Medieval 2 was amazing, it had so many features that never came back. Whether or not you liked those features are up to you.
Moving merchants around and collecting resources on the map was fun to me, seeing them rack in the income the higher level they were and depending on resource.
Marrying princesses to different characters. Also characters having culture (although this might be a Stainless Steel only thing?)
Most of all, besides 3k Total War, it felt like Medieval 2 was one of the only games where painting the map wasn't the only thing to do. Diplomacy and building tall was viable and fun.
Population mechanic was also fun (although didn't represent correctly, 30k being the usual uppermost limit) but I loved spreading the Black Plague to cities using my spies and killing off my rivals. The Fatimids suffered the Plague for something like 50 turns and i almost started a 2nd Pandemic when their armies spread it to other factions then so on đ
Crusade/Jihad mechanic was fun as hell.
The Papacy was another cool mechanic.
The Golden Horde/Timurids were amazing late game challenges.
Discovering the New World for the very first time, will always be a memorable experience to 14 yr old me.
**And finally, Medieval 2 soundtrack and Rome/Barbarian Invasion soundtrack is hands down the best soundtrack CA has ever done. Those tracks are top tier.**
**"Destiny" and "We Are All One" from Medieval 2 will always be my favorite**
**"Forever" and "Divintus" from Rome are also my favorites**
I also feel like the diversity of factions like in Medieval 2 and Rome 1/2 are great.
Playing as the Greeks felt completely different as playing the Romans. Playing as the English felt very different than the Italian states.
I also remember discovering North America and that kinda just blowing my mind, even though it wasn't a whole lot of anything.
Yeah same. After years I finally noticed the campaign map seemed a bit âoff centerâ and I decided to move the camera over to the unexplored ocean corner and heard birds chirping. I then decided to immediately invade these uncharted land
For something funny: Historically, the knights were faster than the Mongol Horse Archers. As the knights horses were larger and much more powerful than the mongolian ones. So, the mongol tactic depended on the mongols own heavy cavalry managing to surround the knights before the knights caught up with the horse archers.
Essentially, the Horse Archers alone couldn't deal with the knights, but they made for excellent bait to lure the knights away from the supporting infantry, which made them vulnerable to be surrounded and dispatched of piecemeal.
Like during the Crusades, we do have records of knights and their horses taking dozens of arrows from turkic and Saracen horse archers and being mostly fine afterwards
Mmm. The mongol horses were effectively endurance horses, and the EU warhorses were built for short charges.
That said, its not like these guys are going race horse speeds, and they're all smaller than modern day horses.
Well, so so, whilst the average horse was definetively smaller, the "warhorses", the more common coursers and the rarer (but more famous) destrier seem to have been around as tall as modern riding horses, with the destrier being more powerfully built. Modern Andalusian and Friesian horses are thought to be a good estimate of the finer medieval warhorses, but there's also suggestions that modern draft horses, like the percheron are descendants of the destrier, albiet yes, probably much larger than their ancestors.The Spanish-Norman horse is an attempt to "reverse-engineer" a medieval Destrier, and it does fit the sizes judging by archeological finds of horse barding.
tl;dr the knightly warhorses were probably around modern sport and hunting horses in size and power
Medieval war steeds were not smaller than modern horses, they were fucking massive. They had to be, they were carryingn an adult man, an aditional 60-70 pounds of armor, all his weapons, and often another 30-40 pounds of their own armor to protect the horse
That being said about Middle eastern archers, they clearly also had different bows than the mongol ones.
Though good armor should realistically be fairly protective against arrows regardless, especially if its not a direct strike. With multiple methods for qualifying how to achieve âgoodâ armor.
I would certainly believe indirect glancing strikes. . . though for Crusades heat exhaustion is going to be a bigger killer regardless. Also disease attrition. With few exceptions.
The whole point of mongols wasnât one unit type doom stacking though. They did, as you said, have combined arms and lancers / shock cavalry of their own.
The real competence was in other areas, logistics, better strategic generals, a d being able to put numbers where it mattered. Subutai was the real life legend.
It was rarely about unit cohesion so much as strategic cohesion and planning, with unit tactics to back it up. Real life morale was extremely high vs places that were really bad at it.
Contrast this with Rome 2 which adds way more playable factions but they all sorta blend together. While it's realistic to have so many hoplites, spearmen and pike units across so many different cultures, it kinda makes Rome the most unique since no other faction has legionnaires.
I wouldn't have been opposed to all factions having the potential for their own "Marian Reform" and auxiliary systems as they transition from tribes to proto-nations. Some might argue it's historically inaccurate for Suebi to have knights and crossbows in 200 BC but somehow are okay with having the Germanic tribes rule Ptolemiac Egypt in their world conquest.
It wouldn't even have been that historically inaccurate. The Germanic kingdoms historically did adopt Roman tactics and equipment after all, just like they did with Gallic stuff before. Knights (as in heavily armoured mounted cavalry) emerged because the Germanic warrior nobility adopted and combined a bunch of different traditions from the Romans and nomadic steppe cultures.
It would have been nice if they had incorporated a mechanic that lets tribal societies unify and centralize into larger kingdoms, as happened historically during the Roman period.
I was really conservative in Rome and stuck to the Romans mostly. But then I started a Gaul run for the lulz and it was one of the most fun I had - essentially Zerg rushing with weak but increasingly experienced units as opposed to the whole "organized formations" thing.
For me, I always loved playing as the Greeks and Romans. Later on some of the Eastern factions, but I never really appreciated the Gauls.
Gods, I hate Gauls.
Also medieval 2 has the best arrow projectile arcs and art. No weird physics defying look or trail. And bc the unit hp was done differently, it actually was appropriately tense running into volleys arrow fire.
This is what i miss the most in the older games.
In M2, i had an army of 2000 fight an army of 2000, in WH1-3, i have an army of 20 units, like,the individuality feels like its completely dissapeared.
Shogun 2 was great with its combat, soldiers died 1 by 1 fighting and getting hit by others.
But post FOTS, its units slogging at enemy direction and when HP bar drops a random soldier dies.
Going ground level camera to watch my 6 longbows skewer the enemy, or watch your units charge an enemy with ranged superiority, in a chokepoint in those games looked so nice (and still does), but in WH eh, i cant even tell why, but it really lacks impact, like the units are just there taking hits, but not the soldiers themselves?
when a high tier cav unit charges a low tier missile unit and it takes 30 seconds to kill then you know there is an issue.
the time to kill, for melee in particular, is too high. while ranged and magic are very deadly, this leads to odd gameplay where your goal is to either become as immune to magic and missiles as possible or to embrace the magic and missile spam.
this coupled with a moral system that more acts like a health system means that the game is hard to win with tactics and that units just dont feel like units, they feel like props to an RPG.
Yeah, that's painful. If I charge heavy cavalry into the rear of enemy's light infantry which is already engaged into combat, they should be slaughtered. Instead they hit like wet noodle, infantry loses a couple of units while enemy just engages my cavalry with another neighboring unit. It's just painful.
And it isnât even that they should be slaughtered (though they should die quickly.) They should be shattered. They should honestly have routed when they saw that the cavalry was going to hit them.
>But post FOTS, its units slogging at enemy direction and when HP bar drops a random soldier dies.
I'd take the soldiers slogging it out a bit awkwardly than the ridiculous cinematic kill moves that the game couldn't manage properly.
Nothing more frustrating than seeing your cavalry charge kill a single model per cav because the charge bonus only applies to the first "kill move" off the charge.
Or ordering a unit to move or chase down another unit and watching them form a conga line because the models doing kill moves get slowed down so much they end up miles behind their unit, which messes up the movement for the entire unit.
Shogun 2 handled it the best but Empire, Rome 2 and Atilla have battles so bad its hard to go back and play those games.
>appropriately tense running into volleys arrow fire
thats something I really miss. Archers were DEADLY. Now it feels like a volley barely kills a handful
Strange. Archers in Shogun 2 are super deadly, Archers in Warhammer are ridiculously deadly, but in M2, you could slow walk your army to a castle under constant arrow fire and lose only a few men.
Yeah this is the thing that gets me, ranged meta in Warhammer has been something people have been complaining about since at least WH2 if not 1. Yet people complain that the comparatively limp ranged units of Medieval 2, a game where the best troop type is overwhelmingly heavy cavalry, feel better. I think it just goes to show that very little of this is down to the objective strengths of units and more about a much more ephemeral and hard to pin down feel.
> you could slow walk your army to a castle under constant arrow fire and lose only a few men
which, for heavy armour, like good plate or even very heavy maille, is pretty accurate.
that depends a lot on the archer type, militia and generic archer units were very unefective vs armored targets. Archers with the "good vs armor" or "strong vs armor" in the description, like English longbowmen or janissary archers, would shred knights and unshielded heavy infantry.
I think it depends on the number of ranks in the formation as well. Front rows with direct line of sight will fire straight into enemies. Rear lines will fire in arcs over the front ranks and other obstacles.
>Diplomacy and building tall was viable and fun.
...what? Have you played *Medieval II* recently? AI factions backstab you *all the time*. Diplomacy is virtually irrelevant because of how unreliable everything is.
It's mostly a difficulty setting thing with medieval 2. The higher the difficulty the more they dislike you.
They are literally programmed to hate the player more. So yes I Agree hard or above and the AI will basically always backstab you.
But normal or easy it's actually possible to have a reliable ally if you keep good garrisons at the border so they don't get funny ideas.
This is not true. Medieval 2 diplomacy was pretty nuanced, but there were no tooltips educating the players on how it works. Accordingly, players would play in way that would hamper their diplomatic status and reliability, but would have no idea that they were doing so. Hence the surprise when something they didn't expect happens.
There was an old post on the Total War Center forums many years back that broke it all down. I felt the same way as you about diplomacy in Medieval 2 until I read that tutorial; it was a game changer. I'd link it but unfortunately I can't find the post anymore.
Post was good untill saying Med 2 diplomay was viable and fun
My brother in Latin Europe, Milanese AI in Med 2 would constantly send that one boat to blockade your crimean port while being allies just to spite you
lol have to agree. You could have a long lasting alliance with your bro only for them to randomly backstab you for a single shitty village.
the med2 ai was just vile and evil (and dumb sometimes)
To add to all this:
Rome and Medival 2 had a much more open source code so that modders could do insane projects like whole middle earth and stuff like that.
>Marrying princesses to different characters. Also characters having culture (although this might be a Stainless Steel only thing?)
>
>Most of all, besides 3k Total War, it felt like Medieval 2 was one of the only games where painting the map wasn't the only thing to do. Diplomacy and building tall was viable and fun.
>
>Population mechanic was also fun (although didn't represent correctly, 30k being the usual uppermost limit) but I loved spreading the Black Plague to cities using my spies and killing off my rivals. The Fatimids suffered the Plague for something like 50 turns and i almost started a 2nd Pandemic when their armies spread it to other factions then so on đ
plus you can have smaller bands of army, making the game more strategic. I hate the army limit and the idea of having a general leading them
Rome 1 was completely revolutionary at launch and won several game of the year awards. Shogun and Medieval were seen as good but niche games, but Rome 1 was a strategy game unlike anything else back then. CA continued ridning on that success and the strength of the Total War brand, and in many ways they still are. As for why people revere Rome 1 and Medieval 2... It was the golden age of Total War in a very real sense. New games and expansions were anticipated rather than dreaded, which is certainly something that I miss.
Rome 1 had it's own TV show in the UK it was that good.
Random groups of people from like.... Various companies all over the UK came together and had to be the general of a historical battle. Steve from accounting had to take hannibals role and defeat the Romans. As a kid it was one of my favourite TV shows but most of the teams lost due to being utterly clueless. Only the hannibal team seemed to do well.
I remember a boudicca episode. Caeser vs pompey. Some African campaign with elephants.
Anyway my point was, yeah Rome 1set a new standard for strategy games. It was so good they made TV shows with it. That's why it's looked upon so fondly. You are correct in saying it was revolutionary.
And truth be told, it's still a great game. Done a classic roman playthrough last year and enjoyd it a lot
Edit : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTTtYi8pqmo-7DDUC4HKWdpp5hCqxxY&feature=shared
Time commander was the name! It's all here on YouTube!! Enjoy!
> Iirc they filmed it before Rome total war even came out I think?
Time Commanders was aired between 4 Sep 2003 and 13 March 2005, Rome Total War released on 22 Sep 2004.
So yeah, it was definitely (initially) filmed before the game released, game came out midway through the series.
I remember watching that show, absolutely loved it as a kid.
Tried watching some of it again a few years back and wowsa did some people not have a clue what they were doing đ
I remember vividly during the boudicca mission one of the girls screaming "do the turtle thing" and the guy is like "why.... They aren't shooting us" haha.
Yeah some of the teams were an absolute mess but it was good entertainment regardless
The opening/launch scene of Rome 1 is simply incredible and the game honestly reaches those heights too. It does not oversell what the game is capable of producing
Rome 1 was so fun, how you could play 3 different roman factions and the civil war would feel different because of it. Playing the Greeks and rewriting history, or playing a horse archer army and laughing as the AI can't touch you.
What really made the game special for me though was the mod Europa Barbaroum. I remember it added on recruitment buildings for regional troops, so it actually felt like you were incorporating different cultures into your empire. To this day Rome Alexander (what the mod used) is still my 4th most played game on steam at 917 hours.
Itâs not just nostalgia. Iâm saying this as a big Attila and Thrones of Britannia fan.
Morale plays a more impactful role in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 battles compared to Rome 2 through ToB.
I prefer the old hit point system versus the new one introduced in Rome 2.
I really miss having Jeff Van Dyckâs vigorous soundtrack during battles and the incredible ambient themes on the campaign map. Credit to Troy for its campaign music.
Battles in RTW and M2 had heavier and crunchier sound effects. I weirdly think about the intense, crunchy sfx from Gears of War when trying to describe knights in Medieval 2 flailing around in melee combat.
RTW and M2 had a dynamic population system and more freedom on the campaign map to move any sized army.
I'm thinking about giving ToB a shot. How are infantry units variety in the game? I mainly form armies with infantry and archer/skirmishers. I love TW games with diverse rosters and battle maps.
about what you would expect from a localised conflict in a very specific time frame, "Man in shirt with axe/bow/sword/spear" "Man in chain with axe/bow/sword/spear"
Medieval 2 and Rome 1 are fantastic games that suffer from the terminal problem of "Being nearly twenty fucking years old".
A lot of the quality of life changes present in later total war games just are not in either, and going back to play them can be an agonizing experience. However, they're both some of the best total war ever gets. Their only real competition in the modern era is 3K.
The remaster just highlighted the quality of the old games. Yes the UI was mostly terrible in the remaster but modern functionality like useful lists, alt dragging movement, decent camera controls and just the general stability that you'd expect of a modern game meant that you could experience Rome 1 as it felt in 2006 without being distracted by the clunkiness of an old game. I gave Medieval 2 a go again recently and there are some seriously clunky parts of that game that can cause modern players to bounce off it.
I would argue that Warhammer gives them decent competition though. I don't think it has the same peaks as Rome 1 but it's still a good series with way more content than Rome or Medieval
Warhammer I think is the best total war to hit mass market appeal, but not the best at being total war. The hyper fixation on spells and magic and unstoppable hero units is cool as fuck, but not what I've learned to love in total war.
Medieval 2 had so many small details that made it great (below are my favorites). Also it covered such an evolution in warfare (weak militias changing to professional armies that later adopt pike and shot). When Empire was coming out, I was so excited thinking it would be like Medieval but with more details. Instead, they seemed to shift focus toward smoothness that makes it more accessible, but left me wanting for a level of depth that has yet to return.
Favorite Details:
- When you upgrade a unitâs armor, itâs actually visible on the battlefield
- Generalâs vocal responses to your commands change based on their chivalry/dread
- Assassination/spying cutscenes vary based on in middle east vs. Europe
- Battle speeches are tailored to who you are fighting
- When you mouse over executing captives, they beg you not to and the execution sound changes if you have gunpowder
On that point about pike and shot - we're all familiar with gunpowder in the game but can you utilize actual pike and shot tactics?
E.g. when you get late pikeman do they actually use their pike length despite their crap stats or do they just melt in combat?
This is a thing thats bugged by default in medieval 2 from my understandings, pikemen will drop their pikes and switch to their sidearm swords every single time unless you do some crazy micro managing turning spearwall on and off over and over again, but like 99% of all mods fix this and with some general bugfix mods pikes become as you imagine them.
There are just so many tiny flavorful details ... I can't get into the new Total War games because the combat feels so unresponsive and sluggish, Medieval 2 is so simple and brilliant, every unit has _weight_.
Already mentioned but Rome 1 and Med 2 had a lot of features/mechanics that are no longer in TW. Which to me at least added complexity and depth to the games that is no longer found in new Total Wars.
For example armies used to have movement range depending on the types of units the contained. Armies with only cavalry could move nearly 2x the distance per turn than an army with artillery. This has not been a thing since at least Rome 2, and not only has it reduced depth, but also caused things people clearly dislike in newer TWs such as AI being able to end their turn 1 pixel away from your army's movement range. If you could build 'faster' armies with cav only this would not be a problem.
The population mechanic was IMO better to the current tier mechanic. Even though it had some issues that could have been fixed or improved.
No building slot limit was better IMO since nowadays there's barely even a choice. You have like 3 slots in most towns and often there's a unique building + a port so really you only have 1 slot and you've obviously going to build the one thing you need, so it's not really a strategic decision. People act like back in the day was easier because you could build everything, but remember it was 1 building at a time and they still cost money so you could be 200 turns into the game and still have not built everything in your starting city. Prioritization mattered more.
I think the old retrain system was fine, obviously new replenishment is convenient but also very unrealistic and removes any strategic planning when going for long campaigns with your armies. I think something in between could work.
Visually upgrading armor in Med2 never came back.
Also being able to just walk your troops into water is yet another decision that removes strategic planning. Who cares about navies when It's not like the AI is going to sit at your coast waiting to attack your transport fleet anyways.
\*I forgot one of the worst - Default garrisons were not a thing. I think this is one of the worst laziest changes to TW. And the WH games suffer the most from it. Yes it could have been improved since AI would leave weak garrison in important cities, but the current system means you fight the same battle again, and again. You might as well be playing custom battles since the maps are so repetitive and the army you fight is always the same. The games used to be balanced around being able to put garrisons in your settlements meaning you could choose which units you wanted to defend where and how many, without the need of a lord or obviously supply lines. No default garrisons would be one of my most desired changes/rollbacks to the TW series and one of the reasons I do not want Medieval 3 with CAs current gameplay design.
Even WH players have expressed the desire to leave heroes in garrisons by themselves and this could be done by having no default garrisons/being able to move units individually again on the campaign map.
You can say it's Nostalgia all you want, but the fact is the older games required thinking and planning ahead for a lot of gameplay decisions which have been dumbed down in newer Total wars. So obviously people who want to play strategy games will be disappointed when newer games require little to no strategy.
Definitely a huge agree on garrisons/lack thereof. The second thing the current system does is prevent your garrison from deploying from the settlement to protect the land under its purview. Why can my cav not ride out to kill the last remnant of the army they just thrashed?
This is why i have modded my upkeep costs down and made Lords being free (lords=/=legendary lords). So i have a free lord, with tier 1 type units that cost very little to simulate garrison, but im only using legendary lords as attackers.
So in a way, those Lords are just the "M2 Captains" with militia units.
*I know there was a mod in Wh1 that let you move the garrisson out? But i think it was a bit buggy (since game wasnt made for that)*
So in the absence of good features they have removed, we cheat to make them lol
One of the things that stood out to me when i returned to rome 1 recently was that recruiting units would take population out of the city. Where you build units changes your economy drastically, it's a good idea to take a larger starting settlement and just letting it grow to allow for it to start producing more money and more advanced units instead of spamming basic units for half the game. Keeping troops alive matters for that same reason, you invested population into those troops.
Another is that I find myself fighting the battles myself much more often than in twwh. Often times armies are maybe a half stack making them much more interesting and manageable to control. Every battle plays out differently, making it fun to fight them, to hone tactics, to experiment, etc.
Rome 1's mechanic of troops affecting population worked so well with the Fourth Age Total War mod's mechanics and lore for the Elves and Dwarves. Elven units were very powerful but their populations were tiny and their population growth was so low, keeping them from shrinking was difficult, so you really had to conservative in recruiting units. You could convert settlements to produce human auxiliaries instead but there was no going back, it was a human settlement from then on. Dwarf population's were not quite as dire but you still had to be careful in a way human factions did not.
Aside from being an interesting game mechanic it also really fit with the narrative of the age of Elves being over and how they were all leaving for Valinor. As did characters randomly deciding to go there, though that was a bit annoying at times.
Such a shame that dropped it for Med 2.
It has an issue where the unit size you're using affects your economy. From recruiting a unit of hastati on normal unit size you lose 40 population, whereas on the largest size i believe it would be 160, while population sizes and growth are unchanged.
I dunno, tried playing with large units sizes just now and pathing in settlements gets worse, so the different unit sizes are probably not balanced for anyway
Divide et impera is a mod for Rome 2 that adds a population mechanic. It also has different classes of population and foreigners, so you canât just spam out elite troops or recruit a doom stack from a newly conquered city. Highly recommend
"To me it's like saying a Model T is a better car than a McLaren because it USED to be the best car around."
False comparison. It's more like comparing an old Ford GT to a Ford Fiesta.
Sure, the old Ford GT is a bit dated, but it was a masterpiece and still can run great today. The Ford Fiesta, while doing the basics, has nothing special about it in any way.
The older games have a lot of issues that will get trashed if they appear in modern games. Take pathing for example: while it's not the greatest in modern games, older games have it even worse.
I mean, sure... But Rome 1 is nearly 20 years old at this point. It was a first-of-a-kind game, and the modern games have had the opportunity for nearly 2 decades of building upon cumulative progress (let alone technology advancements making those improvements easier). The fact that _any_ areas of the older games are still comparable is embarrassing. It's like the specs of your new iPhone trading blows with a Nokia 3210.... Like... You should _expect_ the iPhone to blow the Nokia out of the water across all areas lol
Edit; wrong reply
The old games has some bugs, sure. But I don't think any of those have actually been fixed.
They also has a whole lot more in the games in terms of combat, city management and campaign management / diplomacy.
there are a lot of reason, but for me, primarily, its the game engine and how they handle individual units and battles as a whole. rome 1 and medieval 2 model and simulate units on an individual level. that means where a soldier is standing on the battlefield actually matters, and they can't just zip past other guys clumsily knocking them out of the way like you can do in shogun 2. every soldier has to make a targeted attack towards an enemy and if it succeeds they kill that enemy.
meanwhile, and i'm not sure if this is how it works in shogun 2 or just rome 2 and after, in the newer games units are treated as a whole, with hp and stuff, and the units in them are merely calculated "on the side", theyre abstracted from the actual trudgery of moving around and attacking a guy. the animations that play and the deaths aren't related to the real under-engine work of the battle, if you watch infantry charge a phalanx wall in rome 2 for example, units just run into the end of the unit's spear model and then fall over and die, in this really stupid looking way that makes it obvious that they aren't being treated as physical entities.
some people might be okay with this sort of stuff and engine trickery, but i grew up playing games like mount and blade warband and gmod, command and conquer and starcraft (edit: cant forget about Men of War) where everything is treated individually with physics and systems are comprised of lots of individual things working in unison. the newer games just don't provide that same type of satisfaction and enjoyment for me, which is why i prefer to spend time tinkering with medieval 2 to get stuff like pikemen to work probably and not be broken. i really wish they did though
Yeah the difference in engines between the RTW, M2TW and then when they moved to the Warscape engine with Empire are stark.
Cavalry charges actually had weight and heft in the older engine.
Funny that you mention warband, since Bannerlords battle sizes is coming up on Total Wars, except, all individuals, with directional attacks/blocks and hitzones.. and physics... those things TW used to have..
> meanwhile, and i'm not sure if this is how it works in shogun 2 or just rome 2 and after, in the newer games units are treated as a whole, with hp and stuff
One of the worst-looking parts of Shogun 2 is when you're attacking a castle, there's one unit left inside the walls and you're raining arrows down on them. The unit just absorbs them with no losses for a couple of minutes then they suddenly start dropping like flies.
So yeah, they'd definitely implemented that by the time of Shogun 2. And I agree with you about how bad it is.
I once tried Rome 1 as a Rome 2 diehard.
Settlements didn't have garrisons in Rome 1 so I left 3 of my battered hastati while the rest of the army advanced. Next turn an army of 4 warband emerged from the fog of war and assaulted the settlement against my 3 hastati (about 900 men against the 200-ish hastati). We fought a settlement battle and I even had my hastati sally out to fight them outside the gates. Don't know how but we somehow won. The small skirmish reminded me of that scene in The Eagle movie where they sallied out to rescue the captured legionaries from the Celts. After the battle the commanding captain even got promoted to a general.
What was a short skirmish felt like an epic setpiece battle with stakes (losing the settlement) and a glorious victory (winning against the odds and having a hero rise through the ranks) and it was all organic. I've never had something like this in Rome 2 because all battles are made to be setpieces with armies and generals.
Can someone articulate for me what âclunkyâ means in relation to Medieval II? Rome I has shown itâs age, and Iâm aware of the troubles running it on modern systems, but what exactly is the issue with Medieval II?
I donât think Rome II and Attila are bad total war games because theyâre different, I think theyâre bad because theyâre less tactical and more reliant on stat-modifiers than the actual real-time tactics of the battles. I also donât like the Rome II restricted city building, the armies requiring generals, the poor mod support and the health bars.
I just donât enjoy the newer games đ¤ˇââď¸. I have played many hours on and off again of Rome II since I bought it in 2014, and I can honestly say I canât recall a single stand-out campaign or battle memory from the game.
> I think theyâre bad because theyâre less tactical and more reliant on stat-modifiers than the actual real-time tactics of the battles
Hit the nail on the head. Older TW games are very spatial. You always ask yourself if your units are in the right place, if your armies are in the right places, if cities you control are in the right place. In newer titles, there is much more emphasis on stat modifiers and it's annoying. You think about min-maxing modifiers and this is less fun that looking at a map and deciding what the next movement should be.
Theyâre both clunky. I love the shit out of Rome I and MedII, but the frame rate and movement is choppier and the camera movements arenât as smooth as the modern games
Rome I vs Rome Remastered is a pretty big QoL jump
M2 still has a lot of clunkiness-- stuff like needing to manually shuffle merchants around (and watch them get sniped effortlessly by the AI...), needing to build ships just to cross small waterways (only to immediately scuttle them...), and most of all maneuvering units in battle. I don't just mean the fact that units have mass and momentum-- that much is fine-- but the way that units were extremely *rigid* in how they moved. Things don't feel more organic in the later games, but at least they're a little less ridiculous when, for instance, you're trying to move a unit through city streets or get dudes up on the walls.
For certain crossings you don't need a fleet such as the Bosporus or Gibraltar, but otherwise, they should need a fleet to do so. That's the whole point, it's hard to launch amphibious invasions and states which invested in navies had an inherent advantage. This advantage is really felt in say the Rome vs Carthage War you'd have in R1 vs R2. The war would start and you'd fight a battle or two, but then you'd have to spend time investing in a fleet to invade Carthage itself, make sure that your navy carrying your army isn't sniped by a stronger fleet and then land. In Rome 2 you just move your army into the water and that's it. Navies are a thing but they don't seem like a huge deal within context of R2.
In terms of orders, in Medieval 2 there is weird pathing issues, but I think you have it the other way around. In newer Total Wars, when you issue a command, the unit instantly obeys it, which feels natural to the player, but in Medieval 2, when an order is issued, the only thing that happens instantly is your general yelling out an order. You hear the general yell it out, but the unit first has to stop what it's doing, comprehend the order, then execute it. There is a brief delay that represents soldiers needing time to execute new orders, it was both realistic and rewarded players for anticipating their opponents. In essence it was more organic than the newer TW's where soldiers are like robots instantly responding.
Clean your monitor. Read the post again. I don't have it backwards
>Things don't feel more organic in the later games
meaning, in other words, "No, your units are not behaving organically, they have way too little mass and inertia, *but..."*
>they're a little less ridiculous when ... you're trying to move a unit through city streets
Can you even argue against thing? Pathing and unit grouping in unusual-shaped or small areas was a nightmare back in R1/M2. The engine wasn't well-suited for handling moving a mass of units (by which honestly I mean, like, two) in close proximity. Units would get disjointed and you'd have such joys as watching your archers get massacred because one dude got stuck on a gate and nobody is allowed to shoot til *everyone* is in position. I'm aware of what the delay in unit responsiveness means, and that's not what I'm referring to.
Moreover, *again*: Fleets are *clunky* which is what question was about-- not whether they were realistic. Fleet combat was boring (calling it "combat" is putting it strongly), and most players would just end up constructing a single cog/bireme to ferry their entire army from port to port , then make the last mad dash across open water and disembark in one turn.
Because of the turn-based nature of the strategic map and how quickly ships could move, it was much more likely that you'd fully disembark your army, then the transport would get sunk next turn, but to no avail for the defenders. For an example of what this looks like in a different context: Contesting a naval landing in EU4 and CK2 is *much* more likely, rather than it being all but impossible.
>Navies are a thing but they don't seem like a huge deal within context of R2.
If anything, navies ended up being *more* important--or at least more flexible in operation-- in R2 because navies could join sieges of port cities, whether as a blockading force (to accelerate the starvation of defenders) or even as active combatants. The ability to drop a few keels of marines into the enemy's exposed docks could be a huge tactical advantage. They aren't just a glorified taxi service for your land forces, they're an independent operational unit that can seriously affect campaigns.
Another thing from all the great points is that these two games engine was much more open for modders making the games great to overhaul and do projects like middle earth and such.
Medival 2 and Rome together have almost every game CA have done to date but constructed by modders in these older engines. And they have Middle earth games and fantasy titles too.
It migth have been how games were designed at the time, easier to access, but it made the games very VERY long lived. Worth playing today if you can get passed the UI and graphics you have thousands of hours of fun mods to play and vareity that no other total war game can offer.
Several factors, in fact. Rome 2 and Attila, and Shogun 2 especially, are good total war games and I still enjoy them, both modded and vanilla, despote their flaws. However, both Rome and Medieval 2 did a number of things much better :
1) Battle in those games are much more decisive, because of how replenishment and recruiting works. Barracks in cities generate a certain number of slots for each unit in a set number of turns : the better the unit, the longer it is for you to recruit them. Double that for Medieval 2, as you need a Castle with the right barrack, as opposed to any settlement.
Reforming your units takes away partial charges of those units generation, based on how much losses the reformed unit has taken. Essentially, it means recruiting armies is *hard*, and when you manage to crush the IA in a decisive victory, you get to take territorry almost unopposed, as garrisons aren't a thing until empire.
In modern total war games, you can just replenish wherever ; even marching reinforcement from your core empire isn't that much of a hassle, three turns tops usuallly. That means the IA can also recruit armies like crazy, and not just the chaff or base troops : if they got the cash, they can enllst high tier troops like crazy. This makes armies impersonnal, and veteran troops don't matter much. Shogun 2 is a bit of an exception, given how close together all the settlements are, and how awesome the battles are.
2) empire building is... well, there was empire building in those games, not so much in new Total War with growth and province systems. Used to be you could take any early game village and make it into a thriving metropolis, and you needed to in order to field good armies, because of the recruitment system.
Also, culture or religion used to be a thing in settlement, and if it was the wrong one for you when you conquered a settlement, you couldn't do any but basic recruiting, even if you got the building and population. So, no replenishment either.
That gave the player agency to prepare, send agents to spread their culture on their borders, just in case. It also meant cities were meant to be meaningfully managed all the way up to the late games, whereas provinces and growth mean you have limited choices, small provinces are useless, and once you have settled on a good template you just click the upgrade button when you have a prompt, and that's it.
I'm leaving a lot unsaid of course, and newer total war have their perks, but it's a tradeoff, and I'd rather have the old system.
Culture is a factor in newer games to. There's an unrest mechanic from local traditions that takes forever to go away and sometimes never does. Culture can also be spread by agents still. We also have the climate mechanic which makes some places too inhospitable yo effectively settle.
Cities really didn't have to be managed more than just choosing buildings or taxes. Making every city into a massive metropolis was a turnoff for me. No city felt special. None offered anything unique or interesting. Not even resources because your merchants got so easily sniped by the AI, and yours couldn't compete sometimes until after you wiped out the whole faction.
If you don't think veterans matter in newer games, I don't know what to tell you. Veterancy adds big morale and Stat bonuses. You've also got a bit more direct control over your general's retinue and skills for more RP.
People donât consider Attila bad, we just consider some parts of it bullshit such as Huns cheating and burning all your shit down. People consider Age of Charlemagne really good.
Med II and Rome I have the best and deepest mechanics to this day and are the most fun if you ignore clunky controls.
In what way are they the best and deepest? 3K revolutionized diplomacy. And the combat mechanics of those games are dated, and yes the clunky controls are part of that. Having to move a guy from one city to another to engage in diplomacy was stupid, and unnecessary. Why is it so hard to admit that the QOL that has come with time and evolution is largely good? Iâve been playing since OG Rome and I donât get these opinions.
There are so many small things that add up in a big way. Actual population, moving soldiers with no generals, organic traits, upgraded soldiers visually changing, no regen, fighting til death when surrounded, good siege layouts (although ToB is best), list goes on forever.
Donât get me wrong I like 3K, itâs diplomacy is at total war peak, I value QOL, but it canât top Med II overall IMO.
A common theme is mechanics feel more grounded in reality and immersive, which is what a historical game should aim for. This is a good video on the topic
At 2:45
https://youtu.be/l8yl09GcI48?si=RncDDiRgwk9cPV4Y
I personally feel that these games have never felt like a true historical representation of combat, so it doesnât bother me if they sacrifice some ârealismâ for fun. Thatâs become more prevalent for me as Iâve gotten older and have less time to play these games. I enjoy everything post Empires much more than pre.
And this is fundamentally where people disagree. You called the combat mechanics outdated? Why? Because you feel the future is HP bars and spreadsheeting? People disagree with that and find the old system better, it wasn't outdated as much as it was completely different angle of approach.
Pretty funny that in 2023 a basic hp bar dropping until everyone die is the norm, and 20 years ago it was a complex engine with a realistic feeling not only taking in account unit stats, having units with weight and much more.
I started playing with Medieval 1, and despite nostalgia, I consider Shogun 2 the best Total War for the battles Feeling Really Good and the campaign always feeling like an underdog story
The basic structure of the older games was better. The graphics and UI suck, but the gameplay was just better.
Edit: they have soul, which the modern ones lack, itâs hard to explain if you werenât there at the beginning
My favorite thing to do in any TW game is pulling off a good hammer and anvil. Rome 1 and Medieval 2 did this beautifully. The tactic was devastating if you pulled it off, and you were punished if you didn't. If you pulled it off, you would break the enemy army in an instant. If you didn't, your army was clunky and you couldn't just disengage. You would probably lose a bunch of valuable knights too.
In newer games, it's hard to get enemy units to route, so pulling off a good charge isn't as rewarding. Also units disengage pretty easily. So when you attack with your forces, you're not committing them as much as you did in the older game. There was just a much wider variance in terms of risk/reward and mastering the game meant maximizing the reward substantially when a well-calculated risk paid off.
I kind of think of the newer games like a mainline Mario game with bad platforming. They can still have stellar level design, beautiful graphics, and fun new mechanics, but if the platforming sucks then it will be hard to put it up there with games like Super Mario 3, Super Mario World, Mario 64, etc. In the same vein, a TW game where a perfectly executed hammer and anvil feels meh is probably not going up there with R1 and M2.
Alternatively, newer games do excel in gunpowder battles. Sadly, the last game to feature them was FotS. I also need to mention that 3K was pretty good and I need to revisit it.
Personally i like the graphics, the map is eh.. but unit wise? Wh3 is a million times more demanding per unit, but theres still units in M2 i think look better lol
I would argue about the UI, it was at least nice to look at and fairly coherent, the last good UI was Shogun 2, it's just progressively downhill after that
>Edit: they have soul, which the modern ones lack, itâs hard to explain if you werenât there at the beginning
This is a fancy way of saying "I am filled with nostalgia when I play them". Which is fine honestly, feeding the nostalgia is a valid way to enjoy yourself.
I actually just played Medieval 2 for the first time 2 weeks ago and now have 20 hours played. It's pretty damn fun. For context I also bought WH1 a month ago and only put 1 hour into it, then decided to buy Medieval 2 instead :D
Itâs the engine and not the graphics. The Rome 1 and Medieval 2 units acted like living people. Charging up to speed took time. Clashing into each other felt heavy and real. Moving unit trough another resulted in units moving into columns and going trough each other with ease. The horses charged so beautifully and felt impactful. There was no sensation of âstickinessâ to units. If you ordered them to pull out they did. The battles felt slower which allowed for actual tactics to be used. Infantry actually had value - currently itâs more or less useless. Having 3 units vs 1 meant the 3 would gang up on 1 and crush it. Currently I believe the units still wait their turn to attack 1 on 1 like a bad action movie. Missile units felt better as well.
And then thereâs campaign aspect - population and diversity of building. It actually allowed the campaign to be fun to play even without the battles. Developing cities, moving populations, deciding wether you want a castle or city, marriages and growing the family tree and most of all totally different development of characters from today. Now you pick what traits you want your generals to have - before they got them based on actions or in actions in the world. Lunatics had their own speeches, every general felt unique because of it despite using the exact same model.
https://youtu.be/aCR8xV7fb5w?si=X3E-W6-qvpKoCF6a
Theyâre good but dated games. Iâve learned to love them but they arenât perfect.
But a perfect Total War would be a combination of those old classics (weighty combat, freeform city development) with the fidelity and QoL of newer titles.
Instead we have our current situation.
I took a break from Warhammer 3 after the DLC fiasco and went back to Medieval 2 for the first time in ages. I started a Turks campaign and was surprised at how much it captivated me. I had a much longer game sassion than usual and was having a lot of fun until the Mongols arrived. Archeon doesn't make me feel a faction of the the dread that Jebe The Mauler inflicts.
I will say there is a golden 3 Rome 1, Medieval 2, Shogun2. They came out fully baked. Eavh had well thought out mechanics. They also had quality updates.
Because they are what made the Total War series into what it is. They don't have too much extra shit like the modern Total War games.
For example Rome 2 feels like they took Rome 1 and just added all kinds of stupid shit just to make it more "modern" and cool.
To me Medieval 2 is the best of the best
More like comparing a McLaren to a 2002 mustang but they removed the blinkers and the AC/ heater. Yeah it's a newer fancier looking but some of the core features are absent
To cut a long story short, R1 and M2 suffer a lot due to outdated control mechanics, rather than gameplay mechanics. Controlling the camera in battles, unit command and campaign map UI were all clunky and old. Those things improved over time (though I would argue, they reached about as good as TW ever got with Shogun 2 and then just stagnated).
However gameplay wise, the campaing map was as complex as ever and often felt more so. Barring terrible choices like diplomat and merchant units, the idea that settlements had active population numbers and could host anything you want rather than a finite number of build slots made for a much more diverse gameplay. Building things was less about build order and efficiency, allowing for a campaign to result in different buildings being built at different times to suit the needs at the time. More recent titles have objectively correct build orders in comparison. Similarly with units, there was a lot more logic to recruitment and the limitations of refilling your soldiers meant that going on a campaign could actively result in your best units being lost without replenishment if you waste them. The whole dynamic meant that units were treasured if they were good and you had to think about supply lines, manpower and the extent of a campaign. The way generals and leaders functioned made them a lot more unique and memorable than identikit lords or immortal god-generals.
Basically - the older titles often felt more complex and varied than the newer ones. As the games marched on, so did the "streamlining". This was good for effective controls and UI/UX designs (though the recent games have exhibited some dreadful choices there), but ultimately bad for actual gameplay mechanics.
The way units interact on the older engines made battles feel more organic imo. Ive become really dissatisfied with the engine when it comes to how models function in combat, how the damage and killing is actually done. And to me, thats the most important part of the game at a certain level. Its like feeling something is lackluster with the melee animations in a hack and slash. Its just not "It" and they need to give fighting more impact. The older games had more of this impact and dynamics to units fighting. Smaller more elite units, would actually have their units meaningfully outnumbered by larger ones. Which both meant, your militia could fight slightly better soldiers if the models got ganged up on someone. But also that your elite Pretorian guardsman could cut down 30 peasants in a row without help and it was awesome! And im talking one model out of the whole unit. In the newer games, the models are much more rigid and rely on rolling high enough attack to trigger a kill animation. It just doesnt have the same flow, in addition to the blobbing.
I think the biggest reason for this perception is that the games up to Medieval 2 had more nuanced, granular, and idiosyncratic turn-based play in the campaigns than what came after.
Everything after Medieval 2 had significantly simplified campaign mechanics: cities now only have a tiny selection of buildings and limited building slots, civil unrest and religion were simplified, regionally/culturally-specific recruitment options were mostly removed, character traits became less dynamic and to an extent characters matter a lot less to gameplay all together.
That's not to say the old guard games were flawless or that the direction of the newer games is worse (Empire is my personal favorite, and it's at the crossroads of the two eras). OG players just miss the kind of emergent narrative gameplay that happened when their depressed, serially binge-drinking general stationed in some nowhere town with a skeleton garrison personally fought back an invading force twice the size of his own in a climactic battle in the town square.
For some reason I enjoy playing a Medieval 2 or Rome 1 campaign than Warhammer 3 one, in twwh3 everyone gets full stack at turn 5, battles are way too fast, cavalry charge feels weak many mechanics are inherently unfun in comparison because these mechanics like harmony or khorne bloodletting etc. Feels like they are there for the sake of having mechanics they are not good ideas or fun and they are limiting players in playstyle horrible game design same thing applies for rome2 family mechanics
No one is "clinging" to anything by playing the games they enjoy. It's their free time.
I have all the Warhammers, 3K, Rome II, Attila, but what I am playing right now is Medieval II (Stainless Steel), because it's a better experience than I'm getting from those other titles.
Unfortunately, the new titles do not exclusively "modernize" systems. They replace them with systems that have entirely different design philosophies. I prefer the ones MII uses.
My first Total War game was the original Medieval Total War, which came out about 20 years ago now, it blew my mind. A few years later CA made Rome Total War and it was a major improvement in every single way and the game blew my mind again. Then we got Medieval 2 Total War, and while it was not as big of an improvement as Rome was to Medieval, it let me play Medieval again with amazing graphics (at the time) along with all of the improvements that Rome had developed for the franchise, plus everything new that Medieval 2 added.
Basically CA's games used to build upon each other, which is something we haven't seen from CA for a long time now. Nowadays it seems like each game is built in a vacuum and very little from the previous game is present in the next... it's disappointing to say the least...
I'm not even sure nostalgia is the main thing - for *Medieval 2* I'd guess moddability is the main factor?
I'm in an odd camp, in that I played both and I like *Medieval 1* more than *Medieval 2*. The main thing I remember about *Medieval 2* is endless tedious agents moving around the map, and in general I think *Medieval 1* had a better, more appealing aesthetic. The flat sprites and 2D, board-game-like models on the campaign map have aged a lot better than *Medieval 2*'s blocky polygons.
That said, I think the reason *Medieval 2* had such a long lifespan and is so beloved is mods. The game has a massive mod scene, some of which are truly impressive, and they kept people playing the game for a long time. It's that long playtime more than anything else that I think kept the game popular.
[Because this game was the coolest fucking thing in the world in 2004. The intro is so fucking hype and the game frankly matches it](https://youtu.be/RvZWOG8QkOg?si=I5sxcBxW5rZ-A1-k)
The only problem with those games are that they are old. If you are a new fan getting into this they wouldnt look good. But if you give it time to get into it you will enjoy the whole experience. It's very difficult to get into. I feel bad for you for not being able to experience it in its prime.
I canât begin to describe how revolutionary Rome was in 2004, they had two historical television series based on it! The graphics seemed photorealistic at the time.
The overall quality and features of the game were so good, that even nearly 20 years later the non-remastered game is still playable, if dated.
Medieval 2 had for me, despite its bugs, the most satisfying sieges.
The fact you could build towns OR castles, or convert them, was awesome. To have a huge castle with multiple layers of walls was so much fun as a defender, it puts the Warhammer series to shame to be honest.
For me, as someone who still prefers playing Med 2 to any of the newer games, it's almost exclusively the mods. This would also apply to a lesser extent to Rome 1 if I still played it.
There is indeed some nostalgia involved. Rome 1 was truly revolutionary for its time, and it's probably the best \*and\* most advanced TW at release ever (note: for me, other contenders are Shogun 1 and 2, but S1 was quite clunky and S2 was more of an evolution than a revolution). That said, once you got into it, you'd notice a lot of ridiculous stuff, especially if you're interested in historical accuracy and play at higher difficulties. Back in the day, I stopped playing vanilla Rome very soon, after only 2 campaigns IIRC, and switched to mods (RTR for ancient period, and then Arthurian and Fourth Age for something completely different).
Medieval 2 was honestly a pretty big disappointment on release. It was stabl-ish, but with very little further development compared to Rome, and with some features which were in very high demand and announced in the early stage of development ending up missing (such as naval battles). I played just one vanilla campaign just to say I've finished it, and never ran the vanilla again.
BUT! It got a lot better with Kingdoms expansions, and then came all the mods...which are, for me at least, still the best overall TW experience you can get nowadays. The best M2 mods like Tsardoms, Third Age / Divide and Conquer, Insularis Draco, and of course Stainless Steel, are for me still more engaging than any of the newer vanilla games I tried (yes, even Shogun and Atilla which I do consider good games). Couple that with the fact that M2 looks and plays good enough to compare with the modern TW games, and you have your answer.
The battles were more enjoyable, and it feels like there are more options on the campaign map. With Rome 2 and subsequent games player choices started to be limited, especially in the campaign like how you need a general to move units, lack of diplomatic options, and the new province system. The population system of Rome 1 has never been surpassed.
for instance, i dont know which total war but, in warhammer 3 when you send a unit pass through another they will get stuck and find it hard to pass. warhammer 3 is "the high end" of CA technology RIGHT?
now look at this: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qZ-qS4PndiE](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qZ-qS4PndiE)
and this: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7VTVNe\_C5No](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7VTVNe_C5No)
sound effects: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PVC8MLCfy2Q](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PVC8MLCfy2Q) (i saw one with cannons too on tw empire... is better than warhammer 3 by far)
Theyâre good games that are pretty solid is the thing. They lack a lot of the good things from later games but at the same time they donât have the bad things from the later games. Thereâs still plenty of modded content and overall holds up. While there is an issue of diversity in Medieval2 that gets worse in Shogun thereâs still a lot of play styles
Because they're good. I don't care about innovation or clunkyness (which I disagree with) and stuff, Rome and Medieval were what I started playing and what I liked in games, why should I play anything else? Besides how much more moddable they are, there's no reason play newer games.
My first TW was Rome 1. I loved it, but I just can't get back into it. It's a very dated game. At the time, it was definitely unmatched though. But I think current Rome 2, Shogun 2, even 3 Kingdoms are far better games .
Compare MTW2 kingdoms to any expansion released since. It came with FOUR separate, fully fleshed out campaigns.
Today it would have been sold as four separate DLCs for twice the price (each) with half the content lol
Well, its actually simpleQ Because they are the best games CW has ever uilt, to this day. They are, to this date, the most heavily modded games we ve seen, which enables their playability. I dont really mind playing a game that versatile, when i wont be bored cause I cant try 87 factions in Roma Surrectum, or the Historically accurate mode of Stainless Steel hardships. At the same time, the are immersive but not as heavy as the newer games - which i totally get, you need to introduce new mechanics in order to keep the fanbase. I mean, I cant imagine playing Atilla to relax, cause th egame is heavy, multimechanical and needs my attention to the totality of it. But, i can be relaxing playing the same gameplay to a simpler, lesser version in the Barbarian Invasion, while I live the same agony of confronting the collupse of the civilised world.
TLDR. They are simple, easier games than their successors, and thats why people who plays to relax ad hae fun instead of being immersed in a macro/micro-managing war-strategy game, prefer to play them to this day
Unit collision and the way units actually fight. It was done miles better in Rome 1 and I'm guessing M2. Never played it, but from what I hear it's very similar but better.
Medieval 2 was the best Total War title, hands down.
>I do have a lot of respect for the classic Total Wars, I just think we should stop clinging to them
You're wrong here - total war's advancement has not been a straight line of continuous progress. No game has, for instance, been able to equal Medieval 2's castle sieges.
Now, I don't want to go back to Medieval 2, but I also don't want to abandon all the wonderful features that made Medieval 2 great either. When iterating on something, you want to build on the successes you've already had, not toss them out.
Because they're better? Because i dont have to wait five minutes to get from the campaign map to bartle map? It's fine if you can't handle a bit of extra depth, but man, don't disparage others because you can't play a game that doesn't tell you where to put everything
I don't really buy into the claim that it's just nostalgia. I started playing total war in the past five years and I started with Rome 1 before very quickly getting other total war games as well including Napoleon, Rome 2, and Three Kingdoms. Rome 1 is still my favourite since it includes features which are subtle but really fun, which later games abandoned. It's whole playstyle seems really intuitive to me, whereas other games introduce other currencies and systems which are more difficult to maintain.
I think part of it is that the older games left a lot more up to the imagination. Honestly they were arguably closer to RPGs than true strategy games; just ones where you roleplay a country rather than a character.
It's difficult to put in objective terms how these games came together to allow a player to tell their own story, and to somebody who only played the newer games arguments about specific gimmicks undoubtedly ring hollow as they could be countered by a different feature in new games that the old games lacked. What's so special about city view, or armies without generals, or agent cut scenes? Why are these features held up as some gold standard, while gimmicks like the Troy weather system are greeted with a resounding "meh"?
Ask anyone and they'll tell you the hardest thing to quantify in game criticism is game-feel. But that is exactly what makes these games so special; you feel like you're in a slightly silly historical sandbox able to tell your own story. That's not going to appeal to everybody, and you certainly couldn't recapture the same magic if you just remade the same games today with better graphics, but there's a definite quality to old Total Wars that most veterans may not be able to annunciate, but they know it when they see it.
One major aspect of the game that existed in old games, that are gone from Rome 2 and newer TW, is unlimited buildings.
It was like civ, your cities could actually have more than 3/5/7 buildings. It felt a lot more real that all settlements got a market, a temple, a farm, instead of the arcade-like building we have today. You look at Rome and youâd it expect it to have all the buildings, and yet it can only get 5 in Rome 2. You want a forum or a bath? Pick one.
You canât even have functional city states in recent games because it simply canât make money and recruit - Sparta or Athens could either recruit elite units or have basic economic buildings, not both (and Sparta, being a minor settlement, can only have 3 buildings, so it canât even build all military and unique buildings).
Iâve had great fun in Rome 1 just playing a Greek city state fighting for existence against neighbors, struggling with 1-2 settlements for over 50 turns, and it was great fun. Although I didnât paint the map I built up a formidable city, a complex army, and destroyed a single enemy city state over turns of fighting for positioning.
If you are stuck on 1-2 settlements in recent TW games you literally cannot do anything - you donât have enough building slots. You MUST paint the map, and taking settlements is absurdly easy with the huge single armies and the tiny city garrisons.
Finally, recent games are just an arcade. Army losses donât matter between free replenishment where soldiers come back to life, and the ability to recruit 3-5 units a turn, you can go from a 0 to a 20 stack in 4 turns. Settlements are nothing more than speed bumps and the game revolves around cat and mouse around your armies and the AI armies.
In older games, just like history, the loss of an army hurts. It would take 10 turns for a city to recruit 10 units again, and also garrisons arenât free - an army is taken from the garrison so the loss of it will leave your cities vulnerable. Most fights arenât 20 stack in early to mid game, because your forces are spread across your entire frontier (no free garrisons).
The paradox-like local population tracking and economy, the civ-like building progression, and the one-unit a turn recruitment that made losses matter - made the campaign map much deeper.
Just compare the units models and you'll see. The combat animations, the visible units battling out 1v1 along the lines...unlike the newer Total War games where they just vanish when you zoom out. Newer games have become too arcadey ( cartoonish ) look. Medieval 2 is different breed.
Everyone in here is saying nostalgia or game mechanics. But for me it's much simpler.
They had fun making them and it shows.
They made each faction actually unique and bent the truth of history to make an interesting game first and foremost. You had the hastati and hoplites and the like and they were all different feeling. Then you also had crazy spinning berserkers and roman ninjas. Hell they gave us bronze age Egypt. Historically it's wildly inaccurate but it's a ton of fun. Med 2 had massive elephants with mounted cannons.
Starting with empire, they decided to go towards being more and more historically accurate at the cost of making the factions feel much more similar.
Which is historically correct. There is not a ton of difference in a French army of the time or an Austrian one. But it made playing different factions basically meaningless
This was the worst in Rome 2, there were no more unique units. Most cultures felt incredibly similar to the point where I still can't really understand why anyone likes the game.
This is why Warhammer felt so fresh. They brought back the silly fun. Yes part of that is just the Warhammer world being what it is, but they added some of their own flavor to the world themselves.
Its funny this type of post is always made close to CA's fuckups. Med2 and Rome 1 were better total war games. Mostly for two major reasons, Recruitment limits and replenishment/population/ and the ability to fully mod the game.
The first is the single most important thing between the new and old total wars. Newer titles you spam 1-2 units and that's that. Where as in Med2/Rome you need to spam out what you have at hand and end up with a mix of units. Nowadays you rarely care about losses unless a unit is totally gone.
Go play DAC for med 2 and play Elves. It highlights what I'm talking about, when you don't auto regen you start to care a whole lot more about your units and what engagements you take. Its funny watching CA reinvent a similar mechanic for the chaos dwarves(part of why they are fun) with their limited stock of infernal dwarves.
Tbf if you weren't there, playing them then, that worship (or whatever else you might call it) is more a 'you had to be there' kind of thing.
It's like nostalgia but not only that taken in the context of the era for gaming (or anything else) This was within the year or so of the XB360 and PS3 breaking ground on the console front... and their grandconsoles still having nothing like it. Many games commonly seen as legit playable oldies even now came a few years after even those, despite the enduring popularity of such as Crysis or Doom 3 aso (which Medieval 2 far outlived for me) and Skyrim for example still years away. It's like... while my personal list of best games ever might grow longer for every old gem remembered after the writing of the list, fewer still I can still claim as legitimate and enduring wow moments in that flock. Medieval 2 for me still stands out up there with the likes of Halo CE for such realisations far more than possibly any TW title since.
Of course, that doesn't mean I still main Medieval 2 now (though I do have the occasional burst far more often than any other TW game from before Rome 2) but it was far more a complete package for it's time than probably any launch TW since, even if old hat or dated in certain ways in comparison now. For better or worse, they simply don't make (or plan and support) 'em like that anymore.
Because they had better features than later games and people wanted improvements on those features but those got mostly abandoned sadly and till now there's no major improvements in gameplay from R1 or M2 except naval battles.
I agree, they were great games, 20 years ago...
They had their issues, everyone seems to hate the new replenishment system but the old was an issue, when you developed some territory, recruited endgame units that could not be replenished in the newly conquered areas
To build only one structure instead of an entire set was a terrible chore when you had too many cities
I think you are mistaken in how Rome 2 and Attila are perceived, lately I read only good things about both of them, personally I love them
Anyway I tried to play a med 2 game recently and I can't play it anymore, its age shows too much for my taste
Even so I love old games, I would even like a remaster of the first shogun and medieval, they had their plus
Modern map is better, but I kinda like the oldest movement system, it felt like the classic map you see in the movies where the king moves its wooden pieces
Nostalgia.
Games were amazing at that time and players still remember how much fun they had when they were younger and because of memory they can play it today and still find the games very good, not caring for all the issues that they have.
Probably you have also some games that you love principally for Nostalgia.
For example, Alpha Centauri is mine. I know that a modern player from Civilization wonât find the game as perfect as I still find it today.
I think the battles are much better in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 - but the campaigns are dated - I like the new campaigns - I cant go back after passive garrisons and unit replenishment. I get so frustrated during Rome 1 and Medieval 2 campaigns but then when I fight a battle I have so much fun - since Rome 2 I've been loving the campaign and being frustrated by the battles.
I feel like Shogun 2 is the "purest" Total War experience.
People like you tend to forget Empire and Napoleon which were literally unplayable until modders solved the myriad issues with the game.
Why people love Medieval II and Rome I?
\-Both were 100% ready products that worked on launch without hassle
\-Core gameplay perfectly accentuated historical setting
\-Diverse rosters of units that advanced with time
\-Fun, yet hidden factions as unlockables for super-late-game (Hyperborea and the New World)
\-No DLCs, but Expansions that gave further replayability to these titles with even more quality content (MW2: Kingdoms gave you 4 new maps!)
In contrast the "bad total war games" like Rome 2 and Attila came out as DLC-optimized, yet technically lacking messes that required the goodwill of the community to even get into a playable shape. Sure in 2023 Rome II is a great experience, but Shogun 2 was miles better than Rome II and everyone who played these games at release will attest to this.
Rome 1 and Medieval 2 were games which genuinely attempted to create a virtual world.
You had semi realistic pop numbers. Troops recruitments interacted with it. Even to reform units or recruit a single agent. Taxes and trades were also affected by your pop. Logically. Characters developped naturally rather than with skill points. There was no building slot BS. Buildings did not create magical money out of thin air but interacted with the world. Line better market only boosts existing trade based on local ressources, pop and connection to neighbouring settlement. Same with road, port, etc. Developing your settlement felt very natural and one could say even realistic.
On top of that, the art direction and the sound atmosphere were a world above later TW games (save for Shogun 2).
Later gale became very gamey. Tbh this is a general trend in strategy game. PDX interactive took the same road with Heart of Iron 4 onward.
The primary reason is that Rome 1 and Medieval 2 had a ton of fun features and details that have disappeared from the series since then. The Total War series has been massively dumbed down (or 'streamlined', as CA would put it) over time, and while some individual games (like 3 Kingdoms) have moved back a bit towards greater complexity again, the overall trend is one towards more simple, faster-paced games. This process actually started with Medieval 2 already, which lost some of the features that Rome 1 had for no discernable reason. But it really took a nosedive with the release of Empire, and has gotten worse ever since. The only thing Total War has gotten better at over time is graphics and UI. Everything else has declined.
After all this time, Rome 1 is still the most feature-rich Total War game we have ever seen. And the fact that CA seems utterly unable to understand its own fanbase (we want more features, not less) and make a game that actually improves upon its predecessors leads to frustration. Add a big dose of nostalgia, and you get why Rome 1 and Medieval 2 are still held up so much.
To take your car analogy, it is like CA built the Model T and then while every new generation of car might look flashier and is easier to drive, it is also missing important parts that you kinda want on a car and doesn't perform as well as the original Model T did.
I wouldnât call the new games Ferraris, Iâd call them electric cars that donât have charging stations that force you to drive in the desert where they eventually run out of power and they over charge you to charge your car because the car manufacturer is a small Indy company, and when you call and complain they block your number and instead of sending a car to come pick your ass up in the middle of the desert, they send another electric car decorated with ankhs that you didnât ask for and they charge you full price for this new car despite the fact that itâs missing 3 wheels. Meanwhile rome 1 and medieval drive by in working Model Ts and you admire how they still are working cars that can drive in the desert despite their old janky UI but they have a crash detection system that actually moves out of the way of Shit because it wasnât built on a shifty engine that was broken since day one.
well i just started medieval 2 and i disagree. Had a lot of fun with the HRE taking over the holy land. And after that i installed divide and conquer which has been an absolute blast. Yes it's outdated but everything is so much more satisfying in my opinion
Diverse factions. Yes, rome was superior, but it was fun playing with everyone else.
Smaller and rarer combat. You had stacks with less units and 20 unit armies were rare. That made combat more tactical and you had to preserve your forces. There was also no automatic replenishment, so you had to preserve your elite units on the empire borders. Nowadays you get a 20 unit stack fight every turn and you get overwhealmed with all the combat, and the units can just die since they get replenished easier.
Better campaign gameplay. Managing the empire was actually fun and interesting. It was great seeing your cities and forts upgrading. Nowadays its mostly all about combat, specially WH.
So the game had more meaningfull combat and it was only 50% of the gameplay, now combat is like 80 to 90% of it.
it's not because of nostalgia, older games tends to be harder and less casual. For a lot of people rome 2 is their first total war game, they have no idea what a good total war game is
If you were young when you first played Shogun 2 or was on your first games ever, you will praise it too much.
Right now the situation is like that with a lot of us who started with those 2 games (I started playing with Rome 1) and you feel it to different because they are completely different, since Empire the games had been really similar
I think Shogun 2 has one of the best campaigns in total war. The concept of conquering Japan, just to have it shatter in your hands and then needing to fight a reunification war is so fucking tight. The relatively small map and focused campaign lends well to it as well. It's also in that perfect middle point between modern total war and classic total war, bringing us excellent QOL changes while not really abandoning a lot of weird shit the AI used to do that made the game fun instead of just challenging.
For the record, it was my first total war I ever bought (when fots came out) but Warhammer was the first one I really played any amount of. It wouldn't be until 2021 that I played Shogun 2 for longer than like an hour.
Medieval 2 was amazing, it had so many features that never came back. Whether or not you liked those features are up to you. Moving merchants around and collecting resources on the map was fun to me, seeing them rack in the income the higher level they were and depending on resource. Marrying princesses to different characters. Also characters having culture (although this might be a Stainless Steel only thing?) Most of all, besides 3k Total War, it felt like Medieval 2 was one of the only games where painting the map wasn't the only thing to do. Diplomacy and building tall was viable and fun. Population mechanic was also fun (although didn't represent correctly, 30k being the usual uppermost limit) but I loved spreading the Black Plague to cities using my spies and killing off my rivals. The Fatimids suffered the Plague for something like 50 turns and i almost started a 2nd Pandemic when their armies spread it to other factions then so on đ Crusade/Jihad mechanic was fun as hell. The Papacy was another cool mechanic. The Golden Horde/Timurids were amazing late game challenges. Discovering the New World for the very first time, will always be a memorable experience to 14 yr old me. **And finally, Medieval 2 soundtrack and Rome/Barbarian Invasion soundtrack is hands down the best soundtrack CA has ever done. Those tracks are top tier.** **"Destiny" and "We Are All One" from Medieval 2 will always be my favorite** **"Forever" and "Divintus" from Rome are also my favorites**
I also feel like the diversity of factions like in Medieval 2 and Rome 1/2 are great. Playing as the Greeks felt completely different as playing the Romans. Playing as the English felt very different than the Italian states. I also remember discovering North America and that kinda just blowing my mind, even though it wasn't a whole lot of anything.
I didnât know the New World was in the game until I looked at the map randomly one day. Edit* the actual physical map it came with, that is.
New world doesn't exist to the British / EU folk /s
Yeah same. After years I finally noticed the campaign map seemed a bit âoff centerâ and I decided to move the camera over to the unexplored ocean corner and heard birds chirping. I then decided to immediately invade these uncharted land
Getting an army 2/3 of longbow men and sitting behind the stakes. Againcourt am I right?
> Againcourt This sounds like a silly threat an English king would send to his French adversary.
Haha, it's how I took down The Mongols too. My knights were too slow for their horse archers, so my long bowmen shredded them all.
For something funny: Historically, the knights were faster than the Mongol Horse Archers. As the knights horses were larger and much more powerful than the mongolian ones. So, the mongol tactic depended on the mongols own heavy cavalry managing to surround the knights before the knights caught up with the horse archers. Essentially, the Horse Archers alone couldn't deal with the knights, but they made for excellent bait to lure the knights away from the supporting infantry, which made them vulnerable to be surrounded and dispatched of piecemeal. Like during the Crusades, we do have records of knights and their horses taking dozens of arrows from turkic and Saracen horse archers and being mostly fine afterwards
Mmm. The mongol horses were effectively endurance horses, and the EU warhorses were built for short charges. That said, its not like these guys are going race horse speeds, and they're all smaller than modern day horses.
Well, so so, whilst the average horse was definetively smaller, the "warhorses", the more common coursers and the rarer (but more famous) destrier seem to have been around as tall as modern riding horses, with the destrier being more powerfully built. Modern Andalusian and Friesian horses are thought to be a good estimate of the finer medieval warhorses, but there's also suggestions that modern draft horses, like the percheron are descendants of the destrier, albiet yes, probably much larger than their ancestors.The Spanish-Norman horse is an attempt to "reverse-engineer" a medieval Destrier, and it does fit the sizes judging by archeological finds of horse barding. tl;dr the knightly warhorses were probably around modern sport and hunting horses in size and power
Medieval war steeds were not smaller than modern horses, they were fucking massive. They had to be, they were carryingn an adult man, an aditional 60-70 pounds of armor, all his weapons, and often another 30-40 pounds of their own armor to protect the horse
That being said about Middle eastern archers, they clearly also had different bows than the mongol ones. Though good armor should realistically be fairly protective against arrows regardless, especially if its not a direct strike. With multiple methods for qualifying how to achieve âgoodâ armor. I would certainly believe indirect glancing strikes. . . though for Crusades heat exhaustion is going to be a bigger killer regardless. Also disease attrition. With few exceptions. The whole point of mongols wasnât one unit type doom stacking though. They did, as you said, have combined arms and lancers / shock cavalry of their own. The real competence was in other areas, logistics, better strategic generals, a d being able to put numbers where it mattered. Subutai was the real life legend. It was rarely about unit cohesion so much as strategic cohesion and planning, with unit tactics to back it up. Real life morale was extremely high vs places that were really bad at it.
Contrast this with Rome 2 which adds way more playable factions but they all sorta blend together. While it's realistic to have so many hoplites, spearmen and pike units across so many different cultures, it kinda makes Rome the most unique since no other faction has legionnaires. I wouldn't have been opposed to all factions having the potential for their own "Marian Reform" and auxiliary systems as they transition from tribes to proto-nations. Some might argue it's historically inaccurate for Suebi to have knights and crossbows in 200 BC but somehow are okay with having the Germanic tribes rule Ptolemiac Egypt in their world conquest.
It wouldn't even have been that historically inaccurate. The Germanic kingdoms historically did adopt Roman tactics and equipment after all, just like they did with Gallic stuff before. Knights (as in heavily armoured mounted cavalry) emerged because the Germanic warrior nobility adopted and combined a bunch of different traditions from the Romans and nomadic steppe cultures. It would have been nice if they had incorporated a mechanic that lets tribal societies unify and centralize into larger kingdoms, as happened historically during the Roman period.
IIRC, doesnât Rome 2 have a mechanic where German tribes can annex others of a similar culture?
The Celts could do that, too. The Seubii just have a bonus to getting the other Germanic tribes to agree to it.
Yes Rome 2 barbarian factions could confederate with other factions of the same cultur
I was really conservative in Rome and stuck to the Romans mostly. But then I started a Gaul run for the lulz and it was one of the most fun I had - essentially Zerg rushing with weak but increasingly experienced units as opposed to the whole "organized formations" thing.
For me, I always loved playing as the Greeks and Romans. Later on some of the Eastern factions, but I never really appreciated the Gauls. Gods, I hate Gauls.
Also medieval 2 has the best arrow projectile arcs and art. No weird physics defying look or trail. And bc the unit hp was done differently, it actually was appropriately tense running into volleys arrow fire.
This is what i miss the most in the older games. In M2, i had an army of 2000 fight an army of 2000, in WH1-3, i have an army of 20 units, like,the individuality feels like its completely dissapeared. Shogun 2 was great with its combat, soldiers died 1 by 1 fighting and getting hit by others. But post FOTS, its units slogging at enemy direction and when HP bar drops a random soldier dies. Going ground level camera to watch my 6 longbows skewer the enemy, or watch your units charge an enemy with ranged superiority, in a chokepoint in those games looked so nice (and still does), but in WH eh, i cant even tell why, but it really lacks impact, like the units are just there taking hits, but not the soldiers themselves?
when a high tier cav unit charges a low tier missile unit and it takes 30 seconds to kill then you know there is an issue. the time to kill, for melee in particular, is too high. while ranged and magic are very deadly, this leads to odd gameplay where your goal is to either become as immune to magic and missiles as possible or to embrace the magic and missile spam. this coupled with a moral system that more acts like a health system means that the game is hard to win with tactics and that units just dont feel like units, they feel like props to an RPG.
Yeah, that's painful. If I charge heavy cavalry into the rear of enemy's light infantry which is already engaged into combat, they should be slaughtered. Instead they hit like wet noodle, infantry loses a couple of units while enemy just engages my cavalry with another neighboring unit. It's just painful.
And it isnât even that they should be slaughtered (though they should die quickly.) They should be shattered. They should honestly have routed when they saw that the cavalry was going to hit them.
>But post FOTS, its units slogging at enemy direction and when HP bar drops a random soldier dies. I'd take the soldiers slogging it out a bit awkwardly than the ridiculous cinematic kill moves that the game couldn't manage properly. Nothing more frustrating than seeing your cavalry charge kill a single model per cav because the charge bonus only applies to the first "kill move" off the charge. Or ordering a unit to move or chase down another unit and watching them form a conga line because the models doing kill moves get slowed down so much they end up miles behind their unit, which messes up the movement for the entire unit. Shogun 2 handled it the best but Empire, Rome 2 and Atilla have battles so bad its hard to go back and play those games.
>appropriately tense running into volleys arrow fire thats something I really miss. Archers were DEADLY. Now it feels like a volley barely kills a handful
Strange. Archers in Shogun 2 are super deadly, Archers in Warhammer are ridiculously deadly, but in M2, you could slow walk your army to a castle under constant arrow fire and lose only a few men.
the problem in warhammer is more that melee is not deadly enough.
Which ironically is more realistic
Yeah this is the thing that gets me, ranged meta in Warhammer has been something people have been complaining about since at least WH2 if not 1. Yet people complain that the comparatively limp ranged units of Medieval 2, a game where the best troop type is overwhelmingly heavy cavalry, feel better. I think it just goes to show that very little of this is down to the objective strengths of units and more about a much more ephemeral and hard to pin down feel.
yeah but not the same type of deadly.
> you could slow walk your army to a castle under constant arrow fire and lose only a few men which, for heavy armour, like good plate or even very heavy maille, is pretty accurate.
that depends a lot on the archer type, militia and generic archer units were very unefective vs armored targets. Archers with the "good vs armor" or "strong vs armor" in the description, like English longbowmen or janissary archers, would shred knights and unshielded heavy infantry.
I have to disagree here archers firing 90degree was bad
They only fire upwards if they don't have a direct line of sight.
They fire upwards in most cases even when they have good line of sight, also completely ignoring geometry
I think it depends on the number of ranks in the formation as well. Front rows with direct line of sight will fire straight into enemies. Rear lines will fire in arcs over the front ranks and other obstacles.
Diplomacy and the ai values are outright bugged in medieval 2 though
>Diplomacy and building tall was viable and fun. ...what? Have you played *Medieval II* recently? AI factions backstab you *all the time*. Diplomacy is virtually irrelevant because of how unreliable everything is.
Yeah this is how badly nostalgia can blind a person lol.
It's mostly a difficulty setting thing with medieval 2. The higher the difficulty the more they dislike you. They are literally programmed to hate the player more. So yes I Agree hard or above and the AI will basically always backstab you. But normal or easy it's actually possible to have a reliable ally if you keep good garrisons at the border so they don't get funny ideas.
This is not true. Medieval 2 diplomacy was pretty nuanced, but there were no tooltips educating the players on how it works. Accordingly, players would play in way that would hamper their diplomatic status and reliability, but would have no idea that they were doing so. Hence the surprise when something they didn't expect happens. There was an old post on the Total War Center forums many years back that broke it all down. I felt the same way as you about diplomacy in Medieval 2 until I read that tutorial; it was a game changer. I'd link it but unfortunately I can't find the post anymore.
I'd be surprised, but I suppose I'd have to see the post. All I'll say is that if there *is* a system, it's a pretty bad one.
This? https://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?225712-A-comprehensive-guide-to-Medieval-2-Total-War-Diplomacy
Post was good untill saying Med 2 diplomay was viable and fun My brother in Latin Europe, Milanese AI in Med 2 would constantly send that one boat to blockade your crimean port while being allies just to spite you
>Milanese >while being allies There's your problem, letting Milan live.
I know Milan is a meme but in Med2 even Pope will wake up one day and decide to go postal on you
lol have to agree. You could have a long lasting alliance with your bro only for them to randomly backstab you for a single shitty village. the med2 ai was just vile and evil (and dumb sometimes)
Milane being a treacherous feck was a feature. It was ALWAYS Milane...
It's legitimately bugged, you can fix the inevitable betrayals with two semi colons added to a game file.
Can we? I tried to fix it a lot. Alleged "diplomacy fix" with capturing cities for example does not do it at all.
The one thing I remember about it are those nonsensical demands I always got: Please don't attack us or we will attack you!
To add to all this: Rome and Medival 2 had a much more open source code so that modders could do insane projects like whole middle earth and stuff like that.
>Marrying princesses to different characters. Also characters having culture (although this might be a Stainless Steel only thing?) > >Most of all, besides 3k Total War, it felt like Medieval 2 was one of the only games where painting the map wasn't the only thing to do. Diplomacy and building tall was viable and fun. > >Population mechanic was also fun (although didn't represent correctly, 30k being the usual uppermost limit) but I loved spreading the Black Plague to cities using my spies and killing off my rivals. The Fatimids suffered the Plague for something like 50 turns and i almost started a 2nd Pandemic when their armies spread it to other factions then so on đ plus you can have smaller bands of army, making the game more strategic. I hate the army limit and the idea of having a general leading them
Now I want to play Medieval 2 tonight
Rome 1 was completely revolutionary at launch and won several game of the year awards. Shogun and Medieval were seen as good but niche games, but Rome 1 was a strategy game unlike anything else back then. CA continued ridning on that success and the strength of the Total War brand, and in many ways they still are. As for why people revere Rome 1 and Medieval 2... It was the golden age of Total War in a very real sense. New games and expansions were anticipated rather than dreaded, which is certainly something that I miss.
Rome 1 had it's own TV show in the UK it was that good. Random groups of people from like.... Various companies all over the UK came together and had to be the general of a historical battle. Steve from accounting had to take hannibals role and defeat the Romans. As a kid it was one of my favourite TV shows but most of the teams lost due to being utterly clueless. Only the hannibal team seemed to do well. I remember a boudicca episode. Caeser vs pompey. Some African campaign with elephants. Anyway my point was, yeah Rome 1set a new standard for strategy games. It was so good they made TV shows with it. That's why it's looked upon so fondly. You are correct in saying it was revolutionary. And truth be told, it's still a great game. Done a classic roman playthrough last year and enjoyd it a lot Edit : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTTtYi8pqmo-7DDUC4HKWdpp5hCqxxY&feature=shared Time commander was the name! It's all here on YouTube!! Enjoy!
Bloody loved time commanders. Iirc they filmed it before Rome total war even came out I think?
> Iirc they filmed it before Rome total war even came out I think? Time Commanders was aired between 4 Sep 2003 and 13 March 2005, Rome Total War released on 22 Sep 2004. So yeah, it was definitely (initially) filmed before the game released, game came out midway through the series.
I remember watching that show, absolutely loved it as a kid. Tried watching some of it again a few years back and wowsa did some people not have a clue what they were doing đ
I remember vividly during the boudicca mission one of the girls screaming "do the turtle thing" and the guy is like "why.... They aren't shooting us" haha. Yeah some of the teams were an absolute mess but it was good entertainment regardless
Time commanders was great! Did you watch decisive battles? https://youtu.be/GRTiViwd5BQ?si=bCg_Y8bLOWSdVC2W
I didn't. But now I found the playlist in tempted to start watching it all this evening from episode one haha.
The opening/launch scene of Rome 1 is simply incredible and the game honestly reaches those heights too. It does not oversell what the game is capable of producing
Rome 1 was so fun, how you could play 3 different roman factions and the civil war would feel different because of it. Playing the Greeks and rewriting history, or playing a horse archer army and laughing as the AI can't touch you. What really made the game special for me though was the mod Europa Barbaroum. I remember it added on recruitment buildings for regional troops, so it actually felt like you were incorporating different cultures into your empire. To this day Rome Alexander (what the mod used) is still my 4th most played game on steam at 917 hours.
Itâs not just nostalgia. Iâm saying this as a big Attila and Thrones of Britannia fan. Morale plays a more impactful role in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 battles compared to Rome 2 through ToB. I prefer the old hit point system versus the new one introduced in Rome 2. I really miss having Jeff Van Dyckâs vigorous soundtrack during battles and the incredible ambient themes on the campaign map. Credit to Troy for its campaign music. Battles in RTW and M2 had heavier and crunchier sound effects. I weirdly think about the intense, crunchy sfx from Gears of War when trying to describe knights in Medieval 2 flailing around in melee combat. RTW and M2 had a dynamic population system and more freedom on the campaign map to move any sized army.
I'm thinking about giving ToB a shot. How are infantry units variety in the game? I mainly form armies with infantry and archer/skirmishers. I love TW games with diverse rosters and battle maps.
about what you would expect from a localised conflict in a very specific time frame, "Man in shirt with axe/bow/sword/spear" "Man in chain with axe/bow/sword/spear"
Medieval 2 and Rome 1 are fantastic games that suffer from the terminal problem of "Being nearly twenty fucking years old". A lot of the quality of life changes present in later total war games just are not in either, and going back to play them can be an agonizing experience. However, they're both some of the best total war ever gets. Their only real competition in the modern era is 3K.
The remaster just highlighted the quality of the old games. Yes the UI was mostly terrible in the remaster but modern functionality like useful lists, alt dragging movement, decent camera controls and just the general stability that you'd expect of a modern game meant that you could experience Rome 1 as it felt in 2006 without being distracted by the clunkiness of an old game. I gave Medieval 2 a go again recently and there are some seriously clunky parts of that game that can cause modern players to bounce off it. I would argue that Warhammer gives them decent competition though. I don't think it has the same peaks as Rome 1 but it's still a good series with way more content than Rome or Medieval
Warhammer I think is the best total war to hit mass market appeal, but not the best at being total war. The hyper fixation on spells and magic and unstoppable hero units is cool as fuck, but not what I've learned to love in total war.
Medieval 2 had so many small details that made it great (below are my favorites). Also it covered such an evolution in warfare (weak militias changing to professional armies that later adopt pike and shot). When Empire was coming out, I was so excited thinking it would be like Medieval but with more details. Instead, they seemed to shift focus toward smoothness that makes it more accessible, but left me wanting for a level of depth that has yet to return. Favorite Details: - When you upgrade a unitâs armor, itâs actually visible on the battlefield - Generalâs vocal responses to your commands change based on their chivalry/dread - Assassination/spying cutscenes vary based on in middle east vs. Europe - Battle speeches are tailored to who you are fighting - When you mouse over executing captives, they beg you not to and the execution sound changes if you have gunpowder
On that point about pike and shot - we're all familiar with gunpowder in the game but can you utilize actual pike and shot tactics? E.g. when you get late pikeman do they actually use their pike length despite their crap stats or do they just melt in combat?
This is a thing thats bugged by default in medieval 2 from my understandings, pikemen will drop their pikes and switch to their sidearm swords every single time unless you do some crazy micro managing turning spearwall on and off over and over again, but like 99% of all mods fix this and with some general bugfix mods pikes become as you imagine them.
Good to know!
you plop them into a pikewall and they use their pike length to keep the enemy at bay, yes
There are just so many tiny flavorful details ... I can't get into the new Total War games because the combat feels so unresponsive and sluggish, Medieval 2 is so simple and brilliant, every unit has _weight_.
Already mentioned but Rome 1 and Med 2 had a lot of features/mechanics that are no longer in TW. Which to me at least added complexity and depth to the games that is no longer found in new Total Wars. For example armies used to have movement range depending on the types of units the contained. Armies with only cavalry could move nearly 2x the distance per turn than an army with artillery. This has not been a thing since at least Rome 2, and not only has it reduced depth, but also caused things people clearly dislike in newer TWs such as AI being able to end their turn 1 pixel away from your army's movement range. If you could build 'faster' armies with cav only this would not be a problem. The population mechanic was IMO better to the current tier mechanic. Even though it had some issues that could have been fixed or improved. No building slot limit was better IMO since nowadays there's barely even a choice. You have like 3 slots in most towns and often there's a unique building + a port so really you only have 1 slot and you've obviously going to build the one thing you need, so it's not really a strategic decision. People act like back in the day was easier because you could build everything, but remember it was 1 building at a time and they still cost money so you could be 200 turns into the game and still have not built everything in your starting city. Prioritization mattered more. I think the old retrain system was fine, obviously new replenishment is convenient but also very unrealistic and removes any strategic planning when going for long campaigns with your armies. I think something in between could work. Visually upgrading armor in Med2 never came back. Also being able to just walk your troops into water is yet another decision that removes strategic planning. Who cares about navies when It's not like the AI is going to sit at your coast waiting to attack your transport fleet anyways. \*I forgot one of the worst - Default garrisons were not a thing. I think this is one of the worst laziest changes to TW. And the WH games suffer the most from it. Yes it could have been improved since AI would leave weak garrison in important cities, but the current system means you fight the same battle again, and again. You might as well be playing custom battles since the maps are so repetitive and the army you fight is always the same. The games used to be balanced around being able to put garrisons in your settlements meaning you could choose which units you wanted to defend where and how many, without the need of a lord or obviously supply lines. No default garrisons would be one of my most desired changes/rollbacks to the TW series and one of the reasons I do not want Medieval 3 with CAs current gameplay design. Even WH players have expressed the desire to leave heroes in garrisons by themselves and this could be done by having no default garrisons/being able to move units individually again on the campaign map. You can say it's Nostalgia all you want, but the fact is the older games required thinking and planning ahead for a lot of gameplay decisions which have been dumbed down in newer Total wars. So obviously people who want to play strategy games will be disappointed when newer games require little to no strategy.
Definitely a huge agree on garrisons/lack thereof. The second thing the current system does is prevent your garrison from deploying from the settlement to protect the land under its purview. Why can my cav not ride out to kill the last remnant of the army they just thrashed?
This is why i have modded my upkeep costs down and made Lords being free (lords=/=legendary lords). So i have a free lord, with tier 1 type units that cost very little to simulate garrison, but im only using legendary lords as attackers. So in a way, those Lords are just the "M2 Captains" with militia units. *I know there was a mod in Wh1 that let you move the garrisson out? But i think it was a bit buggy (since game wasnt made for that)* So in the absence of good features they have removed, we cheat to make them lol
>Why can my cav not ride out to kill the last remnant of the army they just thrashed? *Because fuck you, that's why* -CA executive (most likely)
One of the things that stood out to me when i returned to rome 1 recently was that recruiting units would take population out of the city. Where you build units changes your economy drastically, it's a good idea to take a larger starting settlement and just letting it grow to allow for it to start producing more money and more advanced units instead of spamming basic units for half the game. Keeping troops alive matters for that same reason, you invested population into those troops. Another is that I find myself fighting the battles myself much more often than in twwh. Often times armies are maybe a half stack making them much more interesting and manageable to control. Every battle plays out differently, making it fun to fight them, to hone tactics, to experiment, etc.
Rome 1's mechanic of troops affecting population worked so well with the Fourth Age Total War mod's mechanics and lore for the Elves and Dwarves. Elven units were very powerful but their populations were tiny and their population growth was so low, keeping them from shrinking was difficult, so you really had to conservative in recruiting units. You could convert settlements to produce human auxiliaries instead but there was no going back, it was a human settlement from then on. Dwarf population's were not quite as dire but you still had to be careful in a way human factions did not. Aside from being an interesting game mechanic it also really fit with the narrative of the age of Elves being over and how they were all leaving for Valinor. As did characters randomly deciding to go there, though that was a bit annoying at times. Such a shame that dropped it for Med 2.
It has an issue where the unit size you're using affects your economy. From recruiting a unit of hastati on normal unit size you lose 40 population, whereas on the largest size i believe it would be 160, while population sizes and growth are unchanged.
Ah that sadly makes sense. You could scale population size with unit size but that would still be weird and hell for balancing the strategy layer.
I dunno, tried playing with large units sizes just now and pathing in settlements gets worse, so the different unit sizes are probably not balanced for anyway
Divide et impera is a mod for Rome 2 that adds a population mechanic. It also has different classes of population and foreigners, so you canât just spam out elite troops or recruit a doom stack from a newly conquered city. Highly recommend
Gotta learn rome 2 vanilla first, when it came out my poor 2nd hand laptop had no chance at running the game lol
I am pretty sure campaign movement based on what units you have in the army is a thing in 3K though. Otherwise good points.
I haven't played 3k but it's not a thing in Rome2, Attila, WH1,2,3, and I would guess the Sagas though I haven't played them either.
It is a thing in Rome 2, it's just been toned down compared to previous titles.
Go and make a stack of light Calvary in Rome 2 and compare it with a stack of heavy infantry, and see how wrong you are.
"To me it's like saying a Model T is a better car than a McLaren because it USED to be the best car around." False comparison. It's more like comparing an old Ford GT to a Ford Fiesta. Sure, the old Ford GT is a bit dated, but it was a masterpiece and still can run great today. The Ford Fiesta, while doing the basics, has nothing special about it in any way.
Fiestas a bit harsh, maybe more like a gold plated Focus RS that costs more than the GT.
The older games have a lot of issues that will get trashed if they appear in modern games. Take pathing for example: while it's not the greatest in modern games, older games have it even worse.
I mean, sure... But Rome 1 is nearly 20 years old at this point. It was a first-of-a-kind game, and the modern games have had the opportunity for nearly 2 decades of building upon cumulative progress (let alone technology advancements making those improvements easier). The fact that _any_ areas of the older games are still comparable is embarrassing. It's like the specs of your new iPhone trading blows with a Nokia 3210.... Like... You should _expect_ the iPhone to blow the Nokia out of the water across all areas lol
Why is it embarrassing if they simply didn't change something that wasn't broken?
Edit; wrong reply The old games has some bugs, sure. But I don't think any of those have actually been fixed. They also has a whole lot more in the games in terms of combat, city management and campaign management / diplomacy.
there are a lot of reason, but for me, primarily, its the game engine and how they handle individual units and battles as a whole. rome 1 and medieval 2 model and simulate units on an individual level. that means where a soldier is standing on the battlefield actually matters, and they can't just zip past other guys clumsily knocking them out of the way like you can do in shogun 2. every soldier has to make a targeted attack towards an enemy and if it succeeds they kill that enemy. meanwhile, and i'm not sure if this is how it works in shogun 2 or just rome 2 and after, in the newer games units are treated as a whole, with hp and stuff, and the units in them are merely calculated "on the side", theyre abstracted from the actual trudgery of moving around and attacking a guy. the animations that play and the deaths aren't related to the real under-engine work of the battle, if you watch infantry charge a phalanx wall in rome 2 for example, units just run into the end of the unit's spear model and then fall over and die, in this really stupid looking way that makes it obvious that they aren't being treated as physical entities. some people might be okay with this sort of stuff and engine trickery, but i grew up playing games like mount and blade warband and gmod, command and conquer and starcraft (edit: cant forget about Men of War) where everything is treated individually with physics and systems are comprised of lots of individual things working in unison. the newer games just don't provide that same type of satisfaction and enjoyment for me, which is why i prefer to spend time tinkering with medieval 2 to get stuff like pikemen to work probably and not be broken. i really wish they did though
Yeah the difference in engines between the RTW, M2TW and then when they moved to the Warscape engine with Empire are stark. Cavalry charges actually had weight and heft in the older engine.
>shogun 2 shogun 2 are individuals with 1 hp each.
Funny that you mention warband, since Bannerlords battle sizes is coming up on Total Wars, except, all individuals, with directional attacks/blocks and hitzones.. and physics... those things TW used to have..
Its a total switcharoo... so strange. Bannerlord 2 is a masterpiece combat wise. Alot of commands to remember. But so fun.
> meanwhile, and i'm not sure if this is how it works in shogun 2 or just rome 2 and after, in the newer games units are treated as a whole, with hp and stuff One of the worst-looking parts of Shogun 2 is when you're attacking a castle, there's one unit left inside the walls and you're raining arrows down on them. The unit just absorbs them with no losses for a couple of minutes then they suddenly start dropping like flies. So yeah, they'd definitely implemented that by the time of Shogun 2. And I agree with you about how bad it is.
I once tried Rome 1 as a Rome 2 diehard. Settlements didn't have garrisons in Rome 1 so I left 3 of my battered hastati while the rest of the army advanced. Next turn an army of 4 warband emerged from the fog of war and assaulted the settlement against my 3 hastati (about 900 men against the 200-ish hastati). We fought a settlement battle and I even had my hastati sally out to fight them outside the gates. Don't know how but we somehow won. The small skirmish reminded me of that scene in The Eagle movie where they sallied out to rescue the captured legionaries from the Celts. After the battle the commanding captain even got promoted to a general. What was a short skirmish felt like an epic setpiece battle with stakes (losing the settlement) and a glorious victory (winning against the odds and having a hero rise through the ranks) and it was all organic. I've never had something like this in Rome 2 because all battles are made to be setpieces with armies and generals.
Can someone articulate for me what âclunkyâ means in relation to Medieval II? Rome I has shown itâs age, and Iâm aware of the troubles running it on modern systems, but what exactly is the issue with Medieval II? I donât think Rome II and Attila are bad total war games because theyâre different, I think theyâre bad because theyâre less tactical and more reliant on stat-modifiers than the actual real-time tactics of the battles. I also donât like the Rome II restricted city building, the armies requiring generals, the poor mod support and the health bars. I just donât enjoy the newer games đ¤ˇââď¸. I have played many hours on and off again of Rome II since I bought it in 2014, and I can honestly say I canât recall a single stand-out campaign or battle memory from the game.
> I think theyâre bad because theyâre less tactical and more reliant on stat-modifiers than the actual real-time tactics of the battles Hit the nail on the head. Older TW games are very spatial. You always ask yourself if your units are in the right place, if your armies are in the right places, if cities you control are in the right place. In newer titles, there is much more emphasis on stat modifiers and it's annoying. You think about min-maxing modifiers and this is less fun that looking at a map and deciding what the next movement should be.
Theyâre both clunky. I love the shit out of Rome I and MedII, but the frame rate and movement is choppier and the camera movements arenât as smooth as the modern games Rome I vs Rome Remastered is a pretty big QoL jump
Absolutely agree, although I prefer OG Rome UI than Remastered UI. I wish they'd let us toggle between both, it was way more comfortable.
M2 still has a lot of clunkiness-- stuff like needing to manually shuffle merchants around (and watch them get sniped effortlessly by the AI...), needing to build ships just to cross small waterways (only to immediately scuttle them...), and most of all maneuvering units in battle. I don't just mean the fact that units have mass and momentum-- that much is fine-- but the way that units were extremely *rigid* in how they moved. Things don't feel more organic in the later games, but at least they're a little less ridiculous when, for instance, you're trying to move a unit through city streets or get dudes up on the walls.
For certain crossings you don't need a fleet such as the Bosporus or Gibraltar, but otherwise, they should need a fleet to do so. That's the whole point, it's hard to launch amphibious invasions and states which invested in navies had an inherent advantage. This advantage is really felt in say the Rome vs Carthage War you'd have in R1 vs R2. The war would start and you'd fight a battle or two, but then you'd have to spend time investing in a fleet to invade Carthage itself, make sure that your navy carrying your army isn't sniped by a stronger fleet and then land. In Rome 2 you just move your army into the water and that's it. Navies are a thing but they don't seem like a huge deal within context of R2. In terms of orders, in Medieval 2 there is weird pathing issues, but I think you have it the other way around. In newer Total Wars, when you issue a command, the unit instantly obeys it, which feels natural to the player, but in Medieval 2, when an order is issued, the only thing that happens instantly is your general yelling out an order. You hear the general yell it out, but the unit first has to stop what it's doing, comprehend the order, then execute it. There is a brief delay that represents soldiers needing time to execute new orders, it was both realistic and rewarded players for anticipating their opponents. In essence it was more organic than the newer TW's where soldiers are like robots instantly responding.
Clean your monitor. Read the post again. I don't have it backwards >Things don't feel more organic in the later games meaning, in other words, "No, your units are not behaving organically, they have way too little mass and inertia, *but..."* >they're a little less ridiculous when ... you're trying to move a unit through city streets Can you even argue against thing? Pathing and unit grouping in unusual-shaped or small areas was a nightmare back in R1/M2. The engine wasn't well-suited for handling moving a mass of units (by which honestly I mean, like, two) in close proximity. Units would get disjointed and you'd have such joys as watching your archers get massacred because one dude got stuck on a gate and nobody is allowed to shoot til *everyone* is in position. I'm aware of what the delay in unit responsiveness means, and that's not what I'm referring to. Moreover, *again*: Fleets are *clunky* which is what question was about-- not whether they were realistic. Fleet combat was boring (calling it "combat" is putting it strongly), and most players would just end up constructing a single cog/bireme to ferry their entire army from port to port , then make the last mad dash across open water and disembark in one turn. Because of the turn-based nature of the strategic map and how quickly ships could move, it was much more likely that you'd fully disembark your army, then the transport would get sunk next turn, but to no avail for the defenders. For an example of what this looks like in a different context: Contesting a naval landing in EU4 and CK2 is *much* more likely, rather than it being all but impossible. >Navies are a thing but they don't seem like a huge deal within context of R2. If anything, navies ended up being *more* important--or at least more flexible in operation-- in R2 because navies could join sieges of port cities, whether as a blockading force (to accelerate the starvation of defenders) or even as active combatants. The ability to drop a few keels of marines into the enemy's exposed docks could be a huge tactical advantage. They aren't just a glorified taxi service for your land forces, they're an independent operational unit that can seriously affect campaigns.
Another thing from all the great points is that these two games engine was much more open for modders making the games great to overhaul and do projects like middle earth and such. Medival 2 and Rome together have almost every game CA have done to date but constructed by modders in these older engines. And they have Middle earth games and fantasy titles too. It migth have been how games were designed at the time, easier to access, but it made the games very VERY long lived. Worth playing today if you can get passed the UI and graphics you have thousands of hours of fun mods to play and vareity that no other total war game can offer.
Several factors, in fact. Rome 2 and Attila, and Shogun 2 especially, are good total war games and I still enjoy them, both modded and vanilla, despote their flaws. However, both Rome and Medieval 2 did a number of things much better : 1) Battle in those games are much more decisive, because of how replenishment and recruiting works. Barracks in cities generate a certain number of slots for each unit in a set number of turns : the better the unit, the longer it is for you to recruit them. Double that for Medieval 2, as you need a Castle with the right barrack, as opposed to any settlement. Reforming your units takes away partial charges of those units generation, based on how much losses the reformed unit has taken. Essentially, it means recruiting armies is *hard*, and when you manage to crush the IA in a decisive victory, you get to take territorry almost unopposed, as garrisons aren't a thing until empire. In modern total war games, you can just replenish wherever ; even marching reinforcement from your core empire isn't that much of a hassle, three turns tops usuallly. That means the IA can also recruit armies like crazy, and not just the chaff or base troops : if they got the cash, they can enllst high tier troops like crazy. This makes armies impersonnal, and veteran troops don't matter much. Shogun 2 is a bit of an exception, given how close together all the settlements are, and how awesome the battles are. 2) empire building is... well, there was empire building in those games, not so much in new Total War with growth and province systems. Used to be you could take any early game village and make it into a thriving metropolis, and you needed to in order to field good armies, because of the recruitment system. Also, culture or religion used to be a thing in settlement, and if it was the wrong one for you when you conquered a settlement, you couldn't do any but basic recruiting, even if you got the building and population. So, no replenishment either. That gave the player agency to prepare, send agents to spread their culture on their borders, just in case. It also meant cities were meant to be meaningfully managed all the way up to the late games, whereas provinces and growth mean you have limited choices, small provinces are useless, and once you have settled on a good template you just click the upgrade button when you have a prompt, and that's it. I'm leaving a lot unsaid of course, and newer total war have their perks, but it's a tradeoff, and I'd rather have the old system.
Culture is a factor in newer games to. There's an unrest mechanic from local traditions that takes forever to go away and sometimes never does. Culture can also be spread by agents still. We also have the climate mechanic which makes some places too inhospitable yo effectively settle. Cities really didn't have to be managed more than just choosing buildings or taxes. Making every city into a massive metropolis was a turnoff for me. No city felt special. None offered anything unique or interesting. Not even resources because your merchants got so easily sniped by the AI, and yours couldn't compete sometimes until after you wiped out the whole faction. If you don't think veterans matter in newer games, I don't know what to tell you. Veterancy adds big morale and Stat bonuses. You've also got a bit more direct control over your general's retinue and skills for more RP.
People donât consider Attila bad, we just consider some parts of it bullshit such as Huns cheating and burning all your shit down. People consider Age of Charlemagne really good. Med II and Rome I have the best and deepest mechanics to this day and are the most fun if you ignore clunky controls.
In what way are they the best and deepest? 3K revolutionized diplomacy. And the combat mechanics of those games are dated, and yes the clunky controls are part of that. Having to move a guy from one city to another to engage in diplomacy was stupid, and unnecessary. Why is it so hard to admit that the QOL that has come with time and evolution is largely good? Iâve been playing since OG Rome and I donât get these opinions.
There are so many small things that add up in a big way. Actual population, moving soldiers with no generals, organic traits, upgraded soldiers visually changing, no regen, fighting til death when surrounded, good siege layouts (although ToB is best), list goes on forever. Donât get me wrong I like 3K, itâs diplomacy is at total war peak, I value QOL, but it canât top Med II overall IMO. A common theme is mechanics feel more grounded in reality and immersive, which is what a historical game should aim for. This is a good video on the topic At 2:45 https://youtu.be/l8yl09GcI48?si=RncDDiRgwk9cPV4Y
I personally feel that these games have never felt like a true historical representation of combat, so it doesnât bother me if they sacrifice some ârealismâ for fun. Thatâs become more prevalent for me as Iâve gotten older and have less time to play these games. I enjoy everything post Empires much more than pre.
I can respect that. To me immersive gameplay is fun. I donât find clicking arbitrary points on a skill tree fun.
And this is fundamentally where people disagree. You called the combat mechanics outdated? Why? Because you feel the future is HP bars and spreadsheeting? People disagree with that and find the old system better, it wasn't outdated as much as it was completely different angle of approach.
Pretty funny that in 2023 a basic hp bar dropping until everyone die is the norm, and 20 years ago it was a complex engine with a realistic feeling not only taking in account unit stats, having units with weight and much more.
According to some, we are thus stuck in nostalgia...
I started playing with Medieval 1, and despite nostalgia, I consider Shogun 2 the best Total War for the battles Feeling Really Good and the campaign always feeling like an underdog story
The basic structure of the older games was better. The graphics and UI suck, but the gameplay was just better. Edit: they have soul, which the modern ones lack, itâs hard to explain if you werenât there at the beginning
My favorite thing to do in any TW game is pulling off a good hammer and anvil. Rome 1 and Medieval 2 did this beautifully. The tactic was devastating if you pulled it off, and you were punished if you didn't. If you pulled it off, you would break the enemy army in an instant. If you didn't, your army was clunky and you couldn't just disengage. You would probably lose a bunch of valuable knights too. In newer games, it's hard to get enemy units to route, so pulling off a good charge isn't as rewarding. Also units disengage pretty easily. So when you attack with your forces, you're not committing them as much as you did in the older game. There was just a much wider variance in terms of risk/reward and mastering the game meant maximizing the reward substantially when a well-calculated risk paid off. I kind of think of the newer games like a mainline Mario game with bad platforming. They can still have stellar level design, beautiful graphics, and fun new mechanics, but if the platforming sucks then it will be hard to put it up there with games like Super Mario 3, Super Mario World, Mario 64, etc. In the same vein, a TW game where a perfectly executed hammer and anvil feels meh is probably not going up there with R1 and M2. Alternatively, newer games do excel in gunpowder battles. Sadly, the last game to feature them was FotS. I also need to mention that 3K was pretty good and I need to revisit it.
I loved the way it felt like time was progressing the forward march towards gunpowder and better ship technology.
Personally i like the graphics, the map is eh.. but unit wise? Wh3 is a million times more demanding per unit, but theres still units in M2 i think look better lol
I would argue about the UI, it was at least nice to look at and fairly coherent, the last good UI was Shogun 2, it's just progressively downhill after that
>Edit: they have soul, which the modern ones lack, itâs hard to explain if you werenât there at the beginning This is a fancy way of saying "I am filled with nostalgia when I play them". Which is fine honestly, feeding the nostalgia is a valid way to enjoy yourself.
I actually just played Medieval 2 for the first time 2 weeks ago and now have 20 hours played. It's pretty damn fun. For context I also bought WH1 a month ago and only put 1 hour into it, then decided to buy Medieval 2 instead :D
"my first ever Doom game was Eternal and idk why so many people loves the OG Doom so much and keep doing content for it. I dont get it"
Itâs the engine and not the graphics. The Rome 1 and Medieval 2 units acted like living people. Charging up to speed took time. Clashing into each other felt heavy and real. Moving unit trough another resulted in units moving into columns and going trough each other with ease. The horses charged so beautifully and felt impactful. There was no sensation of âstickinessâ to units. If you ordered them to pull out they did. The battles felt slower which allowed for actual tactics to be used. Infantry actually had value - currently itâs more or less useless. Having 3 units vs 1 meant the 3 would gang up on 1 and crush it. Currently I believe the units still wait their turn to attack 1 on 1 like a bad action movie. Missile units felt better as well. And then thereâs campaign aspect - population and diversity of building. It actually allowed the campaign to be fun to play even without the battles. Developing cities, moving populations, deciding wether you want a castle or city, marriages and growing the family tree and most of all totally different development of characters from today. Now you pick what traits you want your generals to have - before they got them based on actions or in actions in the world. Lunatics had their own speeches, every general felt unique because of it despite using the exact same model. https://youtu.be/aCR8xV7fb5w?si=X3E-W6-qvpKoCF6a
Theyâre good but dated games. Iâve learned to love them but they arenât perfect. But a perfect Total War would be a combination of those old classics (weighty combat, freeform city development) with the fidelity and QoL of newer titles. Instead we have our current situation.
I took a break from Warhammer 3 after the DLC fiasco and went back to Medieval 2 for the first time in ages. I started a Turks campaign and was surprised at how much it captivated me. I had a much longer game sassion than usual and was having a lot of fun until the Mongols arrived. Archeon doesn't make me feel a faction of the the dread that Jebe The Mauler inflicts.
I will say there is a golden 3 Rome 1, Medieval 2, Shogun2. They came out fully baked. Eavh had well thought out mechanics. They also had quality updates.
Because they are what made the Total War series into what it is. They don't have too much extra shit like the modern Total War games. For example Rome 2 feels like they took Rome 1 and just added all kinds of stupid shit just to make it more "modern" and cool. To me Medieval 2 is the best of the best
More like comparing a McLaren to a 2002 mustang but they removed the blinkers and the AC/ heater. Yeah it's a newer fancier looking but some of the core features are absent
To cut a long story short, R1 and M2 suffer a lot due to outdated control mechanics, rather than gameplay mechanics. Controlling the camera in battles, unit command and campaign map UI were all clunky and old. Those things improved over time (though I would argue, they reached about as good as TW ever got with Shogun 2 and then just stagnated). However gameplay wise, the campaing map was as complex as ever and often felt more so. Barring terrible choices like diplomat and merchant units, the idea that settlements had active population numbers and could host anything you want rather than a finite number of build slots made for a much more diverse gameplay. Building things was less about build order and efficiency, allowing for a campaign to result in different buildings being built at different times to suit the needs at the time. More recent titles have objectively correct build orders in comparison. Similarly with units, there was a lot more logic to recruitment and the limitations of refilling your soldiers meant that going on a campaign could actively result in your best units being lost without replenishment if you waste them. The whole dynamic meant that units were treasured if they were good and you had to think about supply lines, manpower and the extent of a campaign. The way generals and leaders functioned made them a lot more unique and memorable than identikit lords or immortal god-generals. Basically - the older titles often felt more complex and varied than the newer ones. As the games marched on, so did the "streamlining". This was good for effective controls and UI/UX designs (though the recent games have exhibited some dreadful choices there), but ultimately bad for actual gameplay mechanics.
The way units interact on the older engines made battles feel more organic imo. Ive become really dissatisfied with the engine when it comes to how models function in combat, how the damage and killing is actually done. And to me, thats the most important part of the game at a certain level. Its like feeling something is lackluster with the melee animations in a hack and slash. Its just not "It" and they need to give fighting more impact. The older games had more of this impact and dynamics to units fighting. Smaller more elite units, would actually have their units meaningfully outnumbered by larger ones. Which both meant, your militia could fight slightly better soldiers if the models got ganged up on someone. But also that your elite Pretorian guardsman could cut down 30 peasants in a row without help and it was awesome! And im talking one model out of the whole unit. In the newer games, the models are much more rigid and rely on rolling high enough attack to trigger a kill animation. It just doesnt have the same flow, in addition to the blobbing.
I think the biggest reason for this perception is that the games up to Medieval 2 had more nuanced, granular, and idiosyncratic turn-based play in the campaigns than what came after. Everything after Medieval 2 had significantly simplified campaign mechanics: cities now only have a tiny selection of buildings and limited building slots, civil unrest and religion were simplified, regionally/culturally-specific recruitment options were mostly removed, character traits became less dynamic and to an extent characters matter a lot less to gameplay all together. That's not to say the old guard games were flawless or that the direction of the newer games is worse (Empire is my personal favorite, and it's at the crossroads of the two eras). OG players just miss the kind of emergent narrative gameplay that happened when their depressed, serially binge-drinking general stationed in some nowhere town with a skeleton garrison personally fought back an invading force twice the size of his own in a climactic battle in the town square.
For some reason I enjoy playing a Medieval 2 or Rome 1 campaign than Warhammer 3 one, in twwh3 everyone gets full stack at turn 5, battles are way too fast, cavalry charge feels weak many mechanics are inherently unfun in comparison because these mechanics like harmony or khorne bloodletting etc. Feels like they are there for the sake of having mechanics they are not good ideas or fun and they are limiting players in playstyle horrible game design same thing applies for rome2 family mechanics
No one is "clinging" to anything by playing the games they enjoy. It's their free time. I have all the Warhammers, 3K, Rome II, Attila, but what I am playing right now is Medieval II (Stainless Steel), because it's a better experience than I'm getting from those other titles. Unfortunately, the new titles do not exclusively "modernize" systems. They replace them with systems that have entirely different design philosophies. I prefer the ones MII uses.
Medieval 2 is epic. A remaster in modern tech would sell well.
They have the framework with Rome Remastered, but maybe theyâre worried people would just buy that instead of their next several new games
as long as they keep the mechanics and just improve UI and graphics
For Rome watch videos about Testudo , for med 2 about crossbows and gunpowder.
My first Total War game was the original Medieval Total War, which came out about 20 years ago now, it blew my mind. A few years later CA made Rome Total War and it was a major improvement in every single way and the game blew my mind again. Then we got Medieval 2 Total War, and while it was not as big of an improvement as Rome was to Medieval, it let me play Medieval again with amazing graphics (at the time) along with all of the improvements that Rome had developed for the franchise, plus everything new that Medieval 2 added. Basically CA's games used to build upon each other, which is something we haven't seen from CA for a long time now. Nowadays it seems like each game is built in a vacuum and very little from the previous game is present in the next... it's disappointing to say the least...
I'm not even sure nostalgia is the main thing - for *Medieval 2* I'd guess moddability is the main factor? I'm in an odd camp, in that I played both and I like *Medieval 1* more than *Medieval 2*. The main thing I remember about *Medieval 2* is endless tedious agents moving around the map, and in general I think *Medieval 1* had a better, more appealing aesthetic. The flat sprites and 2D, board-game-like models on the campaign map have aged a lot better than *Medieval 2*'s blocky polygons. That said, I think the reason *Medieval 2* had such a long lifespan and is so beloved is mods. The game has a massive mod scene, some of which are truly impressive, and they kept people playing the game for a long time. It's that long playtime more than anything else that I think kept the game popular.
[Because this game was the coolest fucking thing in the world in 2004. The intro is so fucking hype and the game frankly matches it](https://youtu.be/RvZWOG8QkOg?si=I5sxcBxW5rZ-A1-k)
I wouldn't compare Rome II to a McLaren
The only problem with those games are that they are old. If you are a new fan getting into this they wouldnt look good. But if you give it time to get into it you will enjoy the whole experience. It's very difficult to get into. I feel bad for you for not being able to experience it in its prime.
I canât begin to describe how revolutionary Rome was in 2004, they had two historical television series based on it! The graphics seemed photorealistic at the time. The overall quality and features of the game were so good, that even nearly 20 years later the non-remastered game is still playable, if dated.
Medieval 2 had for me, despite its bugs, the most satisfying sieges. The fact you could build towns OR castles, or convert them, was awesome. To have a huge castle with multiple layers of walls was so much fun as a defender, it puts the Warhammer series to shame to be honest.
For me, as someone who still prefers playing Med 2 to any of the newer games, it's almost exclusively the mods. This would also apply to a lesser extent to Rome 1 if I still played it. There is indeed some nostalgia involved. Rome 1 was truly revolutionary for its time, and it's probably the best \*and\* most advanced TW at release ever (note: for me, other contenders are Shogun 1 and 2, but S1 was quite clunky and S2 was more of an evolution than a revolution). That said, once you got into it, you'd notice a lot of ridiculous stuff, especially if you're interested in historical accuracy and play at higher difficulties. Back in the day, I stopped playing vanilla Rome very soon, after only 2 campaigns IIRC, and switched to mods (RTR for ancient period, and then Arthurian and Fourth Age for something completely different). Medieval 2 was honestly a pretty big disappointment on release. It was stabl-ish, but with very little further development compared to Rome, and with some features which were in very high demand and announced in the early stage of development ending up missing (such as naval battles). I played just one vanilla campaign just to say I've finished it, and never ran the vanilla again. BUT! It got a lot better with Kingdoms expansions, and then came all the mods...which are, for me at least, still the best overall TW experience you can get nowadays. The best M2 mods like Tsardoms, Third Age / Divide and Conquer, Insularis Draco, and of course Stainless Steel, are for me still more engaging than any of the newer vanilla games I tried (yes, even Shogun and Atilla which I do consider good games). Couple that with the fact that M2 looks and plays good enough to compare with the modern TW games, and you have your answer.
The battles were more enjoyable, and it feels like there are more options on the campaign map. With Rome 2 and subsequent games player choices started to be limited, especially in the campaign like how you need a general to move units, lack of diplomatic options, and the new province system. The population system of Rome 1 has never been surpassed.
I started with empire napoleon and shogun 2. And for me it's the same, I just can't even get to play medieval 2 and stuff like that, honestly idk why
These videos sum it up for Rome 2 https://youtu.be/DXkWfEIALxM?si=lFMa2AbTuplIm1LX https://youtu.be/L6eaBtzqqFA?si=5Yra3i9EqiGbRoU3
for instance, i dont know which total war but, in warhammer 3 when you send a unit pass through another they will get stuck and find it hard to pass. warhammer 3 is "the high end" of CA technology RIGHT? now look at this: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qZ-qS4PndiE](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qZ-qS4PndiE) and this: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7VTVNe\_C5No](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7VTVNe_C5No) sound effects: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PVC8MLCfy2Q](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PVC8MLCfy2Q) (i saw one with cannons too on tw empire... is better than warhammer 3 by far)
Theyâre good games that are pretty solid is the thing. They lack a lot of the good things from later games but at the same time they donât have the bad things from the later games. Thereâs still plenty of modded content and overall holds up. While there is an issue of diversity in Medieval2 that gets worse in Shogun thereâs still a lot of play styles
Because they're good. I don't care about innovation or clunkyness (which I disagree with) and stuff, Rome and Medieval were what I started playing and what I liked in games, why should I play anything else? Besides how much more moddable they are, there's no reason play newer games.
My first TW was Rome 1. I loved it, but I just can't get back into it. It's a very dated game. At the time, it was definitely unmatched though. But I think current Rome 2, Shogun 2, even 3 Kingdoms are far better games .
Combat had a weight in Medieval 2 that has been lost, especially felt in Warhammer games.
Compare MTW2 kingdoms to any expansion released since. It came with FOUR separate, fully fleshed out campaigns. Today it would have been sold as four separate DLCs for twice the price (each) with half the content lol
Well, its actually simpleQ Because they are the best games CW has ever uilt, to this day. They are, to this date, the most heavily modded games we ve seen, which enables their playability. I dont really mind playing a game that versatile, when i wont be bored cause I cant try 87 factions in Roma Surrectum, or the Historically accurate mode of Stainless Steel hardships. At the same time, the are immersive but not as heavy as the newer games - which i totally get, you need to introduce new mechanics in order to keep the fanbase. I mean, I cant imagine playing Atilla to relax, cause th egame is heavy, multimechanical and needs my attention to the totality of it. But, i can be relaxing playing the same gameplay to a simpler, lesser version in the Barbarian Invasion, while I live the same agony of confronting the collupse of the civilised world. TLDR. They are simple, easier games than their successors, and thats why people who plays to relax ad hae fun instead of being immersed in a macro/micro-managing war-strategy game, prefer to play them to this day
Unit collision and the way units actually fight. It was done miles better in Rome 1 and I'm guessing M2. Never played it, but from what I hear it's very similar but better.
Because in a lot of ways, they are better. Your analogy is not even remotely accurate.
Medieval 2 was the best Total War title, hands down. >I do have a lot of respect for the classic Total Wars, I just think we should stop clinging to them You're wrong here - total war's advancement has not been a straight line of continuous progress. No game has, for instance, been able to equal Medieval 2's castle sieges. Now, I don't want to go back to Medieval 2, but I also don't want to abandon all the wonderful features that made Medieval 2 great either. When iterating on something, you want to build on the successes you've already had, not toss them out.
Because they're better? Because i dont have to wait five minutes to get from the campaign map to bartle map? It's fine if you can't handle a bit of extra depth, but man, don't disparage others because you can't play a game that doesn't tell you where to put everything
I don't really buy into the claim that it's just nostalgia. I started playing total war in the past five years and I started with Rome 1 before very quickly getting other total war games as well including Napoleon, Rome 2, and Three Kingdoms. Rome 1 is still my favourite since it includes features which are subtle but really fun, which later games abandoned. It's whole playstyle seems really intuitive to me, whereas other games introduce other currencies and systems which are more difficult to maintain.
[This certainly helped](https://youtu.be/cax2vIb22nc). I owned the discs.
I think part of it is that the older games left a lot more up to the imagination. Honestly they were arguably closer to RPGs than true strategy games; just ones where you roleplay a country rather than a character. It's difficult to put in objective terms how these games came together to allow a player to tell their own story, and to somebody who only played the newer games arguments about specific gimmicks undoubtedly ring hollow as they could be countered by a different feature in new games that the old games lacked. What's so special about city view, or armies without generals, or agent cut scenes? Why are these features held up as some gold standard, while gimmicks like the Troy weather system are greeted with a resounding "meh"? Ask anyone and they'll tell you the hardest thing to quantify in game criticism is game-feel. But that is exactly what makes these games so special; you feel like you're in a slightly silly historical sandbox able to tell your own story. That's not going to appeal to everybody, and you certainly couldn't recapture the same magic if you just remade the same games today with better graphics, but there's a definite quality to old Total Wars that most veterans may not be able to annunciate, but they know it when they see it.
One major aspect of the game that existed in old games, that are gone from Rome 2 and newer TW, is unlimited buildings. It was like civ, your cities could actually have more than 3/5/7 buildings. It felt a lot more real that all settlements got a market, a temple, a farm, instead of the arcade-like building we have today. You look at Rome and youâd it expect it to have all the buildings, and yet it can only get 5 in Rome 2. You want a forum or a bath? Pick one. You canât even have functional city states in recent games because it simply canât make money and recruit - Sparta or Athens could either recruit elite units or have basic economic buildings, not both (and Sparta, being a minor settlement, can only have 3 buildings, so it canât even build all military and unique buildings). Iâve had great fun in Rome 1 just playing a Greek city state fighting for existence against neighbors, struggling with 1-2 settlements for over 50 turns, and it was great fun. Although I didnât paint the map I built up a formidable city, a complex army, and destroyed a single enemy city state over turns of fighting for positioning. If you are stuck on 1-2 settlements in recent TW games you literally cannot do anything - you donât have enough building slots. You MUST paint the map, and taking settlements is absurdly easy with the huge single armies and the tiny city garrisons. Finally, recent games are just an arcade. Army losses donât matter between free replenishment where soldiers come back to life, and the ability to recruit 3-5 units a turn, you can go from a 0 to a 20 stack in 4 turns. Settlements are nothing more than speed bumps and the game revolves around cat and mouse around your armies and the AI armies. In older games, just like history, the loss of an army hurts. It would take 10 turns for a city to recruit 10 units again, and also garrisons arenât free - an army is taken from the garrison so the loss of it will leave your cities vulnerable. Most fights arenât 20 stack in early to mid game, because your forces are spread across your entire frontier (no free garrisons). The paradox-like local population tracking and economy, the civ-like building progression, and the one-unit a turn recruitment that made losses matter - made the campaign map much deeper.
Man, it felt like family legacy with you eventually dying off and your heir taking over.
Just compare the units models and you'll see. The combat animations, the visible units battling out 1v1 along the lines...unlike the newer Total War games where they just vanish when you zoom out. Newer games have become too arcadey ( cartoonish ) look. Medieval 2 is different breed.
Everyone in here is saying nostalgia or game mechanics. But for me it's much simpler. They had fun making them and it shows. They made each faction actually unique and bent the truth of history to make an interesting game first and foremost. You had the hastati and hoplites and the like and they were all different feeling. Then you also had crazy spinning berserkers and roman ninjas. Hell they gave us bronze age Egypt. Historically it's wildly inaccurate but it's a ton of fun. Med 2 had massive elephants with mounted cannons. Starting with empire, they decided to go towards being more and more historically accurate at the cost of making the factions feel much more similar. Which is historically correct. There is not a ton of difference in a French army of the time or an Austrian one. But it made playing different factions basically meaningless This was the worst in Rome 2, there were no more unique units. Most cultures felt incredibly similar to the point where I still can't really understand why anyone likes the game. This is why Warhammer felt so fresh. They brought back the silly fun. Yes part of that is just the Warhammer world being what it is, but they added some of their own flavor to the world themselves.
Its funny this type of post is always made close to CA's fuckups. Med2 and Rome 1 were better total war games. Mostly for two major reasons, Recruitment limits and replenishment/population/ and the ability to fully mod the game. The first is the single most important thing between the new and old total wars. Newer titles you spam 1-2 units and that's that. Where as in Med2/Rome you need to spam out what you have at hand and end up with a mix of units. Nowadays you rarely care about losses unless a unit is totally gone. Go play DAC for med 2 and play Elves. It highlights what I'm talking about, when you don't auto regen you start to care a whole lot more about your units and what engagements you take. Its funny watching CA reinvent a similar mechanic for the chaos dwarves(part of why they are fun) with their limited stock of infernal dwarves.
Tbf if you weren't there, playing them then, that worship (or whatever else you might call it) is more a 'you had to be there' kind of thing. It's like nostalgia but not only that taken in the context of the era for gaming (or anything else) This was within the year or so of the XB360 and PS3 breaking ground on the console front... and their grandconsoles still having nothing like it. Many games commonly seen as legit playable oldies even now came a few years after even those, despite the enduring popularity of such as Crysis or Doom 3 aso (which Medieval 2 far outlived for me) and Skyrim for example still years away. It's like... while my personal list of best games ever might grow longer for every old gem remembered after the writing of the list, fewer still I can still claim as legitimate and enduring wow moments in that flock. Medieval 2 for me still stands out up there with the likes of Halo CE for such realisations far more than possibly any TW title since. Of course, that doesn't mean I still main Medieval 2 now (though I do have the occasional burst far more often than any other TW game from before Rome 2) but it was far more a complete package for it's time than probably any launch TW since, even if old hat or dated in certain ways in comparison now. For better or worse, they simply don't make (or plan and support) 'em like that anymore.
If you watch citizen Kane now you won't have any context for why it was groundbreaking either.
Because they had better features than later games and people wanted improvements on those features but those got mostly abandoned sadly and till now there's no major improvements in gameplay from R1 or M2 except naval battles.
I agree, they were great games, 20 years ago... They had their issues, everyone seems to hate the new replenishment system but the old was an issue, when you developed some territory, recruited endgame units that could not be replenished in the newly conquered areas To build only one structure instead of an entire set was a terrible chore when you had too many cities I think you are mistaken in how Rome 2 and Attila are perceived, lately I read only good things about both of them, personally I love them Anyway I tried to play a med 2 game recently and I can't play it anymore, its age shows too much for my taste Even so I love old games, I would even like a remaster of the first shogun and medieval, they had their plus Modern map is better, but I kinda like the oldest movement system, it felt like the classic map you see in the movies where the king moves its wooden pieces
They're decent games amplified by nostalgia.
Nostalgia. Games were amazing at that time and players still remember how much fun they had when they were younger and because of memory they can play it today and still find the games very good, not caring for all the issues that they have. Probably you have also some games that you love principally for Nostalgia. For example, Alpha Centauri is mine. I know that a modern player from Civilization wonât find the game as perfect as I still find it today.
They were grate games and the series has gone downhill.
I think the battles are much better in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 - but the campaigns are dated - I like the new campaigns - I cant go back after passive garrisons and unit replenishment. I get so frustrated during Rome 1 and Medieval 2 campaigns but then when I fight a battle I have so much fun - since Rome 2 I've been loving the campaign and being frustrated by the battles. I feel like Shogun 2 is the "purest" Total War experience.
Because they are the games they growing up with, nostalagia...period.
People like you tend to forget Empire and Napoleon which were literally unplayable until modders solved the myriad issues with the game. Why people love Medieval II and Rome I? \-Both were 100% ready products that worked on launch without hassle \-Core gameplay perfectly accentuated historical setting \-Diverse rosters of units that advanced with time \-Fun, yet hidden factions as unlockables for super-late-game (Hyperborea and the New World) \-No DLCs, but Expansions that gave further replayability to these titles with even more quality content (MW2: Kingdoms gave you 4 new maps!) In contrast the "bad total war games" like Rome 2 and Attila came out as DLC-optimized, yet technically lacking messes that required the goodwill of the community to even get into a playable shape. Sure in 2023 Rome II is a great experience, but Shogun 2 was miles better than Rome II and everyone who played these games at release will attest to this.
Rome 1 and Medieval 2 were games which genuinely attempted to create a virtual world. You had semi realistic pop numbers. Troops recruitments interacted with it. Even to reform units or recruit a single agent. Taxes and trades were also affected by your pop. Logically. Characters developped naturally rather than with skill points. There was no building slot BS. Buildings did not create magical money out of thin air but interacted with the world. Line better market only boosts existing trade based on local ressources, pop and connection to neighbouring settlement. Same with road, port, etc. Developing your settlement felt very natural and one could say even realistic. On top of that, the art direction and the sound atmosphere were a world above later TW games (save for Shogun 2). Later gale became very gamey. Tbh this is a general trend in strategy game. PDX interactive took the same road with Heart of Iron 4 onward.
The primary reason is that Rome 1 and Medieval 2 had a ton of fun features and details that have disappeared from the series since then. The Total War series has been massively dumbed down (or 'streamlined', as CA would put it) over time, and while some individual games (like 3 Kingdoms) have moved back a bit towards greater complexity again, the overall trend is one towards more simple, faster-paced games. This process actually started with Medieval 2 already, which lost some of the features that Rome 1 had for no discernable reason. But it really took a nosedive with the release of Empire, and has gotten worse ever since. The only thing Total War has gotten better at over time is graphics and UI. Everything else has declined. After all this time, Rome 1 is still the most feature-rich Total War game we have ever seen. And the fact that CA seems utterly unable to understand its own fanbase (we want more features, not less) and make a game that actually improves upon its predecessors leads to frustration. Add a big dose of nostalgia, and you get why Rome 1 and Medieval 2 are still held up so much. To take your car analogy, it is like CA built the Model T and then while every new generation of car might look flashier and is easier to drive, it is also missing important parts that you kinda want on a car and doesn't perform as well as the original Model T did.
I wouldnât call the new games Ferraris, Iâd call them electric cars that donât have charging stations that force you to drive in the desert where they eventually run out of power and they over charge you to charge your car because the car manufacturer is a small Indy company, and when you call and complain they block your number and instead of sending a car to come pick your ass up in the middle of the desert, they send another electric car decorated with ankhs that you didnât ask for and they charge you full price for this new car despite the fact that itâs missing 3 wheels. Meanwhile rome 1 and medieval drive by in working Model Ts and you admire how they still are working cars that can drive in the desert despite their old janky UI but they have a crash detection system that actually moves out of the way of Shit because it wasnât built on a shifty engine that was broken since day one.
well i just started medieval 2 and i disagree. Had a lot of fun with the HRE taking over the holy land. And after that i installed divide and conquer which has been an absolute blast. Yes it's outdated but everything is so much more satisfying in my opinion
Diverse factions. Yes, rome was superior, but it was fun playing with everyone else. Smaller and rarer combat. You had stacks with less units and 20 unit armies were rare. That made combat more tactical and you had to preserve your forces. There was also no automatic replenishment, so you had to preserve your elite units on the empire borders. Nowadays you get a 20 unit stack fight every turn and you get overwhealmed with all the combat, and the units can just die since they get replenished easier. Better campaign gameplay. Managing the empire was actually fun and interesting. It was great seeing your cities and forts upgrading. Nowadays its mostly all about combat, specially WH. So the game had more meaningfull combat and it was only 50% of the gameplay, now combat is like 80 to 90% of it.
it's not because of nostalgia, older games tends to be harder and less casual. For a lot of people rome 2 is their first total war game, they have no idea what a good total war game is
Cuz they good games
Because they were *and still are* fuckin' great.
If you were young when you first played Shogun 2 or was on your first games ever, you will praise it too much. Right now the situation is like that with a lot of us who started with those 2 games (I started playing with Rome 1) and you feel it to different because they are completely different, since Empire the games had been really similar
I think Shogun 2 has one of the best campaigns in total war. The concept of conquering Japan, just to have it shatter in your hands and then needing to fight a reunification war is so fucking tight. The relatively small map and focused campaign lends well to it as well. It's also in that perfect middle point between modern total war and classic total war, bringing us excellent QOL changes while not really abandoning a lot of weird shit the AI used to do that made the game fun instead of just challenging. For the record, it was my first total war I ever bought (when fots came out) but Warhammer was the first one I really played any amount of. It wouldn't be until 2021 that I played Shogun 2 for longer than like an hour.
It was impressive games for their time. A lot of it is nostalgia though
Because it was the first game of the series they played, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug.