The 'Rome Total War' LEAKS

[@MelkorGG]

Wow, this is very interesting - thanks for sharing. 33:30: These campaigns can also be found in the game files. There seems to be a 'Scipio Campaign' that is set later in the Empire, but before Barbarian Invasion, with a full map the size of the base game we got. There's also a Caesar in Gaul campaign that can be found in the files, that seems to be more like a narrative, scripted campaign, with missions, again with Campaign (we have the audio files for it). And an image exists that shows a Hannibal campaign. Therefore, I am assuming that this is what that was referencing. (48:37: And wow, there they all are) 33:00: The entire senate system was clearly meant to have more depth. To the best of my knowledge, the entire Senate screen, where it has the people on the left and the senate of the right, does nothing and has no effect at all on the game. Many people think this has something to do with the Civil War, but it was proven not to. 47:40: I saw stuff about Triumphs there. Triumphs were meant to be a big part of the game also, gaining triumph points for conquering cities. (I even had a possible hint from an RR dev that triumphs could have had something to do with the Civil War mechanics) I think a player would get 5 points for taking a wonder, 15 for defeating a faction, and 25 for landing in Britain + many more. 48:16: Just a minor point, but it mentions Macedon being playable after playing as the Brutii, but Macedon was never made playable - unless you modded it in. No clue why. 57:00: I think I recall something about Hostages being in the files. There was certainly decimation stuff that got cut, and some su***de animations. 58:00 There was an entire food mechanic which got cut. Each unit cost a certain amount of food upkeep. How food was meant to be made is unknown. 1:02:12: I recall there been an icon for that in the files. And a lot of the stuff that continues to be mentioned also likely exist in those areas - but the icons are difficult to decipher. 1:09:51: I recall, but cannot remember where from, that the large temples in the cities appeared to be able to support units - hence why they had stairs going to the top on the release build. Just another thing that was sadly cut. 1:21:12: Shame that naming cities feature got cut, because it was almost complete. I think modders were able to find the files for this and finish it. And yeah, I think it is in Med 2. There's so much more small, interesting points here. Thank you for sharing, this is finally the confirmation that I was right on so much stuff. As someone who grew up on Civ 3, a lot of the lost features are 100% Civ 3 inspired. Naval battles were meant to be incredibly in-depth also. We have the stats and everything for them. In the Version 1.0 Navies are incredibly broken - the AI just spams them constantly - to the point where there are more ships than troops. Clearly it seems navies were rushed at the end, resulting in everything being cut.

[@Volound]

the perfect man for the moment. thanks for these comments, youve been in the files a lot more than me and have heard from some people i havent. really interesting and its surprising to see some of these ideas werent crossed off on the drawing board as could easily be assumed, but were in fact worked on and then eventually amputated. presumably the team went straight to work on barbarian invasion when some of them would have wanted to some more serious work on the game with adding in some of these features, or simply finishing them. the document goes into some other really fundamental stuff like the food you mentioned and "baggage trains" (lmao) and army wage sliders etc. it seems like a massive % of the game just got cut. if modders want to make a "full" version of rome total war, i think the source code is out (which is how we got this) and we have at least one full version of the design document public now. maybe one day. id like to play it.

[@MelkorGG]

@@Volound I'll certainly have a closer look through that document someday. I'll let you know if I find anything else. I knew development was rough, and the entire project got scrapped either after a year of development or a year before release - cannot remember which, but I did not know it was this messy. So funny, because wasn't it you who uncovered that Feral also had a completely different vision for RR, and then got told to go back to the drawing board? They never learn 😆 Also, to any modder out there who might be working on making a full version - please reach out.

[@Volound]

im not sure about feral and their own vision but i did hear that CA got given the release build of RR and were like "this is not a remaster". that was funny to hear. the plan was to remaster all of the games before empire though. all of the TW1 and TW2 games. and after RR they cancelled that. that might be what you are remembering. really have not heard much about the process for RR internally though. i just heard from people that were around and saw some of what it was like inside CA at the time. cheers.

[@mulan-jinglesemusicas1513]

Doesn't the su***de mission happens when Senate popularity is too low/people popularity too high?

[@MelkorGG]

@@mulan-jinglesemusicas1513 (I read your comment wrong earlier, and thought you were talking about something else - so deleted it 😆) To the best of my knowledge, that I got from hours of testing with cheat codes, it is based off settlement count. If you follow every Senate mission and do everything the senate wants, you will always eventually get that event.

[@Warmaker01]

"The battlefield is derived from the terrain of the tiles on which the battle takes place"

[@doltBmB]

Easily one of the most boring things about nu tw is the premade maps, the chaos wastes in wh3 are particularly bad, the same 2-3 maps over and over, the same exact shitty little group of trees right in the middle every time.

[@googleandsusansucks]

Pretty sure Shogun 2 does this. Try fighting close to the coast compared to mountain regions. Sure, most maps are similar, but they have maps with a lot of hills.

[@SuperCrumpets]

yep single most important thing of the campaign and its gone Shogun2 does do this somewhat, it has around 700 custom maps but theyre all done with the limited templates of empire/napoleon instead of the actual heightmap like Rome1/M2 so you get the same tiles repeated over and over which is why the same exact hill will be spammed everywhere around japan. at least positioning of armies on the Cmap affects which map you get on the Bmap. with rome1/M2 its perfect except for the fact half the terrain is out of bound because you fight in the middle of the tile and the edges are outside the red line and unusable

[@Warmaker01]

@@SuperCrumpets Shogun 1 also featured maps with severe terrain. BIG hills and mountain sides. And Archers perched atop them with your troops far below? They hurt badly.

[@BucketBoatable]

I also liked being able to see cities and special landmarks in the distance.

[@SerbianLifter997]

Ah yes, basic features behind DLC. I see they've learned from Paradox Interactive. Totally not an act of pure desperation fueled by hubris and greed.

[@lamename2010]

Paradox is pretty bad about it as well. They have no consistency. Sometimes they will pull out basic features like developing provinces (EU4) and add them to the base game, othertimes they will keep basic features behind the paywall. And the level of basic features being locked behind the paywall differs not just game to game (studio by studio) but outright dlc to dlc. 0 consistency. Although with the more recent eu4 dlcs, I find that seeing only Mission Trees being added is somehow worse than actually adding in features behind the paywall.

[@beepboopbeepp]

The new legends dlc for ck3 is actually the worst thing i’ve ever seen, debuff all game for not owning the dlc and being able to gather legitimacy in an easy way is so stupid

[@honeybadger6275]

Yup, I think its time to find a new hobby.

[@xax2952]

​@lamename2010 i disagree, ck3 dlc has been consistently terrible

[@honeybadger6275]

@@xax2952 I couldn't get into the game, the ui was too awful. I hate that they changed the ui from a good layout in ck2 hoi4, eu5 etc. into the new format just so they could release on console and get more sales. When I saw vic 3 was using the same awful ui I knew all their new games would be like that and its not worth buying anymore of their products.

[@greensoldier2142]

The thing that drew me in as a kid was the spectacle and the grandeur of the battles. Now as a man child adult what draws me in is the attempt to recreate historical behavior. You read History of the Wars by Procopius and the entire first part is about the Byzantine-Sassanian squabble. You read about generals besieging cities, battle plans, diplomatic relations, how the Persian rulers tend to consult their court magi and you can't help yourself but want to experience something like that. I think this is what the OG Total Wars were trying to accomplish. You can clear see it with Medieval 2's aesthetic, the game feel very ethereal when you line up your troops and their armor is shining, the general is doing a speech and the music is getting you in the mood for battle. This design document might not be a very good one but you can clearly see that these guys were trying to achieve something big and innovative with Rome 1. It's a shame honestly, NuTotal War is just number pumping, I have more fun on the calculator than in Rome 2. It's just a spectacle without depth.

[@mootedtols4865]

"archers" / "but sire, we'll hit our own troops" / "yes but we'll hit theirs as well, we have reserves" Nu-total war "Archers" / "yes sire, excellent, our laser guided wet noodles will reduce the health bar"

[@laserprawn]

A game design document is technically supposed to detail, at a high level, how each feature is supposed to work--not just announce what a feature is. A lot of 2000-era GDDs seem to be written like this, by game designers who are really producers, who don't really know how anything is supposed to work, and leave it to other people to figure out what is actually feasible. What you have here is not really a GDD, but a big shopping list.

[@Volound]

yeah ive even seen diagrams and flow charts in other ones, which shows some deeper thought and planning. nothing really like that here. someone with no programming knowledge couldve written this, basically. and likewise anyone can scrutinise the entirety of it if they want.

[@michielwerring5846]

@@Volound A design document ideally has been vetted by domain experts, but just having a shopping list of desired features in order of desirability, at least lets you begin to have a conversation on what you think should be completed on the final deadline, create milestones, etc. Some design documents are brief and global, others go in-depth. Most projects I've been on had no document whatsoever. You'd join the project, be given a rough verbal outline with no verification from anywhere else, and best hope your lead has a better handle on things. They didn't know, because their bosses (The directors) hadn't do their due diligence in years. They'd much rather chase after their latest impulse thinking it'll save the game for certain, this time, totally.

[@wile123456]

Because 99% of developers back then were college dropouts working in their mom's garage or in a tiny office building. People in their early 20's rarely make the best leadership and it's also the reason why every game studio has had multiple rapes and scandals happens, because the feature boy dropout toxic culture sticks, even as the Studio grows to hundreds of people, because the immature boys get the leadership positions and abuse the women when they get hired in lower positions down the line (and also why many women are bullied out of quite before they themselves make it to a leadership role)

[@LucasCunhaRocha]

yeah, you also need to take in mind the hardware limitations of the time, the "one elephant/arty" per unit was probably because they thought it having a bunch of elephants and arty would affect performance.

[@LucasCunhaRocha]

@@wile123456 lol dude, don't know where you came up with all this bullshit lmao if you think any of this is remotely true.

[@chuckb11]

Back when R2 came out the creative director was supposed to come to the CA forum to explain some issues with Rome's launch. This engagement was cancelled and I asked on the forum why he couldn't "creatively direct his way to a computer with an internet connection to explain this mess" and was permanently banned.

[@Volound]

the right to speak is a privilege. you clearly forgot that. CA are infallible.

[@TehOmnissiah]

They have hilariously thin skinned, weak people staffing their media.

[@pompeythegreat297]

Scumbags. Never support them again....

[@Dolfy]

A scary thing that people really take for granted was that this is November 2002 when this doc was passed, I assume created around August/September 2002 when Medieval was done. It's not 2 years before launch but the game was already supposed to ship from its initial launch schedule and then release for 2003 but thankfully Activision delayed it to late 2004. CA were also extremely close to bankruptcy back then, one interview mentioned that they were just days before bankruptcy.

[@Volound]

"Music Continue what was begun with Medieval and make the music as dynamic as possible in terms of responding to the state of the game. Music for the game should be suitably epic in feel. The movies Spartacus and Gladiator are obvious models for the kind of thing that is required. " mission accomplished?

[@Warmaker01]

Funny about Gladiator music being mentioned. I often had the Gladiator soundtrack going while I was playing RTW. That movie was very influential and carried a lot of weight for years. Hell, Gladiator made sword and sandal shows a thing again. Sort of like how Conan the Barbarian from the early 1980s made barbarian style and fantasy movies popular that decade.

[@beetheimmortal]

And then they stopped working with Jeff van Dyck after FotS, and the music took a fucking nosedive...

[@reactiondavant-garde3391]

@@beetheimmortal Rome I and Med II still have my all time favorite music in games. Jeff van Dyck just so good in his job. Newer total war games music are shamfull, except some small exception.

[@beetheimmortal]

@@reactiondavant-garde3391 Yeah, every TW OST the man touched is gold. I really love Shogun 2/FotS as well, but yeah, Rome and Med 2 have some of the best combat music in any strategy game ever.

[@JayzsMr]

The soundtrack is even better than in gladiator

[@TheSuperappelflap]

Being able to build new settlements and have multiple resources for construction and unit recruitment sounds like a pretty cool thing to me, if it is added on top of a complete total war game and not replacing existing mechanics. Like the chaos dwarves in wh3 using multiple resources. That faction is quite fun to play and a bit more in-depth than vanilla. Now if they made those resources local (besides from the unpaid interns in each province) and had some actual logistics mechanics, I would play that game a lot.

[@Ahmadabdal_]

Chaos dwarfs feel like the most polished race in warhammer They also get clear reloading animations. Multiple faction mechanics. Proper unit variety with specialised roles instead of direct upgrades (for the most part). You can actually feel the love pit into that race when you play it.

[@AngelSonevski]

The resource system in TW Pharaoh is excellent like this, best TW resource system to date

[@MasonDixonAutistic]

This reads as if some people at CA were trying for 'lightning in a bottle' without realising they had already done it with Shogun and Medieval. Everything that Total War was and should have become would have used those as the basis, and explored the areas which those games themselves highlighted as having opportunities. What instead happens: they look at so many other games, games which are adjacent in terms of genre but are not like Total War. There is the context of the time to consider; this was just past the halfway point of the PC gaming golden age and companies were doing radical things with games that smashed genres together or challenged the idea entirely: Sacrifice by Shiny Entertainment, Giants: Citizen Kabuto by Moon Studios, Hostile Waters by Rage, Deus Ex by Ion Storm. All of those were great games, but they all failed and yet they're fondly remembered. Total War was almost something entirely brand new, because no one else thought to properly try representing and simulating battles in games the same way as had been done in films. It did well enough for follow-ups titles to be made, where the other experimental but mashed-up games did not. This idea still remains grossly under-explored, and it didn't need any gimmicks.

[@mootedtols4865]

Right yeah. I remember there was a braveheart game, never did play it because I started playing mtw. That's what I wanted, real time tactics. It's like the modern 3D maps, What's the point of them anymore, you don't even fight where you put your army on the map. If I wanted to play Frankenstein's civilization I'd play that call to power or whatever it was

[@VindicAlpha]

Failed? Deus Ex? Sacrifice? Giants: Citizen Kabuto?... Okay, maybe Giants. But Deus Ex and Sacrifice were pretty successful as I recall.

[@MasonDixonAutistic]

@@VindicAlpha I think I interpret Deus Ex as a commercial failure because the first sequel pivoted very hard towards consoles to increase sales, something which really hurt the game by limiting the map sizes and the number of interactive objects due to limited system resources. I remember from the time that The Sims was dominating the game charts., which made more than a few Deus Ex fans unhappy as it was denied the number 1 spot in the UK on launch and subsequent weeks had it just keep dropping. Sacrifice released in September of 2000 and was the game I'd most been looking forwards to, but I couldn't find it being sold anywhere. I didn't get hold of it until Christmas after spotting it in a sad corner of PC World, where it wouldn't be if it was selling well. All of these games reviewed incredibly well, but there had just been too many good games happen in a short space of time between 1997 and 2004. The games industry was much more ruthlessly competitive back then, even though fewer games were made: each was competing against others that were either extremely well-made or extremely-innovative.

[@smolpp2516]

its amazing how the exact same thing happens regularly in my soon ex company. different field but the project management has exactly the same issues management refuses to plan realistically because most projects turn out fine after months of overtime and shitty quality delivered to the customer by corner cutting.

[@The13thRonin]

Volound, I'm happy to leak to you the current CA design document. Here it is: Imagine Cartman's line from "Into the Panderverse", but replace "chick" with "Warhammer goblin". That's the entire document.

[@LazarusWilhelm]

31:55 I'm pretty sure succesfully completing SPQR missions does make them more likely to appoint faction characters/generals to the Senate , which gives those little buffs. Really wish they didn't ditch the RPG mechanics.

[@Warmaker01]

Fun comment about the former dev saying the original RTW trailer was just as bogus as Rome 2's. CA was just lucky that RTW was spectacular, so that tactic worked. But it didn't work for CA with Rome 2 because the game was not good. They couldn't point to a fantastic game to shield them anymore and players were angered and looking for blood. Also interesting to see the design intent for 2 turns per year and you commenting that your generals got old quickly. Vanilla RTW was fast. The 2 turns per year was too fast for some of us when the game came out. 4 turns per year mods started appearing and became core to others like Rome Total Realism.

[@doltBmB]

lots of great games have bogus trailers, famously the halo 2 trailer basically didn't even exist outside of the small path they had made full of canned animations standing in for proper mechanics, and would crash the moment you did something unintended, and they had to have a second player deleting parts of the level behind the demo player to avoid running out of memory, but that turned out to be one of the best games of all time.

[@VersVlees]

yup I remember one of the earlier RTW trailers featuring soldiers within a unit having small variations in clothing and armour pieces like Med 2 has. I do remember being kinda disappointed about that and it wasn't moddable too.

[@Shiro-bj2fc]

Why they didn’t implemented the old cut content into the remastered? It would have been like doing a movie and someone wrote you the whole script already

[@Volound]

lol exactly. they even presumably had this document because i think it got out because of how they got the source code to them. so odd.

[@peteruk8]

CA going to target fanbase for each licence they can get. Warhammer, Star Wars, Lord of the rings, Dune, Game of thrones, Marvel. Selling games based on pop culture. Their survey even showed pop culture polls to reflect that. They are now going to falsely think Pharaoh failed solely based on it being "historical", so they're going to assume fantasy/sci fi will be solution going forward.

[@ahmedabdolghani8879]

The scot is back! CREATIVE ASSEMBLY DELENDA EST!

[@metaflight9495]

Not finished watching, but its so interesting how even with multiple good games still in their future, you can see the tendencies that'll eventually lead to disaster for the franchise. You can see which individual guardrails that prevented it from happening earlier (people who made the orginals correcting course, activision giving them extra time) will disappear over time. Nothing happens in isolation. Everything exists within a context.

[@Warmaker01]

With disasters, there's the Swiss Cheese Model. It's typically not one thing that leads to disaster. It's several things that finally come together for a mishap to occur.

[@googleandsusansucks]

Blizzard is similar. The rot started already in the Burning crusade for wow. People just noticed it less cause they had not strayed far enough away from vanilla at that point.

[@Sanglaine]

The ice cracking thing is a pretty neat idea. I remember that in C&C Tib Sun they have that and if you have a line of heavy units going down a riverbed with ice that at least one of them will accidentally sink and be lost.

[@Volound]

oh man exactly. how could i forget tiberian sun. that game was absolutely incredible. also the terrain deformation with artillery and heavy weapons like superweapons. i remember the MLRS unit hovering over ice getting shot at and the ice disappearing underneath it and it being completely unbothered. that one GDI mission where you get an MLRS at the start.

[@GodofToast]

It’s no secret CA has sucked since almost the beginning

[@elpsykoongro5379]

The difference is the devs actually had brains and didn't allowed the bullshit to happen, it's only when the ones doing this papers take control over development that it started to shat itself

[@charlesransom4546]

If I wanted to play a C&C game, I’d play C&C 3. If I wanted to play a AOE game, I’d play AOE 2. If I wanted to play a TW game, anything Shogun 2 and back I’d play.

[@The_Caledonian]

And so it seems the "golden age" of games already had a megaton of content cut from it's release during early development early stages and we have subsequently been going down hill ever since - only to pick up on pieces of the puzzle down the line.

[@mootedtols4865]

This makes so much sense, I remember the release RTW being buggy af and in terms of AI, a downgrade from MTW, but I still played the hell out of it. It was still TW

[@badhabits1965]

it's crazy how people become adults and get corporate executive positions, and they have the ego and personality of a spoiled toddler

[@Idlefd]

For the tech tree, I do imagine a holdover in RTW specifically would be the Marian reforms, it does as some techs in later total wars do in how it simply paves over your starting roster with broadly superior units, perhaps at some point they meant to model that shift onto the tech tree but after scrapping it couldn't find a way to neatly fit it onto the building lines and so made it a scripted event

[@wormfood83]

I don't think automated governors would work well these days. I'm basing this off the nonsensical province management the AI has in the WH games.

[@redjacc7581]

medieval 1 had the best battle AI out of any TW game.

[@Gyrfalcon-312]

Wow, so this is what a game-design document looks like!

[@omfgcow]

It is a sanity check that some CA personal recognized that the campaign and battle map should be more related to each other. Along with logistics and other lacking , this was a part of a few of my rant comments I left on the tw subreddit almost a decade ago. I'm not sure of CA's financials early, but the vision of the series was hampered both by the general triple-A game business life-cycle (as opposed to 5+ years paying some top researchers and industry vets to work on foundations of the next gen engine) and the boneheadedness specific to this company. It's so disappointing that CA or other devs haven't made much progress in the past 2 decades toward the deep continent spanning war and society simulator I've been imagining. What also sticks out to me is the MBA esque sticking ideas and fads from other places (in non-game software terms, shoe-horning fotm such as OOP, blockchain, AI, and so on where they don't belong, spanning back 40 years) without the discernment of if idea belongs or how it should be sensibly woven in; it's a rehash of hiring devs or writers that weren't fans of the OG Halo triology (insert dozens of other media franchises). Or, knowledgable staff not being allowed to veto these awful ideas in their infancy. Age of Empires, Civ, and others do have elements of settling and exploration, but it takes a non-fungibly gifted creative person to expand on these themes, along with a seasoned designer and programmer to refine and implement whatever the creative . If any game that nails either these themes for 100+ hours exists, I haven't played it.

[@Dolfy]

24:57 - while fire arrows made it in, the archers still aren't able to set gates or buildings on fire with them like in Med1 25:31 - I think the doc wanted to mention "specialist" units that are referenced in one promotional video but I think there's maybe 1-2 per faction which makes it 30ish at best (kzbin.info/www/bejne/n5_MdmuHf5xkasU) 50:00 - there are files and voiceovers still left for these battles. 51:10 - Some of these were in Shogun 1 like KoTH was in multiplayer 1:03:05 - very likely referred to engage at will that was in Shogun/Medieval where melee units would go at units at their engage radius 1:03:20 - because guard mode was a merge between hold position and hold ground which used to be engage at will 1:21:15 - BI introduced changing settlement names 1:23:00 - They had to patch in boiling oil, same with Med2 and Kingdoms when Med1 also patched boiling oil in Viking Invasion. Weird pattern. 1:24:30 - The fords get replaced that are crossable anyway.

[@gallendugall8913]

How do you do course correction in the era where people's gender and ethnicity place them above criticism and attempts at feedback can get you fired?

[@mootedtols4865]

Tf has this got to do with anything. Take it to a culture war thread. We talk about games here

[@SFTaYZa]

​@mootedtols4865 he's right.

[@mootedtols4865]

@@SFTaYZa the pattern, is project leads and designers getting bailed out at the death by those who understood what total war is. RTW just about pulled it off, medieval2 (ca Australia) refined and improved, but it fell to pieces with empire. Shogun 2 recovered it, then fell again with Rome 2 and never recovered. It's been there all along, but the wheels finally fell off around the time of Rome 2. Now TW is becoming more and more like the RTW that thankfully never was. That's the pattern. Not gays and blacks and whatever doing whatever. Please just stick to the games, not some nonsense. Rome 2 released with capture the fucking flag. The units didn't even have the no. Of men on release, just a colour bar -- someone else had to come in and fix that stuff after release.

[@misterpinkandyellow74]

​@@mootedtols4865acting like DEI isn't affecting games 😂. Newsflash it is.

[@mootedtols4865]

@@misterpinkandyellow74 DEI is the only reason I'd ever touch Rome 2. Even then I get pissed off with it. No idea what your issue is with it. If you don't like it, fine. It's not like they had a budget.

[@scorpionfiresome3834]

1 like in 1 second, Volound jumped on.

[@wag0NE]

He has onlyfans too

[@phantomjoker5]

we're so back

[@notgoddhoward5972]

The difference between then and now is that the devs don't care and just do the job like the company asks instead of trying to dig the game out of the ground.

[@misterpinkandyellow74]

Medieval 1 is the best there was, best there is, best there ever will be.

[@etienne8110]

Mods do make med2 great though.

[@eglspl425]

You'd love Sacrifice. The potential for ambitious and skilled play is extremely high.

[@lanelesic]

Give this design document and 400 million dollars to any modern studio and none of them will make anything even close as good as Rome: Total War.

[@user-xs3ro3zf3k]

You cant do this to me. Its so late right now and i have work tomorrow. Anyway time to watch a new video

[@willmackaness2991]

inb4 the copryright strike attempt

[@Volound]

inb4 another massive fail and another embarrassing transcript of CA lying in a legal notice.

[@pompeythegreat297]

It's honestly sad how far CA has fallen.... Like a Shakespearean tragedy yo 😂😆. Makes you really respect those game developers that never change. Much props to them.

[@evilsponge6911]

Fall of the Samurai really was the swan song of Total War

[@ThatOliveMrT]

Honestly the all over the place nature of the design document should've killed the studio then and there. I love the idea of aiming high but for the sake of reality it seems like 80% should've been cut and once the core mechanics are mastered you can think about adding more in future installments.... Instead we got a series of products Frankensteined built off the last. Nothing ever truly polished, many things pruned at the end too. Member' visual upgrades in M2? I member'

[@crucibleclips]

"with the adults back in the room".....yes

[@peteruk8]

Just looked through pack files of Pharaoh Dynasty. They basically used Warhammer 2 then reskin it, instead of clean base then copied over resources of Troy on top. The Pharaoh pack file full of Skaven, Dwarf, Chaos Chariot and references to image resources like beer for dwarf, skaven slaves, gyrobomber, skeleton units and Warhammer factions. All the data tables leftover with all the Warhammer 2 textures/images removed. CA too lazy to clean up Pharaoh files. They must of been in a hurry. Animations ripped from Troy and old data left from Centaurs, Chimera, minotaur. Best part...Lots of references to troy_dlc1 and troy_dlc2. Either Pharaoh was supposed to be DLC for Troy or vice versa which was to initially add Troy as paid DLC to Pharaoh until they decided to add into Pharaoh dynasty without cost due to poor reception.

[@Dre2Dee2]

Remember when the History Channel started using Rome Total War in a whole bunch of different shows to show off battles and stuff? That was kinda rocking lol

[@hydra7427]

Empire was planned all the way back then?! Makes sense due to dev cycles, but wow.

[@hermes3976]

I just want the chat back in Rome 2 Multiplayer man, this is how low i've gotten on them, forget a new dlc after 6 years.

[@peebsyt2870]

Volound, please address the glowie brigades saying that dynasties has made Pharoah a 'saved' game

[@SwordEncarmine]

A What If episode

[@chrisdiaz4876]

Bro, i love watching an hour of Volound and getting high so i can digest all this info. u Tha GOAT

[@timbow1833]

big V does it again

[@evanwoodham6296]

At least back then the rational people would end up on top. Nowadays with design, its plagiarize trash, dumb it down, establish a cult around it.

[@McHobotheBobo]

The shift from sprites to 3D has been disastrous :P Strapping in for a long one

[@Iltbsm]

1:01:00 Actually this is in some games, in Rome I and Medieval II most certainly, I think Empire had this, too - to a certain extent, because in Empire you simply recruited a General. The buildings in the region could imfluece them. Not sure about later games. In Rome II you can send children to academies, however it is very gamey and not connected to your buildings.

[@thekey1175]

110 views 1 minute after publishing? Volound mustve fell off (:

[@decp6601]

Those screaming women in the background of the video are giving me PTSD

[@lorix1.14]

I LOVE RTW

[@AnalyticalReckoner]

I'm probably alone in this but I didn't like the 3D map when Rome came out. I didn't find running armies around the map fun and felt that the core of the game should be the battles, not the campaign. Navy management became a chore also. I eventually got used to it but I still wish they would release a game where battle was the focus and campaign was less management dependant. I thought Arena was a good start to a game but CA was dedicated to making it a vehicle for microtransactions.

[@Volound]

yeah i thought the same thing after playing med1 in 2020 or 2021. the risk style map was great. i even mention on here that ive started automating construction and recruitment in my rtw campaigns. all the background footage you see playing is from campaigns where ive automated basically the whole campaign so i can just go battle to battle. also it sounds from the document like a big part of the motivation for the 3D map was "continuity". but they eventually cut out a lot of the continuity. so they couldnt even realise their plan that was surely a big part of the decision to go to the 3D style. sad.

[@mootedtols4865]

The 3D map was good when it actually mattered -- i.e. picking a battlefield. Where you put your army in RTW would be where you'd fight on the *battle map. Armies and reinforcements would come from where they were positioned on the campaign map. Not true at all in Rome 2, probably onwards, don't know because I didn't play them after lol. So what's the point then?

[@reactiondavant-garde3391]

@@mootedtols4865 Yeah, I think it is give extra amount of strategy, like how you manage reinforcments, how far you dare to go from recruiting centeres, in Med II as example we have mechanics to limit how many unit we can requite the smae time. i think the Worl Map part is really improtant to make the campaign more coherent and strategic.

[@mootedtols4865]

@@reactiondavant-garde3391 absolutely. The 3D campaign map in modern total war essentially has no purpose at all. You could swap it back to the risk map with no difference. Would probably be better

[@reactiondavant-garde3391]

@@mootedtols4865 Absoltuly agree, the nwer titles ruined, entirly RUINED, the Campaign Map. It is infuriatingly casual. Limtiing 3 building in settlemtns so stupid. Before I was able to decide what a settlemnt will be, in Med II I can even change it to a town or into a castle, but now I am railroaded what every settlment can do. In Warhammer I can't even build some high level buildings into smaller settlements, it isso restrictive is is suffocating.

[@mordreek]

Rome and medieval 2 were my first total war ges and i know rome isnt the best but i love it all the same and still go play it when i can. Not the remake either

[@dukedunac]

aint no way

[@CAPTJOHN78]

Hello volound , where i can find the document

[@Volound]

ive not hosted it anywhere but other people have already and theyre linking it around. someone posted a link to it on my reddit a few days ago. also some people have been linking it on my discord. and rome 1 modding discords all have seen it by now like i said.

[@CAPTJOHN78]

@@Volound thanks for the info, Volound

[@Volound]

np m8. happy reading.

[@SuperCrumpets]

lol and i always thought total war shouldve copied civ more ironically the combat is worse than civ4s now so idc anymore btw play civ4

[@rekire___]

Can someone please give me tldr on whats going on with total war franchise? I'm out of the loop

[@misterpinkandyellow74]

No

[@dickinwurfer]

Tldr - recent historical games are shit, CA wasted their money on a Fortnite clone, and are still milking Warhammer to get the 1 million they lost on the Fortnite clone back (they won't)

[@minprivatmail1164]

CA had a culture of over ambition and lying because they thought they could always cut corners and finish their mistakes later, this culture would basically bloat into CA, watering down there games, creating entire departments dedicated to bribing KZbinrs with early access games then having them gaslight there audience and more of the same

[@pufiadagaddt9488]

It's gone to shit

[@spiffygonzales5160]

Basically the greedy devs strip features and sell them back years later as new features. Also they made it arcade strategy rather than good strategy.

[@Ragatokk]

I think your giving too much shit to the guy that wanted to add buildings to battles. It would be nice if you had some siege fortifications you could chose to make beforehand and bring along. If defending you could be able to deploy some spikes or the like, and if your defending a siege you could have a few more, maybe a couple of barricades etc. Tough if your starting to talk about building things or making troops during the fight, you have jumped off the deep end.

[@Volound]

"Since the early days of Empire he had been trying to add buildings and unit replenishment into battles to make a game more like C&C." seems unequivocal.

[@Ragatokk]

@@Volound Okay, seems pretty cut and dried then.

[@Volound]

yeah. all in the video. in fact thats probably exactly what i was commenting on.

[@novitrix9671]

Civ III

[@theveryproudmoroccan2834]

GOAT.

[@galidornII]

Lords of the Realm II

[@lorenzofedrizzi8825]

Where can I get this document ?

[@Volound]

ive not hosted it anywhere but people have linked to it circulating on my discord and its got to be all over some of the modding discords

[@lorenzofedrizzi8825]

@@Volound thank you for your service a voice of dissent has always been needed 🙏

[@Volound]

cheers. also someone just linked it on my reddit.

[@GrieferStudios]

But I thought people considered Rome 1 to be the golden age of CA

[@Volound]

commented without watching

[@baggelis_aikaterinis]

Where can i find this treasure ?

[@Volound]

ive not hosted it anywhere but its all over discord. also someone linked an archive of it on my reddit.

[@baggelis_aikaterinis]

@@Volound ok thnx !

[@MBP1918]

🤯

[@Rifqiethehero]

Yikes, it's getting worse and worse shesh

[@Arbiter1414]

The one thing I kinda disagree on calling bad was the finding treasure or a spring events, I think they could be a cool little system, make them more common in more populated and enemy territories so they aren't constant, but when found they have a little flavour text and you make decisions, maybe giving your leader additional retinue for if he engages with these, and giving small buffs to your army in the following battle, like a spring letting your army stay fresh for longer, or scavenged treasure as a wages paid event to make the army free for the next turn.

[@Volound]

that turns the game into a re-roll simulator, which is not anything total war has ever been. there is one moment in time and you are inserted into it.

[@Albukhshi]

@ 28:57 Do you mean Uluru?

[@Volound]

thats the one. couldnt remember the original name. there are big rocks shaped a lot like that in the game. you can guard your flanks with them like giant bulwarks.

[@Albukhshi]

@@Volound I know exactly what you mean: Even smaller boulders--or boulder-strewn fields--can be used to one's advantage. Won a battle in a BI mod by using a boulder-strewn hillside, though in that case it worked less like a bulwark, and more like abatis. Might still have pictures of the battle somewhere, but it must have been 15 years or so.

[@AbdulHannanAbdulMatheen]

👏🙂

[@SSR2902]

I wonder would you want a DLC where a lot of the things that hadn't got into the game would in introduces. Also it not be better to have a total war game that is continuously supported that has different time periods, and activate the DLC that you want to play with like endless legends ore field of glory. Would do you think that the difference between let's say rome 2 the shogun 2 is enough of a difference to warrant 2 difference games.

[@MikeDerucki0]

Maybe the #1 priority for them was having more foreign gay female minorities on staff

[@pedropedro1]

pirate the game or ignore , if you spend money you are fuelling the DEI machine