Makes Me Happy in Pants

[Professor S]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/682/682437p1.html

I am giddy right now. The Total War series of strategy games is by far my favorite series of all time. I never tire of playing them, and in fact, I've been playing Rome:Total War a ton lately (love them War Elephants) with the Total Realism mod (which is great).

I can't wait for this game to be released...

:D

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/682/682437/medieval-2-total-war-20060120002856990.jpg

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/682/682437/medieval-2-total-war-20060120002853944.jpg

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/682/682409/medieval-2-total-war-20060120111327462.jpg

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/682/682437/medieval-2-total-war-20060120002900068.jpg

[Typhoid]

Oh.


My.



God.



Strangler, if my computer was good enough with all my defects and viruses, I would so play you at Rome: Total War.

I'm in love with that game, and it single handedly made me love computer games again.


I actually cant wait for this new one to come out now.

But this one looks awesome. So very very awesome. And realistic. And while I love the Shogun/Rome era more, this could be orgasm worthy.


However, I disagree with your War Elephant loving. I hate those ****ing pricks. I love the War Pigs better than the Elephants. And that doesnt say much.

[Happydude]

if those are in-game screens, you would need a hell of a PC to run it, there are sooooo many units!

[Teuthida]

I want to dress my pony up in pretty colors too. We'll be the stars of the ball.

Quite a disciplined calvary there. Not easy getting so many knights to hold their lances at the exact same angle. Their hands are also in the lance instead of around it...

Looks fun.

[GameMaster]

Is it a strategy game like WC3?

[Typhoid]

Is it a strategy game like WC3?


It's a cross between Civilization, and Age Of Empires (Thats all I can compare the battle screen to, I suppose)

[Canyarion]

Warcraft 3 focusses on small armies, the Total War has massive armies. You don't control seperate units, but batallions.

I've only played the demo of Rome: TW, which was fun.

[Professor S]

The game operates on two different engines: turn based and real time.

The city/region/resource management parts are turn based, where you will build farm land, different miltary buildings, city walls, etc. Its like a mix of Risk and Civilization.

The battles are all in real time (but in sngle player you can pause), and there really is no other comparison. The Total War engine is an engine unto itself. The armies are massive and the battle movement and strategy is about as close to reality as you can get. High ground is imperitive, woods and long grasses are good for hiding select troup types, and always try and flank your opponent. I found myself reading The Art of War and researeching different ancient battle strategies for the game.

So far my favorite civilization to play is the Seleucids. They have heavily armored Phalanxes with extra long spears (great for creating a fixed wall of spers on an open battlefield), good archers to hide behind the phalanx and most importantly... Armoured War Elephants. Let your opponent crash into your wall of spears, pepper them with flaming arrows, and then crush them from either side with Elephants.

I'm al little sad that the next title won;t have elephants, but it will have what I missed from Medeival... black powder! I love me some artillery and musketeers.

[Professor S]

Quite a disciplined calvary there. Not easy getting so many knights to hold their lances at the exact same angle. Their hands are also in the lance instead of around it...

I think that if you coded the lances, for all 10,000 units on screen at once, to randomly angle themselves bewteen a certain criteria or vertices, your processor would not just explode... it would hop out of your PC, bitch slap you to the floor, take a dump on your chest and then kill your family and your dog.

I'll take a few identically angled lances and not create an army of bloodthirsty supercomputers.

[Teuthida]

I saw this video (http://www.projectoffset.com/media/project_offset_crowdtest.wmv) right before I posted so was quite jaded.

[Professor S]

I saw this video (http://www.projectoffset.com/media/project_offset_crowdtest.wmv) right before I posted so was quite jaded.

The narrator said there were "hundreds" of goblins on the screen at the same time. I paused several times and at most I counted 30-40 on screen (and thats being generous) with a miniscule draw distance showing goblins continuing to reappear out of the blackness. Also, even though they said that each goblin was unique, I couldn't tell any of them apart except for maybe clothing colors.

There might be hundreds of goblins around you, but what counts to your hardware is the humbers in your viewing area. Everything outside of your viewing area is simply code that your PC does not have to render until is comes into your view. Also the draw distance in Total War games is about 15-20 times that of that test, at least. Look at the background of the test. Were there any moving set pieces? Anything else to help gum up the works?

I don't think thats a valid comparison.

[MuGen]

this game needs the CELL to program lances for 10,000 units individually.