Total War and Paradox

[Amaror]

Since the new Total War game is currently getting it's marketing campaign going i thought it might be a good time to have a discussion i wanted to have since Rome 2. Namely the question:
What does Total War really has going for it as a Strategy game?
Now i was a huge total war game. My first TW game was Rome, which i played on a very bad PC, resulting in all my roman legionairies walking on stilts. And it was very good. It was a lot of fun to conquer my way through Europe and finally conquer Rome and call it mine. The same went for Medieval 2 that released a few years later. It was a lot of fun, though i noticed that i used the realtime battles less and less. They were great for difficult battles, were you could get the victory even with all odds stacked against you. But in the end for many battles they grew very samey, so after getting the initial better results i would usually just let the battles play out automatically, since i couldn't be bothered to suffer through them.
Empire was less good than Medieval 2, but i still got a lot of fun out of it and the same goes for Shogun 2.
After Shogun 2 i got into the Paradox grand strategy games, namely CK 2 and Europa Universalis 4 and enjoyed them immensely. And after i went back to play Rome 2 i found it severly lacking in every single aspect. Now i know that Rome 2 isn't exactly a prime example of a good TW game, but even going back to Shogun or even Medieval i just couldn't enjoy them anymore.
The diplomacy is just pathetic compared to Paradox games, as it's basically not there. The Ai just seems to do somewhat random moves on the map, without any real strategy and lets you conquer your way through their lands.
Cities just get captures instantly and are yours without any sort of peacedeal or anything. Which means you will be basically constantly at War, just to conquer more cities, to enable you to conquer more cities. There's very few reasons to just stop conquering for a bit.
Everything about the strategy in TW just seems very shallow compared to PGS games. There's no realy diplomacy, the province development in the form of buildings is very shallow and the same goes for trade.
The only "deep" aspect of TW games are the realtime battles and i found them also pretty lacking. The Problem here is the real lack of AI. The enemy doesn't act smart at all, which makes is very easy to "outsmart" them and win basically any battle. There isn't that much strategy required for the battles and i actually found myself a lot more engaged in the simpler battles in PGS games.
If anyone doesn't know these generally play out directly on the Strategymap and are mostly influenced by the terrain of the battleground, the composition of the armies, the unit types and the generals.
But they feel a lot more strategical because those battles are often a lot more important than in TW. When i lose in TW it generally just means a couple of lost rounds that i have to rebuild my army, because the AI rarely pushes it's advantage when it has defeated your army. In PGS it means that i loose precious manpower and warscore. The enemy will most likely capture a couple of provinces while i try to get my armies back up and may even take the wargoal.

So that was basically my little rant about the subject. What are your thoughts. Have you tried both these kinds of Grand Strategy games, which ones do you enjoy the most and why?

 

[Elfgore]

I own two of Paradox's Grand Strategy games, Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings 2. I played the tutorial for Crusader Kings 2, then quit the game, and haven't played it since. I could already tell those games were not made for me.

I prefer Total War games, cause they're pretty much casual RTS and TBS games. One minor wrong move won't cost me too much and micromanagement isn't too bad. I'm not good at RTS/TBS, Total War games are on a playable level for me. Paradox games are not.

 

[dohnut king]

I actually prefer Civ. 4 and 5, although I also like the Paradox and Total War games.

Total War's comparative advantages are accessibility through a gentler learning curve, better graphics, and more of a "feel" for the relevant era by virtue of it concentrating on a more focused subject and the tactical combat, which lets you play with all of those cool units. Also, the Total War series is somewhat less dependent on patches out of the box, and is less susceptible to patches that drastically alter gameplay (I'm looking at you EU IV).

Paradox games have more depth and greater replayability, but learning and applying all of the game mechanics in real time can be very daunting. Also, Paradox does a terrible job of documenting what the game engine does and how the various mechanics work, particularly for their most complicated series, Victoria, and their most different one, Hearts of Iron.

 

[Amaror]

Paradox games have more depth and greater replayability, but learning and applying all of the game mechanics in real time can be very daunting. Also, Paradox does a terrible job of documenting what the game engine does and how the various mechanics work, particularly for their most complicated series, Victoria, and their most different one, Hearts of Iron.

Well both of these latest Iterations, Hearts of Iron 3 and Victoria 2, are basically in the previous Paradox Generation.
Ck 2 and EU 4 both have much more streamlined Interfaces with Explanations for almost everything. It's still not perfect, but it's been getting better and better both throughout Ck2 and EU 4.
But i agree that both Victoria 2 and Hearts of Iron 3 have pretty damn bad Interfaces and are not easy to play.
I disagree somewhat on the patches thing. It's true that EU 4 and CK 2 both got lots and lots of patches, sometimes changing gameplay drastically, but i would never agree that they are dependent on patches. Both games worked perfectly fine when they were released. They weren't perfect, but they were clearly finished games with good polish. Much more, in fact, than Rome 2 for example. They just improved on the Game through the subsequent patches and Dlc releases and i think that's a really good thing.
And that's how dlc should work in my mind. Improving and adding to an allready good game.

I own two of Paradox's Grand Strategy games, Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings 2. I played the tutorial for Crusader Kings 2, then quit the game, and haven't played it since. I could already tell those games were not made for me.

You literally described my first experience with Ck2. Downloaded the demo, tried the tutorial, got way overwhelmed and quit. I heartily recommend you to watch a short let's play of the game on youtube. The tutorials for these games suck and it would require a giant wall of text to explain everything about the game, but videos showing of the gameplay and explaining it a bit while doing it are perfect for these games.
I will recommend this series here. The videos are not too long, they explain all the different mechanics very well and it's all very calm and understandable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAvJJuv1hvM&ab_channel=Arumba
Believe me, if you like Total war, you will love these games!

 

[RadioactiveRodent]

Since the new Total War game is currently getting it's marketing campaign going i thought it might be a good time to have a discussion i wanted to have since Rome 2. Namely the question:
What does Total War really has going for it as a Strategy game?
Now i was a huge total war game. My first TW game was Rome, which i played on a very bad PC, resulting in all my roman legionairies walking on stilts. And it was very good. It was a lot of fun to conquer my way through Europe and finally conquer Rome and call it mine. The same went for Medieval 2 that released a few years later. It was a lot of fun, though i noticed that i used the realtime battles less and less. They were great for difficult battles, were you could get the victory even with all odds stacked against you. But in the end for many battles they grew very samey, so after getting the initial better results i would usually just let the battles play out automatically, since i couldn't be bothered to suffer through them.
Empire was less good than Medieval 2, but i still got a lot of fun out of it and the same goes for Shogun 2.
After Shogun 2 i got into the Paradox grand strategy games, namely CK 2 and Europa Universalis 4 and enjoyed them immensely. And after i went back to play Rome 2 i found it severly lacking in every single aspect. Now i know that Rome 2 isn't exactly a prime example of a good TW game, but even going back to Shogun or even Medieval i just couldn't enjoy them anymore.
The diplomacy is just pathetic compared to Paradox games, as it's basically not there. The Ai just seems to do somewhat random moves on the map, without any real strategy and lets you conquer your way through their lands.
Cities just get captures instantly and are yours without any sort of peacedeal or anything. Which means you will be basically constantly at War, just to conquer more cities, to enable you to conquer more cities. There's very few reasons to just stop conquering for a bit.
Everything about the strategy in TW just seems very shallow compared to PGS games. There's no realy diplomacy, the province development in the form of buildings is very shallow and the same goes for trade.
The only "deep" aspect of TW games are the realtime battles and i found them also pretty lacking. The Problem here is the real lack of AI. The enemy doesn't act smart at all, which makes is very easy to "outsmart" them and win basically any battle. There isn't that much strategy required for the battles and i actually found myself a lot more engaged in the simpler battles in PGS games.
If anyone doesn't know these generally play out directly on the Strategymap and are mostly influenced by the terrain of the battleground, the composition of the armies, the unit types and the generals.
But they feel a lot more strategical because those battles are often a lot more important than in TW. When i lose in TW it generally just means a couple of lost rounds that i have to rebuild my army, because the AI rarely pushes it's advantage when it has defeated your army. In PGS it means that i loose precious manpower and warscore. The enemy will most likely capture a couple of provinces while i try to get my armies back up and may even take the wargoal.

So that was basically my little rant about the subject. What are your thoughts. Have you tried both these kinds of Grand Strategy games, which ones do you enjoy the most and why?

I am very much the same. Paradox broke my expectations of Grand Strategy Games, and its non-existent combat mechanics (compared to Total War) meant that I found myself less positioning units and more working with excel charts or plotting the murder of my cousin. Even now, in Total War, I barely play the battles themselves - but that's missing the entire point of the game. Total war is an RTS with a Turn-based management crust - Paradox is the other way around - it's just RTS, but has literally no combat elements like Total War.

Welcome to my world, where I await the arrival of the messiah, Victoria 3, to save me from spending my free time on shit that actually matters and instead sinking it all on creating a unified Boer Africa.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Paradox games are basically the only single-player strategy games I play nowadays. Nothing else even remotely compares.

Weirdly, the game I am incredibly hyped for at the moment is actually Stellaris, which has only just been announced.

Basically, it seems like a cross between CK2 and EU4, but in space and with an emphasis on exploration and discovery..

But yeah, I remember after playing CK2 for a bit I had a nostalgic craving for the medieval 2 combat system so I reinstalled it. Played the Turks, and conquered Constantinople in the first few turns.

And suddenly I realized I'd just done an action which might be the culmination of a full in game century, potentially hours of RL planning, in CK2 (even for an experienced player, which at the time I wasn't) and I realized I could never go back, not really.

Battle systems are fun, but they're also effectively cheats. A small human controlled force can almost always do disproportionately well by exploiting stupid AI. In a game like CK2 and EU4, even if the AI is still a bit derpy sometimes, the basic rules of the game prevent the human player from gaining a disproportionate advantage. Total War games can basically only create difficulty by giving the AI such vast mechanical advantages that it just swamps you with ridiculous and immersion-breaking numbers of troops.

 

[The Madman]

For me at least the Total War series has always been about the spectacle. Other strategy games out there, Paradox games for example, will offer greater depth and long-term playability but only the Total War franchise has ever really nailed the grand vision of having thousands of soldiers fighting on screen with amazing music blasting in the background.

It's the same reason sometimes I'm more in the mood for a cheesy but awesome action movie in favor of something more thought provoking or meaningful. Sometimes I just wanna see awesome shit happen and blow some stuff up. Which isn't to say the TW games are just spectacle, they're also quite fun to play and I enjoy managing the battles, it's just that tends to be the biggest draw in my mind.

 

[Mikeybb]

*I am snippicus maximus, father to a snipped post, husband to an edited post, and I will have my vengeance*
Weirdly, the game I am incredibly hyped for at the moment is actually Stellaris, which has only just been announced.

Same.
While I never managed to get along with the hearts of iron series and have yet to dive into crusader kings, the sheer scope and ambition of this space setting have me hooked already.
This, galciv 3 already here, a new endless space AND a remake of the granddaddy master of orion...
It's a good time to be an old fan of space 4x games.

 

[Fox12]

I could never get through Crusader Kings, though I like the idea in theory. It's hugely complex, and they don't explain anything at all. I finally got frustrated and went back to Total War.

It's the best strategy game I've ever played, but I don't think I've EVER lost a campaign, if that tells you anything. I do wish the enemy AI was more competent.

 

[RandV80]

Battle systems are fun, but they're also effectively cheats. A small human controlled force can almost always do disproportionately well by exploiting stupid AI. In a game like CK2 and EU4, even if the AI is still a bit derpy sometimes, the basic rules of the game prevent the human player from gaining a disproportionate advantage. Total War games can basically only create difficulty by giving the AI such vast mechanical advantages that it just swamps you with ridiculous and immersion-breaking numbers of troops.

Yep this is a massive and unfortunate flaw in strategy games. Tactical combat makes for funner gameplay, but in a single player game the human player is inevitably going to be able to run circles around the AI and always win. Take Civilization V for instance, hex grid and one unit per tile makes for much more interesting combat than the previous iterations infamous "stack of doom", but now the human player only needs a few units and they can fend off massive AI armies. This greatly undercuts the overall 'strategy' of the game.

And this flaw of course has always been in Total War games. The one I played the most was Medieval II, from what I recall the general 'human' strategy I settled on was find the best defensive position on the map that I can stack my infantry on hold position and back them with archers, then manually maneuver my cavalry & general units around the map to find some nice juicy ungarded flanks of the AI units to charge into while they throw themselves at my fortified human all. If the armies are equally matched, I always win. If the AI has a modest advantage, I always win. If the AI has a significant advantage, then it's maybe 50/50 but at the very least I'll inflict heavy casualties and decimate their army. At some point it just isn't strategy anymore.

That's not what really turned me off Total War games though, even with the above flaws you should be able to get some lengthy gameplay out of the game before you run out of steam.

First, it's that with all the iterations they have a a few core mechanics that they simply never improved on. The graphics will look a lot shinier in Rome II than Medieval II, but the AI is still just as wonky and now there's probably even more bugs in it. They'll start developing a new game in a new location with higher specs but they've never mastered some of the underlying core basics.

Second, is what keeps me coming back to Civilization while I eventually get bored of Total War... maybe purists won't like it but this is hardly a historical game so why stick so strongly to a single historically accurate map? In Total War I can start as England, Scotland, or Denmark, and while there are some unit differences eventually once I unify my own region I will be conquering the same continental Europe. Once you conquered France or Germany with England, it's pretty much the same doing it with Denmark so there's not much point in starting a game with them. Civilization on the other hand you have so many random map options that every time you start a new game you can get a different experience. Now I know this is much easier to do in Civ than in Total War, but I always wished with how frequently the Total War guys release games one of these days they could add in some flexibility here.

Oh and that reminds me of another key point: Civilization embraces and encourages mods and user created content, while Total War systematically cut back on it to push pre-order and DLC nonsense.

 

[baddude1337]

Total War has always focused more on it's battle map that strategy map, which is limited (although recent titles, notably Rome 2, further simplified the battlemap).

The main difference between games like Total War and Europa Universalis is obviously the battles. Total War is the only series you can fight on battles of such scale. Most other global strategy games have either no combat or very limited combat.

However, vanilla Total War hasn't been any good since Medieval 2. You really need mods to make it a more enjoyable experience, something the games since Empire don't have. For the older games, here are mods to add more depth to the global map, and other mods than entirely change settings (Third Age Total War with the MOS Submod is the best Lord Of The Rings game by far.)

 

[Muspelheim]

Total War really does feel like Baby's First Absolute Monarchy in comparison to the Paradox games, but its features are more than good enough to make up for it. It's such a thrill to see your troops march down the field, hearing the drums and see the flying colours. It's a great feeling, and it does make me appreciate it despite its flaws. Seeing the cannons rip open the enemy ranks makes me forgive the thick AI and the shallow grand strategy.

It's also nice to have something much more simple to toy a bit with to relax after some time plotting and scheming on a Paradox throne.

 

[Nicha11]

For me one of the biggest factors is moddability and support for the modding community.

Paradox games are totally moddable, to the extent that they have been able to recreate the entire ASOIAF world with appropriate mechanics. They're something for history nuts, something for graphics nuts and something for fantasy nuts.
The Total War Series has pretty much treated modders badly since Empire and like trash since Rome 2; the days of being able to make mods like Third Age Total War or Call of Warhammer (my favourite) have been pushed aside so that CA can sell map DLCS.

When my pardox games get boring I install a couple mods and go conquer Westeros or engage in 6th century English geopolitics.
When total war games get boring I grumble about the a.i and hope they don't screw up Total War Warhammer too much.

 

[Bombiz]

When total war games get boring I grumble about the a.i and hope they don't screw up Total War Warhammer too much.

That's the ting though. that only matters for the more recent ones. Medieval 2 and Rome still have a huge modding community.

Edit:
I feel like this should be added here
relevant part begins at 1h6m

 

[Shinkicker444]

Also with CK2 are the events, some of those are pure hilarity and make for some awesome re-playability. Ahh, Demon-Spawn of an Emperor... much murder, such torture, wow.

 

[Amaror]

Also with CK2 are the events, some of those are pure hilarity and make for some awesome re-playability. Ahh, Demon-Spawn of an Emperor... much murder, such torture, wow.

Yeah, hehe, that you can basically become the Antichrist is just hilarious.
I think it's really cool how many fun events there are in ck2.
Another thing i really like about Paradox, even though it has less to do with the actual games, is how they interact with their customers. They really listen to them and often the next patch and/or dlc is based on what the players wanted in the game.
The lead designer of EU4 was even originally a mod-maker and got hired after that.

Edit:
I agree with many here that the total war battles are usually epic but i found that epicness just lasts a very very short amount of time. Very quickly the battles just get boring because there's no challenge.
Hell, i played the first rome when i was 12 and the most complicated tactic i used was cycling around with my cavalry a bit and i still won every battle with barely any casualties and thousands of enemies dead.

 

[bauke67]

I agree with OP, I too used to sink hundreds(thousands?) of ours into Total war games, but once I'd played enough Crusader Kings to know what I was doing, I just couldn't go back. I recently bought Shogun II since many people said it was the best Total War game, but after a few hours I just quit because either there wasn't much challenge, or the AI was miraculously able to afford three times as many units as me.
I do agree with some other people here that Paradox just doesn't have the epicness of battles that games like Medieval II captured so brilliantly. But if they did it would probably undermine some strategic aspects of the game, with human advantage in such set-ups.
So a combination of the two would be awesome, but sadly unachievable with today's AI.

 

[Bombiz]

seems like if total war added more then 2 player hot seat campaigns then most of its problems would be fixed.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I agree with OP, I too used to sink hundreds(thousands?) of ours into Total war games, but once I'd played enough Crusader Kings to know what I was doing, I just couldn't go back. I recently bought Shogun II since many people said it was the best Total War game, but after a few hours I just quit because either there wasn't much challenge, or the AI was miraculously able to afford three times as many units as me.

Eh...frankly Rome is still the best. Nothing since then has really matched up to it. Shogun 2 is okay though.


@OP: You're pretty much comparing chalk and cheese here. They're entirely different games. As mentioned a little above, Total War is more about the spectacle and the tactical battles and the fun of building up armies, with the strategic management layer on top to provide a solid foundation for all of that. Paradox stuff is basically the purest of pure grand strategy.

I like both a lot (particularly Heart of Iron 3 over the past year or so); but I don't play them for the same reasons.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

The Total War series has been circling the drain of mediocrity ever since Medieval 2. A multitude of factors went into that, but the most palpable was the loss of the RPG elements. Total War worked best as a big, wonky, story telling machine that dished out emergent game play. When it was streamlined to to feel more like an RTS with a perfunctory board-game strategic overlay, all the heart left it. It's a purely clinical exercise now, and not a particularly compelling one. The game was always completely naff at offering up a challenge.

Crusader Kings 2 took the emergent story-telling aspect and turned it up to 11, but everything else about the game play is as exciting as eating dirt. The UI is ugly and cumbersome, the pacing is off, there isn't a shred of the spectacle that infuses the Total War series, and the systems are too easily gamed. It's a very interesting game that feels more like a proof of concept than a fully functional and polished product.

Crusader Kings 3 should be interesting though, if Paradox ever learns how to make a UI, and affords the player more flexibility in game systems. Needs to be more random, less gamey.