PrimeJunta

I'm actually only seeing "it would be too much work." It would. There have been pretty good explanations of why it would be too much work. I'm not seeing the "pro" camp address these objections much. Seems they prefer to ascribe all kinds of unrelated motives to the "con" camp instead. I know, less work that way.

Enemy campaign AI is surprisingly good IMO. Battle AI is... I would say OK in battles on open maps, but limited in other ways, especially at settlement assaults; defending against that is pretty much a guaranteed Heroic Victory if you have any troops in place at all. So that does need work. I don't find it all that important actually because it's fairly rare to run into that situation; if the enemy army hits an undefended city you might as well auto-resolve (and lose) anyway, and if it's defended the garrison is probably big enough that the AI won't attempt to storm. You'll only get a settlement assault worth fighting on the battle map if it's a province capital, or if you have a navy in place to provide just enough power to give you shot but not so much it'll deter the attack, which isn't all that common. There's some other AI dopeyness in there too, for example it doesn't appear to account for dismounted cav units, and mounts aren't on transports when doing a naval invasion, which leads to really silly situations, like war elephant units, minus the elephants, marching right at heavy infantry and subsequently getting slaughtered. Battles on open terrain are fun and the AI does do stuff that's interesting enough to make things, well, interesting; for example it attempts to do flanking maneuvers and such. And it's of course much faster at coordinating things than a human player, which makes combat against barbarians quite challenging since they have such good charge bonuses, and the AI will do that all at once. I played the bejeezus out of the first RTW, and even more out of the Rome: Total Realism mod. I miss some of the realism aspect of RTR, in particular cultural conversion is way too fast and you can build up your own culture's training camp in a settlement as soon as you get it, so that whole business of eventually accumulating armies made up of a core of own-culture units mixed up with a rainbow range of auxiliaries isn't really there. So it's not perfect by any means. But it's certainly not the disaster (now) that the initial reviews and fan response make it out to be. IMO as always.

Or could it be :gasp: that we have actual, substantive objections? Shocking idea, I know. If you read this thread carefully, you might even find some!

@Nepenthe ah, yes, well, I was referring to the civilized world. :ducks:

The problem is, I do not like any TB combat I tried in high fantasy so far. Best TB combat in a cRPG is for me by far Fallout. Simple, yet still requiring tactical placement. I would say that Age of Decadence has a decent TB combat as well, although it's not a party based game Arcanum TB was abysmally bad for me. ToEE while capturing the rules well, it just felt too tedious for a computer game. Huh. I thought Fallout's combat was pretty much a disaster in every possible way. Threshold effects turning it into insta-kill (either you, or the enemy), late-game was "aim for the eyes", companion AI getting each other or you caught in volleys or grenade effects or running into idiotic spots, enemy AI basically consisting of zerg rushing you, etc etc. AoD isn't horrible for what it is, but IMO turn-based is actually a pretty poor fit for a single-character game. It's pretty easy to manage just one character so you don't really need the extra control turns give. On balance I prefer RT systems for single-character games, regardless of perspective, and TB for multi-character ones. :moment of silence for Arcanum: As to ToEE, again, I didn't find the combat system tedious at all. Some of the encounters were, for sure, but that's a problem with encounter design, not the system. I think the main problem with it is for people who aren't familiar with D&D; that system is overwhelmingly complex if you're dropped into it completely green, and ToEE does not make any attempt to soften the blow, e.g. by introducing the mechanics through some kind of tutorial thing. Also with D&D you have to know what you're doing when character- and party-building or you'll turn out squibs. We already know PoE won't have either of these problems. So yeah, I do still think TB would've been a better fit. We'll see though; I like what JES has been saying about it, like the slow-motion mode, AI, and passive abilities, so it might actually play really well.

Rome II Total War. I didn't follow the hype at all (didn't even realize it was coming out), and only jumped it at Patch 7, so I missed all the angst about it. Apparently it was badly broken on release, and some hyped features weren't in at all, which caused a certain amount of upset among the calm, collected, and rational set of human beings known as 'gamers.' Lots of outrage going on in the forums still as a matter of fact. I, however, am having a hell of a good time. I figured out how the mechanics work and am back to playing on Hard, and this is definitely the best TW yet, no question. Specifically: Campaign play. In all the previous installments, it was just dopey. The AI was doing really dumb things based on extremely local conditions, which made campaign play dull. That's way improved. Diplomacy in particular actually means something: it's possible to pursue an actual policy of, say, forging a chain of alliances along a border to secure it, while leaving other borders without such alliances so you can expand in that direction. Yet it's not trivially easy; you actually have to pay attention to the relations between your neighbors, pick the ones to befriend, and build up on that to strengthen ties with their friends. Conversely, if you suddenly do a U-turn and stab them in the back, things will get ugly fast. This makes the whole thing much more interesting in my book. The AI also plays the campaign map much more intelligently, sometimes even springing nasty (i.e., nice) little surprises. Example: I had two legions close enough to support each other on an enemy map, hoping to entice it to attack in the open. It did, but it first used an agent action to slow down one of the armies so it couldn't support the other, and then attacked the other one. I was suddenly seriously outnumbered. I won that one on the battlefield – just – and it was a lot of fun. Combined-forces assaults. Navy battles are kind of broken (they tend to turn into clown-car free-for-alls with half the ships sunk really fast), but combined-forces assaults on coasts do work. Navies become a real strategic asset; you can raid unprotected coastal settlements, or when working together with land armies, add more pressure to them. That's a whole new dimension to the battles, and a good one. Cover and concealment. Terrain topography matters for line of sight. It's suddenly possible to plan battlefield ambushes, hide flanking groups behind ridges, and so on, and then spring them on the enemy. (Doesn't always work of course.) Building tree and economy. The usual dumb "build everything you can as fast as you can" method doesn't work. Your food or public order consumption will outstrip your food or public order production, and your empire will collapse in famine or rebellion. Instead, you have to actually plan what to build and where. (This could be deepened, balanced, and polished a bit, but it's already much better than the previous TW's). Dynamism. The factions – especially on Hard difficulty – are quite active, and produce unpredictable results on the map. It feels much more like a living world than the previous iterations. I've also had zero crashes and performance is excellent. There have been occasional bugs but they're more in the annoyance department than real showstoppers; e.g. sometimes the diplomacy screen gets "stuck" so you can't get out of it, and once two of my provinces suddenly stopped growing for no reason I could tell. I haven't looked closely enough at the animations to see anything badly wrong with those; there are some cosmetic things e.g. with routed units running off the map in neat queues, that sort of thing, but that's about it. A lot of the rage is about the family tree (not implemented) and politics (which is thin on the ground and strangely random), but I don't particularly care about either; in fact I think the main problem with those may be that (I believe) they were hyped a lot before release and don't measure up to the promises.

@Nepenthe, Cthulhu is in the public domain.

@Darkpriest, which party-based high-fantasy cRPG does turn-based combat better than ToEE, in your opinion?

Yeesh. A bunch of lily-white Orange County hipsters making a blaxploitation space opera? Bad idea.

Put another way, actually, I'd probably back any single-player cRPG Obsidian would produce. If 20 clams is the base price for the electronic version of the game, here's how much each of the options on top are worth to me (ones not listed are 0): Original IP – 20 Turn-based – 10 Cyberpunk – 5 Dieselpunk – 20 Steampunk – 10 Alternate timeline – 30 Saint Christopher of Avellone as Creative Lead – 50 Josh Sawyer as Lead Designer – 25 George Ziets or Eric Fenstermaker as Lead Writer – 25 each ...other stuff I haven't thought of, about 50 maybe You can tally up what that would add up to. I can imagine throwing a few hundred at something that is an exact, perfect fit to my somewhat weird tastes, but I'm not sure what that would even be.

I would love an alt-timeline dieselpunk turn-based RPG. Inspiration: Century Rain. Other than that, I'm good with pretty much anything other than genericwesternfantasyswordsandwizardsohmy or genericspaceoperablastersnadspacemarinesohmy. Nothing wrong with those as such, except that they're way overdone.

I actually quite like the evolution of Total War. I'm fairly hooked on Rome 2. Campaign play is finally more than just a side dish. Diplomacy is actually meaningful – I can secure some borders by forging alliances while keeping my expansion options open. Building choices are actually meaningful; not just "build everything as fast as you can." Agents contribute meaningfully to gameplay. Navies are a meaningful strategic factor. Terrain topology and concealment actually works, so you can meaningfully spring surprises in battles. Combined-forces battles work. Full-army morale works, so winning battles is all about breaking the other army's morale rather than just slaughtering the bejeezus out of them. And so on. (Edit: gotta brag -- I just won a pretty tough battle yesterday against an army that was much bigger, led by a unit of war elephants. I focused my peltasts on the elephants, which killed the general, dealing a major morale blow. When their heavies engaged my heavies -- spread out in a thin line -- I sprung just one heavy unit out of hiding to hit one end of their line from behind, and focused my peltasts on the same knot. They routed, freeing up the two melee units to hit the next one, then the next, and the whole line unzipped beautifully. It was a close call though; by the time it got to the end, my unit at that end of the line had routed, but it was enough. Not so proud about how I got into that fight in the first place though; that was a mistake on the campaign map...) That said, I only jumped in at Patch 7, so I have no experience of the (apparently) horrifyingly incomplete state it was in upon release. Another series which was on an upward slope was NWN. NWN OC was frankly bad. NWN HotU was a pretty decent dungeon crawl. Despite its flaws, NWN2 was better than either fo them. MotB was a real high point, and I very much liked the direction SoZ took, although it fell flat in the execution (killed by way too slow loading times IMO).

@Måndagsbarn I have a Mac, actually. And I don't like the locked-down hardware, closed-garden app store, etc. etc. on it either.

I disagree. Let's see why. It is buggy. There's also not much, uh, game to the game. Just an extended dungeon crawl and endless bugbears. Admittedly pretty dungeon and beautifully-rendered bugbears. I agree about the flaws of D&D, especially low-level D&D. Getting to level 2 was a genuine chore. Right. This may be a bit long, but you asked. First off, my thoughts on D&D as a system. I kind of love/hate it. I've DM'ed PnP D&D since... 1985, I think. All editions except 4e. Mechanically it ranges from godawful (AD&D, both editions), to passable (1st ed, 3d ed). I won't go into the details of the why and the wherefore of it. However, one thing D&D does do well -- especially in the later incarnations -- is support a vast range of character builds and special abilities. D&D3 has feats, spells, and spell-likes which are genuinely fun, and hooks them into characters which play really differently. In PnP D&D, that is. The fighters plant themselves to hold a line, while your rogue sneaks behind to backstab the enemy mage and then dodge back into the shadows, while your ranger shoots them full of arrows, your cleric buffs and heals, and your wizard looks for an opening to blast them with something nasty and area-effected. Good fun. ToEE is the only cRPG where you can actually effectively do this. Coordinate an entire party in a meaningful way. Because it takes micromanagement, and the party has to do its thing simultaneously for it to work. The closest approximation to this type of tactics in a RTwP game I've seen has been in IWD, and that only because the maps are specifically designed with, say, choke points your tanks can hold while others do their thing -- and even there, rogues are pretty much useless because you'd still have to micromanage them, which means you won't be micromanaging your casters, which means that either they'll be doing nothing (if you're sane and have switched off their AI casting), or doing something horribly unsuitable, like dropping a fireball right on the rogue as she's sneaking back. The combat in ToEE requires actual, meaningful tactics -- like a group of polearm-wielders controlling a choke point as a phalanx, while ranged and support characters do their thing from behind. D&D has quite passable rules for reach and attack of opportunity, which build on feats like Cleave, but they don't actually mean anything in a RTwP game. TL;DR: The thing about ToEE isn't that it's a particularly good game (it isn't), but that it shows the potential of what TB combat could be when combined with a rich, complex system of character-building mechanics. I would love to see a cRPG with equally rich character-building and combat mechanics, but without D&D's deficiences, and with TB combat that lets me make the most of both. PS. Why is it OK for a sequel to have completely different combat (e.g. Fallout 3 vs Fallouts 1 and 2), but a thematic successor must have the same kind of combat to qualify? I'd think it's more the other way around.

@Karkarov, I did not want to imply that someone who doesn't like PoE style games is an idiot. I don't think someone's taste in games is a very good indicator of that.

Yeah, they could do better than "the dungeon collapses and you're all dead, neener neener." That said, a good ending doesn't have to be happy IMO. PS:T's endings were brilliant, and "happy" isn't a word I'd use for any of them.

I'd throw a hundred bucks blind for the Saint Christopher of Avellone Goes Wild RPG. More if the pitch was good.

:me raises hand: I think PoE would be better with turn-based combat. Reason: ToEE. It would be nice to get an actual game with the combat one day. I like RTS, but it's better suited for actual, y'know, RTS games. Where you fight more or less by positioning a number of more or less identical units, after which their AI takes over. In a party-based cRPG, each unit is unique and different and the major part of the fun is managing their unique and different special abilities. This is a natural better fit for TB. My favorite combat in strategy games is Total War. My favorite combat in party-based cRPG's is ToEE. PoE would've been better with turn-based combat. Now the best we can hope for is best in class for RTwP. That's not bad, but it could've been better.

I apologize. It was an attempt at humor. Perhaps not one of my strong suits. Welcome back, Helm.

Impressive, the miracles of modern medicine.

Okay, who are you and what did you do with the real Helm?

I was thinking more the other way around. I.e., if you can afford a console, you probably already have a low-end PC capable of running PoE, so there's really no point to a console version. Console games tend to cost more, too. And if you're low on money, you're more likely to have a PC than a fourth-gen console.

I'm sure I'll tire of re-stating this at some point, but here goes one more time. Save-scumming isn't the problem. Games designed for save-scumming are. If the manual says "Save frequently and in different slots," the design is broken. Many of the IE games were broken in this way. It was simply not possible to play without saving often and in different slots, and reloading repeatedly to get through many combats. Not until you had trial-and-errored the solutions and already knew them anyway. I liked the combat in IWD because it didn't do this all that much. There were just a couple of boss fight type things that played this way; most of the fights felt tough but fair. Same thing with ToEE, once you've figured out the mechanics of combat. BG and BG2 were really bad in this respect. IOW, I should certainly hope that the game allows unlimited saves, which by implication lets you save-scum to your heart's content. If you enjoy that sort of thing, then knock yourself out, I don't care. But I would like the game to be playable without save-scumming, once I've played enough to have figured out the systems and mechanics. (As an aside, I also intensely dislike people who whine that a game is "too easy" because it doesn't force you to save before every fight. That kind of design doesn't test your skill, only your persistence, and persistence in the face of a computer game is not much of a virtue as far as I'm concerned.)

I have nothing against controllers. I am against the design compromises that will inevitably happen if you make a game that is playable both on controllers and with mouse+keyboard. One or the other will feel gimped, and it's usually mouse+keyboard. A control scheme is more than just a re-skin, it has implications deep into the systems. Put another way, make PC games for PC's, and console games for consoles, and everybody will be getting a good experience. If you enjoy both types of games, then buy both devices. It's not like they're hideously expensive these days.

I've asked it before when this comes up, but, I'll ask it again. How many console owners do you think don't also own a low-end PC capable of running PoE? Of those, how many do you think would be interested in playing an isometric party-based cRPG with lots of reading mixed with tactical combat and character-building?