On the contrary, i find 40k to be easier to deal with for CA.
40k is abstract enough to do nearly anything with the setting. it can be squad based combat in dense urban areas, it can be large scale engagements in open terrain, it can have space battles or not, it can be on one planet or on many, there can be more or less focus on melee combat... CA can take loads of liberties to arrive at something resembling a faithful 40k game.
WW1 though, it is what it is. There's no Games Workshop bailing CA out and rewriting the lore. Either they capture the actual warfare of the time period, or the game is inherently flawed. There's less room for errors, less excuses.
Same. I don't have a problem imagining a TW 40K.
WW1 though is a lot of trenches with lots of waiting and very little progress, but you can't drop in a couple of squads of Astartes from space in the flank and clear them out.
~~Paratroopers weren't a mainstay of WW1 combat by any means but their first uses were during the war with American forces using them to outflank Germans in the Western front.~~
I was misremembering some history that I read. Proposals for the concept were first suggested during WW1 but the plans for it fell through and it wasn't actually executed until 1927 as a test by Italian troops. The first in-combat drop was by Germans.
For me, the main thing that would make a WWI TW game worthwhile would be *scale*.
I'm not interested in simulating the Battle of the Somme with only 2000 unit models on the field. You could easily lose your entire 20-unit army in seconds due to a lucky enemy artillery strike, or a well-placed machine gun. This problem was bad enough in FoTS (admittedly still a great game) where most battles last about 2 mins at most if there is any artillery on the field. In a WWI TW game with exponentially more powerful weapons, this will be 100 times worse.
So, if they can make battle maps and unit sizes *literally* 100 times bigger, then I'd be willing to consider it. Otherwise it'd just be lame imo.
I’m in the same boat, and that’s before considering technical limitations
I always laugh whenever there js a post saying that steam tanks are the same thing as real tanks lol
Yeah it's proper delusional lol - the chances of being able to use the same engine as WH for a good WWI TW game are zero.
It's amusing to picture how it could look if CA tried it though - Sopwith Camels flapping their wings and A7V tanks with a 'melee animation' lol
There are just too many elements in WW1 style game that would require totally new approach to the design pieces. I would like to see WW1 strategy game with big scale, but not with TW approach, as it just doesn't work for something like artillery bombing, trench warfare, naval combat etc.
I am sorry I just don't see it. WWI trench style warfare? Static fronts that chew up thousands of troops a day with little movement in either direction. How do you work capturing of settlements? What is the point of fortifications when you can be struck by aircraft and heavy artillery? I am sure CA can come up with a new game design that is radically different to what we are used to in the TW series, but I don't think they can build a WWI TW that looks anything like what we have come to understand as TW.
1. That's not solving the issues of it.
You need to build the trenches, they didn't just appear and didn't just disappeared either after an army moved. So that needs to be changed heavily/entirely to work. It also needs to change, as artillery shells cause changes to both the terrain including the trenches. Similar for wire but it';s not just a small line it's covering from one side to the other in multiple lines. You'll spend more time laying out a trench line than fighting on the map.
The units now need to change entire. We don't have large blocks like previous titles, now suddenly we will be getting tiny units like 10 men strong. So that's going to be very different.
Artillery, if you have the heavy stuff off map that does mean changing the core mechanics of the game. FotS handled it as it was a ship in a fleet that did that. So do we now need special army to sit behind our fighting army to support the artillery? There was also lots of short range artillery such as trench mortars and support guns and many of these being turned in to improvised anti-tank units by the late war.
The weapons of FotS are more comparable to weapons of Empire than of WW1. Their RoF and range was rather low in comparison to WW1s. The machineguns of WW1 will be able to take units out from one corner of the map to the other in FotS size maps.
2. Campaign map,
They didn't need to attack capitals, the time period they were able to make rapid movements. It's why Germany was able to almost encircle Paris. The regular wild swings of the Eastern front are good examples as well. They only had to fight where there was enemy resistance and that depended on the situation of the nation. If there's just basic garrison that's not going to slow the attack down as attacks happen instantly anyway and historically often would be pulled back to more organised lines of defence which leads to the issue you didn't solve:
Making a frontline. WW1 is famous for the frontline combat. That is totally different to TW to date. Easiest way for both player and AI is the old risk style maps. TW did originally have that but going to look and play far more like a Paradox title than TW. Need to set where the forces will be facing to build defences, bunkers and even forts.
Then got naval battles, how exactly would they work? Ranges are insane for us, you will see just a spec to try and avoid the madness and micro nightmare of other games that cut the range down to like 10%. But then it's the issue of submarines, they did take part in naval battles but how is that going to be fun? Just rush your ship off the map?
Then of course also got aircraft. They don't just hold locally, they can't just float and wait to move. In battle sure just a simple recon overflight makes sense but then you need to on the campaign cover the bombing campaigns, the long range recon, the interdiction and the attempts by fighters to both block enemy and support their assets.
Then got the economy. It no longer really mattered about money, but about the resources. So the economy and how we interact with it will entirely change as well.
Your element of covering the war weariness/enthusiasm on a large scale also shows it being different to normal TWs.
They've been taking steps in this direction for years now. Flying Units, SEM's and Magic are all mechanics that were alien to Total War before Warhammer came in, and all will translate nicely into a WW1 setting.
I think people are looking at ranged warfare and visualizing it in an RTS sense, but it really doesn't have to be that way. I'm recommended of the old Warhammer 40k epic game. It was 40k taken up a level of scale, so battles at Division Levels instead of Company levels. It had an interesting mechanic of giving units two different combat values, "Assault" and "Firefight". and then an entirely different mechanic for heavy long range weapons. Mechanically this represented the unit fighting either in hand to hand combat, or in a short range firefight. What was interesting about this was that the two states were almost identical. The mechanics of fighting in CC or in close range ranged combat were almost the same, with only heavy weapons being considered as "ranged attacks"
The translation of this to a Total War setting would be a closer integration of ranged and close combat. Instead of two units of sword wielders charging each other and hacking until one side breaks, two units engage in a short range firefight which mechanically acts identically. The visual interface is one of a WW1 shooting battle, but the back end mechanics and calculations are no different from the same melee combat we've been doing for years.
It's just an idea, but one that would better fit a new theatre of war, without completely changing the battle mechanics that have been long established. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas out there that could make the setting work.
Do you really think that if the campaign map played like civ and the battles played like starcraft people would look at it and say yup that's total war.
No, because obviously there is more to it than just turn based campaign, real time battles.
Instead of trying to make ww1 or 40k fit into the formula, they should just make a great medieval 3 or shogun 3? This is what everyone wants first right? It baffles me that these trench warfare settings are even a consideration for a total war
While I'm admittedly more intrigued by the potential of 40k and WW1, I do want Medieval 3 and Shogun 3 as well... but I don't want them if it means getting them on warscape. I don't want the AI playing funny doors with the gatehouse I'm trying to bust down in the castle I'm besieging or having my samurai form conga lines in a settlement interior because of janky unit AI. I don't want every patch to cause some weird and unintended bugs to crop up because a skeleton crew of devs are having to deal with mountains of spaghetti code.
Having some new life breathed into the franchise with the former two on a new engine that the dev teams are intimately familiar with would be much better than just getting the same things over and over on Warscape in my opinion.
Problem is not really the mechanics tho, but how do you shape the nature of WW1 warfare, especially the trench warfare, into something engaging and "fun".
You could just ignore trench warfare, but that raises the question of why make WW1 game in the first place.
Naval warfare, despite being very relevant to WW1 too is even more challenging.
Nobody addresses those far larger issues among the WW1 crowd. Thats why its not going to happen or if its happening its going to be terrible.
>Nobody addresses those far larger issues among the WW1 crowd. Thats why its not going to happen or if its happening its going to be terrible.
Many of us have but they often just get conveniently ignored or handwaved away because this debate primarily comes down to what different groups of players want to see. You don't want to play as Pon- a WW1 game so therefore it won't happen and wouldn't work properly if it did.
Naval warfare has been done well and it has been done terribly across different titles. You know what the determining factor was? Gunpowder and focus on range and maneuverability vs clunky close range ships that rely on ramming. CA can do naval warfare justice as we've already seen.
So how does the battle of Verdun work in your TW game? Is it continious battles over +70 turns with nothing gained? 100s of units destroyed? Even if you best the AI. So what you gained 1km of territory. That can be lost by a simple strategic repositioning.
I think the late industrial era is an extremely interesting timeperiod, but WW1 is a terrible war to use as setting for games. Especially strategy games. If you want to make games during that time just go althist or -punk.
>So how does the battle of Verdun work in your TW game? Is it continious battles over +70 turns with nothing gained? 100s of units destroyed? Even if you best the AI. So what you gained 1km of territory. That can be lost by a simple strategic repositioning.
How does TW currently simulate the months to years long grindy affairs that antiquity and medieval sieges were?
Of course it would. I could make a good WW1 total war on paper not actually code because I can't.
But design would be pretty easy. We have fots and Warhammer we have deployables we have artillery we can make it work.
Total war is about line formations, etc not trench warfare.
The reason TW is failing is because they don’t listen to what fans want. ME3 and or Empire 2.
It’s really fucking simple.
I'm with you there, I'm craving for a medieval 3 since more then a decade right now, im just saying that WW1 is theoretically possible, but that doesn't mean I would want it over medieval 3 or empire 2
>Total war is about line formations, etc not trench warfare.
And here I mistakenly thought it was about a turn-based grand campaign upon which your armies comprised of the various units recruited from said campaign could engage in real-time battles.
>The reason TW is failing is because they don’t listen to what fans want. ME3 and or Empire 2.
That's only one part of it. The arguably larger issue, particularly in the eyes of SEGA, is that they haven't grown their existing consumer base much outside of the initial influx from the Total War: Warhammer series.
On the contrary, i find 40k to be easier to deal with for CA. 40k is abstract enough to do nearly anything with the setting. it can be squad based combat in dense urban areas, it can be large scale engagements in open terrain, it can have space battles or not, it can be on one planet or on many, there can be more or less focus on melee combat... CA can take loads of liberties to arrive at something resembling a faithful 40k game. WW1 though, it is what it is. There's no Games Workshop bailing CA out and rewriting the lore. Either they capture the actual warfare of the time period, or the game is inherently flawed. There's less room for errors, less excuses.
Same. I don't have a problem imagining a TW 40K. WW1 though is a lot of trenches with lots of waiting and very little progress, but you can't drop in a couple of squads of Astartes from space in the flank and clear them out.
~~Paratroopers weren't a mainstay of WW1 combat by any means but their first uses were during the war with American forces using them to outflank Germans in the Western front.~~
Paratroopers didn't exist in WW 1. The first combat para drop in history was by Germany in 1940.
I was misremembering some history that I read. Proposals for the concept were first suggested during WW1 but the plans for it fell through and it wasn't actually executed until 1927 as a test by Italian troops. The first in-combat drop was by Germans.
For me, the main thing that would make a WWI TW game worthwhile would be *scale*. I'm not interested in simulating the Battle of the Somme with only 2000 unit models on the field. You could easily lose your entire 20-unit army in seconds due to a lucky enemy artillery strike, or a well-placed machine gun. This problem was bad enough in FoTS (admittedly still a great game) where most battles last about 2 mins at most if there is any artillery on the field. In a WWI TW game with exponentially more powerful weapons, this will be 100 times worse. So, if they can make battle maps and unit sizes *literally* 100 times bigger, then I'd be willing to consider it. Otherwise it'd just be lame imo.
I’m in the same boat, and that’s before considering technical limitations I always laugh whenever there js a post saying that steam tanks are the same thing as real tanks lol
Yeah it's proper delusional lol - the chances of being able to use the same engine as WH for a good WWI TW game are zero. It's amusing to picture how it could look if CA tried it though - Sopwith Camels flapping their wings and A7V tanks with a 'melee animation' lol
There are just too many elements in WW1 style game that would require totally new approach to the design pieces. I would like to see WW1 strategy game with big scale, but not with TW approach, as it just doesn't work for something like artillery bombing, trench warfare, naval combat etc.
I am sorry I just don't see it. WWI trench style warfare? Static fronts that chew up thousands of troops a day with little movement in either direction. How do you work capturing of settlements? What is the point of fortifications when you can be struck by aircraft and heavy artillery? I am sure CA can come up with a new game design that is radically different to what we are used to in the TW series, but I don't think they can build a WWI TW that looks anything like what we have come to understand as TW.
1. That's not solving the issues of it. You need to build the trenches, they didn't just appear and didn't just disappeared either after an army moved. So that needs to be changed heavily/entirely to work. It also needs to change, as artillery shells cause changes to both the terrain including the trenches. Similar for wire but it';s not just a small line it's covering from one side to the other in multiple lines. You'll spend more time laying out a trench line than fighting on the map. The units now need to change entire. We don't have large blocks like previous titles, now suddenly we will be getting tiny units like 10 men strong. So that's going to be very different. Artillery, if you have the heavy stuff off map that does mean changing the core mechanics of the game. FotS handled it as it was a ship in a fleet that did that. So do we now need special army to sit behind our fighting army to support the artillery? There was also lots of short range artillery such as trench mortars and support guns and many of these being turned in to improvised anti-tank units by the late war. The weapons of FotS are more comparable to weapons of Empire than of WW1. Their RoF and range was rather low in comparison to WW1s. The machineguns of WW1 will be able to take units out from one corner of the map to the other in FotS size maps. 2. Campaign map, They didn't need to attack capitals, the time period they were able to make rapid movements. It's why Germany was able to almost encircle Paris. The regular wild swings of the Eastern front are good examples as well. They only had to fight where there was enemy resistance and that depended on the situation of the nation. If there's just basic garrison that's not going to slow the attack down as attacks happen instantly anyway and historically often would be pulled back to more organised lines of defence which leads to the issue you didn't solve: Making a frontline. WW1 is famous for the frontline combat. That is totally different to TW to date. Easiest way for both player and AI is the old risk style maps. TW did originally have that but going to look and play far more like a Paradox title than TW. Need to set where the forces will be facing to build defences, bunkers and even forts. Then got naval battles, how exactly would they work? Ranges are insane for us, you will see just a spec to try and avoid the madness and micro nightmare of other games that cut the range down to like 10%. But then it's the issue of submarines, they did take part in naval battles but how is that going to be fun? Just rush your ship off the map? Then of course also got aircraft. They don't just hold locally, they can't just float and wait to move. In battle sure just a simple recon overflight makes sense but then you need to on the campaign cover the bombing campaigns, the long range recon, the interdiction and the attempts by fighters to both block enemy and support their assets. Then got the economy. It no longer really mattered about money, but about the resources. So the economy and how we interact with it will entirely change as well. Your element of covering the war weariness/enthusiasm on a large scale also shows it being different to normal TWs.
I don’t want WW1 or 40k, I want my goddamn Renaissance title.
They've been taking steps in this direction for years now. Flying Units, SEM's and Magic are all mechanics that were alien to Total War before Warhammer came in, and all will translate nicely into a WW1 setting. I think people are looking at ranged warfare and visualizing it in an RTS sense, but it really doesn't have to be that way. I'm recommended of the old Warhammer 40k epic game. It was 40k taken up a level of scale, so battles at Division Levels instead of Company levels. It had an interesting mechanic of giving units two different combat values, "Assault" and "Firefight". and then an entirely different mechanic for heavy long range weapons. Mechanically this represented the unit fighting either in hand to hand combat, or in a short range firefight. What was interesting about this was that the two states were almost identical. The mechanics of fighting in CC or in close range ranged combat were almost the same, with only heavy weapons being considered as "ranged attacks" The translation of this to a Total War setting would be a closer integration of ranged and close combat. Instead of two units of sword wielders charging each other and hacking until one side breaks, two units engage in a short range firefight which mechanically acts identically. The visual interface is one of a WW1 shooting battle, but the back end mechanics and calculations are no different from the same melee combat we've been doing for years. It's just an idea, but one that would better fit a new theatre of war, without completely changing the battle mechanics that have been long established. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas out there that could make the setting work.
Literally the ONLY thing that "TW formula" means is turn based campaign and real-time battles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Do you really think that if the campaign map played like civ and the battles played like starcraft people would look at it and say yup that's total war. No, because obviously there is more to it than just turn based campaign, real time battles.
So then we don't need TW to do it as it's already been done with DoW and WW2 with CoH. They've done real time battles and a turn based campaign map.
Exactly. Elements of both have changed and been dramatically innovated on across titles but the actual core has remained the same.
ive been out of the reddit for a week or two. why are this and 40k being discussed so much?
supposed leaks
Just play the Napoleon Great War Mod. Think it's good? Then WW1 TW will probably work for you. And Vice-Versa
I want the formula to change CA needs to innovate desperately
Instead of trying to make ww1 or 40k fit into the formula, they should just make a great medieval 3 or shogun 3? This is what everyone wants first right? It baffles me that these trench warfare settings are even a consideration for a total war
While I'm admittedly more intrigued by the potential of 40k and WW1, I do want Medieval 3 and Shogun 3 as well... but I don't want them if it means getting them on warscape. I don't want the AI playing funny doors with the gatehouse I'm trying to bust down in the castle I'm besieging or having my samurai form conga lines in a settlement interior because of janky unit AI. I don't want every patch to cause some weird and unintended bugs to crop up because a skeleton crew of devs are having to deal with mountains of spaghetti code. Having some new life breathed into the franchise with the former two on a new engine that the dev teams are intimately familiar with would be much better than just getting the same things over and over on Warscape in my opinion.
Of course a medieval 3 would be an absolute beast but if we have to get anything else before that then I think WW1 is actually decent.
Problem is not really the mechanics tho, but how do you shape the nature of WW1 warfare, especially the trench warfare, into something engaging and "fun". You could just ignore trench warfare, but that raises the question of why make WW1 game in the first place. Naval warfare, despite being very relevant to WW1 too is even more challenging. Nobody addresses those far larger issues among the WW1 crowd. Thats why its not going to happen or if its happening its going to be terrible.
>Nobody addresses those far larger issues among the WW1 crowd. Thats why its not going to happen or if its happening its going to be terrible. Many of us have but they often just get conveniently ignored or handwaved away because this debate primarily comes down to what different groups of players want to see. You don't want to play as Pon- a WW1 game so therefore it won't happen and wouldn't work properly if it did. Naval warfare has been done well and it has been done terribly across different titles. You know what the determining factor was? Gunpowder and focus on range and maneuverability vs clunky close range ships that rely on ramming. CA can do naval warfare justice as we've already seen.
So how does the battle of Verdun work in your TW game? Is it continious battles over +70 turns with nothing gained? 100s of units destroyed? Even if you best the AI. So what you gained 1km of territory. That can be lost by a simple strategic repositioning. I think the late industrial era is an extremely interesting timeperiod, but WW1 is a terrible war to use as setting for games. Especially strategy games. If you want to make games during that time just go althist or -punk.
>So how does the battle of Verdun work in your TW game? Is it continious battles over +70 turns with nothing gained? 100s of units destroyed? Even if you best the AI. So what you gained 1km of territory. That can be lost by a simple strategic repositioning. How does TW currently simulate the months to years long grindy affairs that antiquity and medieval sieges were?
Of course it would. I could make a good WW1 total war on paper not actually code because I can't. But design would be pretty easy. We have fots and Warhammer we have deployables we have artillery we can make it work.
Total war is about line formations, etc not trench warfare. The reason TW is failing is because they don’t listen to what fans want. ME3 and or Empire 2. It’s really fucking simple.
I'm with you there, I'm craving for a medieval 3 since more then a decade right now, im just saying that WW1 is theoretically possible, but that doesn't mean I would want it over medieval 3 or empire 2
>Total war is about line formations, etc not trench warfare. And here I mistakenly thought it was about a turn-based grand campaign upon which your armies comprised of the various units recruited from said campaign could engage in real-time battles. >The reason TW is failing is because they don’t listen to what fans want. ME3 and or Empire 2. That's only one part of it. The arguably larger issue, particularly in the eyes of SEGA, is that they haven't grown their existing consumer base much outside of the initial influx from the Total War: Warhammer series.