Tag Archives: Total War

Games

A Game: Empire Total War

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In a way, Empire is what Creative Assembly’s Total War series has always been building towards. Epic doesn’t even begin to describe its scope. Three distinct theatres, a dizzying multitude of major and minor factions, a greatly expanded strategic layer involving tech trees and multiple towns in each region, the ability to play naval battles in real-time mode for the first time and last but far from least, a spiffy new graphics engine so detailed and shiny that you can see the guns and buttons of your each of your soldiers gleaming in full HDR bloom.

Empire covers a relatively thin slice of history, but what glorious history it is! The French and American Revolutions, the rise of gunpowder and the apogee of the Age of Sail, the Age of Enlightenment and the beginnings of the globalized world. No one is ever going to mistake the Total War series as a replacement for a real history textbook, but this is as close as you’re going to get in a mass market video game. Total War fans already know the drill, but here it is anyway for those who have managed to miss out on it for the past 10 years.

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Potholes on the Road to Independence

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In a moment of weakness, I decided that my next big game after finishing Far Cry 2 would be Empire: Total War. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved the Total War series ever since the first Medieval and I’m the guy who’d once wrote that I’d buy Total War set in just about any genre. Still, I have to admit that I start way more Total War campaigns than I actually get around to finishing and the standard formula might just be wearing a bit too thin for me. Plus, there’s the fact that the initial releases have always been buggy messes. I knew there was a good reason why I waited for the Gold Edition before buying Medieval 2.

Empire turned out to be far more of a mess than any of the previous releases. I’d had intermittent sound problems, multiple crashes to the desktop within a single play session and even out of memory errors. Some folks have reported corrupted savegames and campaigns that had to be abandoned due to irrecoverable crashes. Granted, the 30 March patch seems to have fixed most of these technical problems, but my first impressions have been irredeemably soured by all this.

Partly due to all the crashes, I’m still playing the “tutorial campaign” called the Road to Independence in which the player guides a fledgling America towards indepedence from the British Empire. One thing that has to be said is that the game is gorgeous. The naval battle portion in particular features ships so richly detailed it’s silly, because you’re unlikely to actually go in for such close-up views more than a handful of times. The strategic portion has been significantly revamped, apparently to make it play more like the Civilization games, a change that I have mixed feelings about and will go into more detail about later. As for the land battles, while it’s cool to see ranks of infantry firing guns at each other and seeing just how far your artillery can hit, the fact that all infantry can now fire missile weapons makes all of the factions a bit too similar to one another.

Anyway, I’m well on my way towards clearing the Brits out of North America completely and then we’ll see how much I like the real meat of the game, the Grand Campaign. Now, which nation should I play first?

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Games

Given up on the Americas

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Okay, I’ve officially given up on finishing the Americas campaign of the Kingdoms expansion for Medieval 2. Mainly because I’ve just discovered that as New Spain, you really have only one option when conquering a native city: exterminate them all. Sure, the game presents you with the additional options of either conquering the city (relatively) peacefully or looting it for all it’s worth, but if you actually choose any of those two options you’ll just end up with a huge city full of enraged native Americans that you’d need a full stack of troops to garrison just to keep the rioting under control.

Normally, having a large population should at least confer advantages in the form of a larger tax base, making a populous city a more valuable source of income. In this campaign, however, I haven’t been able to see any noticeable increase in revenue due to a larger population, which makes exterminating them all the only viable option. Since games are all about having multiple choices and options, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, a choice that is really no choice at all is a cardinal sin.

In my game, I’ve been mostly looting the cities I’ve captured, which has caused my offensive campaign to be bogged down by the need to allocate the majority of my troops to police duty. I could “cheat” by completely abandoning the cities to the rioters so that they rebel and then move back in with my troops to conquer them all over again, only this time choosing to kill everyone, but just thinking about playing that way just takes the wind out of my sails.

So I’m done with the Americas campaign. I might come back to the other campaigns in the expansion, but after this, it’s likely to be later rather than sooner. In the meantime, I have plenty of other games to play.

Games

Massacring natives for fun and profit in the New World

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Since I’ve bought the Medieval 2 Gold Edition which includes the Kingdoms expansion, I thought it’d be a waste if I didn’t play any of it at all. The expansion consists of four additional campaigns, each of which is actually a separate installation and executable. The campaigns are the Americas, covering the arrival of the Europeans at the Americas in the 16th century; the Britannia campaign, set in the 13th century during which various factions fought for control of the British Isles; the Crusades campaign covering the Third Crusade in the 12th century and the Teutonic campaign covering the struggle between Christian and pagan forces for control of what is now Germany.

I chose to play the Americas campaign first because it’s easily the one that’s most different from regular Medieval 2. Basically you can choose to either play as New Spain, representing the newly arrived Spanish forces, or one of the established nations in the Americas, mostly meaning Mayans or the Aztecs in the south or the Appacheans in the north. It’s pretty obvious that playing as New Spain is where most of the fun lies, what with the special mechanics and scripted events in place for that faction, so that’s what I chose.

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Games

A Game: Medieval 2

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I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Creative Assembly’s Total War series. On the love side of the equation, the basic formula of a turn-based strategic game coupled with real-time combat, unchanged since Shogun: Total War was released in 2000, is supremely satisfying. The combination of deep decision-making played out on the grand stage of history with a graphically rich and detailed tactical combat phase just scratches all the right strategy itches. At this point, I’d play total war anything. Robotech: Total War? Warhammer Fantasy: Total War? Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Total War? If they’ll make it I’ll buy it.

On the other hand, CA’s failure to update the interface for the strategic portion of the game is an endless source of frustration. It is wholly unacceptable that the Total War games still don’t have the basic tools to streamline gameplay, such as the ability to quickly check which units still have unused movement points, that the Civilization series has had since its inception. This means that actually playing through an epic campaign is unnecessarily daunting and time consuming. Medieval 2 continues this trend and actually adds to it by making the strategic portion more complex compared to previous games. This means that the latest game in the series is epic, beautiful and grand, but, boy, but does it take a long time to actually get through a campaign.

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Games

Racism and Nationalism in Medieval 2

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I’ve been playing Medieval 2 Total War for a while now. I’d passed on it when it was first released in late 2006 and only bought the Gold edition including the Kingdoms expansion earlier this year. Easily the most popular choice of nation when playing the Medieval games is England, partly due to a combination of cultural familiarity, its easily defensible starting location and the excellence of English longbowmen. I tried my first game with the Venetians who start out with a great navy but whose provinces are actually separated from one another but couldn’t make much progress. Venetians get hemmed in too much by their Italian cousins, the Milanese and the Sicilians, as well as the powerful Holy Roman Empire to the northwest and the Byzantine Empire to the east, so I ended up having to restart my game as the English in which I’m handily conquering the whole map.

One of my favourite things about this new version of Medieval are the pre-battle speeches that your generals make. The speeches made their debut in Creative Assembly’s previous game Rome Total War, but they’ve been greatly expanded here. Each major nation now has a different way of insulting each other and the personality traits of the general making the speech also influences what gets said. Check out the YouTube video I linked to for a great selection of these speeches. Playing as the English, my generals have called the French wine-sodden and arrogant, the Germans pox-ridden, the Sicilians sons of Satan and the Danish “scrofulous”, whatever that means. It’s awesome and doubly hilarious when a drunken or even outright insane general spouts off some utterly nonsensical stuff.

On a vaguely related note, here’s an Ebay listing for what must be the coolest auction ever. For the princely sum of least twenty five thousand British pounds, you can own a full size replica of a Roman siege catapult. It was built for a television show and now doesn’t fire, but it would be the perfect lawn ornament if you happen to live in a castle!