I've been playing Total War games since the first Shogun. They're buggy as hell for sure, but there's something about them that I just sort of get on with.
The main problems, for me, lie with the AI. Well, that and the stupidly high lethality of ranged weapons, the stupidly high morale of units and the way some of the breaks don't even seem to make any actual sense...
Look- I loved Empire and got on quite well with Napoleon, largely because I'm a massive Napoleonic warfare geek, I love that stuff and all the formation movement and lines and columns and so on, admittedly with a few glaring inaccuracies and (unmodded) very low troop numbers but what the hell, it was still pretty cool.
But the AI never really presented a challenge. The AI could be relied upon to never really try to flank your line of battle except with one or two units of cavalry- easily defended against with one or two skirmishing units- and it's been that way since the start. In Rome (the original) I had an army with a couple of mercenary Phalanxes, a pair of Scorpions, a unit of Onagers, a couple of units of Legionaries and a stack of ranged units (peltasts, archers etc) with which I defeated literally all comers for ages- they just sort of rampaged across Asia, goading the enemy into an attack with artillery fire then repelling the inevitable full frontal charge with the spears of the Phalanx. Which is not to mention the entire armies I had which were composed of nothing but War Dogs. More on that later though.
Further back, in Medieval (again, the original), there were basically two strategies. One, you stack up with as much heavy horse as you can fit into an army, charge ALL of it through one unit in the centre of your enemy's line (target the unit in the second line and the cavalry will dive further into the front unit) and watch the enemy cascade into a rout, at which point you have your cavalry mop up everything and two, you stack up on spear infantry with a few units of skirmishers as your front line and everything else is archers and artillery. Longbows will kill anything in this game, regardless of armour. Same with the heavier crossbows.
I mean, sure, it can take a while to figure out how to win a battle when you first pick the game up but once you've figured it out there isn't much actual tactical depth. Because the AI's reactions never change, you can quickly start to predict exactly what they will do in response to any action and make sure it's the wrong answer. Archers will always run away from horses, even if it's straight into a line of skirmishers. The AI will always charge at you if you hit him with artillery, regardless of whether you have enough ammunition to win the battle that way or how much damage you are actually causing. Only the cavalry will ever try to flank: Light cavalry will ALWAYS try to flank. That kind of stuff.
The thing is, none of that has really changed from game to game. Fast forward back up to Medieval 2 and all of the same problems are still in evidence. You either build a wall of fuckspears and put a big stack of archers and artillery behind it, or you build your army entirely out of cavalry and slap seven shades out of the enemy line with your horses' cocks.
Also, if you ever get the opportunity, take eight units of cannon into a siege; Pick the section of wall that has the most men on it, aim four units at each end. Watch something like 50% of the entire defence force die in a single volley of gunfire.
Empire constituted an innovation in that regard because the different paradigm of ranged combat in block units allowed for a lot more tactical space in which units could maneuver, with the added bit of depth related to the low accuracy of the weapons- get closer and do more damage and so on- and the artillery actually became a lot more significant in terms of casualty numbers outside of a siege or a bridge fight (aiming cannons along a bridge in Medieval 2 was murderous and hilarious). Canister, grape, percussion-cap, shrapnel, incendiary- all of these made artillery into real battlefield killers, and made a significant proportion of the game about protecting your guns. Dragoons, also, were a useful innovation even if the units were a little small for a foot unit (though having them any larger would have been unbalanced as well because who doesn't want a FUCKHUEG unit of light cav in the early game?).
Green Jackets and Fergusson Riflemen were hugely OP in late game though. They were supposed to be counterable with cavalry, as with other light infantry units, but even then the light infantry had always had deployable cavalry defences (not to mention the defensive mines!) and sufficient accuracy to make charging them with cavalry tricky at best: trying to charge down riflemen, especially rapid-fire riflemen like the Fergussons, was a surefire way to get your cavalry wiped out to a man before they even made it into combat. Add to that the fact that the dispersed formation made them very resistant to artillery fire, they were better at hiding than anyone else and they kicked the shit out of line regiments in a ranged fight, and you essentially have a pretty broken unit. Late game, I would have entire armies of nothing but Light Dragoons, Green Jackets and artillery. Sometimes they needed a bit of finesse, but zero-casualty victories become routine after a while.
So there was a clear opportunity for a lot of tactical depth in this game, all of it kind of killed by the thick-as-pigshit AI and the fact that ranked fire makes taking cover almost obsolete in the opening fifth of the game. A unit taking cover doesn't get enough protection to compensate for the fact that it can only fire with one rank. And they certainly didn't solve the problem that being in a fort was more of a liability for the AI than it was a bonus- not helped by the AI which still steadfastly refused to leave the fort unless you got very close to it. Otherwise I might have been forced to move more than my guns and a single sacrificial unit of low-value troops into cannon range of the fort.
All you need to do to win an attacking siege is destroy enough of the wall that the AI refuses to defend it (preferably with as much of the AI's infantry still on the wall as possible when it goes down), then move your light infantry, artillery and/ or riflemen into range of whichever breach they are defending in the most force and wear down the enemy from beyond their own gunnery range until they're all dead, you feel comfortable charging in or their morale breaks en masse.
Of course, forts are skill kind of useful as a defender, as the AI often builds armies without cannons, or entirely out of conscripts, and the moment the AI has a breach in the wall they will stop even pretending to try climbing the walls and run hell for leather at the breach. In that situation, you either deploy your cannons outside the walls and target their artillery, sally forth with cavalry to silence their guns or just wait behind the breach with stacked defences. Enough infantry in a horseshoe just inside the breach will break or murder almost anything that comes through, and the entire AI army will be trying Route 1 almost as a matter of course.
The big thing about Empire, of course, was the sea battles. Ahh, the sea battles. Basically all you need to know about the sea battles is chain shot. A fast ship with good range and accuracy can easily disable a larger ship in Empire, and once a ship is dismasted maneuvering to its stern is trivial: One or two volleys of round shot and it will surrender. I've captured first-rates with frigates in this way. Hell, I once defeated roughly half the Spanish merchant marine with two Fifth-Rates and a sloop, just kept running away and hitting the rigging until there were galleons lying disabled across half the map. Once you figure it out you scarcely need to build a ship in your own yards ever again, and any time you're hurting for cash all you need to do is find an enemy fleet and you're golden- free cash injection. Once you get heavier ships, of course, you need to worry a little less about the finesse of things, but that mostly just makes things easier. Make sure you take out the bomb ketches and rocket ships early, always have a couple of chasers to run down and capture fleeing ships, and don't get too close to anything that might blow up and you're pretty much golden.
Napoleon was a bit more interesting- the attrition mechanics made long marches a more considered option, and the higher tempo of the strategic game meant you often had to go in with fewer men than you'd like and actually finesse your way to victory against a larger force, which actually made some of the battles a bit of a challenge in spite of the retarded AI, which was actually a bit more fun. A bit more accurate in the way the units behaved, too, to be honest. Mostly though, it was similar to Empire.
Shogun 2 struck me as being a little broken. I played as Otomo as well, and after a couple of false starts it became clear that the European Tercos were hugely OP. One of the best shooting units in the game, capable of ranked volley fire, better armoured than Samurai and almost as good with a sword? If they had an anti-cavalry bonus they'd literally be the unit that could do it all. In a field battle these guys are almost all you need.
Well, I say that: Shogun 2 did at least address the problem of horrible AI by making close combat more murderous. If an enemy unit did make it into HtH with you all tactical finesse went out of the window and it became a straight numbers game, which the AI sucked less at than it did everything else. I had a few early reversals that way to huge armies of Samurai fanatics early on, but later the Tercos started to take hold.
Well, the Tercos and the Samurai Archers.
One of the quirks of the Shogun 2 system is the way you can stack bonuses on a province. Find a province where you can make the right kind of artisans' building, stack all of the accuracy-bonus buildings in the same place and you can put out levy archers who outshoot the samurai of other nations, or Samurai archers who can take the apple off a small boy's head when the boy is up a hill, behind a wall and the Samurai is blindfolded and facing the wrong way. Seriously, I think my archers were coming out with a base accuracy at level 0 of over 120%. Insanely accuracte Samurai archers are the reason I almost never had to actually get into a fort to take it- the range and arc of fire on the archer units basically made them into mid-ranged, highly targeted artillery units that were guaranteed to do no infrastructure damage (unless I loaded flaming arrows and hit an archery tower).
Siege situations became a handicap for the AI again, as any siege would consist of any artillery units (rocket soldiers FTW, anything else is 50/50 at best) taking out the most heavily-populated sections of wall and trying to kill as many of the defenders as possible before my archers moved into range, followed by an archery duel between the archers on the walls and my FUCKHUEG army of superhuman Samurai archers (never really in doubt in spite of the defences) and the rest was basically mop-up as the archers would surround the fort until there was nowhere for the enemy to hide and I would just shoot them to death with arrows. Very often the last man left in the fort would have upwards of fifty arrows in him as entire units volleyed him simultaneously, their superhuman accuracy planting most of them in his face.
Not only that, but the other Otomo special units- notably the Donderbuss cavalry- are also hilariously OP if you use them right. Basically, gunpowder rules, Samurai drool.
On the sea it's not much better. Nanban trade ships, available very early on to anyone who trades with the foreigners (notably the Otomo), not only serve the trade function but are also both the toughest ships in the game and the most heavily armed. You can get a cannon-armed ship on something like turn six of the campaign, if not earlier. From that point on, any sea battle consists of keeping the Nanban ship clear of flaming arrows using your cheaper Japanese vessels while the Nanban ship wrecks the enemy with its cannons. They did something to the system in Shogun 2 so it's almost impossible to actually sink a ship short of setting it on fire for some reason, so the cannons aren't likely to actually put the enemy under but they will kill a lot of the crew and put the fear of God into them, so it's pretty trivial after that to make them surrender with a couple of light vessels. Especially matchlock ships. I've forgotten what they call them, but the Japanese boats with the siege towers and matchlock crew are really, really good- they are far more murderous than most archer-equipped ships and while they aren't great in a boarding action if you keep them close enough together it won't ever come to that because everybody surrenders.
The really light ships with the bomb-throwers on them are great too, especially against those fast sailing ships with the huge marine crews which are obviously designed for boarding actions. Which are completely fucking useless because the boarding action mechanic is broken. In a boarding action in Shogun 2, the ship's crew number ticks down every time somebody leaves the ship to board another regardless of whether he's actually dead or not (and as such decrements the vessel's morale) and doesn't increment it (or restore morale) when they return. The upshot of this is that if you engage in an aggressive boarding action your ship is almost guaranteed to surrender in short order and even if it doesn't and by some miracle wins the action, it will surrender at the drop of a hat to the next thing that comes along and in the post-battle you will have to pay to replace most of the crew even though they didn't die because according to the game's system apparently they count as dead the moment they leave sheir parent ship.
The Rise of the Samurai campaign I think is probably a little better, since there are no cannon-armed ships and none of the gunpowder nonsense that broke the Shogun 2 campaign. On the other hand, this mostly just simplifies things along the traditional Total War Cavalry/Infantry divide. Shock cavalry or Foot Samurai armies really are the way forward, and it doesn't actually help much that the choice between skirmishers and archers has been removed because the best skirmishers and the best archers are the same unit. Historically accurate maybe, but it makes for very homogenous armies if you're playing to win rather than for historical accuracy.
Fall of the Samurai was hilarious, both more and less broken than the main Shogun 2 campaign and in many places kind of sad really. The story campaign I think was actually the best part of this game, because it actually presented you with real challenges in places that you couldn't avoid by smart maneuvering on the strategic map and I think the constraints on the tactical combat actually worked pretty well in making the campaign a fun challenge. The main campaign on the other hand... well, you can still do the stacking bonuses thing on provinces (to the point where my levee troops shot straighter than most other armies' sharpshooters by the end of the game), foreign soldiers were still the best in the game (which strikes me as a little prejudicial even if they did represent the elite of the foreign armies) and foreign ships and ironclads still rendered pretty much every Japanese ship obsolete as soon as they showed up but at least you could only build a limited number of foreign units (and only one of the large ironclads).
Also, sieges- fortifications in Actually Useful Again shock! Well, kinda. They certainly still made it harder to assault the AI, though the way that you could still kill entire units by shooting at the walls with cannons did still put a bit of a dampener on things. Direct-fire units without the archers' arcing fire aren't as stupidly good at killing things from outside the fort, though, which means you do actually have to assault the damned things this time, and the way the earthworks don't magically go away when you hit them with enough cannon fire means they're a lot more worth having here (not that that wasn't already a feature in Shogun 2, it just didn't matter because archers). Add tot hat the whole maneuvering system that I enjoyed so much from Empire with the rifle units and the fact that having removed (or at least reduced the exaggerated effect of) the ranked fire nonsense cover is actually useful again (similar to Napoleon) and there's even a little tactical depth here.
The problem, of course, is that when it's not programmed specifically to make a scenario interesting the AI is still thicker than pigshit. It will run straight into your lines with sword-armed Samurai. Straight into your murderous volley-firing, stupidly accurate riflemen. Who will more often than not cut them down to a man before they get within ten yards, even without the gatling guns, cannon and so on. On the few occasions when they did make it into combat- don't get me wrong here- the sword-swinging lunatics were horribly murderous, but if you're going to put that kind of tactical disparity into a game you really need the AI to be smarter about how it uses those troops.
Not just that, but the sea battles... Well. Less one-trick than Empire's sea battles maybe, in that you couldn't just aim at the rigging and there's a bit more detail on which parts of the ship is taking damage and so on, but explosive rounds in the early game and the advanced armour piercing shot in the late game are still hilariously OP and I think I only lost one Ironclad, ever, and that was because of a monstrous fuckup on my part: The basic calculus of any sea battle would normally be that if I had an ironclad in the fight it would be a very nearly zero-casualty win.
This was greatly enhanced if that Ironclad was the Warrior. I don't mind admitting that I went straight for the British as trade partners, and Warrior was a large part of that decision. She is HUGE, easily twice the displacement of almost any other ship in the game, with the heaviest broadside, the heaviest armour and the hardest crew. One, maybe two volleys from Warrior was all it ever took, on any of the vessels I ever came across in the game, for them to either explode or surrender. The smaller ships were almost worthless, the torpedoes almost impossible to hit with, and anything unarmoured or with a wooden hull was nearly guaranteed to catch fire and die at some point.
Not only that, but the bombardment mechanic. Oh my goodness the bombardment mechanic.
First of all, shelling things from offshore on the strategic map was a little under-powered, I'm not really talking about that: I'm often more than a little irritated at the inability of any strategic action short of flat out bribery to influence how many units the enemy has in the field (at what point does shelling reduce a unit to the point where it is no longer viable?) and this was no exception. No, what I'm talking about is offshore bombardment onto the tactical map.
Aim it right and you can kill half of the opposing army before they even get in range of your on-field artillery.
Seriously. In a siege you can destroy most of the enemy fortification without going near the damn thing. I have won fights where my force was outnumbered hugely simply by dint of being far enough back on the map that by the time they reached me two thirds of their units were already getting ready to run away, half their army dead and scattered.
Yeah. Fun, sure, but it feels a little cheap after a while. And again, even when you're attacking, if you hit the enemy with offshore bombardment they are very nearly guaranteed to start running at you.
All of which, I suppose, brings us back to Rome 2.
Or, as I like to call it, The Dogs Of War.
I'll start off with the strategic stuff. I haven't really talked much about the strategic level of the Total War games so far, and that's largely because until Rome 2 they were mostly pretty homogenous, basically consisting of a need to castle up early game and build your economy while seeking every alliance and trade agreement you can find to boost your income (strategically the most important part of any Empire game is the trade theatres, the earlier you grab all the trade points the better) until you can afford to spam units onto the map and not really give a shit about the economic impact; Grab any land you can find that's relatively easy to take, but don't worry too much about the harder targets until you're a major economic power, then go nuts. In the games that have it as a mechanic, use the time to tech up like a motherfucker. Then, once you are earning roughly as much per turn as the next three or four factions put together, go on the rampage.
In Rome 2, advancement is a much trickier beast so far. I haven't been playing much so I don't have it properly figured out yet, but so far I'm finding public order and food supply to be fairly major constraining factors on my advancement and the balance is a little trickier. I'm sure I'll get there eventually.
The thing is, they really haven't solved the problems with the tactical AI and if recent experience is anything to go by the strategic AI has actually got stupider.
Not only that, but the dogs are back.
To elaborate: In the original Rome: Total War, there is a unit called War Dogs, and they're back in Rome 2 but more powerful than ever. The unit consists of a number of dog handlers and a larger number of dogs. The handlers close to the enemy and release the dogs, then basically run away. The dogs themselves are pretty murderous against broken formations or lightly armoured troops, but not that tough and can be defeated by good skirmish units or shield walls. So far, so good. But(1) once the dogs have been released, they can't be targeted directly- any command to attack them simply results in an attack command on the handlers. The best strategy when under attack from war dogs is actually to turn your unit to face the main advance of the dogs and leave them to it, as they will automatically fight the dogs as they enter combat. If you do this, the dogs often won't cause severe casualties; Unfortunately, the AI constantly commands its units to attack, which means they break formation to run after the handlers, and a broken formation is just meat for War Dogs.
But(2) the AI is insanely aggressive anyway and will happily chase after any unit that comes near regardless of how much sense that makes- so even if they aren't chasing the dog handlers all you need to do is get close to them with your General's unit and they will happily break formation to give chase and- again- the broken formation is meat to the dogs.
But(3) (and strategically this is the biggest problem with the unit) as long as the handlers stay alive the unit does not lose strength. What this means is, if you attack an army and defeat it, then attack another on the same turn, with any other troop type you will attack the second army with depleted numbers because some of your men will have been casualties in the first fight. With dogs, as long as you keep the handlers safe, this is not the case. You can have lost all or nearly all of your dogs in the previous fight, but as long as the handlers are alive a new entire army of war dogs appears from nowhere to vanquish your foes again. Straight away. At no cost.
As a combined illustration of both how OP this is and how stupid the strategic AI is, I had an army composed of a General and nothing but War Dogs on campaign in enemy territory. Reaching the end of my move, I spotted a huge column of armies heading directly towards my territory- we must have been talking very nearly the faction's entire military force here, it was impressively large. "Oh fuck," I thought. "They will either gang up on my now-horribly-exposed army and annihilate my most experienced War Dog handlers almost trivially or keep marching into my territory and annihilate my local defences (which are pretty weak because most of my army is off elsewhere)."
Did they? Did they fuck.
They came at my army of War Dogs. One stack at a time.
The first army came at me: I marched my handlers towards them, released the dogs and ran the fuck away. One of my units of handlers got caught, but judicious use of my General's unit and the fact that by this point the handlers themselves were hard as nails (the unit gains exp based on what the dogs kill and doesn't lose it when they die, but the exp bonuses affect the handlers as well) mean that handler casualties were light. Using the General to persuade the enemy to break formation a couple of times, I wiped the first army out to a man. To. A. Man.
The second army came at me: bit more cavalry this time, which made it a little harder, but because not many handlers had died I had very nearly a full complement of dogs again and they were mostly light cav anyway- meat for my General's unit. I did lose one unit of handlers, but casualties elsewhere were relatively light except for the dogs (which nearly all died). This army had I think one, maybe two units of survivors? Not much though.
The third army came at me: This one was mostly infantry. There's not much to tell here, infantry that can be persuaded to break formation (read: any AI-controlled infantry) are basically meat for the dogs. Which had automatically replenished between fights.
The AI decided that now was the right time to try to assassinate my general. It really pisses me off how easy spy actions are in Rome 2. Becoming a field general might as well be a death sentence if there are enemy spies in the area, and they can cripple the fuck out of your cities almost with impunity.
The fourth army came at me. Without my general's unit, making the enemy break formation was riskier and I didn't have a troubleshooter unit to pull my dog handlers out of the fire so I lost a few more guys but no whole units. Still killed almost the entire enemy force. Got all my dead dogs back.
The fifth army came at me. This time I had to commit the dog handlers to a couple of nasty skirmishes and lost a fair number of them because all the whittling had reduced the numbers of dogs available, but they did their duty well and I didn't lose any more whole units. The same could not be said of the enemy.
And with that, a single stack of dog handlers had systematically dismantled the entire war machine of a major opposing faction. In one turn..
So yeah, there's a lot that I really enjoy about the Total War series, but there is also a lot that is terribly, terribly broken.
