Warhammer Total War 2 revealed. (Edited the Title)

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

MASSIVE EDIT OF THE TITLE SINCE CA REVEALED WHAT IT IS!

So its pretty much it Warhammer Total War II:


Pretty much what we all expected, High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardman, and SKAVEN1!!!!

 

[Zhukov]

What, already? I feel like TW:WH only just came out.

Eh, the first game was poorly designed. I might consider scraping this out of a bargain bin in a couple years time.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

What, already? I feel like TW:WH only just came out.

Eh, the first game was poorly designed. I might consider scraping this out of a bargain bin in a couple years time.

Poorly designed Battle wise or Campaign Map wise?

Because I think Battles are fine as they are.

Also this isn't unheard of.

Rome 2 came out in 2014 and Attila came out 2015.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

While Total Warhammer was largely an improvement on recent flubs by Creative Assembly, it does have what I consider to be a game-breaking design flaw. That being the auto-resolve giving almost universally superior results to actually hand-directing battles.

 

[Zhukov]

Poorly designed Battle wise or Campaign Map wise?

You and I have had this exchange before. I shall spare you a full fledged rematch.

In short, the battles are irrelevant because 99% of the time you win by just having a bigger army of higher quality troops. The number and quality of your troops is determined by what you do on the campaign map. And the campaign map gameplay is pretty meh.

I never needed tactics. All I needed was the Recruit Black Orcs button and the Charge button. And after I got bored of that I replaced the Charge button with the Auto-Resolve button. And thus was the Old World conquered beneath the blood-spattered boots of Grimgore the Iron Auto Resolver.

Oh, and the blood effects look like shit. Turns everything into a splotchy maroon mess.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Poorly designed Battle wise or Campaign Map wise?

You and I have had this exchange before. I shall spare you a full fledged rematch.

In short, the battles are irrelevant because 99% of the time you win by just having a bigger army of higher quality troops. The number and quality of your troops is determined by what you do on the campaign map. And the campaign map gameplay is pretty meh.

I never needed tactics. All I needed was the Recruit Black Orcs button and the Charge button. And after I got bored of that I replaced the Charge button with the Auto-Resolve button. And thus was the Old World conquered beneath the blood-spattered boots of Grimgore the Iron Auto Resolver.

Oh, and the blood effects look like shit. Turns everything into a splotchy maroon mess.

At least it is bloody compared that pathetic excuse for blood and gore in Rome 2.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

While Total Warhammer was largely an improvement on recent flubs by Creative Assembly, it does have what I consider to be a game-breaking design flaw. That being the auto-resolve giving almost universally superior results to actually hand-directing battles.

Auto Resolve has been here since Rome 1.

How is it different now of all games?

 

[meiam]

Ehhhhh... maybe if they go back to something closer to shogun 2 I'll be interested. But otherwise, nah, the direction they went after rome 2 just isn't something I liked, and since this is so close after the last I'm guessing it's going to be closer to expansion pack than anything else.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Auto Resolve has been here since Rome 1.

How is it different now of all games?

Because it's overtuned.

Through even recent Total Wars I could beat the auto-resolve by hand-managing the battle 99 times out of 100.

Now it's virtually impossible. It's so broken you can just build a couple of stacks and auto-resolve your way to victory without ever even coming close to losing a fight. In my last Chaos campaign on very hard I fought 3 battles in total, all in the first month (outside of quests). And had zero losses all the way to a campaign victory.

If you can't conceive of why that's unhealthy for the game I dunno what to tell you. It's literally "press button to win campaign".

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Auto Resolve has been here since Rome 1.

How is it different now of all games?

Because it's overtuned.

Through even recent Total Wars I could beat the auto-resolve by hand-managing the battle 99 times out of 100.

Now it's virtually impossible. It's so broken you can just build a couple of stacks and auto-resolve your way to victory without ever even coming close to losing a fight. In my last Chaos campaign on very hard I fought 3 battles in total, all in the first month (outside of quests). And had zero losses all the way to a campaign victory.

If you can't conceive of why that's unhealthy for the game I dunno what to tell you. It's literally "press button to win campaign".

Most of my Total War gameplay is playing around in Custom Battles making different kinds of battles.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

UPDATE, Its Total War Warhammer 2:

 

[Zhukov]

Oh look, a lacklustre trailer with awful character designs.

EDIT: Damn it. Beaten to the bunch. Trailer removed to cut down on visual noise.

Is that hinting at Skaven at the end?

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Oh look, a lacklustre trailer with awful character designs.


Is that hinting at Skaven at the end?

Your dissing the charcater desings of GW's models or just how they look in this CGI trailer?

Also yep its pretty much confirmed Skaven will be here.

But yeah the trailer could have done better, I mean what ever happened to this:

 

[Zhukov]

Your dissing the charcater desings of GW's models or just how they look in this CGI trailer?

Well, in this instance I'm referring to the ones shown in the trailer.

Although almost all the GW models I've seen looked ugly too. I'm amazed people spend money on them. If I were into the game I would just get the rulebooks or whatever you need and use Lego men for models.

Some the models of mechanical type units look alright. I saw a Tau mech thing that looked pretty cool once.

 

[Erttheking]

Well, this actually interests me. My biggest problem would be that I already have Total War Warhammer (Thank you Humble Bundle Monthly for giving it to me at a reasonable price) and I very much enjoy it, and that I don't want to buy a totally separate game where the content is cordoned off. This part of the announcement GREATLY interests me.

"Shortly after launch, owners of both the original game and Total War? WARHAMMER II will gain access to the colossal new combined campaign. Merging the landmasses of The Old World plus Naggaroth, Lustria, Ulthuan and the Southlands into a single epic map, players may embark on monumental campaigns as any owned Race from both titles."

That? That interests me. So, so long as the hidden race is Skaven and they DON'T FUCKING UTTERLY NICKLE AND DIME US TO DEATH WITH ALL OF THE FUCKING DLC, this is certainly something I'll be getting around to eventually...seriously, fucking control yourselves. I only got the original because I managed to snag it for twelve bucks, that way I didn't feel guilty about cherry picking the DLC that I liked, and even then I feel like I only get away unscathed because, from what I've heard, the most expensive parts of the DLC (Chaos, Wood Elves and Beastmen) were kinda shit. Oh yeah, DON'T TAKE A CORE FACTION AND MAKE THEM PRE-ORDER/FIRST WEEK ONLY OR YOU HAVE TO PAY! Fuck's sake Creative Assembly, you have a really, REALLY good game and concept here, DON'T FUCK IT UP!

While Total Warhammer was largely an improvement on recent flubs by Creative Assembly, it does have what I consider to be a game-breaking design flaw. That being the auto-resolve giving almost universally superior results to actually hand-directing battles.

It's not a universal thing, as there are still times where directing the battle directly is the better way to go. I had a point where two stacks of Vampires were bearing down on me (One full and one half full), while I only had one full stack of Empire soldiers. I would've gotten stomped, a close defeat at best, so I took the direct battle. Managed to get a valiant defeat with the entire first stack utterly wiped out, lord included, and I managed to inflict decent losses on the second. More of my soldiers actually survived the fight than the vampires, but a lot of them were scattered, broken, and those that weren't were ranged units that had exhausted their munitions.

Keep in mind that I'm not actually that great at Total War, at several times in the battle I had units just standing around because I'm overwhelmed by everything going on at once and I sometimes forget. Someone more skilled might have been able to pull out a win there.

I have been hearing that it is in dire need of re-balancing though, no argument there.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

It's not a universal thing, as there are still times where directing the battle directly is the better way to go. I had a point where two stacks of Vampires were bearing down on me (One full and one half full), while I only had one full stack of Empire soldiers. I would've gotten stomped, a close defeat at best, so I took the direct battle. Managed to get a valiant defeat with the entire first stack utterly wiped out, lord included, and I managed to inflict decent losses on the second. More of my soldiers actually survived the fight than the vampires, but a lot of them were scattered, broken, and those that weren't were ranged units that had exhausted their munitions.

Keep in mind that I'm not actually that great at Total War, at several times in the battle I had units just standing around because I'm overwhelmed by everything going on at once and I sometimes forget. Someone more skilled might have been able to pull out a win there.

I have been hearing that it is in dire need of re-balancing though, no argument there.

The sad thing is if you'd just had a 2nd stack of units following you around you could've easily autoresolved your way to victory in that battle. Whatever algorithm they used is broken in favor of superior numbers. It makes playing Orcs or other "Horde" factions ridiculously cheesy. That the game also delights in throwing a lot of small/worthless battles at you rather than forcing occasional massive engagements also reinforces the use of the (broken) autoresolve.

I also powerfully dislike the reinforcement system. Back in the Medieval 2 era, lost troops couldn't be recouped until you actually went back to controlled territory and built replacement units. You could merge a new unit with a damaged one, but the influx of rookies would lower the damaged units veteran status accordingly. On long campaigns or excursions it was not uncommon to have a half-dead army littered with half-quarter strength units of hard bitten veteran men. Now you just wait a turn and all your troops magically spring back to life, ready for another exciting round of auto-resolves.

It's a shame because the tactical layer works FINE. The strategic layer is just completely broken.

 

[Erttheking]

It's not a universal thing, as there are still times where directing the battle directly is the better way to go. I had a point where two stacks of Vampires were bearing down on me (One full and one half full), while I only had one full stack of Empire soldiers. I would've gotten stomped, a close defeat at best, so I took the direct battle. Managed to get a valiant defeat with the entire first stack utterly wiped out, lord included, and I managed to inflict decent losses on the second. More of my soldiers actually survived the fight than the vampires, but a lot of them were scattered, broken, and those that weren't were ranged units that had exhausted their munitions.

Keep in mind that I'm not actually that great at Total War, at several times in the battle I had units just standing around because I'm overwhelmed by everything going on at once and I sometimes forget. Someone more skilled might have been able to pull out a win there.

I have been hearing that it is in dire need of re-balancing though, no argument there.

The sad thing is if you'd just had a 2nd stack of units following you around you could've easily autoresolved your way to victory in that battle. Whatever algorithm they used is broken in favor of superior numbers. It makes playing Orcs or other "Horde" factions ridiculously cheesy. That the game also delights in throwing a lot of small/worthless battles at you rather than forcing occasional massive engagements also reinforces the use of the (broken) autoresolve.

I also powerfully dislike the reinforcement system. Back in the Medieval 2 era, lost troops couldn't be recouped until you actually went back to controlled territory and built replacement units. You could merge a new unit with a damaged one, but the influx of rookies would lower the damaged units veteran status accordingly. On long campaigns or excursions it was not uncommon to have a half-dead army littered with half-quarter strength units of hard bitten veteran men. Now you just wait a turn and all your troops magically spring back to life, ready for another exciting round of auto-resolves.

It's a shame because the tactical layer works FINE. The strategic layer is just completely broken.

Hm, I certainly can see how that would be a problem. Maybe some reworking would be necessary. Though it doesn't really bother me too much, as a combination of the fact that I often choose to go through battles (because honestly they're just more fun) and I suck too much to fully abuse it.

It does need some reworking though, hopefully we'll get that in this new game.

 

[Catnip1024]

So they're so short of historical time periods and fantasy worlds that they go immediately back to Warhammer? Or had they already written all the DLC, is that it?

You have Tolkien's Middle Earth, you have the world of Shannara, you have China - you know, that place with a sixth of the worlds population? But no, let's do some more Warhammer elves.

Not that it really effects me, since my computer can't run anything more recent than Empire with any degree of speed. But it shows a distinct lack of imagination and putting pure commercial reasoning first and foremost.

 

[Erttheking]

So they're so short of historical time periods and fantasy worlds that they go immediately back to Warhammer? Or had they already written all the DLC, is that it?

They've got a separate team working on historical games. And they pretty much flat out said that this would be happening a long time ago.

 

[CCLegion]

So they're so short of historical time periods and fantasy worlds that they go immediately back to Warhammer? Or had they already written all the DLC, is that it?

You have Tolkien's Middle Earth, you have the world of Shannara, you have China - you know, that place with a sixth of the worlds population? But no, let's do some more Warhammer elves.

Not that it really effects me, since my computer can't run anything more recent than Empire with any degree of speed. But it shows a distinct lack of imagination and putting pure commercial reasoning first and foremost.

TW:Warhammer originally had 2 expansions planned for it. After its success last year, the content plan for it was apparently expanded with the expansions becoming TW:WH2 and the as of yet unannounced third game. A new historical game in a time period that they haven't done yet is also in active development by a separate team.