The Warchiefs campaign (part II) is a total mess

[HE1NZ]

Throughout the most of it you can hardly tell what's going on. I thought it was bad writing and poor voice acting, but checking online it turns out it was rampaged by censorship and weirdest changes were applied that make no sense.
For one, all enemies are replaced with some bandits and gunslingers occupying mountains and deserts for no reason.
Second, you can't build anything in most missions. For some reason you play as a severely cutdown European style civ with limited units. You can't build community center. I haven't played the original, but judging by Youtube walkthroughs the campaign was mostly about indian tribes fighting each other. In this version, I don't know who's fighting who, but somehow some Lakota guys are oppressed.
I don't how severely they've changed part I of the campaign, but I couldn't build a community center there either.

This is quite disappointing cause I mainly bought it for campaigns. Somebody should make a mod restoring the original campaign.

[OPC_RedSniper]

I agree with the suppression of tech and growth in mission. I know they normally start off slow without giving you access to all the tech and tools to build and grow a civilization but it just seems like it never fully gave me access to all the abilities a civilization has to offer if i was to play it in multiplayer or solo matches vs a AI.

Those second Campaign acts were decent. It continued on with that families ancestry for a good chunk of a time period but quickly got rid of The Circle and their whole lore in the game. I have yet to play through all the Japan campaign yet so i'm unsure if they completely ignore that family's lineage from the act but starting it off with storming a castle to kill a child for the power and territory in that area was pretty cool. Also it was kind of weird to make a 3rd act so completely separate from the other 2 acts but again i have yet to finish it so they may have tied it together.

[wcbarney]

The Black family does not appear at all in "The Asian Dynasties" campaigns, nor did the Blacks appear in the original version of TAD.

[Catalytic]

A few thoughts:

1) The poor writing and voice acting is kind of a standard for video game campaigns honestly. It's not terrible, and it's hard to find people talented enough to make great content, especially at industry wages (which aren't stellar), and I think developers are so technically minded they settle for "good enough" on this note, so they can focus on features, balance, and bugs.

2) The DE version of the game mostly reuses assets from the original game, and part of "being faithful to the original" when doing a remake means leaving some of that stuff alone for the fans who liked it. The Circle of Ossus/Knights Templar/Illuminati concept was cool. They went a different direction with the Warchiefs expansion and told the Black family story through the wild west. It was a good choice to tie back to the first campaign, but not repeat it. There was no need for the recurring villain, and the tie-in ultimately to Custer is good history. And the Asian Dynasties would've been impossible to tie into one cohesive story, so telling each civ's own story worked beautifully. I really don't have much criticism for the core ideas of the campaigns.

3) I do hate the woke revisionism in the Warchiefs campaign though. They deliberately changed the game so Native Americans weren't cast as the bad guys in several missions. They replaced them with white bandits. Not only was it woke, racist garbage that paints white guy: bad, brown guy: good, it screwed up the balance of those missions by dumping huge HP bonuses onto spawned opponents making those missions significantly harder than they were in the original.

4) OP's point about the stripped down deck mechanics is well taken, but this was in the original. The card system was relatively new. The campaign itself was essentially a tutorial, so everything was greatly simplified to introduce new players to the game. This is common in RTS games and a smart thing to do, but yes, for veterans, it can be frustrating.

[wcbarney]

Originally posted by Catalytic:

... 3) I do hate the woke revisionism in the Warchiefs campaign though. They deliberately changed the game so Native Americans weren't cast as the bad guys in several missions. They replaced them with white bandits. Not only was it woke, racist garbage that paints white guy: bad, brown guy: good, it screwed up the balance of those missions by dumping huge HP bonuses onto spawned opponents making those missions significantly harder than they were in the original....

I tried to start a discussion on this very topic a few weeks ago, but wasn't successful because so few on this forum had played the original version. Regarding your comments, I found the DE "politically correct" version to be way too easy, compared with the original. The "Bozeman Trail" scenario, for example, was virtually unbeatable on "hard" in the original because of the hundreds & hundreds of Indians coming at you from both sides of the map. The DE version, on the other hand, is almost ridiculously easy -- even on "hard." Another of the scenarios, where you had to wade through thousands of Indians to reach Chief Crazy Horse is almost laughable in the DE version where you have to waltz through a few dozen outlaws to reach "Uncle Frank." Geez.!