So, CA, Any Plans to Improve Campaign Pacing (Other Than With Caps)?

ShiroAmakusa75

So you don't want elite caps. Already a bafflingly terrible decision, but OK.

Any other plans to make campaigns not end de facto at turn 100 but de iure at turn 300? That's 200 turns just for the game to catch up on the fact that you won the campaign long ago.

You can't tell me you are happy about this pace. You can't tell me you're happy about more than 90% of your players on average not completing campaigns they started just because going through those 200 turns is an incredibly tedious chore.

So, anything, @CA?

(notice the title edit)

Deep_echo_sound

C.A. thank you very much for supporting and respecting your customers base freedom of choice.
Most of us, total war players, do not need artificial forced caps in campaigns.

ShiroAmakusa75

Deep_echo_sound said:

C.A. thank you very much for supporting and respecting your customers base freedom of choice.
Most of us, total war players, do not need artificial forced caps in campaigns.

Nothing artifical about having elite troops in limited reserves.

Pr4vda

I agree. What I want are short campaigns victory conditions. I dont have the possibility to play dozen and dozen of hours per week, and Im bored after the 100 turns of a campaign. If I could have short victory conditions, that would make me so happy ... while people who have more time or prefer the long victory conditions would still be able to play that way.

Reeks

Unit caps are horrible thanks god that CA have no plant to implement them in campaign

Slogging through a campaign have little to do with unit caps and more to do with boring end game objectives/victory conditions.

ShiroAmakusa75

Reeks said:

Unit caps are horrible thanks god that CA have no plant to implement them in campaign

Slogging through a campaign have little to do with unit caps and more to do with boring end game objectives/victory conditions.

I guess you failed to actually read the OP, huh? Then you might have noticed I was asking for other plans to improve campaign pacing besides elite caps.

neodeinos

CA doesn't want to make the game like you want it, they are monsters !

Zogash85

You must be new to Total War mate.

Not finishing Grand Campaigns has always been the norm. At some point you always snowball and it becomes impossible for the AI to put up an effective resistance.

It's the nature of an evolving campaign system and an AI that is incapable of adapting to and anticipating players' actions.

I don't think there is much CA can do to fix that with the current technology.

You as the player dictate the pace of your campaign, maybe try playing less aggressively?

ShiroAmakusa75

Zogash85 said:

You must be new to Total War mate.

Not finishing Grand Campaigns has always been the norm. At some point you always snowball and it becomes impossible for the AI to put up an effective resistance.

It's the nature of an evolving campaign system and an AI that is incapable of adapting to and anticipating players' actions.

I don't think there is much CA can do to fix that with the current technology.

You as the player dictate the pace of your campaign, maybe try playing less aggressively?

Here's the thing, it would be good to try and change that.

Tennisgolfboll

Zogash85 said:

You must be new to Total War mate.

Not finishing Grand Campaigns has always been the norm. At some point you always snowball and it becomes impossible for the AI to put up an effective resistance.

It's the nature of an evolving campaign system and an AI that is incapable of adapting to and anticipating players' actions.

I don't think there is much CA can do to fix that with the current technology.

You as the player dictate the pace of your campaign, maybe try playing less aggressively?

This can be improved mate

LolTHELol

Thank you CA, for not implementing caps.

I will always prefer you to spend those resources on other more important issues like improving WE and BM campaigns.

ShiroAmakusa75

LolTHELol said:

Thank you CA, for not implementing caps.

I will always prefer you to spend those resources on other more important issues like improving WE and BM campaigns.

LoL, the thread isn't even about unit caps.

Deep_echo_sound

LolTHELol said:

Thank you CA, for not implementing caps.

I will always prefer you to spend those resources on other more important issues like improving WE and BM campaigns.

Absolutely right.

Zogash85

Tennisgolfboll said:

this can be improved mate

An AI advanced enough to strategically match a human opponent in a long-term evolving campaign enough to keep it challenging would require processing power no PC could handle.

People are already complaining about end turns now. Imagine the amount of impotent rage coming CA's way if those took 1 hour to compute instead of 1 minute.

Sure, you can tweak a little here and there, but once you are at the point that you can afford enough armies to both attack and defend simultaneously, the AI's days are numbered.

dodge33cymru

Urgh, you’re kidding? Is it confirmed they won’t consider this? The game badly needs some more restrictions to be more of a game and less of a grind.

Have long preferred MP in this game, which isn’t usual for me in a TW game, and was hoping this sort of thing would come along to improve it eventually; it seems like such an easy open goal.

Pity, hopefully that decision is reconsidered.

ShiroAmakusa75

Zogash85 said:

Tennisgolfboll said:

this can be improved mate

An AI advanced enough to strategically match a human opponent in a long-term evolving campaign enough to keep it challenging would require processing power no PC could handle.

People are already complaining about end turns now. Imagine the amount of impotent rage coming CA's way if those took 1 hour to compute instead of 1 minute.

Sure, you can tweak a little here and there, but once you are at the point that you can afford enough armies to both attack and defend simultaneously, the AI's days are numbered.

It's actually more dependent on how quick and easy it is for the player to amass power and WH is pretty rotten when it comes to that because it doesn't take much time to get to the point where you can't simply be threatened anymore.

Cookie35641

Ephraim_Dalton said:

So you don't want elite caps. Already a bafflingly terrible decision, but OK.

Any other plans to make campaigns not end de facto at turn 100 but de iure at turn 300? That's 200 turns just for the game to catch up on the fact that you won the campaign long ago.

You can't tell me you are happy about this pace. You can't tell me you're happy about more than 90% of your players on average not completing campaigns they started just because going through those 200 turns is an incredibly tedious chore.

So, anything, @CA?

(notice the title edit)

For what it´s worth, i agree with you wholeheartedly.

Campaign pacing feels really off and composing armies of anything but the strongest units avaiable to you at any given moment is extremely unrewarding because there´s just no benefit to it. Nor is strategising fun for long because theres no need for it as long as you just take cities really fast.

But it seems like a lot of people here are just fine with steamrolling the map with doomstacks, so i´m not holding my breath for the game to improve in that regard.

ShiroAmakusa75

See, I would be already happy if the game was a lot more stingy with the moneys. The game throws so much money at you so quickly, by midgame you've probably already maxed out at least a few provinces and field several elite armies.

They could make it harder to conquer settlements from other races, not allow you to fully exploit them until some sort of "integration" period has passed, make large empires more prone to internal rebellions and have inflation eat up the extra money you gain from conquest. Something, anything would be better than the current pacing.

Xenos7777

This an old strategy games dilemma, the snowballing. There are basically three ways around it:

1) Slowing expansion. This is what SFO does with strong garrisons and caps.
2) Dynamic difficulty. The AI gets more cheats later in the campaign, or you get scaling penalties the larger you get. May feel very artificial.
3) Decadence mechanics for large empires. It's the most realistic solution but it really doesn't work in games because it robs the player of agency.

I think 1 is the best solution without redesigning the game from scratch.

Theo91

Deep_echo_sound said:

C.A. thank you very much for supporting and respecting your customers base freedom of choice.
Most of us, total war players, do not need artificial forced caps in campaigns.

I’ve never understood why we can’t just have both. A simple tick box for unit caps would do the job and everyone would be happy

ShiroAmakusa75

Well, 3K actually has a much better pace to its campaign because it's both stingier with resources and has the challenge change and grow with the player, starting with the warlords surrounding you and ending with the three-way Three Kingdoms war, which, happily, does not require you to capture all of their territory to win, just to take their imperial seat and/or force the rival emperor to abdicate.

blaat

Ephraim_Dalton said:

See, I would be already happy if the game was a lot more stingy with the moneys. The game throws so much money at you so quickly, by midgame you've probably already maxed out at least a few provinces and field several elite armies.

They could make it harder to conquer settlements from other races, not allow you to fully exploit them until some sort of "integration" period has passed, make large empires more prone to internal rebellions and have inflation eat up the extra money you gain from conquest. Something, anything would be better than the current pacing.

I would love that idea it would feel organic

CA did domething simlar in the MTW2 kingdosm expansion in the britannia campaign

Zogash85

Ephraim_Dalton said:

It's actually more dependent on how quick and easy it is for the player to amass power and WH is pretty rotten when it comes to that because it doesn't take much time to get to the point where you can't simply be threatened anymore.

Which again boils down to the AI being entirely unable to outthink or outplay a human opponent. The AI can't threaten you because it can't anticipate what you are going to do.

In my HE campaign, at one point, Bretonnia had about 20 full stacks running around conquering half the world. I declared war on them with 8 armies of my own (Alith Anar+Shadow Walkers+2 Arty, 6 balanced stacks, one dragon doomstack). In a human-on-human war, I would have stood no chance. But because the AI is incapable of anticipating my moves or making sound strategic decisions, just 6 of my armies (2 were otherwise occupied) made short work of most of theirs in a handful of turns.

All this happened about 300 turns into the game. I like taking it slow.

What I'm trying to say is... it doesn't matter if you go fast or go slow. As soon as you have a few decent armies, the AI is toast. And unless we get Skynet - level AI, that isn't going to change. I still enjoy the game immensely, just don't kid yourself that it ever was or will be a fair fight. ;-)

ShiroAmakusa75

See, I disagree because there are TW games that are better paced without having smart human level AI, I mentioned 3K above. It's all about how quickly the game lets you progress and right now you can outpace the AI by a fair margin simply because the game makes conquest so convenient.

MeanSonOfAGun

Ehm, I’ve never played a campaign- at least on ME- under 300 turns and I’m hardly ever bored. Maybe because of the quite defensive playstyle I prefer, maybe I’m not too good a player or maybe because I just love to play this game for the hell of it. 100 turns? Appears more than just a bit rushed to me but to each his own. Why not make caps an option like the checkbox we’ll have in mp, only for campaign. So everyone can play according to their preferences and we can all be happy?

ShiroAmakusa75

MeanSonOfAGun said:

Ehm, I’ve never played a campaign- at least on ME- under 300 turns and I’m hardly ever bored. Maybe because of the quite defensive playstyle I prefer, maybe I’m not too good a player or maybe because I just love to play this game for the hell of it. 100 turns? Appears more than just a bit rushed to me but to each his own. Why not make caps an option like the checkbox we’ll have in mp, only for campaign. So everyone can play according to their preferences and we can all be happy?

You are one of the 6.5% that completed a ME campaign. That's roughly one out of twenty TW players.

The game doesn't need to be rushed, you get mad powerful even through normal play unless you deliberately stall.

Rikis

I just like the idea of starter units still being useful late game, is that really such a difficult thing? The militia units in 3 kingdoms are used even late game and I like it for that. Do I want an elite army of dragon warriors or 4 militia armies? Its actually possible either way.

In warhammer it simply isn't viable/not worth it to field, say, regular armies of skavenslaves to just swarm the enemy in hordes.

Likewise for High elves, I love the idea of a frontline of spearmen in the late game, supported by a star dragon etc but good luck making that work when they go toe to toe with a stack of 10 executioners, 5 black guards and 5 dark dragons or, what I actually saw lately, 2 full stacks of nothing but swordmasters.

Maybe thats why I like the Vamp Coast so much, those zombies are still useful late game and I dont feel handicapped if I dont stack the deck with crabs...

angry_rat_lover

Shame, but look at the bright side, CA might do something else other than unit caps to improve the campaign.

ShiroAmakusa75

angry_rat_lover said:

Shame, but look at the bright side, CA might do something else other than unit caps to improve the campaign.

This thread is exactly about those other things.

angry_rat_lover

Ephraim_Dalton said:

angry_rat_lover said:

Shame, but look at the bright side, CA might do something else other than unit caps to improve the campaign.

This thread is exactly about those other things.

Yeah I know, Im reading the thread right now, CA should add something to resources or something like that, like, you need X resource to recruit this unit or Y resource to do this rite, things like that

ShiroAmakusa75

I was thinking that they could put secondary resource costs on high tier units. So Swordmasters not only cost money but also influence to recruit and since influence accumulates slower than money (somewhat), you'd have a limiter on elite recruitment right then and there.

Necessitating certain trade resources to build their recruitment buildings in the first place would also be an idea.