Thread 2109986

It's not so bad, you retards.

what's so good about it?

>>2109986 (OP)
Who gives a FUCK about ancient egypt???

I still have no clue how to play this game.

>>2109986 (OP)
Prove it.

>>2109986 (OP)
It's not, but it came at the moment warhammer babies were malding about bad DLC and hiscucks would hate everything other than medieval 3 anyway.

>>2109991
>>2110036
stfu and go play it, mkay?

>>2109986 (OP)
I tried to like it but ultimately it's just boring

>>2109986 (OP)
>stat bonuses the game
>good
no, its more bad game design from nu-total war

>>2110019
Rush to t3
Fill your army with 5lthe highest tier shock infantry your gold/bronze income can manage, t2-3 archers, and the rest with whatever your t3 units are.
Rush to conquer food settlements, ignoring everything else
Use food to make more t3 armies. It's okay to go negative if you have a big stockpile
Eventually start taking bronze and gold settlements as well and replace shitter units with gold upkeep ones

Continue until you've painted the map.

>>2109991
Pharaoh has three elements that should be in every Total War game.

1. You can customize the general's bodyguard. Bow infantry, spear infantry, shock infantry, chariots etc. It's great being able to match your general to the rest of your army composition.

2. Custom victory objectives. Only complete the ones you want!

3. Resource system. Merges TW's traditional currency system with resource trading. Want to boom? You still disband your armies, but now you need to find a foreign state to trade all that extra food and bronze for wood and stone.

>>2110281
Based and Assyrian pilled.

>>2110284
>Resource system
I didnt find it all that engaging to be honest. Its just different types of currency. Just expand and give food to get whatever you need, didnt feel well implemented idk. Very basic. Still better than nothing but not excited by its implementation.

I tried to like it but I couldn't get past the terrible UI, and the embarrassing unit variety that makes the combat boring as shit. It's a shame cause the points >>2110284 brings up and Native Recruitment are all cool ideas hamstrung by being attached to one of the worst base games Total War has ever had

>>2109986 (OP)
>It's not so bad
Yeah but I don't have time for "not so bad" when there are good games to play.

>>2109986 (OP)
It's kind of better than Rome II, I'll give it that, but it's still not good at all and carries many shit design elements inherited from that game plus the awful collisions from Warhammer.
The Bronze Age is my favourite time period and let me tell you that game does a fucking awful job at being a Bronze Age game; it provides no context whatsoever to the time period as if it's expecting everyone to know who the fuck are any of these characters and factions when the average Total War player doesn't know much beyond the most surface level pop-history trivia, the aesthetic is also confused and flavourless and there's innacuracies everywhere. It might as well be a fantasy game without any of the things people play fantasy games for.
Also from the bugs, bad balance and half-baked boring mechanics, it's painfully obvious that it was just a low-budget Saga game masquerading as a complete title hastily made by people who have no passion for the time period who somehow deluded themselves into thinking making this game at all was a good idea at a time when the only thing the community wants is Medieval 3. As if we needed more proof that CA's management is grossly incompetent and out of touch.

>>2109986 (OP)
It's not good, either.

>>2110334
>Medieval 3
Don't forget Empire 2.

>>2110320
>>2110487
boohoo, every game needs to be good

>>2110520
they kinda do. when there are thousands of good games out there, why would i waste money on a mid game?

A couple things that ruin Dynasties for me:
The AI struggles to recruit more than 2 full army stacks, no matter how big it is or how many cheats it has. As soon as you can afford a 3rd stack you basically can't lose any 1v1 war. By the late-ish game where you can have 8-10 armies you will outnumber basically the whole map by yourself.

Basically every faction and every 'native' roster covers all the same bases, so no matter who you play or where you start, your army composition is almost always the same. Everyone can easily access good archers, cost-effective chaff, strong lineholders, powerful shock infantry etc. The difference between them become so minute that they basically don't matter and there's basically no reason to ever do anything except spam your most cost-effective shock inf and archers and just run over people abusing lethality. Shock infantry is basically cavalry from other TW games except they don't lose to spears or to anything else. Only a handful of native rosters have anything unique or noteworthy (like the ones with cavalry) so 90% of the time it doesn't feel like there's any reason to care about accessing a new region.

Food is the main limiter in the size of your army but the food upkeep of basic and elite units is basically the same. There's no benefit to your food economy in picking elite units or chaff units, and because gold/bronze are abundant and food is needed in colossal quantities, you'll pretty much always be more limited in your ability to recruit elite bronze/gold units by your food income than by your bronze/gold income.

The economy is just broken overall. There's no recurring expenses to Wood/Stone, which are abundant overall, so you basically just spend a lot earlygame to rush through your settlement development and then never have another use for it. You can buy all of the wood/stone that you need via trade so they're basically pointless.

>>2110550
Food feels like the only resource that matters most of the time, because you can just buy your bronze/gold using your huge surplus of wood/stone. You just need so much food income to expand the size of your army but once you have enough, you basically need nothing else and the game devolves into an autoresolve steamroll.

It's like the usual snowballing economy problems of total war, but if you took out the fact that you need to invest money in infrastructure to develop your economy (since you use a separate resource that might as well be free) so you just infinitely expand your income or accumulate a massive stockpile that lets you run a deficit forever. But even worse, since the value of stone/wood plummets for the player so quickly, you can just sell to buy food as soon as you're done building with it, so it and any other resource surplus just becomes food eventually anyways.

I think the whole economy is just completely unbalanced and brainless, and it just sort of devolves settlement development into "buy everything because it's basically free" and army development/expansion into "ignore everything but food, stack food, snowball"

>>2110568
yes. good breakdown.

aaaaaaaa

>>2109986 (OP)
Diplomacy and economy both feel good for once but I found the royal court system to be boring and repetitive. Don't really like how outposts work either.

Battles feel pretty good despite the lack of cavalry, but I'm a little bothered by the shift in map design. Battles used to take place on magnified sections of the campaign map, but now you see the same few maps over and over again.

>>2110334
>when the only thing the community wants is Medieval 3
>>2110060
>and hiscucks would hate everything other than medieval 3 anyway.

Wasn't thrones of Britannia basically a way to test the waters for medieval 3 and nobody liked it or played it?

>>2110986
it was meh with annoying parts, also only isles, who cares

>>2109986 (OP)
buy an ad

>>2110986
It's technically in the medieval period, but most people mean more high-late middle ages rather than early. You think vikings are popular enough to carry it but it seems it didn't manage either. It came after attila and charlie already. They also didn't market it as a mainline game but as the misguided Saga thing, they themselves never really figured out what it was supposed to mean and now it hags over the franchise. Now fanbase has a skewed expectations and will reject anything short of a global scale as a mainline title.
Anyway "real" med3 needs to have knights and crusades for audience to accept it.

>>2110986
>Wasn't thrones of Britannia basically a way to test the waters for medieval 3 and nobody liked it or played it?
CA learning from the Blizzard school of community relations I see
>players keep asking for X, so we gave them something that's vaguely similar to X but also we made it shit and boring on purpose, and they didn't like it, so we're never going to actually make X because they didn't earn it

>>2110986
ToB was literally an Attila dlc cut and repurposed as a full game because the devs got rugpulled by their horrendously incompetent leadership pulling the plug on Attila after a year when they had already paid to fund another dlc.
Saga was coined as a marketing term for ToB because it was a dlc-sized release coming as a standalone rather than attached to a full sized game.

They kept the term around as a tacit admission that even during CAs peak of financial success and labour pool size, they did not possess the ecumenical competence to juggle two full sized projects simultaneously and historical games were to remain completely shafted as long as Warhammer was selling.

>>2111083
Even Attila itself was derivative and it was sold as a standalone expansion at the time. It was a $40 game when rome 2 was $60. It was probably more comparable to what FotS was before they started retroactively pretending that was a saga title.
So CA has been flailing around not able to figure out their pricing tier structure for a while now.
The saga marketing they also flipped-flopped on, first it was supposed to be games with a more zoomed with a narrower time and geographic scope (why is FotS a saga if Shogun2 isn't), than it was experimental title, than something else before they finally dropped it because the term was poisoned and just started to mean low quality while at the same time creating unreasonable expectation of what a mainline game is.

>>2109986 (OP)
its god awful, ywnbaw

ToB is the most mechanically innovative TW game CA ever made (for better and for worse), and was the first game to try to get out from Rome II's shadow. Sadly only 3K has continued from where it left off, Pharaoh is still just a RII clone in the end. Although, I do think Pharaoh is better than Rome II.

>>2111240
Yeah, 3K was the first game in a long time that actually pushed the series forward a bit but CA would rather kill a game because their shitty DLC didn't sell than actually make good content that might be worth paying for. Even the nation of gacha whales didn't put up with the shit that warhammerfags do so now we'll have 40k and star wars games until end up time.

>>2110520
With how ridiculously inflated production costs and asking prices have gotten they'd better fucking be.

>>2110986
>a way to test the waters for medieval 3
CA has never made such statement. If it was, though, then they executed it in the worst possible way.

>>2111240
The only really innovative thing ToB did was the recruitment system, which had problems of its own. Medieval 2 is still the game with the most intuitive and balanced recruitment system in the series.
ToB still plays too much like RII, too, so I don't know what you mean by that it tried to leave that game's shadow. It's even built off of Atilla's engine. Their only attempt at moving on from Rome II would be Three Kingdoms, which has a slightly similar recruitment system to ToB, yes, but it also does a lot of other things differently.

Three Kingdoms is the best TW right now. And if we get a 3k2 it will be THE total war game.
Just imagine a Warring States Total War. The race to be the first emperor...

>>2111259
pandering to the Chinese is a double edged sword. If they like a game and the people making it, they're an infinite money printer. But if you piss them off, they'll swear curses on 7 generations of your family and dedicate their life to obliterating you

>>2111259
The funniest part is that the DLC did sell well despite CA's bizarre and abject refusal to capitalize on its success by making the DLC the players actually wanted.
Then it cratered because the community manager went on a feminist crusade against chinese modders for making the models pretty.

Hilarious shit.

>>2109986 (OP)
Dynasties is a chore to play just because of how buggy and broken it is
>recruitment slots in provinces constantly changing with no indicator to why
>income leaps up and down by thousands from turn to turn
>replenishment randomly disabled because "replenishment level too low" and then randomly fixes itself a few turn later
>set an ambush
>success rate: 100%
>enemy army walks to the edge of the circle and stops
>"YOUR ARMY HAS LEFT AMBUSH STANCE"
>enemy army engages and triggers a normal battle
The game is basically a beta but boldly abandoned in that state forever so whatever it potential it has will never be realized.

>>2111357
I doubt the bikini incident had anything to do with CA's financial decisions.
Community managers don't dictate business policies.

>>2111369
To be fair, about half of those complaints are probably not bugs but the game just being obtuse. The UI is shit and doesn't convey useful information well at all. Stuff like seasonal and province effects and administration burden is hidden in tiny corners of the screen for no reason and the game makes little to no effort to show you anything you'd probably like to know. It'd rather show you some soulless flavour text.
The game is definitely buggy on some aspects, though, but from what I noticed most of them are during battles, it's clear Pharaoh was a small budget title in spite of CA's insistence that it's a main entry in the series.

>>2111396
>>2111369
Total War games obfuscating information for no reason except "fucking the player over for no reason is le hardcore" has been a problem since Medieval 2 desu

>>2111425
>le hardcore
I don't even think it's that, Julian McKinlay's article on Rome II's development made it pretty clear that there's a lot of simply bad game designers working in high-level positions at CA.

>>2111388
I think you're having some trouble with this concept, anon.
The community manager offended the chinese community. The chinese community, offended, boycotted the DLCs. The next DLC released to dramatically lower sales. CA realized the ship had sailed and announced "The Future of Three Kingdoms."

The failure of 3k was a direct consequence of some minimum wage spokesperson running their mouth

>>2110520
Yes. Why would you play one that's not good?

>>2111041
>You think vikings are popular enough to carry it but it seems it didn't manage either
Redditors would've fallen over themselves to buy Viking: Total War

>>2111698
But that's literally what ToB was

>>2111718
wasn't called it tho is my point

>>2111633
Were there actually people saying that they were boycotting the DLC at all?
All the reviews just say that it's a bad, shallow mini campaign that also crashes a lot.

>>2111721
You're not wrong.
Imagine Napoleon TW being called "Thrones of Europe" or Rome being called "Kings of Europe". Nowhere near as marketable.

>>2111721
Changing the name alone wouldn't have made much of a difference. ToB is still a low-budget, watered down Atilla with a bad map and worse replayability and that was clear from the announcement trailer.

>>2111633
>The next DLC released to dramatically lower sales.
wasn't that one 8 princes though
no one cared about that shit

>>2111718
it honestly took me a few seconds to even remember that thrones of britannia was even a thing

>>2112253
>Changing the name alone wouldn't have made much of a difference.
actually delusional
the name is one of the single biggest impacts on your initial sales wave
>ToB is still a low-budget, watered down Atilla with a bad map and worse replayability
yes
>that was clear from the announcement trailer.
I don't think you realise how many normies don't watch that shit, and buy games based off the vibe the name and cover photo give them

>>2113219
Why would normies who don't normally buy Total War games ever give a flying fuck about the shitty vikings game over the Warhammer one that came out the previous year?

>>2113291
because vikings, dumbass
normies froth vikings

>>2110284
>Victory objectives
Who the fuck cares?

>>2113927
In the normie mindset, Dragons>Fantasy Vikings(i.e. Norsca)>>>>>>>>>Historical Vikings
Is it clear enough for you now, dumbass?

>>2110284
>Not the game tweaks
Shit like better attrition and optional upkeep shit go along way to making big battles and defenses better than aggressive expansion

>>2109986 (OP)
Yeah seems cool but unironically who wants a game with a bunch of half naked brown dudes running around shooting arrows at each other. Give me medieval III.

>>2123200
>who wants a game with a bunch of half naked brown dudes running around shooting arrows at each other
me

>>2109986 (OP)
This is everything bad about total war warhammer turned up to 11. Totally gamey and unfun.

It's all about stats and modifiers. No tactics, no cav, no artillery.
It's warhammer without magic.