle to the point where total war will end. I can say with true honesty that i only play total war for the mods. Vanilla to me is terrible and for years that i don't play them.

[Baharr]

I'm always suspicious of this idea that companies stop or restrict modding out of greed or fretting over their bottom line.

The answer is often much simpler - as games get more complex (not necessarily in terms of gameplay, I'm talking more in terms of the codebase) it becomes more and more costly and time-consuming to expose the innards of the game in a readable, moddable format. Medieval I and Shogun I, for example, really did just use plain text files to read unit data, which accidentally made them easy to modify. Similar deal with Rome I and Medieval II - but once you move into Warscape, everything becomes drastically more complex, relying on interlocking tables and fancy internal databases. So while the guys (or probably, you know, The Guy) who coded the units in Shogun I only needed Notepad and some coffee, editing unit tables in Warscape games requires specialist tools that CA may not want to share with the world for free (because, say, the tools are corporate property and they don't want competitors pinching them) or they may not even be able to share them even if they wanted to (e.g. if they use a suite of tools that work together and some of them are third-party with contracts that forbid sharing them for free).

There's just a lot more happening under the hood. Shogun I fit on a CD-ROM. Newer TW games are routinely in the 20GB+ range; not all of that is nicer textures, you know.

Finally, compare CA for example with Paradox, who kept supporting mods as their engines and games got more complex. This is a huge endeavour for them; often a large chunk of a dev diary explaining the new features that will come with a paid expansion is dedicated to showing how they're exposing the new code to users in a readable/moddable way. It's clearly a lot of work for them and they even seem to have a guy/team dedicated to doing mostly that.

IMO the fact that the Warscape TW games are moddable at all shows that CA is still pretty committed to supporting modding.

Of course, it's a shame the new games aren't as "open" as the older games but I don't think this is attributable to malice.

[Wolf Priest]

I'll agree with Baharr, they hardly get more money without modding. I would not even play this game without EBII. Or HoI4 without Kaiserreich. Or R2:TW without Divide et Imperia. You get the picture.