I'm glad many developers have realised that the Total War series are good quality games, and are fairly popular these days. Having played the series since the original Shogun, I'd tend to agree with them.
However, they really do seem to feel that any RTS game can be improved with a Risk-Style segment. To quote the following recent examples; Rise of Nations, Cossacks II, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade; all of these games have decided that furious real-time action would do well when combined with a Risk territory system. WHY? The entire point of Rise of Nations is that you're constructing everything from scratch, so why put this segment in? Especially when all you have to do is ally with the two most powerful nations and wait until one kills the other. To be fair, Thrones and Patriots did explore the concept, with the Cold War campaign actually feeling well made. But then I say again Dawn of War... The game is fine without the addition of cheating AI who seem to get every Honor Guard unit on the face of Kronus. Cossacks II was so shockingly awful that the risk-style campaign was barely noticeable, but like everything else it too was half-arsed and irritating.
Lets not even go into the realms of entire games trying to ape Total War verbatim, for example Imperial Glory, which had an impossibly boring TBS aspect, and a very basic RTS aspect that was only worthwhile because of the ship combat Total War currently lacks (until the new Empire Total War), and even that was let down by awful music, battlefields with NO difference between them whatsoever and really a lack of anything to immerse you into the experience.
The point of all this being; please stop developers... If you're going to copy a really imaginative series that has had a lot of attention devoted to it and barely bother to disguise it, at least do it well.
However, they really do seem to feel that any RTS game can be improved with a Risk-Style segment. To quote the following recent examples; Rise of Nations, Cossacks II, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade; all of these games have decided that furious real-time action would do well when combined with a Risk territory system. WHY? The entire point of Rise of Nations is that you're constructing everything from scratch, so why put this segment in? Especially when all you have to do is ally with the two most powerful nations and wait until one kills the other. To be fair, Thrones and Patriots did explore the concept, with the Cold War campaign actually feeling well made. But then I say again Dawn of War... The game is fine without the addition of cheating AI who seem to get every Honor Guard unit on the face of Kronus. Cossacks II was so shockingly awful that the risk-style campaign was barely noticeable, but like everything else it too was half-arsed and irritating.
Lets not even go into the realms of entire games trying to ape Total War verbatim, for example Imperial Glory, which had an impossibly boring TBS aspect, and a very basic RTS aspect that was only worthwhile because of the ship combat Total War currently lacks (until the new Empire Total War), and even that was let down by awful music, battlefields with NO difference between them whatsoever and really a lack of anything to immerse you into the experience.
The point of all this being; please stop developers... If you're going to copy a really imaginative series that has had a lot of attention devoted to it and barely bother to disguise it, at least do it well.
C is negligable and makes sense in context of the universe. Not to mention its based on a table-top game.