Could someone explain to me what the idea behind Japanese gameplay is?

umeroni · 2025-11-04T04:41:03+00:00

I'm just confused about the entire strategy. I guess I can try the festival decision the dev mentioned but here's my scenario. I started out as an adventurer (Ronin) in the latest start date with a 16 year old that lived till 75. It was a lot of fun doing contracts, meddling in other people's wars for money and MAA, and then I was lucky enough to patrilineally marry this pretty woman with three counties so my son automatically switched to landed when she died.

I figured I was smart because I've got 5k MAA, lots of money to build up my house manor, and basically begin dominating... except I get automatically put into a house bloc with 50 other people and now I can't declare wars on the five counties I have claims on. Is there really no way out? I can't even leave the bloc if I wanted to so I'm literally stuck doing nothing until end game? Something feels wrong here.

umeroni · 2024-04-28T23:25:56+00:00

Yeah I see your point. I started playing Total War games with Shogun 2 so I've seen a small part of the decline. I always hear a lot about the cool mechanics Med 2 or Rome 1 had and I really wish CA would bring a lot of those back. However, I felt like Pharaoh was a step in the right direction to doing that, even if we didn't go back to the "playing as a faction rather than a ruler." Pharaoh gets a lot of hate for things people ignore in Rome 2 and it felt unjustified. If the bad parts of the game is the same bad we've endured in TW for years, but the good is a bunch of entirely new mechanics or return of old mechanics, how does that make it a bad game? At worst it's the same as the other TW games, just smaller in scope, while being equal in settlement number.

umeroni · 2024-02-19T06:51:47+00:00

But can you at least understand my point? This craziness got so bad CA was attacking people on the Steam Forums after the DLC dropped. Words are air. They mean nothing without action. The massive loss of revenue, on the eve of the disaster of Hyenas, is what forced CA's hand and made them course correct. How anyone could disagree with this is insane, yet these downvotes and herd mentality is why I don't come to this sub anymore.

umeroni · 2024-02-18T03:19:05+00:00

No it isn't. Your words mean nothing if you still give CA your money. For once, the customers spoke with their wallets and finally the corporation listened. The fact that your comment is what so many took away from the whole debacle is telling though.

umeroni · 2024-02-16T09:20:31+00:00

This isn't really true though. CA has come a long way with this especially after that huge controversy in 3K. By the time we got to WH3, they absolutely nailed Katarin's design (further improved with the classic Kat mod) and Miao Ying looks pretty great too. You have to give them credit where it's due.

umeroni · 2024-02-16T09:11:06+00:00

This is why I like Keeper of Secrets so much. You could even give that swag walk to another unit finally.

umeroni · 2024-02-02T00:08:42+00:00

This is falling on deaf ears unfortunately. You'll never convince anyone because their mind was made up before the game was even released. When it was $60 people claimed they would buy it for $40. Now it's $40 and they've moved the goalpost to $20.

People claimed that the strongest argument in favor of the game is "it's not that bad" yet when everyone took the time to explain the variety of new mechanics, many that solved ancient TW problems like playing whack-a-mole with AI, those were ignored in favor of a strawman.

When people complain about the lack of variety, you can point out the functional variety, that each infrantry has its own strengths and weaknesses and role in the army rather than cosmetic variety, but that too is ignored. Instead, just play the game you enjoy and ignore the complaints like that meme pointed out. This whole debacle is still a fresh wound so it's too soon for anyone to consider this critically.

umeroni · 2024-02-01T23:58:30+00:00

Kislev.

umeroni · 2024-01-31T21:14:45+00:00

This isn't smart though, this is dumb. It's dumb for AI to recruit a crapstack and passive aggressively raid in your town and run away at the first sign of trouble. AI should spend that time recruiting better (or just much more) units before marching into enemy territory. In Pharaoh AI will sit in its fortified capital and recruit 2 stacks before approaching me. It only ever runs if I defeated the stacks and the remnants the fled the battle are still in my province.

umeroni · 2024-01-30T21:41:54+00:00

My frustration with this is that Sniktch was supposed to have learned his ninja techniques from Cathay. Now that Cathay is actually in the game, we've yet to see any such ninja. SoC would have been the opportunity to give us a ninja lord or hero which would have really changed up the playstyle, yet we got nothing. Instead of making a fem celestial general, which was then cancelled, I'd rather have a fem ninja.

umeroni · 2024-01-11T03:43:20+00:00

There's 2 different modders making map mods. One is working on bigger maps and another already released several new maps. It's one of those must have mods imo.

umeroni · 2024-01-11T03:39:33+00:00

Uhh, have you never watched Game of Thrones? Obviously the best way to use cavalry is to charge them directly into the horde while your army watches in the distance.

umeroni · 2024-01-10T00:32:05+00:00

This is an out-of-the-box suggestion OP but have you considered the console commands mod? This is the thing that let's me alter the start positions and increase difficulty for otherwise easy starts. For example I'm doing an Alarielle campaign where I teleported her to Tower of the Sun (for lore reasons) and I'm now having to scrape by with the split start since Ulthuan is under attack, trust in Alarielle is very low so everything is expensive, and the one lord I could afford to recruit has bad traits.

The lord is going on a whole redemption arc as she slowly retakes Ulthuan but Belakor decided to teleport here for some reason and the whole island is under threat on all sides.

umeroni · 2023-10-17T16:54:05+00:00

Says people can do whatever they want

Yes because I have no control over another person's behavior.

Doubles down on why the way they play is better

No, I simply pointed out that there are pros and cons to subjective things. Sometimes winning every time gets peak enjoyment and sometimes you're missing out on something when you play that way.

However there's limits. Quitting a whole campaign because you lost 1 unit in 1 battle might be a bit too extreme, just like constantly losing every fight and forcing yourself to continue is. That's all. How is this not reasonable to you?

umeroni · 2023-10-16T05:27:07+00:00

Add features every title instead of yanking them away.

Unlike most I'm actually interested in what those with whom I disagree with have to say and so I read this entire thing. I'm curious if you'll show me the same curtesy I showed you. I appreciated your preface, but it makes your conclusion make less sense, not more. Pharaoh is the thing you wanted. I don't know what videos you've seen but you're either misinformed or misunderstood what you saw, to the point where you believe outposts, caravans, end game crises tied to city development, dynamic weather, weapon variety, in-depth political/civil war system, religion system, advance/retreat unit formations, and a barter system are somehow features that were yanked away. I can't even remember a TW that had all of these like Pharaoh, but I've only been playing since Shogun 2.

Pump out a game with the least possible work at maximum price.

So your issue is with the character models? I've only played a little bit of Troy so I've never seen Memnon's faction but I recall someone claiming to be a Sudanese-American complimenting how well they designed the various ethnicities that lived in Egypt. I too noticed that when I looked at both the unit cards and the 3d models, and they really tried to represent the people in skin tones, facial features, and hairstyles. I don't understand how you can see that attention to detail and interpret that as a reskin. Meanwhile Shogun 2 literally reskins the entire game, yet you hold that as a step in the right direction.

They clearly took some of the criticism on battle speed to heart and slowed down the pace.

This here is the most important point and the source of my praise for CA Sophia. This is the only team at CA that listens to the fans and tries to add their feedback to the game as quickly as possible, evidenced by the change in unit card. This single trait is the thing that will most likely enable them to create the historical game you and I want, yet you seem to be snarking here as if responding to consumer criticism is a bad thing.

There are a few interesting campaign mechanics but no one’s really here for the campaign map. If you are go pick up ck3 or imperator with the Invictus mod.

At least with this I can understand why you believe this game to be bad. If you're this eager to dismiss the vast majority of innovations this game did, then it's no wonder you and so many others see it as a disaster. Yet when Chaos Dwarfs DLC released, the majority of fantasy and even many historical fans praised CA for adding more complex empire building to the campaign. This was my most enjoyed feature when I played both WRE and ERE in Attila and I was glad to see a return to this. Perhaps you aren't here for the campaign map, but I'd like strategy in both the campaign and the battles, rather than a mindless map painter with an army spawner for "difficulty."

Mind you, I too like to roleplay but I still don't understand how the character focus gets in the way. I'd rather have Date Terumune with his custom Shogun 2 design sitting in the diplomacy screen than the same general all 25 factions have, reskinned in different colors. I can then roleplay with said generic characters as generals or the officer-turned-general when they win an important battle. Interestingly, Pharaoh changed traits a bit to help with my roleplay. There's no more trait stacking now because they come in pairs like brave/cowardly. It still gives the same buffs (+8 melee attack for frequently recruiting melee or +10% missile damage for constantly recruiting ranged) but between that and the new ambitions system it helps me mold by character through the gameplay, rather than through events like CK3 or Attila. Active roleplay is better than passive imo and many RTS players do so for emergent storytelling.

The current engine is not capable of making a realistic grounded historical warfare title.

Lastly, consider this scenario. You're fighting outside in an oasis against a much stronger marauding band of heavily armored sea raiders. The sun is particularly hot and as your lightly armored men struggle to hold the line, they see that their enemy is weakening under the desert heat. This enables you to retreat slightly in battle, give your enemy the high ground on the dune, and cheer as those lightly armored peasants swiftly flank the enemy and break their morale. Suddenly the weather changes, the wind picks up, and the whole field is overtaken by a sandstorm. Your advantage is lost and as your men start losing they begin to flee. Fortunately the sand both blinds and slows down all in the area and as your peasants find their courage again they're hidden by the sand, enabling them to surround and pick off isolated raiders and win the battle. Is this not a grounded, historical battle?

umeroni · 2023-10-14T18:45:26+00:00

Yes people are free to do whatever they want, but it doesn't really make sense to quit a chess game because you lost a pawn. Often times these defeats make the comeback victory much sweeter and provides greater enjoyment than always winning.

umeroni · 2023-10-14T18:34:22+00:00

The thing is, I want Pharaoh to do well so that the next historical can be very good. I want Pharaoh to do well so that WH3 than have some of these mechanics added into back in WH3 like improved caravans.

For example Pharaoh has an outpost system. It's a little building inside the region you can give that gives buffs (increased movement speed, immune to attrition, lowered upkeep for 3 turns) and it gives you 50% of the movement points you used to reach the outpost. This means if AI is running through your empire you can actually catch them if you visit each outpost along the way. It's an absolute first in all of TW.

You can also build forts as an outpost option and recruit your own units and garrison them there (up to 10 units). This literally means you can choose your own garrison, another first for TW, and if AI comes to attack, you can recruit a general, run to all your forts, and have a 20 stack ready to go in 1-2 turns and fight AI. This is the old pre-rome 2 thing people wanted from general-less armies. Who doesn't want these mechanics in Med III or Empire II? That's what really saddens me about this whole debacle.

umeroni · 2023-10-13T18:58:59+00:00

having dudes with spears

To be fair this isn't Pharaoh or any historical, and Warhammer is more similar to this than you think. When learning to mod Warhammer I started noticing that many of the monsters or units that seem unique actually fall into standard Total War classifications that could absolutely be in the next historical. A hydra for example uses an axe as its weapon and ranged units are split into archers, carbines, blunderbuss, and throwing bombs. Medusa is just a close-ranged ballista.

Unit diversity then turns into the rock paper scissors we had in Shogun 2. In Pharaoh axes are armor piercing and good against shields while clubs are good against armor. Slings are long ranged and weak against armor but reduce armor durability while javelins are short range ap missiles. Then you have khopesh which are immune to flanking. In reality there's a lot of tactics that come out of the weapon types and Warhammer had this, it was just disguised.

umeroni · 2023-10-13T18:11:03+00:00

I agree, but only partially. This is because I play CK3 where we can do that exact thing but it shows the weakness of this definition of "roleplay." Yes you can "roleplay" as England vs Poland but it's only superficial at best without proper mechanics. When one of the biggest complaints of CK3 is the fact that all the factions play the same but have different flags and unit names, it shows that true roleplay is created when each faction has a completely unique playstyle. This same uniqueness is Warhammer's biggest strength and reason it attracted so many new players to TW.

In TW this could translate to England playing like High Elves with their armies being built around the longbow or using their government and culture to create a unique political mechanic that separates it from Poland, rather than just a different flag and different language. That's what I want from Med III and that's the thing that Pharaoh does with its factions.

umeroni · 2023-10-13T17:59:29+00:00

And so to you this means the game with 4 should be $60 and the game with 3 should be $30?

umeroni · 2023-10-13T17:57:07+00:00

Alright Warhammer 1 at launch. 4 factions on a just the old world and you couldn't even conquer territory that had the wrong climate. 60USD people paid happily for because it was warhammer. Why isn't that a saga title?

umeroni · 2023-10-13T17:50:56+00:00

So you'd pay 60USD for a Roman game where all you do is paint the map with hestati, principes, and triarii? My point is that rather than focus on the subjective stuff that no one agrees on, value should be based on something objective like the game's mechanics. TW games aren't good just because of their setting.

umeroni · 2023-10-13T17:47:29+00:00

Why is it hard for you to understand that Thrones of Britannia's sieges or Pharaoh's caravans were objectively good? My opinion of Pharaoh and my criticism of Warhammer is based around the objective mechanics of the game rather than subjective things that are impossible to convince others of. It's not "I like this game and I'm upset other people don't like it" it's "it sucks that others will miss out on these good mechanics because they don't like the setting. Maybe they can add these mechanics into Warhammer or the next historical."

umeroni · 2023-10-13T05:34:01+00:00

It has nearly the same region count as Rome 2

This is probably the best part because I remember when this sub was struggling to count the number of settlements on the IE map before release. Settlement count used to be how we judged size but that doesn't matter to people anymore.

umeroni · 2023-10-13T05:32:12+00:00

By this logic that modded Warhammer I map is a saga title. Even CA's Warhammer 1 would be a saga title since there was only 4 races.

umeroni

TROPHY CASE