Total War: Pharaoh's "Battle Update" reads a bit like satire
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- Опубликовано: 21 июн 2024
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#totalwar #totalwarshogun2 #totalwarpharaoh 
Игры
“We’re introducing a NEWWWWW feature to battles called ‘Lethality’ “ lmaooo they just re adding what was there 2 decades ago
Its never a dull moment watching attempts to fix things that were often broken at their core.
better: attempts to fix stuff that was never broken
Nah, best part is how none of these things were broken. Med 2 and Rome are still played to this day because they’re well made. They keep moving away from the stuff people actually liked.
This is revolutionary. Total War is so back! This will change everything!
it is SO BACK
To add to what you said about the setting being a constraint on the game / gameplay, Rome Total War is very historically inaccurate and every faction is a sort of meme version of it, and this allowed for a ton of meaningful asymmetry between the factions and their rosters and therefore the way you actually would play them. It also made it to where most of the factions have an iconic feel and look to them. Compared to Rome 2 and Pharaoh where every faction feels and looks more or less the same and the mechanical variety between these factions is found in percentage bonuses and minuses and in menus on the campaign map (the famous warhammer "campaign mechanics").
Empire total war also strikes me as a game that has no "theme" in its Grand Campaign, it's just "this is Europe in 1700, deal with it and do whatever you want". Unlike its sequel being focused on a single character's career, for example. And ETW despite its flaws has a lot going for it (functional gunplay and well differentiated unit classes, solid tech progression tree despite it being their first try at it) more than I could ever say for something like Pharaoh.
Rome wasn't perfect, The Romans and horse archers were overpowered, the AI didn't act in its own self interest and pathfinding was frustrating. Compared to modern TW (except Medieval 2), OG Rome is lightyears ahead, except for graphics/engine.
All they had to do is look at what worked in Rome, keep those bits and build on what didn't work. One thing I wish they'd kept from Medieval OG, is making a family member a duke/lord/Prince.
Dhia effectively reading CA's secret admitions of their mistake and guilt ASMR.
They might be reinventing the wheel, but that's still better than having the wheel remain forgotten technology.
this lethality thing is an admission by sofia that how TW games currently play has massive problems. this is them admitting the hitpoint system has ludicrous results.
and like you said, reintroducing a reintroduction. they tried it with thrones of britannia. after not having it since rome 2. when every game had it until rome 2.
and yeah it is annoying to see them not even commit to it, leaving it as an option. just make a good game and stand by it.
by the way, this video has over 1000 views and 57 comments and has almost certainly quadrupled pharaohs current player numbers as just about the only pharaoh video in about 6 months.
You know the state of CA is dysmal, when Sophia is more consistent with updating their games than CA England. (Sophia were the ones patching Rome 2 after the British team dropped it like a lead ball)
They got experience trying to fix shyt😅
Pharaoh is still the worst anw.
No wonder Rome 2 is actually good/fun now (with mods).
What they need to change is the f'ing armour piercing system they currently use.
The health pool of models isn't an issue by itself, but the AP mechanic just being a set amount of guaranteed damage that ignores armour entirely is completely nonsensical and it is what decays the experience following the increased health pools.
Before Rome 2, there was a logical relationship between armour and AP where AP *decreased* the effectiveness of armour but *not* bypassing it entirely.
Since Rome 2, however, AP is just a seperate pool of damage from that ignores armour completely, no matter how armoured the unit is. No relationship whatsoever.
This is the biggest fault of current day Total War battles, because combat has become way more static and homogenous.
The best middle ground I can think of is the mechanic used in XCOM 2. It's very simple; each weapon has a damage range like 5 - 7 DMG. Each point of armour decreases the incoming damage by one point. Each point of AP a weapon has decreases the armour value by one point.
There are several reasons why the XCOM 2 system is way more attractive; for example, weapons having varying damage ranges makes a lot of sense. No attack is static in real life, there are multiple factors affecting how 'powerful' a hit is whether melee or ranged.
It's kind of weird to me that armour is the variable and damage the static aspect of current Total War.
Having damage ranges instead of static damage also allows for an interesting dynamic of some armour being impenetrable where a weapon with a too low damage range simply can not damage something with too high armour. Basically like small arms versus a tank. We don't have this right now in Total War, but this dynamic definitively has its uses.
They need to add an additional combat modifier for the weapon itself. Crude weapons, vs military industrial weapons, vs commercial weapon. And the campaign progress could be made into a weapons race based on the geographical historicity of minerals and forging techniques implemented through time to improve weapons. Which is already a feature I believe in some sense
I was waiting for your reaction to this cause a lot of the update deals with your critique of modern Total War. I'm looking forward to see you test how it is changed.
I hope they add the ability to toggle leadership mattering on.
i prefer the term "morale"
Now the audio is much better, I can hear the video with both ears
:))
Glorious stereo sound
@@haldir108 actually it was weird, i had to change the audio to Mono for it to work properly. Must be something to do with this new mic I got hooked to the camera.
Cavalry in Warhammer total wars feels terrible to use. Both because how knocked down opponents can't take damage while they are down and because how all the maps are too tiny to maneuver with cav on.
this started with Empire, healthbars made it 10x worse
Yeah like bruh raming 2 meter tall nearly 1 ton monsters into back of men apperently just mildly annoys them, I know it's fantasy but this is kinda stretching it.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Health bars have been an absolute abomination ! I can't express my annoyance at seeing a unit get hit with 3000 arrows and not a single model falls because the "health" hasn't been fully depleted.
@@IceniTotalWar That one little change completely fucked combat. I have seen footage of the magic-rock launcher users (For some reason called "gunners" despite not using a gun) pegging a single guy with at least 5 rocks and dude just gets back up because the HP bar didn't go down enough for him to stay down. It ruined R2, and combined with the pivot from rewarding clever tactics to relying entirely on numbers going up (Wedge in R1 was just your dudes reorganize, Wedge in 3K gives a massive stat boost even when they don't actually make the wedge).
@@demomanchaos Things went way down for the TW series with R2. It's 1 of the reasons i mainly play Rome 1 RR and Med 2 even though i own all TW games, couldn't bring myself to buy Pharaoh.
With Fall of the Samurai it looked like there was so much potential.
I think most people were expecting a Victorian TW, American Civil War or WW1/WW2 because all the tech in FotS was pointing in that direction.
15:45 is such a great point tbh
Add a red arrow!
SO BACK
Yes, it's just such a shabby excuse! As an example the Warhammer setting has the potential to have crazy good gameplay mechanics if you follow this argument, yet the battles are ass cheeks.
Lethality mechanic sounds like what it used to be in RTW1 and M2TW, now the question is, Does it work like the old game or like TWWH? I'm wondering...
Isn’t this just how battles used to be?😂
no, no, no!! why would that be?!! NO!
Except instead of a guy being poked with sticks that have an adjustable chance of un-aliving him depending on many factors, which was changed to sticks that gradually chip away health until it's zero, it's now sticks that continue chipping health away but have a non-dynamic chance of un-aliving him set by a designer.
To get around the criticism that this is 'top-down designer-says-so' Numberwang, they made it optional. So you have these gameplay options, and none of which are options that are decided as part of the gameplay.
Super stoked for TWP's update! Love the Bronze Age
The fuzzy quality added a nice aesthetic to this video.
Is switching stereo to mono worth 2024 for con tent to hear with two ears? My ears feel like target audience now!
I'm so concerned there's no numbers shown or an idea of what to expect besides lethality interacting with armour. Don't know what charges will do to lethality or if missile block overrides everything (Thrones was designed to pierce through shield walls so expect a potential bug of units being one shot despite not receiving damage). Only number we know and get to know is 24 new factions wowee new content
also calling this one now: whatever fancy changes they do to this game mysteriously won't get carried over to the next instalment
gud work sensei
Tying into the “setting” discussion, I know ww2 is a very popular setting. I don’t think it translates well to total war, but it doesn’t matter. In 2009, Square Enix published “Order of War,” which directly placed total war into the ww2 era, and it is actually a decent game. If they truly wanted to, they could refit total war so that it could fit ww2 and be a good game, but I know that’ll never happen.
I stopped playing TW with Rome 2 intuitively. I could never pinpoint my exact issues with it. The weight of the units and their overall dynamics just felt off. I mean I don't mind whatever bs health bar system or whatever they wanna use to calculate things, for me the battles just have to feel right and intuitive. I tried Rome 2 and Warhammer, both didn't do it for me. When I come back to Total War ocassionally, I tend to cycle between Rome 1, Medieval 2 and Shogun 2. But I observe myself playing them less and less. The singleplayer is just too easy after thousands of hours of battle experience. I would love if we had a proper Total War with a competitive 1v1 ladder where you could just hop on for a couple of games and play against evenly matched opponents.
wasnt this literally how combat worked in medieval 2. its basically the attack/defence stat.
We need more mana, more bars, more +1% modifires, more dlcs unlocking locked content.
if they would split all this into more DLC's that would be great, too, more opportunities to spend
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498
16 TIMES THE DETAIL
IT JUST WORKS
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 On a more serious note, i agree with your take on modern total war having better vision mechanics.
I actually think Total War Arena had some interesting vision mechanics.
I doesnt translate 1to1 to a regualar total war, but i did like how terrain and vantage points affected visibility.
In history sending a light trooper on a hill or to take a tall building was common. It would incentivise having some troops for different tasks.
I would also add a climbing stat. How steep a ledge the unit can climb. It would compliment visibility mechanics.
Naturally heavy units are bad at climbing, mountain peoples are good at it, chariots suck at it and so do elephants.
rome 1 BI expansion had swimming ability for light infantry, maybe bring that back as well
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Im not sure about actual swimming in open water, but shallow water crossings/wetlands/rivers in general.
It makes me think of all the creative ways ancient general would use to allow troops to cross a river without having to wait for the engineer crew to build a bridge.
It would be great if maps had weather/seasonal variants. I think Pharao ikinda has different reach of wetlands depending on if its raining or not.
I would go further, with rivers partly flooding, drying up, freezing. Vegetation being thicker and reaching further in some parts of the year than others.
It would reward adaptability while still allowing you to roughly predict whats the best time for you to begin your campain or with roads to follow to minimize the procentage chance of having a battlefield where you have a disadvantage.
To quote Napoleon "I defeated an army by marching"
I was hoping Pharoah devs paid more attention to the relationship between building armies, and how they are employed over time. Really shape the game to refelct the improvement of tribal skirmishes, vs massive imperical armies becoming professional organized forces. Armies starting of as groups of renowned warriors to then become leaders. Certain kingdoms choose their leaders differently so the political system would have to be reimagined.
Incorporate a pre battle screen with your assigned commanders as your faction improves in warfare. Give them pre orders to carry out, or small missions. The better thr generals, the more options unlock to convey the unconventional strategies used during real recorded emgagments.
Rather than units being deployed in blocks as the typical rome total war standards, that should be something earned over time to further seperate the cultural differences of actual existing empires. Some nations just lined up and charged, while others used tactics when fielding their armies. All of these should be depicted and fleshed out.
It probably is new because they don’t have access or can’t simply port the old system in and has to be ground up remade
That is THE tmumbnail😊
Pharaoh... Let me people go...
I recently played unmodded Rome 2 on legendary difficulty the other day feeling a bit nostalgic. The game was somewhat fun (and very easy) when I just pressed auto resolve for every single battle. With how stupid the Ai-Cheats during manual battles are, playing battles manually felt awful with meele units hitting each other for hours (and being useless unless it's pikes), cav being useless too and unit quality making me uninstall the game after I won the campaign. Shogun's battles just play so much better. It's actually drove me insane. Thank god I'm not buying their games anymore.
During the whole Campaign I've not fought a single defensive siege (for a major settlement) and that felt really sad too because I loved defensive sieges in past games. Offensive sieges are awful too.
A NEW feature called Lethality!
It's new guys, I swear! don't look into it, just trust me!
They basically built a non-total war, total war game.
Would be cool if they brought some of this to Warhammer 3. Sophia will be working on most of the future dlc for this game. Cavalry is super ass in the game unless you use Bretonnia or monster cav.
@ 0:49
To answer their question: well, it's pointless to ask, if CA keeps putting unit health into hp pools. I don't even play the newer titles, and even I know this is a bad idea.
@ 2:06
RTW had something like that. Here, from my own mod:
stat_pri 2, 3, no, 0, 0, melee, simple, slashing, sword, 1, 0.4
@Dishonorable_Daimyo People should be very skeptical as to TW, and I can understand the skepticism about the new update - but while the features aren't new (I don't remember that they market it as new to the series unlike the weather which they did and it annoyed me) I think the 3 main points are pretty good ones, and it seems that the Sofia team is actually trying to make a better TW game compared to the main team.
So while I am still not convinced myself on buying Pharaoh, I will give credit where credit is due that there is someone in Sofia that seems to shift in the right direction ... one could only wish those were come for WH. Shame the guys who seem to care about the franchise are the ones who probably are getting very little breathing space to do so (Pharaoh's biggest issue is it being a really small budget game - was suppose to be a DLC).
I personally waited years for a better implementation of the line of sight feature they mentioned (the Medieval 2 example is the same one I had in my mind for years).
I personnaly hate line of sight. Older games operate on the supposition that when field battles begin both sides have scouted the enemy already. Also it's just plain annoying in gamey terms. Maybe thats just me.
maybe it should be relegated to lighter infantry units, or at least they can hide more effectively than heavier units, since after all, *noise* is an overlooked factor and heavy infantry are very noisy on the march.
Can't agree more. Adding more factions or a bigger map doesn't solve the core problems of the series. It's just asking for more of something bad instead of asking for actual improvement.
You are blessed with good hair line.
Jokes aside, Pharaoh will become a discount Atilla. The only reason why Atilla is played is due to 2 reasons.
First, It was picked by a niche group of autists on the /vst/ board due to its aesthetics.
And 2nd, it tried doing a Medieval 2 with its combat(but in Warscape, which is impossible). Modding is tied to these 2 so I don't count it as a reason.
Pharaoh is trying to do that, but without the aesthetical depth. It will stay dead and be played by weeeweee people like Andy'pisstake for "immersion" purposes or people who... ehm... who else is there? Yeah...
I would never get bored of looking at you handsome
Nothing can save TW Pharaoh, it was D.O.A. because of choices CA made. Sure there'll be a tiny spike in players as there always is with every game and patch/update. But i honestly don't believe even a small number of new players are going to jump on board.
I just don't understand why more options/settings is a bad thing... Agree with the rest of this though
more "options" is, in the context of modern day strategy / RTT a smoke screen for "we didn't know how to balance our game and didn't want to commit to a consistent vision for fear of alienating a certain subset of players, therefore we left it to the player to do the busywork of sifting through settings trying to figure out what the optimal experience is"
Things were much better when it was a difficulty slider and campaign length slider.
Also more importantly none of these options make this into a worthwhile game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 (that feel when you type out a whole reply, then bump the stupid panic button and opera closes the window *pepehands*)
basically, what i said was
agreed pharoah bad, more options good despite circumstance because player agency, advanced difficulty options smallest issue with franchise regardless of motives for implementation.
respectfully
Simplest way I can put it: I don't order pizza from any place that also serves fried chicken or burgers. A variety of sides is fine, but main dishes: if they don't have a speciality, they won't have a reliable reputation for doing something well. What you get depends on which staff are on shift, and if it's not the pizza guy, they don't offer refunds.
Pizza place that does only pizza and a few sides? ALL the staff have to be pizza guys, and the manager is right there with them making sure of it.
Im stealing this analogy.
They must be TERRIFIED if they've half listened to the community on how the game should work.
🤯
Even if battles were fixed this doesn't solve the issue of boring and easy campaigns
every Total War game has had varying degrees of problems relating to challenge. Shogun 2/FotS came the closest to solving it with Realm Divide + actually decent campaign AI.
The difference is some Total War games have *other* qualities that can at least compensate somewhat for battles being a forgone conclusion. In FotS battles were very visually spectacular (puts Warhammer to shame) and the sound design was excellent, in that game I regularly find myself zooming in and whizzing past everything, admiring the scenery.
Things like music, sound design, and just polish in general can make up for the times where the gameplay is lacking challenge. If it looks and sounds like the game was put together by people that didn't care, then I find it hard to be invested myself.
Hate to burst your bubble but every total war is easy when you figure out how to cheese the ai and reach a certain level of game knowledge
@@tylerman39 you are not bursting anything it has been an issue all along which is why i don't play total war anymore
Strange take. Sounds like a random crit chance like tf2. It's optional because it's the complete opposite of tactical flexibility lmao. Why make plans if you can throw crits
"opposite of tactical flexibility" what tactical flexibility does Pharaoh even have as it stands? Is this tactical flexibility with us in the room right now?
That doesn't make any sense. All this "lethality" would do is increase the pace of combat, as if nu-TW isn't fast enough.
Rome 1 is insanely fast. Have you even played it?
@@tylerman39 I have, but I no longer remember its particulars. Even then I reckon it's slower than nu-TW's apm fetishism.
@@tylerman39 think he was referring more to the extreme APM burden of current Total war and not the length of battles
@@TheSonOfDumb it's not, R1 is incredibly fast, and it's great, battles could be over in a matter of seconds in the right circumstances because morale actually mattered
The answer becomes 'it depends' based on how many alternatives exist. In modern Total War, there are few real paths a player can take: so everything that increases lethality makes APM burden higher, battles shorter and Dopamine cheaper(and you lose the feeling that you 'earned' it).
In a properly designed gameplay environment, more lethality means something else: it means stand-offs and stalemates, because a battle that could potentially be over in seconds is not one where either side wants to make the first move in case that move turns out to be a mistake. They want to avoid recreating the charge of the Light Brigade incident. You instead find you only commit to an attack when you either have no choice, or the potential advantage to be seized outweighs everything else.
Total War used to have that, and now doesn't.
Just revert back to med2 😂
👏🙂
Do we (the paying customer) really *need* CA Sophia?
keep it down lets atleast let the update hit
the text itself is interesting and important since it gives a bit of insight into what it is they're trying to do, its important context whatever the results end up being
the fall of CA
CA took the plunge...
This guy just very mad there is no Ismaelites tribes lol, Allah knows best