Transcript
Speaker: Hello everyone and welcome to the Fog of Warcast. Today we are finally doing something we have been teasing for a while. We are finally kicking off the Total War episodes.
Speaker: And this episode is going to be about mostly about the games we actually have talked about. So we're going to start off... from the early games and then move forward. so you're going to recognize a few takes, you're going to find a new ah bunch of new hot takes that you won't recognize and won't agree with.
Speaker: It will be a really fun episode. My name is Andreas Eriksson, with me I have my co-host Johan Mossberg. Hello, hello. And Magnus Ek, and I think Magnus, you're one who's going to start us off today.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm so psyched. I'm so nervous because as we talked about before we started recording, we're heading into kind of like the first episode about a whole game series. It's a popular game series. It's a classic, a modern classic. They're still going.
Speaker: Well, if they're not going strong, they're still going. And there are a lot of people like... casting about the streaming these games that know more than us that are more read up on on the studio than us and so with that disclaimer that we're approaching this from like being just being gamers we played we logged a lot of hours in the total war games and We are in no way claiming to be experts about this, but we really want to talk about them.
Speaker: And if you haven't played the Total War games, well, first of all, why are you' you still listening to us? You must be so bored with this by now. ah But if you're here for some reason and you haven't played a lot of Total War games, at you've missed out, I should say. This is one of the game series that got me into strategy gaming.
Speaker: And it is a quite unique blend of kind of turn-based strategy. ah very no You spend a lot of time in an overworld map looking at a map, moving units around. And the early games, you're kind of it feels like more of a chess set.
Speaker: And you're actually modeled moving units tiles around on a physical map and combining that with real-time strategy battle maps.
Speaker: ah So you have this kind of mix between ah very abstract strategy game and a very abstract ah strategy part of the game and a more hands-on, more realistically rendered real-time strategy.
Speaker: And it's a cool mix because it means that you You build your settlements, you build your castles or your towns up. There's a bit of a bit of a a city building element to it.
Speaker: Uh, more or less between the games, we'll get back to that and ah more hands-on moving guys around the map and actually charging your cavalry units into the flank of the opposing army, setting up your artillery, make sure that your cannons or your ballistas actually hit the enemy units.
Speaker: Uh, And I think that's what really launched this game series. But the game series is developed by... I just want to break in and make a really cursed hot take.
Speaker: Oh, hot take. So the move from overworld into a specific battle when units encounter each other, it feels a lot like the old Pokemon Game Boy games, right?
Speaker: My hot take is that Total War is Pokemon-inspired. I said it was a cursed one. It might be, because they launched the first game in 2000, and I haven't ah seen or heard that hot take before, but you might be right.
Speaker: So, the game is ah developed by Creative Assembly, it's been published by ea it's been published by Activision, and by Sega throughout its history. And the... started the series out with Shogun Total War in 2000. I've always thought that it's quite an interesting ah first game going into Japanese history before something that is maybe more, you know, commonly known, at least in the West.
Speaker: ah But it started out with Shogun Total War in 2000. They followed that up with Medieval Total War in 2002, two very similar games in quite different settings. ah And then they moved into the real slogger, Rome Total War, which is where I got in and which I think that and they really got the hype up about these games here from Total War. And it's one of these strategy games that gets reference and gets referenced a lot, both as one of the best and actually one of the worst games ever made.
Speaker: And i yeah I've repeated that in this podcast before. um But what eat with their own Total War, they really found their footing. That became Game of the Year. that was...
Speaker: Almost when they released it, universally lauded. And I think that it's one of these kind of like genre defining games, at least within the strategy game sphere. and They followed that up with Medieval 2 Total War, ah which felt like more of the same, even though it's a really good game. Andreas' Lauderdos is one of the best games ever released.
Speaker: um They shifted tack with Empire Total War in 2009, where they went from a medieval setting for the first time, or a medieval or an ancient setting, into kind of like early modern period and empire building setting, which also launched for the first time sea battles or tactical sea battles within the series. um They followed that with Napoleon.
Speaker: you know Clues in the title, it was about the Napoleonic Wars, at Total War Shogun 2, Total War Rome 2, and then with Total War Attila. And for today, we're going to draw the line at Total War Attila because we realized when quite quite early that we can't talk about the whole Total War series in one episode. We're not going to do a deep dive into every game, but we just can't fit everything into here.
Speaker: So we're going to draw the line after Total War Attila, which released in 2015. And we'll come back to you and talk about ah Total War Warhammer, which released in 2016 and all the games that were released after that.
Speaker: And I think you'll understand when we get into this, why we draw the line between Total War Attila ah set in the late suddenly late antiquity and Total War Warhammer, which is a purely fantasy setting.
Speaker: So no not only that, and we're not going to dive into it too much this episode, but I can tease already that the Total War Warhammer game did in some ways change or influence the direction of the entire franchise.
Speaker: And it's changed how Total War game worked. So the the stretch of game we are talking about now, they are in some ways their own era. And my favorite era, I might add, because Total War Medieval 2 is the best game.
Speaker: but But in general, they're on they are sort of an era. And then we got another set of games with another style. We're going dive into that much more when we good do those games. But...
Speaker: It's not just that they went from realism to fantasy. They also sort of swapped sort of where they were in the in the style of strategy games. whether Whether one agrees with you or not, Andreas, you might say that the games we're talking about today are at least they set out to model a historical period, historical units. And that's one of the things i should have mentioned, that there is a very clear very clear ambition with all the games we're talking about today, trying to model historical units, historical cities, historical countries, historical persons even.
Speaker: ah Most clearly in Napoleon or Attila, where they're very clearly focused on one historical figure. and his time or the world around them. ah But even in the earlier games, I mean, from the first Shogun game, you play and you try to model historical armies and historical historical people that actually existed.
Speaker: Johan? I think actually we can call this this episode, here we're delving into the Total War classical era. That's what we're doing here. It's the classical gameplay. It's the first gameplays, but also the kind of evolution. I mean, we have, if I'm not mistaken here, I think we're going from 2000 to 2015. Yeah. and Something like that, the first fifteen years And then also I just have to say, it's not Pokemon. It's Dragon Quest in 1986. I've never been this mad at you, Andreas, as I've been when you said this.
Speaker: Well, I'm a 90s baby. I don't know about any Dragon Quest. yeah that's deliciousious to me Yeah, this game is as old as I am. but yep no I was sure that we were going to disagree violently.
Speaker: I'm starting here. I'm disagreeing here. Yeah, before we even substantially started talking about the Total Warriors, we were already disagreeing violently. But yeah I think we'll do like this. We'll talk about these first... How many games? About the first 15 years, kind of chronologically.
Speaker: ah and take it game by game. And then we can start doing comparisons as we go along. yeah So Shogun 1. Opinions. Oh, I love that game.
Speaker: yeah I love that game. I mean, I was... Let's see. I was 14 when that game came out. And God, I loved it. It was it what game it was a game you yeah hadn't seen it before it was it kind of mixed the grand strategy with the RTS, the city management, the buildings, the modeling of armies, the the cool little cutscenes. We'd seen the cutscenes in Westworld Studios before, but when this game came, it was...
Speaker: It was kind of the pinnacle of what a computer that day and age could handle. it it was It was an amazing game. I still remember the feeling when I bought that one, got the box, got home, installed it, and played it.
Speaker: And i'm I'm happy that my mother and father aren't here to listen to this. I missed three days of school just playing this game. I was so immersed in that game. i loved it.
Speaker: It was great. That's actually a good metric for is a game good? If you haven't missed school or work for it, it just isn't that good a game. ah but But also something with it was this was kind of the first game because I knew about knights. I know knew about Rome. I knew about and Carolinians. I knew about Napoleon.
Speaker: But this was Japan. You knew summarize sure. But But you didn't know. You didn't have any kind of grasp or feeling about field battles in Japan.
Speaker: And sure, looking back now, the graphics are clunky. The AI is clunky. But for me, this is kind of the the games that brings warmth to my heart but when I talk about it and when I remember it.
Speaker: it It was such an iconic game when it came, for me at least. Andreas? Yeah, so this game was released when I was 10. This is not a game for a 10-year-old. No. That said, I have played it.
Speaker: and I played it when I was a kid it was ah It went way above my head in so many ways. But it was still a really cool game. And I think what made it really cool, because I don't really have any criticism of this game. First of all, i was too young to actually figure out all weaknesses and exploit it properly.
Speaker: but also it set off something really interesting. So I played a lot of the other strategy games from that era, and I've been returning to that era a lot, as we all have. and Almost all other games which try to model battlefields or fields of battle in that time were always held back by the fact that they had their battlefields on the overworld.
Speaker: So you played your battles in the same space where you did your base building, um your units were, well, on the map they were often larger than the trees and stuff like that. Yes, so... fit the map together with what you were modeling on it.
Speaker: So you can't really have a... Essentially, you had to make a compromise between the two, sort of the base building RTS game and the battlefields. You couldn't model as much on them. I know Total Annihilation tried.
Speaker: um But like Total Annihilation is also a good showcase because they had to make compromises. They had to remove the um a lot of the really big geography and stuff like that.
Speaker: The robots were sometimes as tall as mountains. which is cool, but what Shogun introduced and what the Total War games have been doing since then, when you have this sort of overworld, which is essentially just a map and a turn-based game on a map, and then you model real battlefield...
Speaker: is that you can make the battlefield so big. You can have so many things on it. You can have a bunch of geography. You can have more units. Especially with the 2000 tech, you can have so many things going on all of a sudden.
Speaker: And that was amazing. It was really cool. And it's something they kept going with ah since then. I feel still think it peaked around Medieval 2 when they started building these really massive castles.
Speaker: But like, It's hard to express to someone who's younger than us how how incredibly big and new this entire idea was. yeah I got that feeling slightly later with Rome because I ah came in with Rome and then I went back. we but realized When I realized that I loved Rome, I went back and played medieval and shon And, I mean, that exacerbated this feeling that the game is clunky.
Speaker: One of the things I remember is just the sounds a battle because it's cool that battles were, like, huge and they were rendered. You can actually move the units around. ah But just the soundtrack to that, the kind of...
Speaker: the sound of ah Japanese medieval soldiers beating each other over the head with sticks and spears. And I remember the soundtrack, as are the sounds the sound effects very vividly.
Speaker: And they didn't really match up to what you saw on the screen, but it was a cool game. ah But we should explain that. yeah I think I did a poor job of this, that The first couple of games can differ from the rest of the series because they haven't started.
Speaker: and i mean, the overworld map or the map of ah of Japan that you start with is in this game is really stylized. It is like yeah if you rolled out a map of Japan, then they divided it into regions.
Speaker: yeah But what's similar to later games is that basically the map consists of regions. In each region, there is a capital city. And to take the region, you conquer the capital city. ah And in later games, it's you actually move kind of like the armies are stylized like little guys walking around on the map.
Speaker: That's not the case with Shogun. you You drag and drop yeah tiles or pieces into the region you want to move. ah And that's also one thing that starts from the first game that your army is basically a stack of units, usually 20.
Speaker: So you could have 20 units. I think it's 20 in Chogun. I might be wrong. It's 20. Yeah. So you in your castle, you build and buildings. These buildings provide food or they provide money. They provide training opportunities. You're like barracks or stables.
Speaker: And these enable you to recruit units. You then put your units into your stacks, your armies, and then you move the army to where you have ah want to have a battle or to the city you want to conquer. And that's the basic concept of every Total War game since then.
Speaker: But it was ah really weird thing going back from Rome, back to these two early games where it's really stylized. You drag and drop tiles and pieces on um on a map or board. But it's kind of a smart way to move around the constraints of the time that you have a lot of mechanics that are happening. You don't show everything, but you have this very stylized overworld and then you go into a detailed battle map.
Speaker: And i can remember precisely the same thing you and as you on the US, but with Roan Total War, that's just, this is something completely different to every other game I've ever played. ah And I think that that stays with you and that made me a Total War fan.
Speaker: yeah I agree with you there because I have that feeling that you're talking about with Rome. I have that with this game. We had never seen anything like this. it It was so new, so innovative and such a new way of bringing in strategy games and RTS games to the table. I'm doing air courts now, but you guys can't see it. But...
Speaker: It was like playing a board game on your computer, which was, it was great. I mean, we got the best parts of civilization and we got the best part of RTS games like Command and Conquer or Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3.
Speaker: ah Because the battles you could direct, but you could also focus on city building. it It was, when it came out, it blew my mind. But then again, i was 14 and I probably didn't know.
Speaker: As Andrea said, it wasn't appropriate for a 10-year-old. It wasn't appropriate for a 14-year-old either. I mean, I was the worst kind of candidate for being a shogun that has ever existed.
Speaker: But I had fun. It was great.
Speaker: Yeah, ah lots of rebellions from the start. And that's also something that... Rebellions is... It's a game. With every Total War game I've ever played, especially for kind of before you figure out the game, like, why do I get rebellions all of the time? Is there no way to please these people?
Speaker: And in some Total War games, there is no way to please people. We'll get back to that. But if we move along to medieval ah medieval Total War... Which, to be fair, very much of the same thing.
Speaker: ah Slightly better because it was a really cool game show, but with obvious flaws. I mean, there there was a lot of kings to iron out. But basically, I think that it was clear to a lot of people that they'd stumble onto something good here. This kind of mix between ah ground strategy and real-time strategy. or where And where, you know, the constituent parts made the other one better.
Speaker: So the RTS component made the strategy game so much better. And the strategy component made the RTS game so much better. Like you said on the, yes, it's something completely new there, but, uh, medieval total war, not completely new, but different setting. Uh, we have the Pope for the first time. Uh, I hate the Pope in that game.
Speaker: Yeah, but you're from Sweden. It's in your blood and your DNA. Okay. Weirdly nationalistic there. We have we have a Lutheran history. Yeah. He did something good.
Speaker: Yeah. ah But that that was the the the main mechanic I got out of that. Yeah. The Pope... and is important and the Pope's ah son of a bitch because he always gets there because Total War Games is about painting the map. Basically, you conquered. diplomas we Diplomacy has always been a joke in these games.
Speaker: yeah And it wasn't better way back when, which basically means that while you're you know happily conquering Europe, ah the Pope comes in and says, no, you can't do this or no, you have to go on a crusade.
Speaker: Yep, but also something, I mean, I hated the Pope and the papal system or the conclave system, as I think they call it. I've hated it in European Rishalis games also.
Speaker: But they did some things that I actually loved. ah The maps, the battle maps became bigger. So since we're in the medieval times of Europe, cavalry became more viable.
Speaker: Because you could actually go around and you could rear-charge someone. Or you could have this and left flank, right flank, center. You could actually start using more tactics in the game.
Speaker: Which I thought was great. And also, I think it's the game where... Correct me if I'm wrong i my I might confuse this with Medieval 2 and Rome, but I think this is the first when you had when you actually saw the armies starting to move. And you got merchants in in another way than you had in Shogun.
Speaker: a I think this is the game. that the I mean, it's a long time ago for me, so I can't really remember that. But... The game was good. It had a lot more variety of troops. You also had some special troops that were more distinct to the country you were playing.
Speaker: ah It was a good game. It didn't blew my it or blow my mind as much as Shogun did. Because it it remember, this is just two years apart from Shogun to medieval.
Speaker: still a good game. There's something about a cavalry charge right into someone's archers that you didn't really get in Shogun.
Speaker: And here is a thing, if I'm not remembering it entirely wrong. So first of all, Medieval 1 is in most ways just an update of Shogun. That is, they play with the same game engine. They didn't really remake the game engine to make this new game.
Speaker: And I think they did for Rome. And what I also, if I remember it correctly, I don't think i think Medieval 2 is actually the same game engine as Rome.
Speaker: Yep. So the Medieval games have always been sort of blessed and cursed with ah essentially being, you know well, in some ways being a really big expansion rather than it's a than a standalone game.
Speaker: So they have been adding to and doing more and more with and they've been probably influenced by good mods and And it makes it a really refined game. That's why I love Medieval 2. I think it takes all the best things from Rome and then just builds more of it.
Speaker: And I think the Medieval period is pretty good for it because you can there but you you don't have like the same thing as you do in Rome and in Shogun with one dominant culture. ah which you play as, you have various sort of, at least in the way we understand history in the in the West, very separate cultures, which means you can do different things. You can move in different directions depending on which faction you play in a way, which is hard when you're doing Rome. You can do it in Rome, but you do it by essentially faking an entire set of archaeological evidence for how, for example, Cretia worked.
Speaker: And but But essentially, it means that they get to do two medieval games, which are both bigger, better, bolder, rather than having to introduce a new entire set of game mechanics with the medieval games.
Speaker: And the problem of it is, of course, that Medieval 1 and Medieval 2 is a game you have already played if you played Shogun or if you played Rome. Hmm. Yeah, and that was the feel.
Speaker: I mean, slightly updated, better looking, but same game engine, same kind of very stylized world map. ah ah A shout out to a very fun expansion, though. They did a Vikings, Viking, let's see what the it was called, Viking Invasion. Viking Invasion.
Speaker: Yeah. Very much like Corbarian Invasion, but are in are Yeah, you can see where they are yeah the the ideas have been swirling around. But yeah, that was a really cool little expansion to this. ah ah It suffered from a problem that's also, that plagued this game series for a long while, that they had a cool idea with the expansion, but the expansion was just a little bit too small, a little bit too simplistic. I think that Barbarian Invasion was kind of cool there because it it gives a whole new setting and it was the same size as the base game.
Speaker: Basically, I think they had a ah slightly fewer regions, but it it felt like you really got something out of buying the expansion. um Viking Invasion, maybe not really worth your money, but a cool little expansion.
Speaker: Yeah. But as they've been developing and releasing Medieval Total War, things have been happening in the world outside the world. And in 2000, the absolute blockbuster Swords and Sandals movie, Gladiator, dropped. And I think this must have played into kind of like the discussions of what are we doing for our next game?
Speaker: So I think they were already in the works of developing Medieval Total War. ah But in 2002 or 2003, they announced that the next game would be Rome Total the War.
Speaker: yeah And I do remember the hype for this game. This is the first game where I really, I was old enough to, cause I'm born 94. Uh, I was old enough to kind of be psyched for this. I was a Roma boo like every other little boy. And one of my best friends said, yeah, they're dropping ah game called Rome total war. It looks really cool. We need to play it.
Speaker: And i remember sitting at the kitchen table, reading like the morning newspaper and reading a re review for Rome total the war and just being so, so psyched for this. Uh,
Speaker: do have Have I hallucinated this or was this real a real hype for Rome Total War? I mean, I was 20 at the time. There was a hype in the gaming community. And not just a hype. It was kind of a big hype because we had seen Shogun. We had seen Medieval.
Speaker: But now we kind of got the dream that that we had inside our hearts. As every little boy has, we can play Caesar. We can play with Legions.
Speaker: This is going to be awesome and cool. And... it was it It was a good game when it was released. I know I'm going to get some heat from you guys now, you or at least I think I'm going to get it.
Speaker: and When it was released, buggy as hell. it was It wasn't as smooth as Shogun or Medieval, but it kind of worked up the kinks quite fast.
Speaker: But it was a hype, and the game delivered in a sense that it got our expectations. We could play with Histatis and Triarias and Praetorians and all of that. We could be Hannibal going across the Alps, or if you actually play the game, you don't go through the Alps. You take them from Syracuse because that's it quite a short way.
Speaker: But it was somewhat buggy when it was released. The first release was buggy. but it was still ah great game. I can't say i remember that, but I remember that about ROM 2. It might be true though, because the the disc version I have is the Game of the Year edition when they have the chance to... They had worked it out.
Speaker: Yeah, they had worked it out. And ROM 2, I'm saving the clunkiness and the buggyness for ROM 2. but This was... it It was still a great game. Everyone loved it when you had the Brutii, the Skippii, Duelii, and you had the mechanic with the Senate and Senate missions, but you can't be... You you can't do too well too quickly because the the Senate will see you as a threat.
Speaker: It was just a good game. It was a great game. Above all, it was cool. It was cool. I mean... Just... Sorry, I had to close my window. It has a fun mix of being sort of realistic, but also going for the rule of cool in in some ways. For example, the really fun thing is that Rome is entirely wrong.
Speaker: Like the Skippii and the Brutii and the Julii, they weren't really things happening at the same time in reality at all. And they're also geographically placed entirely wrong.
Speaker: This is not like the north, of south, and the west of Italy. There is no such thing. you and These are, in some senses, different families connected to different dynasties.
Speaker: And to the extent that they have like a geographical hub, it's it's not in the right place at all. This is something they just did to let people play... various versions of the Roman Empire.
Speaker: if you wanted to play like a BC Empire, you could pick the faction that was sort of relevant in that period. If you really wanted to conquer Germany, you could go for the Iuliae.
Speaker: ah So so it's it's a good sort of rule of cool ah dominating over historical realism. and so Speak of that, because Magnus mentioned the the Gladiator movie. A really fun thing I've noticed, I returned actually to the base game once not too long ago.
Speaker: It loves generating captains named Spartacus. Yeah. There are so many captains on the map, like rebel armies and local armies. Whenever you pop one out, it has a really silly chance of being being led by Captain Spartacus.
Speaker: Yeah, but but but they actually they they modeled that on purpose to having rebel armies in Italy to be Spartacus. The problem was that since it's such an old game, every rebel army, wherever if it ends up in Britannia or Gaul or something like that, it was Spartacus.
Speaker: Because I am Spartacus. Yeah, exactly. think it's just a callback to everyone raising their hand. No, I'm Spartacus. Yeah, there exactly. yeah but i mean i mean I think that historical knowledge has bothered me a little bit.
Speaker: that right But it was just so cool that I i didn't mind much. ah Yeah, of course. I mean, having four Roman factions, I mean, Senate and three families, the Geographic Center, Nobis in historical area, most of the factions, a lot of problems with historical consistency. I mean, Greek cities like there we would ever agree about anything.
Speaker: it's No, it's not as matter of fact. But that's... It was... it feels like a clear choice that they knew that, okay, so this isn't perfectly historically accurate. I think what bothered them more about, you know...
Speaker: a critique from a realism or a historical accuracy standpoint is when you look at the units, ah because I think they tried to go more for historical accuracy there. And it's it's just so hard because especially, i mean, 25 years ago, 20 or 25 years ago, we knew less about bow historical armies in ancient Europe.
Speaker: And you have to kind of try and make this so you have... around 20 factions that all have a around 10 to 20 units and they have to have some basing in history but you're you're not going to get so yeah the Dacians have Falksmen the Romans have Legionaries um the Carthaginians have war elephants because you want war elephants But they get away with it because it's just so cool. And it was the first time you could... I mean, you could have a unit of elephants charging a Macedonian phalanx in real time. You could have ballistas just ruining a fort.
Speaker: And playing around with that is what... ah for At least for me, that that was the real high point of Rome Total War. It was just so cool to see this for the first time. And they actually had a game mode that was like... they had kind of but realistic battle mode and then arcade just so yeah if you want more fire if you want more units flying if you want more elephants throwing people around click this box and we'll give it to you and i think they they it's just the nail on the head with them that was exactly what a lot of people were buying the game for it just yeah the cool factor
Speaker: Yeah, and I just have to say this. If you're contemplating yeah playing the Egyptians in time history, don't buy Pharaoh.
Speaker: Buy Rome because you will get the units that were actually used by and the Egyptians during Pharaoh. No, no, no. In Rome, look at the units for the Egyptians when they should be this kind of Ptolemaic, Greek...
Speaker: hot light, this kind of thing. What do they run with? No, they are Ramses II taking... and kind of that That's basically what they have.
Speaker: Because how can we differentiate the Egyptians? It doesn't ruin my immersion, but it's kind of lazy, isn't it?
Speaker: but it similar when yeah But when the game came out, I loved it. i loved it. i think it was good. Yeah, they also introduced something that makes ah Egypt the strongest faction. um They introduced something that stuck around for a while in the Total War game, which I think was sort of a mistake, because they underestimated how good bow units were supposed to be.
Speaker: And they introduced long-range missiles. So this is ah one of the most annoying parts I remember about playing the Romans, is that your archers can't fire as far as the Greek or the um the Egyptian ones.
Speaker: at but by a long shot. And then they also have these big, cool battle maps, we which I talked about earlier, which means that you can get these massive hills and stuff like that, which also means that you can just stick your incredibly long-range Cretan archers or the armored long-range Egyptian archers on top of a hill.
Speaker: Other archers can't really kill them because they have armor, and also they reach further and do massive damage. they did They never really figured that out, and that stuck around for Medieval 2 as well.
Speaker: If you could get a really long-range upgraded archers, they were just decimating even the most armored knights and the massive shield legionaries.
Speaker: It was not entirely perfectly balanced, the Equatorisc around the strength of the realm. Yeah, precisely. Why are you playing Bowman as Rome? Heavy infantry and then your crap cavalry goes round just mob stuff.
Speaker: And this way you really get that. Stick hoplites at the front line and then archers behind. Like two archers per hoplite and then you're just screwed. Talking about mechanics that stayed with ah the Total War series, because I think this becomes, where it's there in Shogun and Medieval, but it really, it it becomes so clear here. Like, how do you win a battle?
Speaker: Decent infantry, cavalry on the flanks. Yeah, basically you can just, yeah. You stop it up, you do a hammer and handle thing. Works every time. Not me. I just trick the AA to attack me and and I stand in a corner with spears and just a shit ton of archers and catapults.
Speaker: So they really have the two tactics for winning a battle in Total War. Yeah, and also with this, if you stand in a corner with your archers and the other archers outranged you, then it's on you, Andreas.
Speaker: I guess I'm playing the power bottom strategy of the war. But once again, we have i mean a genre-defining game, an era-defining game.
Speaker: ah But after a few hundred hours of play, clear that there are some flaws. ah It gets a bit repetitive after a while. I mean, you can only conquer Gaul so many times while it gets a bit repetitive. It's clear that not all factions have the depth really for an entire campaign. I mean, playing as Germans, you're basically... Or Britons.
Speaker: Yeah. and There are things that can be improved upon. And as we move on through the history of Total War, we have, once again, a medieval... or want to sidebar something just before we go to medieval.
Speaker: Yeah. Or even if you want to mention barbarian invasions. Do you have one of the weirdest things if you play Britannia? have The head hurlers. Yeah. Yeah. ah yeah A unit which is so overpowered that it's insane. You get it almost immediately. And what it does is essentially it throws the heads of dead enemies as a projectile.
Speaker: And it's fucking stronger than a hand grenade. Yeah. yeah And also a good example of up yeah some historian mentions this maybe in a passage and we have to build this out to an entire unit and whoops, it became totally overpowered.
Speaker: ah But moving on, and I was about to almost skip past what you and Rias has described as one of the best games ever, ah nearly medieval Total War two Do you want a quick recap about what is this game? We've talked about this before. we We have talked about it a lot before and we talked about it in this episode. Just mentioned it as sort of the the same thing as Medieval 1 where it's just a continuation of the engine that the the previous ah big Total War game was built upon.
Speaker: um but My case is always that Medieval 2 is one of the best strategy games for that very reason. So Rome was groundbreaking.
Speaker: But it also ah received a lot of criticism and they had to push it out. They had a deadline. And then they just got two years of just essentially use this engine and make a new game. And they really did. So they made everything bigger, essentially.
Speaker: and they They made ah areas and the like the battles in towns and cities... larger They made cities bigger in many ways. They made them cooler. They they just implemented more things.
Speaker: They introduced castles, which were essentially a new type of town where you actually got a massive medieval castle. They built the castle so big that you couldn't actually defend them.
Speaker: um i mean, the AI couldn't attack them either, so it was okay, but... to But it made him like essentially ah they overpowered as hell.
Speaker: They made it so that you could your army could drop down a fort somewhere. And it was actually modeled a small castle. Also kind of unfair, but really cool. got these amazing castle battles, which you hadn't really seen before.
Speaker: I mean, Medieval 1 had them, but like not they they had them just as a sort of as an aesthetic. Here you have them as a gameplay mechanic. They introduced merchants, they introduced something incredibly cool, which is that, so as Magnus said, Rome had a tendency to get a little bit repetitive.
Speaker: So they introduced phases. Like you have the early phase, then you have the bubonic plague, then you get sort of into a gunpowder phase, and then if you play really late on...
Speaker: ah You go into a phase where you actually discover a new world. And sometimes in between this, they just bring in a horde attacking you. and so the Mongols show up.
Speaker: So they try to script the game over time to make sure that it has a lot more staying power. ah But mechanically, it's ah it's more or less the same game as Rome. Yeah, and a lot more units. But is this also the first time we see horde mechanic in Total War?
Speaker: Because that will come back to us. ah No. In Barnabas Innovation, at the the ah expansion pack to Rome, they introduce Horde Factions.
Speaker: and they don't One of them starts as a horde without a city and they just show up. But I think one third of heard of the the civilization has the opportunity to or the option to horde, which is is that they abandon their only little remaining base and then they get a shit ton of really weak units and they can sweep across Europe and it push us further and further.
Speaker: ah So they have the Huns especially starting off doing this. But they are that that is a game or a player mechanic. um In medieval, they start using hordes as sort of an external event. You can't actually play the Mongols when they show up.
Speaker: They're just sort of a new catastrophe you need to deal with. Yeah, I mean, Medieval 2 is by many regarded as the best game in the classical era of the series, which is what we're talking about today.
Speaker: Medieval 2 has a really big drawback because leadership was incredibly important in Medieval 2.
Speaker: Which also gives term to something that we have from that game leading up until the the latest game, which I think is Farrow. Or is it Warhammer 3? I think it's Farrow.
Speaker: General sniping. kill the enemy general, the rest will break and flee. Which kind of made the tactical battles, especially if you play against the AI, especially on lower difficulties, something you did. Take two heavily armored cavalry units, move them on the side and engage the general. You can make them, you can break them.
Speaker: and which is, I think, a flaw in it. I mean, it might be historical, it might be something like that, but and c certainly we've seen historical examples of that.
Speaker: But when it starts to become your strategy with general sniping, I think that's weak. Particularly, the AI loves to throw their general away. Yeah, they just charge into spear wall with their armored knighted general into peasant, die, everything's shattered. This is something we haven't really talked about before. We have dipped into the Total War games a lot of times.
Speaker: I call't ah can't remember how it was for Shogun or Medieval 1, but But in Rome, they introduced a really fun and weird concept around the generals. First of all, you had generals. They were important. They were like tim a small unit which to led your army. They gave a bunch of buffs depending on the stats. They earned more stats through experience.
Speaker: So if you did nothing with them, they all turned out to be weird drunks. And if you did give them experience stuff, they go grow more and more clever, more and more capable or drunk.
Speaker: ah Everyone kept getting drunk in that game. It was sort of weird. but like They started off as a very incompetent upper nobility, and then you could develop them into something good.
Speaker: in Rome, they did something really weird, which was that you could transfer retinues between your generals. and They could yeah not only pick up experience, but also pick up ah people around them. And if you, for example, got a really good advisor, turn out you could just transfer him from general to general to general.
Speaker: And this game plays over a bunch of several hundred years. But if you want don't want to lose your retinue, what you do is, the moment that your most powerful general or faction leader or whatever looks, okay, it's a little bit too old.
Speaker: We take all the cool stuff he has and transfer it to next people a person. And then he gets all the buffs. And then we transfer to the next one, the next one, the next one. You get to this this sort of amazing it's ah almost god of a general with, so I guess, enormous amount of buffs whilst its just redistributing abilities. So um this sort of product of a weird incest in the Roman court of ah of a child who was essentially unable to count, you just drop so many advices onto him that he's just the genius of his of his era.
Speaker: and And this is something um they removed in the medieval. In medieval, you could generally not transfer any of the retinue or relics or stuff they found.
Speaker: So you had to start from scratch and actually build up each new general as well. Yeah. But just to say, I mean, the general sniping aside, I still think that medieval to you,
Speaker: is when when we end up but probably are ranking top five or our top three, Medieval 2 is going to be on my top five. I mean, it's still a great game. and General sniping aside, it is...
Speaker: one of the games that made the Total War series to what it is today. You started off with these unable upper-class... Upper-class Twitter. Yeah, and then you had to make something off them. They were not...
Speaker: like A base general, when you got them, they didn't just have no stats. They generally had sort of bad stats. Like if you got zero on lead, on command, and zero for on all of these abilities, you actually sort of had minors or debuffs already.
Speaker: You had to become something. you You had to train these people by doing stuff with them. I'm going to try to pull you back, Andreas, because I don't know if you noticed, but I think you got sidetracked there.
Speaker: ah we did There are a lot more we can say about i mean the mechanics of at Rome Total War, and we might in the fullness of time do an episode on just these separate games, Medieval, Rome.
Speaker: ah But moving forward in the series, because we have two very successful games, Rome very clever critically acclaimed, but Medieval too... not far after, not the earlier games either.
Speaker: But it starts to get time for the game series to kind of reinvent itself. So what are we going to do next? We've done a couple of games that yeah all other games have ever been in set in antiquity or in medieval times, and it's time to reinvent ourselves. so And in 2009, they drop Empire Total War.
Speaker: And i mean, the whole marketing for this is very much a reinvention. Total War is entering the early modern era. They're entering the gunpowder era. or You're going to have sea battles.
Speaker: good i think Because tactically, you could play tactical land battles, but not tactical sea battles in the games up to this point. So completely new era and new mechanics, new units. You have gunpowder, you have naval units, and it's not just about conquering Europe or Japan anymore.
Speaker: ah This for the first time, this is the first total war game with at least purportedly a global scale. They don't really get there, but you can trade with other parts of the world and you can actually fight battles and on other continents for the first time in the Total War series.
Speaker: You won. You want to get in? Yeah, big because I think you're forgetting something here that I think is crucial and important. This is the first Total War game with a tech tree. actually do tech in this game, at which they've kept and used in every other the Total War game.
Speaker: And when that came, it was quite daunting to new players. but But also we have to see something here. If I'm not mistaken, we've done Shogun Total War, Medieval Rome, Medieval 2 Empire.
Speaker: I mean, in nine years, they've released five games that are... Stunning games. Great games, it so to speak. But with Empire, they actually try something new. They go for gunpowder. They go for the naval battles. They go for tech trees. They go for scale it up.
Speaker: Make it total war, in a sense. And I did not like it when it came out. I did not.
Speaker: I didn't. ah No, but i've I've replayed it and I'm like, no. But when I started playing it, it was was clunky.
Speaker: and It didn't feel, I mean, the difference between playing Sweden or Russia or Prussia or Great Britain or France or Netherlands or Poland-Lithraena in the start It's kind of the same units. It didn't give me the thing I needed from the game as I got from Shogun or I got from Medieval 1 and 2 or I got from Rome. I liked the tech tree. That was good. I liked the Renaissance men. liked the merchants. I liked the naval battles.
Speaker: But the game was just...
Speaker: If you get some my drift. I completely get it. so ah So what happened with Empire? Because I was really excited about it. i played it. I loved it.
Speaker: But they committed a cardinal sin with that game. Which is that, as we talked about before, one of the really cool things about all of the Total War games when they launched and when they started it was that you have both this really cool overworld And the really expensive, really cool battles.
Speaker: And I think Empire is actually the first of the Total War games when they didn't stick the landing on the battles. Yeah. yeah for for For two major reasons. And you won you you already went into the first one, which is that all units were fairly similar.
Speaker: They realized, okay, we're going to do gunpowder. We can't really do guns from the previous games because they never really worked. And they didn't really have to because medieval guns weren't that impressive. ah um we need to rebuild this mechanic. They built a fairly good line infantry mechanic.
Speaker: It had some weird bugs. For example, your line of riflemen. or for that matter, matchlock men, they really want to face straight towards their the middle of the opposing enemy's unit.
Speaker: Cavalry moving sideways. A few of them are going fire, and then they're going turn and turn and turn their entire formation instead of just moving the guns. It got a little bit stupid.
Speaker: But it also meant that they implemented this new mechanic And everyone just got a line infantry sort of unit. Every faction got a line infantry unit. The numbers on how much damage they did differed a little bit.
Speaker: But the units on the battle map was doing so exactly the same thing. It is as if you gave everyone archers. you can't really do an archer versus archer battle that also feels dynamic.
Speaker: and They tried to fix this a little bit. They implemented a new sort of cannons. They allowed your troops to dig your sort of battlements and stuff like that. But ah as a matter of fact, the battle was still just a bunch of people slowly turning towards each other, firing, and then you had an attrition battle oh of two lines just standing and shooting for a really long time.
Speaker: and when you play against the ai you can easily game this mechanic when you play against another player it gets very boring very easily but but i mean let's just say it as as i mean blanket statement on all the child wars stupid ai is oh yeah yeah it's actually it's been there from the start it's still there they've tinkered with it but No one has ever lauded this game series for the brilliant AI opponents. and And if you do, you're not good at the game.
Speaker: If I can just offer a post-op, because I love this game. I clocked a lot of hours in it, and I wasn't disappointed to start off with.
Speaker: I thought it was really cool. I i wished, i mean, yeah you could play Sweden for God's sake. You could actually invade Russia. I was really psyched for the gunfire units. I think this kind of package shop here, it really worked. I liked the tech tree. and Pro tip for you out there, rush the bayonet because ah apparently the bayonet is a very war winning weapon, at least in Empire Total War is.
Speaker: um But, as you said, I mean, it lack it does lack in diversity. ah yeah You basically play the same faction with the different skins, and that's a problem.
Speaker: I was disappointed straight away, and still can't really understand why but why are there so few regions, because there are just so few. I mean, France is, if I don't remember, it's one or two. ah you You capture two cities, and you've conquered France.
Speaker: I think there's three. It might be three, but i Yeah, I think it's Alessandro Moray and yeah Yeah, but max three. mastering Sorry, sorry i I went a bit Imperial German there and didn't count Lorraine as as salohan is a part of France.
Speaker: but you also got up so yeah I think you're actually right, Magnus. In this game, this is going to be a weird sidebar for anyone who hasn't played it. and I'm not actually going to explain it well enough.
Speaker: But you have regions, as in any Total War games, but only the regions contain a real city. are actually necessary. you You need to have one of these to live.
Speaker: so um So there are more regions of France than just two. They also have a bunch of colonies. But if you take Paris, the air sort of falls. and if yeah I think you have to take two of them for France to fall in the game.
Speaker: which is way too easy to do if you start off as Great Britain. You sail above with every unit. You start with a cross, and then you take Paris, yeah and you can't really build anything good. Then you take one more city, and then the entire France falls.
Speaker: Oh, and like Heart of Iron disjointed the government. but But I think that's... and
Speaker: Empire Turtle War, they see this. they realize They release the game. They see all of these things. But they correct it for the upcoming two games.
Speaker: So they do learn from it. And this is the first one with Gunpowder Units. But I think when we're magnus one when we move on, we see progression, which I love from a game studios.
Speaker: Absolutely. And I was about to say that that's what really ruined because, as I said, I was positive. i I wasn't disappointed. I thought, okay, I wanted a bit more. Please give me more regions.
Speaker: it It felt a little bit too easy to win this game. It isn't that hard to conquer all of Europe. And once you've conquered Europe, the rest of the world, because the setting is Europe, India, and America. And then you can send trading fleets to...
Speaker: yeah to South America and the the West Indies and the East Indies, basically. um You can enable battles there, but you can't really conquer it functionally. And but the when they added this mechanic, also trade is really unbalanced in this game man and in the subsequent game because trade fleets. mean, knock out your nearest neighbor and then build docks and ah build trade fleets make sure you can handle off straight please you've won the game. It's just a matter of time from then on because you will generate more income.
Speaker: ah But what really...
Speaker: But what really ruined this game for me ah was the next game. Because once I played Napoleon, why would I go back to Empire? Because Napoleon it took so many... It really took Empire. And it it feels like an expanded DLC, really.
Speaker: ah The mechanics is basically the same. But there are more regions. There are more units. ah The battles are a lot more... Are more dynamic. Because the battle maps are better. There's just more of them. it's It's a lot smoother. It looks a lot better.
Speaker: And it's just cool. it's it's It's just a shame that you're... you are limited to the Napoleonic Wars and really to one stretch of Napoleonic Wars from like 1802 to 1812. I mean, so sort from my point of view, it felt like they did Empire, then they released Napoleon.
Speaker: Empire felt like, oh we have to release something. Let's release the beta version of Napoleon. But we can't call it Empire 2 now. We have to call it Napoleon.
Speaker: So let's call it Napoleon. I mean, Napoleon was everything I wanted the Empire to be. It was more dynamic. and It was better. It was better looking. Grander regions. and Troops didn't cartwheel to try and fire on a cavalry unit.
Speaker: That was the polished game I wanted the Empire to be. Yeah, i think I think they really wanted to do Napoleon because that game is also, it's a weird Total War game because it is so focused on on the battles and you have a whole series, I mean, the heat the historical battles are a lot more of the game than they are in the earlier Total War games.
Speaker: ah So you can kind of like follow Napoleon's career and sadly the campaign mode is a bit it is too, too short and it is more of an afterthought. And I, that's really sad because that sinks the Napoleon game.
Speaker: But once I'd played Napoleon, I couldn't go back and enjoy, and enjoy empire. Cause I can't enjoy empire. No, after that it was, and i've I've gone back and played Napoleon. And rears and I think it, it holds up. And that's a,
Speaker: What is good in that game is really good. It's just a shame that it isn't a bigger game and there isn't a longer campaign campaign or a campaign that you play more freely. ah It really tries to be, and I think it's the first time I've said this, it tries to be too historical.
Speaker: Yeah, but Napoleon, the gameplay in Napoleon is what empire should have had. Absolutely. and Absolutely. And they could have just skipped Napoleon, basically. This is, so I made ah the comment ah before about medieval, about how medieval essentially was a continuation of Rome or of shogun.
Speaker: And this is also something I feel about the Empire, that the Empire was the new engine with the new mechanics and it really didn't stick the landing. But then Napoleon cameramerra came ah along and was sort of the medieval to the Empire game.
Speaker: And if there is a drawback, it is that they probably made it too small. I would have loved them to make something the size of what medieval was. Medieval 2 was compared to Rome and what medieval 1 was compared to Shogun.
Speaker: And in so ways it did that with Shogun 2, which is the one continuing the series then. Because that was, I think it's the same engine as Empire. It works very much the same way, but then they really polished it.
Speaker: But both Napoleon and Shogun are set in fairly small regions over fairly short periods of time. So rather than being like a hundred years spanning sort of everything that happened in the Renaissance onwards, these become very focused games. And they're really good games, they really cool games.
Speaker: But as a person who loved Rome and Medieval, I want to play across many hundred years and just build a yeah yeah world or like the known world spanning empire.
Speaker: Yeah, totally agree. I thought I'd get more i mean more pushback on my expression of love for Napoleon Total War. No one mentions that as their favorite Total War game. For me, it's up there, top three.
Speaker: Absolutely. yeah I do have pushback, but the pushback is essentially just that they don't let me play across all of Europe. They remove the things, and they don't let me do this this sort of classical empire building, because there there are campaigns set in very specific regions.
Speaker: Yeah. um the show love those reg I love those campaigns I love the did these things but I really want them to just also make the Napoleon mod of the Empire base game just let me do everything yeah I mean i have to step in here with I think the most interesting part is because, I mean, we planned two episodes of this. I think it's going to be a third episode when we go through our top five or top three. And when we go into what do we have on our top five, top three, then we're going to hear the argument. But I i can, spoiler alert, I can tell you now neither Empire or Napoleon is on my top five list.
Speaker: On your top five. They're not on my top five. No, they're not. I understand that, actually. you know um love Empire. Let's save that.
Speaker: Let's save that for another episode because I don't want Magnus to have a brain hemorrhage yeahre right here, right Those fighting words. Those are fighting words. Oh, they're fighting words. um but but i In some ways I agree. i love Empire for what it brings into the Total War games, but I also almost immediately want them to drag it back to medieval.
Speaker: And this is something I think I've said in a previous episode as well. The sort of mechanic of a Total War game with the battlefield where you control formations of units, despite each unit having sort of an individualized AI, you still control formations.
Speaker: It works better the closer you are to a time period when the formations were a thing. yeah This should make it perfect for the pike and shot period.
Speaker: But since they, even in in Napoleon, do make yeah line infantry and guns so incredibly dominant, so that sort of cavalry is almost a suicide, pikemen is more or less suicide, it's only shot and shot in this game.
Speaker: um these sort of formation battles with different formation filling different functions and trying maneuver them across the battlefield to make clever maneuvers and stuff like that it doesn't exactly work and the moment a total war game can't utilize this sort of um formation by formation doing their separate thing logic it gets worse I can forgive ah both the Empire and Napoleon for this because they introduce so many other things I love. ah They introduce the tech system. They introduce more much more developed economy. They introduce villages on the maps doing different things. You can VR your territories towards specializations of of different kinds. They do a lot of cool things.
Speaker: But since the formation battle doesn't work the way it probably should... They just can't really stick to landing. They can't really be one of the best games for that simple reason.
Speaker: That's how I feel. Yeah, and I mean, we we can probably have that when we talk about the top five. But I mean, we're coming up on above an hour now. And I mean, we haven't talked about Magnus' favorite game, Attila, but I don't think we have time for that right now. so at This episode, we're going to split it up in probably three. This will be the first one. We'll go with the second one, and then we'll go with the top five and have a fight.
Speaker: I would love to do that as a drunken episode where we're at the same place drinking beer and just see what happens. ah That could be cool. But Magnus... Do you want me to get in an actual fight?
Speaker: Yeah. It's just going to be me drunkenly singing Rule Britannia, but with Thrones of Britannia as the lyrics. Oh, God. I've forgotten. i mean yeah I know. Yeah, yeah I know. I know he likes that. I know he likes that. And he's so dead wrong for that. But we'll take that when we get to that our episode. Magnus, any final words on this episode comments? Should we leave on the one shelf?
Speaker: I don't agree with him on the modeling. and I can just say, for my last last thing about Napoleon. i don't think they ever came as close to actually making...
Speaker: tactical battles work. ah And I think that's more down to, I mean, the mapping of the tactical battles. They actually work with, you know, differences in elevation. i think artillery adds something that makes it more viable not to just put everything in a big line.
Speaker: They don't get there, but they got damn close. And as I said, i thought we would get to Attila. And talk about Attila. Obviously, there's more to talk about. So we'll have to break this up differently thought. But it was really fun finally getting into Total War with you guys.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. You're still so wrong. And you will get more wrong in the next episode. June and Steve and me and Andreas get in an actual fight or just a verbal.
Speaker: Exactly. Exactly. And with those words, we want to thank you all for listening. Please like, share, subscribe, just spread word. And they have a good one, folks.
