DELETED

[Scobie]

DELETED

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I don't think that you will get anyone who will copy Total War feature for feature but they do have very strong competition from Stardock, Paradox and Firaxis. Just off the top of my head.

The recent King Arthur game was very influenced by Total War.

If you want this format of game with a Sci-fi setting then try Sword of the Stars with expansions.

 

[xvbones]

Although they often get called RTSs, what they actually are are grand strategy games that let you fight out the battles in your massive continent-spanning campaign in the form of real-time tactics gameplay.

In other words, RTS.

To keep the peace, let's call it an RTT, real-time-tactics.

Why do you think that no-one else has decided to play follow-the-leader and rob the Creative Assembly of their monopoly?

Because such games tend to have fairly steep learning curves due to a vast gulf of complexity that simply does not exist in the overwhelming majority of popular video games, which can dissuade casual or new-to-the-genre gamers from buying.

You have spent years with these games, if you picked up a brand-new RTT by a brand new developer, chances are you'd be pretty familiar with the UI from the first time you booted the game up - to say nothing about your experience with troop placement and movement, and such things as micromanaging battle of tremendous scope.

The casual gamer (where the money is) or the new-to-the-genre-gamer (where the money will be) might look at the hundreds upon hundreds of options, buttons and controls and just feel completely lost right away - like they are staring at the control console of a nuclear warhead written in an alien language and suddenly all the lights on it are blinking red.

Now, you, and the other gamers like you who enjoy RTTs, you expect and demand that complexity - without it, the games feel stripped down, idiot-proofed, built for the kiddies.

The problem is, the idiot-proofed ones - which tend to lack satisfying depth and often feel either far too easy or frustratingly difficult - are the ones that will sell to casual gamers.
Casual gamers and gamers who are not already fans of the genre will drown in the ocean of complexity that the better, deeper games represent, and thus need, in theory, to be eased in... but these idiot proofed ones are generally too shallow, they often end up sucking and won't make any new fans. Or, worse, may turn a gamer off to the genre entirely.

So devs are faced with a choice:
1) Make a really deep RTT that will have a limited pool of potential buyers
2) Make a really shallow RTT that will not appeal to the hardcores
3) Say 'fuck it' and just churn out another space-marine shooter or American Sports game, both of which have such impossibly broad market appeal, even if the game completely sucks it stands a chance of making a profit.

Unfortunately, the choice is often clear: leave the hardcores to the company that is willing to cater exclusively to them and go off to make more space-marines.

 

[oliveira8]

I say, the reason you don't get many games with the Total War formula, is because CA got there first.

Still CA has competition against Firaxis, Blizzard or Paradox in the RTS and TBS region. TW games get compared a lot to Paradox games, so CA has plenty of competition.

 

[Scobie]

DELETED

 

[xvbones]

Snip snip snippity

When you say RTS I think arriving on the battlefield then building a base, gathering resources and building units. When you say RTT I think bringing your units to the field and then winning based on your tactical skill. When you say grand strategy, I think controlling a nation in all its aspects in a protracted and not necessarily entirely military effort to control everything. Hence, the Total War games are turned-based grand strategy games with RTT segments. While it has real-time bits and strategic bits, they never overlap, so I wouldn't call it an RTS. I haven't come across this combination anywhere else and I really like it.

While i do agree to a point, it's still just semantics. RTS just means Real Time Strategy, resource gathering and management is not an integral part of the acronym by any stretch.

Essentially, Risk. (most people on this forum tend to be british - do you have Risk over there? It's a board game that both facets of the genre emerged from)

But that is only semantics, meaning I'm just picking at your nits here, so pay it no mind.

Thing is, the market appears to be able to support a multitude of strategy games of all levels of complexity. There certainly seems to be an appetite for this sort of thing, even if it's not mainstream. And the Total War games aren't even particularly deep as these things go.

Total War is not as deep and complex as, say Sins of a Solar Empire (by the way, try Sins of a Solar Empire, it's quite good and may fill your jones for RTT space battles) but it is (and this is really just my opinion) really just incredibly dry. (Total War, i mean.)

And yes, there is an appetite for it, but compared to space marines, it's more a bit peckish, where space marines invoke the ravening.

Please note that I am not mocking your favored genre, I am just being pragmatic, here.

Their distinguishing characteristic is combining grand strategy with RTT. I'm just wondering why this combination - specifically, operating on two different levels - is so rare.

Again, it's that level of complexity. Casual gamers are where the cash is, and casual gamers want shit they can pick up and play. There's very little that is pick-up-and-play about a game with a four-hour tutorial. (GTA 4 notwithstanding.)

Again, though, get Sins of a Solar Empire if you don't have it. One single battle can literally take hours to complete - in a good way, imo.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Are the battles actually RTT, or are they RTS as I described above? Either way, I'll have to look into it.

I only played the demo of King Arthur and the battles did not seem to be especially good to me. They seemed a little bit tactical.

Achtung Panzer: Kharkov 1943 is a more acclaimed recent real time tactics game.

 

[Scobie]

DELETED