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#2324428 - 08/26/07 04:11 PM New age of sail combat sim  
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I don't know how many here read the postings to both the land combat forum and the naval forum, but I thought it worth mentioning here that Creative Assembly has just announced their next game in the the total war series: Empires: Total War.

It will cover global warfare in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th century and in addition to land battles will include a full fledged age of sail naval warfare simulation engine. I saw a release date of 2008, but that may be pushing it from what they say is going to be in the game. The game is going to include Napoleonic warfare, colonial expansion, and of course empire building.

Here is a link with few of what they are saying are in-game screenies. There are some inconsistancies in the shots, such questionable wind direction, but still even they are early staged shots, they sure do look damn promising.

Check it out if you are interested:

http://www.totalwar.com/index.html?page=/u...mp;nav=/us/6/8/

There is also an interview posted with the lead developers, where they talk at length about the naval component. They go on about the dynamics of modeling the ocean, the wind, and the physics of what a cannon ball will do to wooden ships filled with mere flesh and blood men.

It's enough to make all us Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower wannabees simply drool in anticipation.

The interview was posted at CVG, but link is broken now, but it has been posted at the Org:

Quote:
Napoleon had the perfect quote for this moment. "One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority."

This is what he meant. The developers of the Total War games are changing their tactics. Out go suits of armour, big sticks and straightforward conquests of Europe. In come ships. Cannons. Muskets. Steam power. The American Revolution. The race for colonisation. Men in extravagant hats.

Are you excited yet?

One of the greatest names in PC gaming is getting a makeover. An epic, empire-building, sea-faring makeover. So take Napoleon's advice to heart....

Empire is being developed by Creative Assembly in a mechanical-looking office block just inside the Horsham ring road. Presenting it to me are James Russell, lead designer, and Mike Simpson, founder of the company.

Organised and precise, James is working from a list of pre-typed bullet points. Mike is different: a distracted, intellectual, almost Doctor Who-like figure. While James lists the things they're prepared to talk about ("I think it's fair to say we'll be improving the campaign map"), Mike enthuses about the issues that interest him.

Such as game design: "It's easy to design a complicated system. Hard to design an easy system that retains flavour", gusts of wind: "The thing is, gusts don't actually move at the speed of the wind," and programming: "Getting 10,000 guys to collide with each other, and objects, and find their way out of a paper bag - now that's a problem".

Both share a passion: their games, and the periods they're set in. Best of all, for them the two subjects are almost entirely interchangeable. They'll talk about the game and the history in the same breath. Every time they mention a tactic or strategy, they'll reference what happened in the real world, and how it's identical in the game. They don't use special-case scenarios to illustrate how their battles work. They just pick an example from history and say: "Yes, you can do that."

Spend even a few minutes with them, and you feel the same passion.

The Total War games are a delicious mix of grand strategy and battlefield tactics. Empires are planned from birth to death, princesses married off to loyal generals, armies raised, alliances arranged. But when nations clash the focus switches: now you're controlling the troops themselves, commanding cavalry to ride down routing archers, ordering cannons to assault an enemy castle.

There are some fundamental truths to Total War. The first is the holy trinity of pikes, archers and cavalry. Cavalry will cut down archers, no question, but will buckle if charged into pikes. But pikes are slow and vulnerable to archer fire.

In Empire, that's a thing of the past. The new 1700s-to-early-1800s setting, with its muskets and artillery, demands new stratagems. Generals will have to rethink their entire approach.

Total War's second rule is that battles at sea are fought silently. When great navies clash, you're just handed the result. In Empire, that's been fixed. Add maritime warfare to your list of required skills.

Total War's third fundamental is that you're there to paint Europe your nation's colour, invading your neighbours from the outset, developing a giant hammer of an army to crack open the continent.

That, too, is no longer true. Empire is about exploration and conquest, founding colonies and fighting wars away from home. Sure, you can invade your neighbour. But there's wealth to be had in India and the Americas.

So, Empire is an epic strategy game starting in the early 1700s, in which you direct your nation to dominate not just Europe, but the known world. A question: why then?

Mike has a couple of prerequisites for a Total War setting. "One is a shift in technology to drive the arms race. The second is lots of different factions all vying for some prize, where in reality any of them could have won but only one of them did."

Empire's technological leap is the industrial revolution - where the hand- and horse-powered mills and factories were replaced across Europe with steam and smoke. Tactics and battle plans changed extraordinarily in the process: soldiers began the period carrying sharpened sticks and swords, and ended it with muskets.

Cavalry lost its dominance. "In this period, the key use of cavalry was not to plough into the infantry, but to scare and harass the infantry into remaining in a square formation."

Formations? Formations are the new rock-paper-scissors of warfare. It's all about arranging men in such a way as to present the most possible muskets at the line of enemy advance. "A square of men beats a cavalry charge. A column of men will beat a long line, but only if it arrives. And a line of men, pointing the maximum amount of muskets to an advancing force, will always beat a square."

Why? Because a flat line of men firing will obliterate a single target. If that unit is placed into a square, only a quarter of the men, those facing it, can fire. But columns, men filing behind each other, present a small target to the inaccurate muskets of the men. The men in front might take a few bullets, but those behind will survive.

The key battle of the era was Waterloo (but not the only battle: "Why does everyone always come back to bloody Waterloo?" Mike grumbles). It's a grand demonstration of the tactics available to you in Empire.

At the halfway point of the battle, British infantry took up position along a ridge, firing down at the French armies. Mike takes up the story. "Columns of French [infantry] marched up towards the British line stationed on a ridge. The British maintained their line, and managed to chase them off. The French then charged with cavalry - they got a bit impetuous and just all went - so the British formed squares. But because the French didn't have any infantry supporting the cavalry, the English could see them off again. They repeated that cycle a number of times - they couldn't get infantry and cavalry to the English lines at the same time."

That brings up some important questions. We've all seen episodes of Sharpe, or other period dramas where musket men wait for the very last second to fire, to guarantee their rounds will hit. Will we, as generals, have that kind of control over our men?

"Yes," says James. "We will have a fire button. It's a sort of override tool so you can time your shot when you want to. And timing is critical. Let off muskets too early, and you won't do enough damage. Let off your muskets too late in the face of a cavalry charge, and you've got every chance of being crushed by a flying dead horse."

It's not just the troops that face technological upgrades. The battlefields themselves are getting revamped. A new emphasis on battlefield buildings plays directly into the heart of era combat.

"Because combat moves on from melee," explains James, "cover becomes really important. In the Battle of Blenheim, for instance, a lot of the fighting was focused around capturing and occupying key buildings. That creates focal points for the battle - adding drama. It's almost like terrain 'plus': can I capture this farmhouse? It's a strong point that you can try and hold. A dramatic node for the battle to focus around."

Add to that a new ballistics and physics model that enables you to take down buildings a cannonball at a time, and ragdoll soldiers who leave great stains of blood and death on the field, and you have a recipe for carnage-based hilarity.

James laughs as he describes the battles he's already fought. "Cannonballs go through people, they bounce, and they bounce differently depending on the surface they hit. They leave huge stripes of dead bodies as the unit routs."

Unfortunately for these poor units, there's one place where they just can't rout. A place where they can't flee muskets, and have to stare cannonballs in the face.
It's on the water. Under-decks, loading shot in one of Empire's great galleons, in a naval battle. Commanding those ships under fire is going to be awe-inspiring.

When James and Mike talk about the period Empire is set in, they repeatedly affirm that the 1700s were the "great age of sail". It's a time when the nations of Europe realised there was serious loot around the world, loot that could, if captured, fund their own expansion. Every nation wanted a piece of the action - and were willing to kill to get it. It is the perfect time period with which to demonstrate Creative Assembly's new naval combat technology.

Sea battles have been absent from Total War games since the series' inception. Why? "We've always wanted to do naval battles," says Mike, "but we've always wanted to do them properly - that's why we haven't tackled them in previous games. It's a big chunk. If you're going to do it, you have to do it really, really, really well."

How well? "It already looks beautiful," Mike says. "I've been staggered by how good it looks for quite some time now. And we're not done yet. There's one guy I gave a job to. I said 'make sea look like the sea.' It's a hard challenge. Sea is incredibly complicated stuff. We want to model different wind conditions, different light conditions, different weather conditions. The thing is that gusts of wind don't actually move at the speed of the wind. A gust of wind is caused by a whirlpool of wind moving vertically; they actually move quite slowly and cover quite large areas - you see it because it makes the surface of the water rough, and the rest shiny. It means you can build gameplay into entering and chasing gusts of wind, and using them to overtake an enemy fleet."

You'll command not just one ship, but entire fleets, using the full range of tactics and stratagems from the period. Want to know how's it's going to play? Watch Master and Commander - and just imagine what it's like to be Russell Crowe.

Mike is enthused. "We've got a full and very detailed damage model on these ships. The cannonballs can damage the hull, they'll damage the panels they go through, they'll kill individual men, they also knock down masts, tear sails off... that obviously affects the manouvrability of your ships. You can tell your ships whether you want to aim at the sails or at the hull, or at the men on the decks. You can choose what ammunition to load, or even whether to board an enemy ship."

Best of all, you'll see and feel it all: the wind in the sails, the choking atmosphere of the gun-deck as the crew frantically reload the cannons, the fights on deck... the man at the steering wheel, driving the boat. Umm. Maybe we need to read up on the actual nautical terms before we start wearing epaulettes.

Reading up might indeed be helpful, because naval tactics is an entirely new subject for even Total War veterans. Learn from the experts. Such as Nelson. Or James.

"You want to cross in front or behind - it's called crossing the enemy's T. That's the classic line of battle. You want to line ships up so your gunnery faces the enemy: essentially the ships are just great big floating double-deckers full of guns. You want those rows facing the enemy. There are other tactics: doubling, where you effectively get your line of ships around the front of the enemy, and bring them around the enemy's line so you're firing from both sides."

Mike: "That's important because boats only have enough gun-crew to fire from one side at once. You're getting a two-to-one advantage."

"Exactly," says James. "That's a tactic we can get in the game. It works. Similarly, raking fire - what Nelson did at Trafalgar - was precisely the opposite. He charged in and fired along the longitudinal axis of the ships, from stern to bow (from back to front - Naval Translation Ed). Instead of the cannonball going through one gun-crew and out the other side, potentially it could plough all the way along the decks, and take out nearly all the gun crews in a single shot."

The conversation changes tack. While the battle sequences of the Total War games are the eye-catching, extravagantly brilliant banner feature, purists know that the real challenge comes from the long-term building of a kingdom - the campaign game. How will all these battles affect the wider world?

By way of an answer, Mike talks about Creative Assembly's plans for the Total War series. They work on two titles at a time. The first is a brand new Total War game, using new technology, and new ideas. The second game builds on the first - using the same ideas but improving upon them with a new setting. This is the third time the company has begun that cycle. Medieval was an evolution of the original Shogun. Then, CA rebuilt their tech for Rome: Total War, and evolved from that Medieval II. Empire is the next revolution.

Why go through that process? "At the same time that we start the second game we start work on the completely new engine. From the coder's point of view, that gives you a nice clean codebase to work from. If you evolve an engine over more than two iterations, plus the add-ons, it starts to... creak. It turns to spaghetti. If you start from scratch, everything takes a great leap forward - usually in speed, but in technique as well."

James takes up the theme. "One of the quirks of the old engine was that the diplomacy and military AI were two separate routines, developed separately by two different programmers. Those systems fought each other. The military side would say 'we need to invade' while the diplomatic side will say 'well, I just made a treaty with them.' Getting them to work together was difficult. It meant the behaviour wasn't always consistent."

Throwing out those systems should fix the quirks, while allowing for new game mechanics. The big change for the fans is the reinvention of army movement. "It's fair to say that the campaign map in Rome and Medieval was divided into army-sized tiles," says James. "Each tile could hold one army. In Empire, there's no tiling system. The player will never see any type of tiling artefact - it's entirely freeform. It's like taking the squares off the chessboard."

Even better, they're aiming to draw armies out of the cities, removing the dominance of sieges. That's being done by making region improvements - structures such as barracks, mines and palaces - exist outside of the city, vulnerable to attack. Generals can no longer afford to hide behind their city walls in the event of an invasion. They must sally forth and chase the aggressor away.

Who will those invaders be? CA are careful not to name specific factions for the campaign game yet - mainly because it isn't finished. But there are obvious candidates. Great Britain formed as a single nation in 1707 - and already had significant holdings in America. Its first task in Empire would be secure these and prevent their revolt - the American Revolution of 1775. Even if America does secede, there's always India, over which Britain and France fought viciously during the Seven Year War.

The French are a shoo-in, too. France held significant portions of Canada, Louisiana, and modern Senegal before the game begins, again finding themselves in conflict with the British.

The German Empire, led by Prussia, a 17th century amalgam of Germany and Poland, has a tough start: it was almost bankrupt after the devastating 30 Years' War. To add to its problems, its empire was fragmented and overstretched. And the bubonic plague killed a third of its civilians in 1708. Nevertheless, it managed to field significant armies and allied with Britain during the Seven Years' War against France and the rest of Europe.

The Ottoman Empire held much of south-eastern Europe and north Africa, while fending off Russian armies to the north, but began to decline in the early 1700s - partly because of its reluctance to rise to the challenge of industrialisation.
But the biggie is Yankeeland. CA are going to enable players to play as the newly colonised Americas, fighting for their independence from the British. The revolutionary war began in 1775 and continued on until 1783 - the tail end of Empire's period, but that doesn't matter.

All that matters is that with a good general and an influx of well-drilled soldiers, Britain should be able to prevent secession.

But the setting brings up other questions. Contentious questions. During the 1700s, Britain and other countries were actively involved in the slave trade, while we're still feeling the effects of colonialism. Are CA about to walk into an ethical minefield?

Mike chooses his words carefully. "Our instinct is to purely tell it how it was. I actually don't think anyone will be too upset about us portraying colonisation in the game - it happened and unless you delete vast quantities of history you can't get rid of it. It was a force for good and ill and exactly what the balance of that is, it's up to historians to work out."

But slavery is different? "Yes. I think the best bet is to include it, but not to have it as a gameplay feature." The Total War games are full of events that change how you play the game - like the Marian reforms that restyle the armies of Rome, or the discovery of the New World that sees you racing to subjugate the Aztecs in Medieval II.

As Mike explains it, slavery appears, but it's not something you can actively get involved in. "Some people will be quite offended by that- that we're not allowing them to trade slaves. But it's not necessary to make the game work. You're not going to be landing in Africa and dragging slaves off to America."

When I explained Empire to friends and gamers, they expressed concerns that the 1700s didn't feel violent enough. That it's too civilised, too smart. Too... Jane Austen.
That's not true. This is an extraordinary time in history. It's a time of revolution, both American and French. It's a time of massive industrialisation: I was shown drawings of steam-liners and technology that goes well past the 1820 closing date to enable players to create 'what-if' scenarios.

It's a time of commercial warfare: India wasn't colonised by a country but by a state-approved business, the Honourable East India Company. And it's the period in which the modern democracies were born. It's an extraordinary period in time. It deserves an extraordinary game



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#2327545 - 08/30/07 11:58 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Forward Observer]  
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I quite like the Total War series, but I don't think any can qualify as 'sims'. The closest was probably the 3D battles in Shogun, after that it's more a case of the AI flings all his units at you. The interview above sounds like it'll make a good game but I don't see any reference to anything likely to move more in a realistic direction and quite a few references to distinctly dodgy things dressed up as history. The TW series makes for good wargame-lite type games, not sims.

Have fun
Finn

#2328108 - 08/31/07 12:44 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: FinnN]  
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Read my post and the latter part of the interview again more carefully. I never said that any of the Total war games were sims, although technically any game that simulates various aspects of real life could be called a sim, but I assume we are speaking in terms of a military sims here.

What I did say is that from the pictures posted at their web site and their descriptions of the ocean environments, wind physics, ship's physics, and naval tactics, it appears that what they are describing pretty well qualifies as an age of sail naval simulation---at least closer than anything published for the PC to date. Other than a few pirate games and the bug ridden Age of Sail II by Akella there has been almost nothing devoted to this genre.

I see no real difference in their descriptions of the naval aspects of their game and what developers of such games as the Silent Hunter series of sub sims would say describing their games--- other than the fact that the subject matter and time periods embrace totally different technologies.

Cheers


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#2328336 - 08/31/07 09:11 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Forward Observer]  
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Well the thread title says 'sim' and this is about the next game in the TW series so...

Anyway, what I'm seeing is exactly the sort of description that preceded Rome. Lots of emphasis on localised tactics but little on the overall battle. And surprise surprise Rome battles ended up as two hordes smashing into each other from random directions with each tiny bit being rock-paper-stones but the overall battle lacking any sort of cohesion. Medieval II was a bit better, but still definitely along the same lines.

I'd love to see a good game on the period (a bug free AOS II with something resembling an AI would be good enough), and I'm sure I'll buy and enjoy E:TW but I don't think it'll be the game I'm waiting for.

Have fun
Finn

#2334706 - 09/10/07 12:54 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: FinnN]  
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Originally Posted By: FinnN
And surprise surprise Rome battles ended up as two hordes smashing into each other from random directions with each tiny bit being rock-paper-stones but the overall battle lacking any sort of cohesion.


Then again, that is probably a fairly accurate description of most historical battles involving the ancient Greeks and Romans . . .

#2335048 - 09/10/07 09:50 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Nimits]  
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Well, providing they were fighting over terrain that allowed them to do so the Romans did rather well by not acting like a horde (not that the idea that all barbarians fought like some big mass is particularly accurate either).

I just hope that the new game addresses the idea of multi-unit formations seriously and doesn't simply make infantry into something that can morph from a Medieval II spearman unit into a musketeer unit and back again by changing a units formation from square to line. Not that that's a bad thing in itself, it's just that it needs a lot more than that. Likewise visions of ships racing around by sitting on magic carpet wind vortexes sounds potentially very gamey as well (you can bet approach speeds from initial sighting to contact are going to be dramatically accelerated for one thing).

Have fun
Finn

#2335165 - 09/11/07 01:23 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: FinnN]  
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Originally Posted By: FinnN

I just hope that the new game addresses the idea of multi-unit formations seriously and doesn't simply make infantry into something that can morph from a Medieval II spearman unit into a musketeer unit and back again by changing a units formation from square to line. Not that that's a bad thing in itself, it's just that it needs a lot more than that. Likewise visions of ships racing around by sitting on magic carpet wind vortexes sounds potentially very gamey as well (you can bet approach speeds from initial sighting to contact are going to be dramatically accelerated for one thing).

Have fun
Finn


Of course any developer interviewed a year or more before his next game is to be released may promise a lot more than he can deliver, but the folks at Creative Assembly have repeatedly delivered a lot of game play to the fans of the franchise.

They seem to make a big point that the rock/scissors/paper equation used in the previous TW games will no work for Empires, and they also seem to go on at length about how unit formations, unit placement, and particularly cover and/or concealment are going to be huge factors. I also really the idea where they say that now one will be able hold and give the fire command to a gunpowder unit at just the right time for maximum effect.

As far as the approach in naval encounters, I would assume they would handle it just like they do now with the land battles. One can do it in real time marching slowly across the battlefield, or selectively speed up the time scale to get to the action quicker. This should suit both the hardcore naval enthusiasts and the "get me into the action quick" fans.

The only game I am aware of in the last 5 or 6 years to try to replicate age of Sail naval warfare
in a serious manner had no approach what so ever. It simply threw your ship into battle with no warning and usually within range of your opponent. This was Akella'a bug infested Age of Sail II from back in 2002. The game was almost unplayable even after 5 patches and was actually voted one of the 5 worst games of that year by both PCGamer and Computer Gaming magazines.

Creative Assembly could hardly do worse, and I am sure they will do a lot better.

Cheers


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#2335376 - 09/11/07 11:22 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Forward Observer]  
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Well, they have a track record of historical name-dropping when it comes to announcing new games so I'm doubtful that this will be that realistic. I think it's probably going to be a good game, but I doubt it'll have more than a passing resemblance to warfare of the time unless the AI engine basically gets torn down and rewritten from the ground up. Their comments so far can be taken in different ways so lets see...personally I think they're saying there's no such thing a archer unit (unit in line formation) that can be cut apart by cavalry because it can morph (change formation) into a spearman unit (unit in square formation). Although the graphics won't be as good, personally I'm really looking forward to HistWar: Les Grognards (for battles) and Ageod's Napoleon's Campaigns (stratgeic level) for some proper Napoleonic gaming.

Land battles start and finish ridiculously quickly even now (though things have improved since Rome) even if you stick with real-time all the way. It'd take a total change of philosophy to get anything like 'hardcore' realism in a Total War series wargame, and in a big name big seller I don't see it happening.

I agree completely about AOSII and I'm still amazed when it occasionally pops up when people list their favourite games. You could actually edit the scenarios to move fleets further apart so you start outside gunnery range, problem being that the AI fell apart then and you ended up with your ships massacring a confused random huddle of ships. Very much like a Total War land battle in fact...

Have fun
Finn

#2335405 - 09/11/07 12:25 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: FinnN]  
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Originally Posted By: FinnN
Well, providing they were fighting over terrain that allowed them to do so the Romans did rather well by not acting like a horde (not that the idea that all barbarians fought like some big mass is particularly accurate either).


Dare I mention Cannae . . .?

As for the speed of land battles, point taken. But one hand consider that just about every 19th century "real time" wargame actually accelerates time. The slowest speed in Sid Meier's Gettysburg and its siblings was still faster than normal time (and I belive the "Normal" speed was something like 2x real time), and even Take Command, which uses real time, accelrates the battles in other ways (faster unit movement rates, reduced sized maps) to accelerate the battle. And on the other hand, consider that a wargame that required one to fight out a 4-12 hour battle for every engagement would probably take years to play just one campaign.

#2336143 - 09/12/07 10:44 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Nimits]  
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Well I don't think either side at Cannae operated like the uncoordinated mess you see in RTR.

A certain amount of acceleration in the Total War series is obviously appropriate for the sort of game it is, my point isn't that it's going to be a rubbish game just that if the previous ones in the series are anything to judge by it isn't going to be a sim (or a 'serious' wargame for that matter). It will probably be a nice light wargame with stunning graphics (I'm still amazed at how good everything in M2 looks even on my creaky old machine) but for a game that makes a serious attempt at modelling the command system of the time I'm more hopeful of Les Grognards with its battle plans, orders traveling by courier, etc.

Have fun
Finn

#2337038 - 09/13/07 01:05 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: FinnN]  
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Agreed. Les Grognards and the Lordz groups attempt at a Napoleonic grand strategy both promise much more realistic views of the Napoleonic wars. But the Total War series are no worse, in my opinion, than the Sid Meier's games, not hyper realistic, but not total fantasy either; certainly better than either Imperial Glory (wargame lite to the extreme) or Napoleon 1813 (the worst execution of the best wargame concept possible).

#2385140 - 11/23/07 04:37 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: FinnN]  
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 Originally Posted By: FinnN
I quite like the Total War series, but I don\'t think any can qualify as \'sims\'. The closest was probably the 3D battles in Shogun, after that it\'s more a case of the AI flings all his units at you.


That sounds fairly realistic for ancient warfare to me.

#2393677 - 12/04/07 08:41 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Pink Panther]  
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lol I must agree...


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#2394304 - 12/05/07 05:48 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: JAS39]  
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Somehow you guys keep reading past the title of my post and keep concocting your own thread subject.

To my point again---I would never argue that the total war games are realistic simulations of the land warfare in the periods that they encompass. As with any PC war game they have to make compromises for any one of a hundred reasons--i.e. current technology, game play, game balance, target audience, and so on.

However, they are unique in that they try to model both the strategic and tactical sides of ancient warfare and in doing so they have created something that I personally find a lot more entertaining than computerized turn based historical warfare boardgames or Sid Meier's style RT S's

The main point of my posting was that for the new Empires game, they are going to attempt to add an age of sail naval combat simulation component. I don't want to get in an argument over semantics of the word simulation, but given the fact that other than a few pirate games and the age of sail sim crap that Akella has put out, nobody has ever managed to authentically capture this genre of combat.

Cheers


Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.
#2396440 - 12/08/07 04:23 AM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Forward Observer]  
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 127
FLGibsonJr Offline
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FLGibsonJr  Offline
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Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 127
Clinton Township, MI USA
I actually had a lot of fun with the old Age of Sail II game. I started playing it well after it was initially released, and it had already been patched multiple times, but had a great time with the game. However, I only played the game in multiplayer as part of a squadron that competed against other squadrons. For instance it was neat for us American players playing as a squadron of the USN to battle against Russian players playing as a squadron of the IRN. We had squadron battles that sometimes went a couple of hours.

There is still some activity at one of the communities websites: http://www.sealordsvf.org/

I agree the single player was hopeless.

Regards,

Last edited by AB1 Gibson; 12/08/07 04:25 AM.

FLGibsonJr

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#2416299 - 01/06/08 06:38 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Forward Observer]  
Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 147
Col. Mustard Offline
Member
Col. Mustard  Offline
Member

Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 147
 Originally Posted By: Forward Observer

However, they are unique in that they try to model both the strategic and tactical sides of ancient warfare and in doing so they have created something that I personally find a lot more entertaining than computerized turn based historical warfare boardgames or Sid Meier's style RT S's

The main point of my posting was that for the new Empires game, they are going to attempt to add an age of sail naval combat simulation component. I don't want to get in an argument over semantics of the word simulation, but given the fact that other than a few pirate games and the age of sail sim crap that Akella has put out, nobody has ever managed to authentically capture this genre of combat.

Cheers


I'm with you. I hate it when I see the grognards putting down the TW series because they say the 3D battles are not realistic enough. What they don't realize is that the TW series are evolutionary versions of the great Koei games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms etc. The battles in TW series is much more realistic than the Koei games were but I still enjoyed those games greatly too. I have plenty of grog type of wargames and can still enjoy the TW series too. Some people can't seem to do both.

#2420130 - 01/11/08 03:08 PM Re: New age of sail combat sim [Re: Forward Observer]  
Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 9
Dr. Chuck Offline
Junior Member
Dr. Chuck  Offline
Junior Member

Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 9
Although not a sim, the new Pirates of the Burning Seas MMO looks pretty neat....


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