Tactical Combat Better than Strategic Layer

[enricofermi2]

Something I've noticed is that I don't care that much about the strategic layer. On the other hand I like the real time combat system alot.

However the strategic layer makes it difficult to actually experience this. So many of the fights are just stomps, that you auto resolve. Like attacking a non-walled garrison with an actual army.

As well, many of the difficult fights that you do get end up being siege fights, with the AI hiding behind walls. Especially as you get a stronger army, which the AI avoids, you end up fighting a higher and higher amount of siege battles.

I wish the strategic layer worked in a way that caused hard fights to happen consistently throughout the game.

[Chaoslink]

Yeah, it would be nice. Though to be fair, in human history battles being fought in fields were actually quite rare while sieges were more commonplace. It was hard to get two armies to fight like that as each side needed some reasoning as to why they thought they'd win. If one side felt like they wouldn't, they'd just retreat. Makes it somewhat realistic I suppose, though in most cases realism doesn't make for the best gameplay.

[Android Poetry]

Great point, and the biggest complaint I have with the game as well.

[Chizzler]

It's an inherent problem with strategy games in general and why many players never finish a campaign in Total War. You start off relatively weak, and every action you take is important to your survival. With each victory though, you weaken your enemy and shift the balance of power further into your favour, which makes the next fight easier, further shifting the balance of power. It's called snowballing and nobody has really come up with an effective solution for it.

Creative Assembly have tried many times to come up with ways to bring back the challenge as a campaign progresses, and none of them have been particuarly well received. It's why we had civil war events in Rome & Shogun and the chaos invasion in TW:Warhammer.. . The vortex race in WH2 is them trying a different approach, which also hasn't gone down too well with the playerbase.

It's not unique to Total War either. Real time strategy games such as Starcraft suffer from it just as much, where an early battle can determine the result of the match because it just becomes so difficult for a player to recover from a setback. It's not just the loss of units/income. Not only are you having to replace those losses, but that's income that you won't have to invest in expanding, which your opponent does... That means they'll have a stronger economy, and can pump out more troops, making the next battle easier for them. Pro matches rarely play out to their inevitable conclusions, with players conceding defeat long before their base is destroyed.

It's easy to see the problem and to critisize a game for it, but much harder to come up with viable solutions that don't simply handicap players for doing well.

[enricofermi2]

It's true strategy games often have a snowball problem, however the issue with TWW:2, is that it's really 2 games in 1. It's a turn based strategy game, and an RTS.

They could just rip out the strategy layer, and replace it with something simplified like XCOM, leaving the RTS aspects alone.

[Inardesco]

Y are siege battles the hardest? AI in siege battles are so passive to the point they dont do anything.

I rather fight them on the field since there the AI actually does something.

[Gentlest Giant]

As for myself, I enjoy the campaign gameplay far more. To me it's all in managing economy, public order and foreign relations. I frequently grumble a bit whenever I can't comfortably risk the auto-resolve. I started playing this back in the first game where autoresolve was overpowered broken, so my first few hundred hours of gameplay I only played the battles the game forced me to, such as the starting quest battles for the Empire and the Dwarfs.
That said, I've grown to tolerate playing the battles and I think the game got overall better for it.

[Fendelphi]

At the end of my campaigns less than half the battles are sieges, which I think is a fair amount.
If you are effective at the strategic layer you can win campaigns much faster(we are talking long victory in ME in about 120 turns).
If you win your campaigns faster, you dont burn out on them as much.

As such the strategic layer is an incentive to get better at the game as a whole. Removing or simplifying it would actually diminish the replay value and challenge to a large degree.

If you want to only do the tactical battles, just play custom games or MP.

[Tr0w]

Originally posted by enricofermi2:

It's true strategy games often have a snowball problem, however the issue with TWW:2, is that it's really 2 games in 1. It's a turn based strategy game, and an RTS.

They could just rip out the strategy layer, and replace it with something simplified like XCOM, leaving the RTS aspects alone.

Technically it's a grand strategy/RTT hybrid as the real-time component is much more like games like Ground Control where there isn't any base building.

If you want something like the real-time battles in this but without the grand strategy component you should check out Shadow of The Horned Rat and Dark Omen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fyPNEPLDrc&t=

[SwampDragon]

I tend not to play campaigns beyond a certain point. You know when that point comes because it gets slightly boring. Managing a massive Empire is not as fun as carving it out, so I restart.

If you play on Legendary and take 'Lightening Strike', I can guarantee most of your battles will be challenging one-stack vs one-stack engagements. Especially if you get rid of the 'conquer the world' way of thinking, and instead just keep a few, well managed, regions and fight your wars in allied territory. Leave all the siege work to allies and focus on field battles and glory.

ME is a sandbox at heart.

[funkmonster7]

I personally like the strategic layer more than the tactical combat. I just prefer to see my province grow and I don't have much time to play games these days. When you play for 2 weeks on-and-off only to gain a new province by playing out every single battle rather than AR-ing; you honestly want to quit playing.

On the other hand, if tactical combat is all that you're after, then just play the Battle games vs AI. I normally don't like those battles because I just don't like to get pyrrhic victories all the time. Some of those wins make you feel like you didn't win at all, with the amount of casualties you suffered.

[madracc00n]

U can try Sfo mods packs.

[Go0lden_Archer]

Get something like Better AI. Then AI wont run away from fights as much. Beware though, sometime they go mental and attack you even with severe disadvantage on AR.

[enricofermi2]

Originally posted by SwampDragon:

I tend not to play campaigns beyond a certain point. You know when that point comes because it gets slightly boring. Managing a massive Empire is not as fun as carving it out, so I restart.

If you play on Legendary and take 'Lightening Strike', I can guarantee most of your battles will be challenging one-stack vs one-stack engagements. Especially if you get rid of the 'conquer the world' way of thinking, and instead just keep a few, well managed, regions and fight your wars in allied territory. Leave all the siege work to allies and focus on field battles and glory.

ME is a sandbox at heart.

I also restart alot. I've never beaten the map. However 1 issue with this is that alot of the higher tier cool units take forever to tech up to. So often I'm just stuck using the units I started with.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Inardesco:

Y are siege battles the hardest? AI in siege battles are so passive to the point they dont do anything.

I rather fight them on the field since there the AI actually does something.

If you don't have Good artillery it doesn't matter how bad the AI is, those units guarding the walls will cause a lot of damage and so will all the archers that they have.

But if you have GOOD artillery like Skaven catapult you can get rid of a lot of enemies quickly.

Then we have the large wall turrets which when they are maxed out will kill a lot of your units. some are stronger than others but they will still do damage if you just sit back and wait for archers to deal with.

So these fights can be quite annoying because there are walls to climb and archers on walls to deal with.

[SwampDragon]

Originally posted by enricofermi2:

Originally posted by SwampDragon:

I tend not to play campaigns beyond a certain point. You know when that point comes because it gets slightly boring. Managing a massive Empire is not as fun as carving it out, so I restart.

If you play on Legendary and take 'Lightening Strike', I can guarantee most of your battles will be challenging one-stack vs one-stack engagements. Especially if you get rid of the 'conquer the world' way of thinking, and instead just keep a few, well managed, regions and fight your wars in allied territory. Leave all the siege work to allies and focus on field battles and glory.

ME is a sandbox at heart.

I also restart alot. I've never beaten the map. However 1 issue with this is that alot of the higher tier cool units take forever to tech up to. So often I'm just stuck using the units I started with.

Personally I enjoy having more rank and file armies (tier one and two), mainly because I've got used to that. Even on Legendary top tier stacks make the game trivial anyway because the AI just doesn't know how to deal with them.

"I wish the strategic layer worked in a way that caused hard fights to happen consistently throughout the game." - Playing how I described, and playing on Legendary, tends to keep the fights frequent and hard for me. It depends what you want from it really.

Have you tried jumping on Multiplayer and having a few battles? It took me a while to summon the courage, but it's a lot of fun!