I kinda love this developer's story. Started out as a Empire: Total War modder, that massively improved the game while Creative Assembly was crying that people weren't praising them hard enough for adding the naval system.
Creative Assembly has continued it's steady decline over the years, but this modder didn't just build out his own game, but is successfully building out his own fuckng franchise (Ultimate Generals: Gettysburg, Ultimate Generals: Civil War, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, etc)
I can also state that UG: Gettysburg is one of the few Civil War games that I saw take very clear inspiration from "Sid Meier's Gettysburg!" and Civil War Generals 2.
I might try to jump in on the Early Access, tbh. Seems like it might be fun.
they behave like unprofessional shit heads to anyone who criticizes them.
That's what I noticed when CA started complaining about the grief they were getting with Empire back in the day. I watched a movie that came with the game, and I shit you not, one of the developers literally said (paraphrasing):
'People need to stop complaining about this game. This isn't just one game. It's three games. It's a grand strategy game, a battlefield game, and a naval game all in one! Then you have the gall to complain that it's $60 for three games, you should be paying $180! Grow up!'
Real humans actually released that in a behind-the-scenes kind of developer video as a feature.
Imagine trying to release Empire, in it's original broken state, nearly 15 years ago, for $180.
Now that's entitlement.
As a result I've completely boycotted them and won't touch anything they put out, it's all getting woke as fuck now anyway and they're probably going to start ruining Warhammer next.
Yeah, I've been trying to find other battle simulators. Like "Fantasy General" and "Age of Wonders'
This does look interesting. The latest Total War title I have is Napoleon, so that gives you an idea of how long I've been out of the loop on CA. Everything I've heard suggests that they've gone down the same path that all the other big studios did. What would really be interesting is a Total War type game that deals with the Age of Discovery. Europa Universalis gets the time period right but playing land and naval battles from that period would be really cool.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a bit of a mix of trying to do grand strategy & real time battles.
I actually think this mix is more realistic than just having a large stack of troops in a grid. The layout of actual armies in geography is actually very broad.
That looks like a game I could sink hours into. I hope they have French and Hessian campaigns.
This is why I am very pro modder. We get this from people who learn to tweak the engine until a really good game comes from it. The Indie scene seems to be lacking this because too many people want to be Auture d'Amazing instead of getting into the bones of it and working out something cool.
The Canadian campaign in the war was actually quite violent and filled with irregular warfare style border skirmishes. People's homes and villages just getting burned down, and some just getting openly murdered.
It wasn't as bad as the south & south-west (Appalachia); but it was pretty bad.
I think there's 2 for Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail & Dreadnought. I think Dreadnought allows you to build your own ships.
I should probably take some time to play through them. I'll probably do some Early Access bullshit and see how the game feels. I'd like to get ahead on a game that is probably going to be pretty good.
I think Dreadnought allows you to build your own ships.
Basically, it works like this. You start with a hull from one of the major navies from the 1890's-1940's. That hull, in addition to intrinsic ratings on things like tonnage limited, passive stability, default damage resistance, etc with all hulls being based on IRL designs of their time period (ie: The hull for an Iowa, the hull for a Queen Elizabeth, the hull for the Massina, etc). You then have a budget and are supposed to use that budget to design a ship that does not exceed the max tonnage for the hull, and can add whatever guns and armor you like. So if you want to make an Iowa that traded some armor for 18" guns, it is possible. Subsystems like autoloaders, fire control, and advanced armor schemes also count but can give pretty substantial boost so can not be ignored.
At the moment, there are three modes to play with it. One is the Naval Academy, where you are given pretty tight limits on ships and funds to wargame out a scenario (ex: "Build a battlecruiser to rescue a convoy that has been ambushed by an enemy fleet of cruisers, with your battlecruiser starting several dozen NM from the convoy"). There is a campaign mode, where you pick a nation and are effectively the Lord of the Navy in charge of the fleet through your wars, where you are limited by your shipyard capacities and the budget given to you by the government. And multiplayer capable single actions where the rules are a bit more flexible.
I would also recommend it for the simple fact that I dont know of many pieces of media (never mind games) that cover the Pre-Dreadnaught era of naval warfare. Which I honestly find more fun in the game than when you get to the Dreadnaught era, even if I enjoy the game as a whole.
It's a much more complicated game fighting wars in the Age of Sail; and one of the biggest problem is that the game board is never 'clean'. Wind speed and direction is so critical to battle that sometimes it's better off not fighting simply because you don't have advantage in wind, even if you have advantage in men & material. Frankly, weather doesn't play enough of a factor in these games because it's so important that you have to defeat the weather before you defeat the enemy. In situations like that, the game can become less fun, but more authentic, and drive a harder problem to solve.
Definitely applies for their Age of Sail game, and I do enjoy that one too. but I was talking about Pre-Dreadnaught steam ship warfare. The ships like this, or this, or Semi-Dreadnaughts like this. And while they have a bad reputation, I love the ugly French bastard fleet.
This was before autoloader systems really existed, before long range fire control existed, and ships that were only barely considered stable in calm water. And as much as I like the Dreadnaught-era warfare for its large fleet battles at long range, there is something to the "Get in close and slug it out" style of the Pre-Dreadnaughts that I find more entertaining. It is also more about positioning since your secondary's make up the bulk of your firepower in those ships. And you will learn to fear Torpedo Boats, because in an era before effective anti-torpedo and flood protection systems existed, I have absolutely lost battleships to a single torpedo that caused it to capsize before I could even do anything to save it.
Ultimate Admirals: Dreadnoughts is a very, very fun game. Imagine KSP and EU IV had a baby together. Build your own ships, fight other nations, build an empire. It's rough, and the rate patches come out mean you can't really finish a campaign before a patch breaks your save.
My last campaign was USA 1890-1950, and my last fight was USA-France on the Mediterranean with the French fielding 30,000 ton modernized tumblehome-hulled battleships, and me fielding 80,000 ton battleships with 16 16"/60 guns and radar. A long way from trying to take Cuba with 8,000 ton ships with 2 7" guns on them.
I'm sure it is. It's on my list. I thought Age of Wonders 4 was pretty good too, and I've barely played it. Something might come out. I'm making starfield mods. I don't mind being spoiled for choice. I can't seem to ever get to all the good games.
The Darth Mod's greatest success was around improving the terrible AI that Empire had, so I would assume so.
Balance in the game is going to be hard, because the Americans and the British are not at all balanced belligerents. The campaign map is the size of the the Eastern Seaboard.
That depends. DCS's, Ready Or Not, and a slew of other ultra-realistic games show that you can have plenty of fun with high realism.
Now, in fairness, it might not be fun to you, which is valid depending on how wide you want the consumer base to be.
I doubt this games going to do that anyway.
I don't want to have to play as a faction only to have it fucked over due to some silly historian autist taking the game way too seriously and demanding it be done a certain way.
I don't think this has every really happened. Either the game developers were autists, or they weren't.
I think most of their previous games have been iterations to just build a foundational gameplay structure that will be imported into this game. So, they may not have a teams and b teams, but just the whole team cannibalizing the previous game's code for this one.
I wonder if the war might have had an effect on development. I can imagine someone making an ugly decision of: "Does the mechanic work? Yes? Did we make most of our money back from this development, sort of? Good enough. Tear this out and put it into the new game, we'll make money back from that."
I've thought about this kind of thing actually being built for complicated games. It's effectively like Agile Software Development, but instead of just making specific libraries or instances of the same product, you actually build out games to sell as a partial instance of the product, and then pull back the parts and pieces into your main project.
I think this is basically the responsibility of the parent developer. It would take a very high level of Project Lead knowledge and understanding to manage it, and you would actually build out your own architecture to develop multiple games, and you'd have to have very good knowledge documentation on them; but I think that's the better way to build games in the future.
I just don't know that anyone actually does that yet. Frankly, because I think they're all coders and they're not thinking about managing a framework as your own platform to build different games thorough.
Nice to know that the DarthMod guy found commercial success with his own strategy games.
As far as early modern Total Wars go, I remember someone made a pretty good looking American Civil War mod for Napoleon TW (IIRC). There was a neat little trailer for one of their later releases, showing the 54th Massachusetts USCT battling Confederate cavalry & infantry set to the music of the final battle from the Matthew Broderick & Denzel Washington movie Glory (ironically they weren't storming Fort Wagner in that trailer, instead it looked like a field battle in a forest meadow and called to mind one of the earlier skirmishes from that film).
I mostly just really, REALLY miss the insane moddability of the first couple Total War games. LOTR: TW and Fourth Age Total War for RTW I and Divide and Conquer for M2TW remain the best Lord of the Rings strategy games I've played and even more fun than Battle for Middle-earth, which itself was already pretty awesome. The switch to the Warscape engine from Empire onward really tanked the modding scene (and probably hugely contributed to the death of sites like the .Org and TW Center which used to be the franchise's main modding nexuses), people are still trying but they can't quite measure up to the sheer ambition & variety of the mods for ye olde pre-Warscape Total Wars IMO.
I kinda love this developer's story. Started out as a Empire: Total War modder, that massively improved the game while Creative Assembly was crying that people weren't praising them hard enough for adding the naval system.
Creative Assembly has continued it's steady decline over the years, but this modder didn't just build out his own game, but is successfully building out his own fuckng franchise (Ultimate Generals: Gettysburg, Ultimate Generals: Civil War, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, etc)
I can also state that UG: Gettysburg is one of the few Civil War games that I saw take very clear inspiration from "Sid Meier's Gettysburg!" and Civil War Generals 2.
I might try to jump in on the Early Access, tbh. Seems like it might be fun.
That's what I noticed when CA started complaining about the grief they were getting with Empire back in the day. I watched a movie that came with the game, and I shit you not, one of the developers literally said (paraphrasing):
'People need to stop complaining about this game. This isn't just one game. It's three games. It's a grand strategy game, a battlefield game, and a naval game all in one! Then you have the gall to complain that it's $60 for three games, you should be paying $180! Grow up!'
Real humans actually released that in a behind-the-scenes kind of developer video as a feature.
Imagine trying to release Empire, in it's original broken state, nearly 15 years ago, for $180.
Now that's entitlement.
Yeah, I've been trying to find other battle simulators. Like "Fantasy General" and "Age of Wonders'
This does look interesting. The latest Total War title I have is Napoleon, so that gives you an idea of how long I've been out of the loop on CA. Everything I've heard suggests that they've gone down the same path that all the other big studios did. What would really be interesting is a Total War type game that deals with the Age of Discovery. Europa Universalis gets the time period right but playing land and naval battles from that period would be really cool.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a bit of a mix of trying to do grand strategy & real time battles.
I actually think this mix is more realistic than just having a large stack of troops in a grid. The layout of actual armies in geography is actually very broad.
That looks like a game I could sink hours into. I hope they have French and Hessian campaigns.
This is why I am very pro modder. We get this from people who learn to tweak the engine until a really good game comes from it. The Indie scene seems to be lacking this because too many people want to be Auture d'Amazing instead of getting into the bones of it and working out something cool.
Not yet, but I think a Spanish, French, Hessian, Canadian or Indian campaign would be interesting.
I would love a commanche campaign.
I'd take an Iroquois one for early game (excellent marksmen), and potentially a Seminole one for just after the Revolution.
Can you imagine if they had the audacity to make a "War of 1812" Expansion?
Have a Canadian campaign where they just stand their cheering the destruction of both sides.
The Canadian campaign in the war was actually quite violent and filled with irregular warfare style border skirmishes. People's homes and villages just getting burned down, and some just getting openly murdered.
It wasn't as bad as the south & south-west (Appalachia); but it was pretty bad.
That does sound interesting.
The game needs to have some kind of irregular forces, even if it's like the "riflemen" light infantry unit in the Empire game.
I haven't tried Ultimate Genera/Admiral yet. The admiral one looked quite good.
I think there's 2 for Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail & Dreadnought. I think Dreadnought allows you to build your own ships.
I should probably take some time to play through them. I'll probably do some Early Access bullshit and see how the game feels. I'd like to get ahead on a game that is probably going to be pretty good.
Basically, it works like this. You start with a hull from one of the major navies from the 1890's-1940's. That hull, in addition to intrinsic ratings on things like tonnage limited, passive stability, default damage resistance, etc with all hulls being based on IRL designs of their time period (ie: The hull for an Iowa, the hull for a Queen Elizabeth, the hull for the Massina, etc). You then have a budget and are supposed to use that budget to design a ship that does not exceed the max tonnage for the hull, and can add whatever guns and armor you like. So if you want to make an Iowa that traded some armor for 18" guns, it is possible. Subsystems like autoloaders, fire control, and advanced armor schemes also count but can give pretty substantial boost so can not be ignored.
At the moment, there are three modes to play with it. One is the Naval Academy, where you are given pretty tight limits on ships and funds to wargame out a scenario (ex: "Build a battlecruiser to rescue a convoy that has been ambushed by an enemy fleet of cruisers, with your battlecruiser starting several dozen NM from the convoy"). There is a campaign mode, where you pick a nation and are effectively the Lord of the Navy in charge of the fleet through your wars, where you are limited by your shipyard capacities and the budget given to you by the government. And multiplayer capable single actions where the rules are a bit more flexible.
That's pretty interesting, actually.
I would also recommend it for the simple fact that I dont know of many pieces of media (never mind games) that cover the Pre-Dreadnaught era of naval warfare. Which I honestly find more fun in the game than when you get to the Dreadnaught era, even if I enjoy the game as a whole.
It's a much more complicated game fighting wars in the Age of Sail; and one of the biggest problem is that the game board is never 'clean'. Wind speed and direction is so critical to battle that sometimes it's better off not fighting simply because you don't have advantage in wind, even if you have advantage in men & material. Frankly, weather doesn't play enough of a factor in these games because it's so important that you have to defeat the weather before you defeat the enemy. In situations like that, the game can become less fun, but more authentic, and drive a harder problem to solve.
Definitely applies for their Age of Sail game, and I do enjoy that one too. but I was talking about Pre-Dreadnaught steam ship warfare. The ships like this, or this, or Semi-Dreadnaughts like this. And while they have a bad reputation, I love the ugly French bastard fleet.
This was before autoloader systems really existed, before long range fire control existed, and ships that were only barely considered stable in calm water. And as much as I like the Dreadnaught-era warfare for its large fleet battles at long range, there is something to the "Get in close and slug it out" style of the Pre-Dreadnaughts that I find more entertaining. It is also more about positioning since your secondary's make up the bulk of your firepower in those ships. And you will learn to fear Torpedo Boats, because in an era before effective anti-torpedo and flood protection systems existed, I have absolutely lost battleships to a single torpedo that caused it to capsize before I could even do anything to save it.
Ultimate Admirals: Dreadnoughts is a very, very fun game. Imagine KSP and EU IV had a baby together. Build your own ships, fight other nations, build an empire. It's rough, and the rate patches come out mean you can't really finish a campaign before a patch breaks your save.
My last campaign was USA 1890-1950, and my last fight was USA-France on the Mediterranean with the French fielding 30,000 ton modernized tumblehome-hulled battleships, and me fielding 80,000 ton battleships with 16 16"/60 guns and radar. A long way from trying to take Cuba with 8,000 ton ships with 2 7" guns on them.
Ah, a true Tillman connoisseur I see
Eh, more Super-Montana than most of the Tillman designs. Those BBs also made 34 knots and had 18" of armor.
I'm sure it is. It's on my list. I thought Age of Wonders 4 was pretty good too, and I've barely played it. Something might come out. I'm making starfield mods. I don't mind being spoiled for choice. I can't seem to ever get to all the good games.
The Darth Mod's greatest success was around improving the terrible AI that Empire had, so I would assume so.
Balance in the game is going to be hard, because the Americans and the British are not at all balanced belligerents. The campaign map is the size of the the Eastern Seaboard.
That depends. DCS's, Ready Or Not, and a slew of other ultra-realistic games show that you can have plenty of fun with high realism.
Now, in fairness, it might not be fun to you, which is valid depending on how wide you want the consumer base to be.
I doubt this games going to do that anyway.
I don't think this has every really happened. Either the game developers were autists, or they weren't.
I think most of their previous games have been iterations to just build a foundational gameplay structure that will be imported into this game. So, they may not have a teams and b teams, but just the whole team cannibalizing the previous game's code for this one.
oop
I wonder if the war might have had an effect on development. I can imagine someone making an ugly decision of: "Does the mechanic work? Yes? Did we make most of our money back from this development, sort of? Good enough. Tear this out and put it into the new game, we'll make money back from that."
I've thought about this kind of thing actually being built for complicated games. It's effectively like Agile Software Development, but instead of just making specific libraries or instances of the same product, you actually build out games to sell as a partial instance of the product, and then pull back the parts and pieces into your main project.
I could be talking out of my ass though
I think this is basically the responsibility of the parent developer. It would take a very high level of Project Lead knowledge and understanding to manage it, and you would actually build out your own architecture to develop multiple games, and you'd have to have very good knowledge documentation on them; but I think that's the better way to build games in the future.
I just don't know that anyone actually does that yet. Frankly, because I think they're all coders and they're not thinking about managing a framework as your own platform to build different games thorough.
My job, but I can't go further. It's a smaller company though.
Nice to know that the DarthMod guy found commercial success with his own strategy games.
As far as early modern Total Wars go, I remember someone made a pretty good looking American Civil War mod for Napoleon TW (IIRC). There was a neat little trailer for one of their later releases, showing the 54th Massachusetts USCT battling Confederate cavalry & infantry set to the music of the final battle from the Matthew Broderick & Denzel Washington movie Glory (ironically they weren't storming Fort Wagner in that trailer, instead it looked like a field battle in a forest meadow and called to mind one of the earlier skirmishes from that film).
I mostly just really, REALLY miss the insane moddability of the first couple Total War games. LOTR: TW and Fourth Age Total War for RTW I and Divide and Conquer for M2TW remain the best Lord of the Rings strategy games I've played and even more fun than Battle for Middle-earth, which itself was already pretty awesome. The switch to the Warscape engine from Empire onward really tanked the modding scene (and probably hugely contributed to the death of sites like the .Org and TW Center which used to be the franchise's main modding nexuses), people are still trying but they can't quite measure up to the sheer ambition & variety of the mods for ye olde pre-Warscape Total Wars IMO.
They probably did that on purpose because the of the mentality of a lot of game developers is "modding is a form of hacking, cracking, and theft".
Because they are idiots.