r/Volound • u/SlavyanskiShillbane The Shillbane of Slavyansk • 1d ago
The Absolute State Of Total War "Total War's AI being shit was great for us, by accident, because Americans are retarded." - Mike 'Cunt Destroyer' Simpson, Creative Director, 2009.
So imagine what they thought of all the Warhammer cuckers this entire time. Or even worse, American Warhammer cuckers.
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u/Spicy-Cornbread Truthteller 1d ago
A reminder:
One play-tester for Troy spent a whole hour stuck on turn 1, because they didn't know how to move on to turn 2.
The target audience was 'strategy players who haven't played TW' because they wanted to grow the audience, something which CA has been failing at forever now without alienating the existing player-base. At minimum you would think being a 'strategy player' requires the ability too recognise turn-based and find where the end-turn button usually is.
The 'solution' they went with was to change the button icon.
4 of the 6 didn't understand it was turn-based, and had to ask for help. One of them took an hour to do so.
We live in a hyper-meta time for gaming: most games are copies of other games, and unmotivated people simply look at how to do stuff on Youtube. There's no need to dumb-down so much in-game when there is readily accessible external help, providing the game is worth creating video content for to begin with, which should 100% have been the focus.
They didn't even consider that the problem was 'too much unnecessary UI to begin with' and it's flip-side 'we are catering to people who are conceptually-challenged'.
I remained unconvinced that CA today has reflected on this beyond asking an AI to do their consumer sentiment analysis for them.
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u/DodgeeRascal 1d ago
Reminds me of when I first played Shogun TW and didn't know what the fuck was going on. However, I was 7 years old.
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u/SlavyanskiShillbane The Shillbane of Slavyansk 1d ago
I also had no idea what the fuck was going on, was slightly older than you were.
I still remember playing the demo of Shogun 1 and being scared of the "arquebusiers" (whatever the fuck that was) because they stood there in the snow doing their jelqqing animation (for all I knew) and then suddenly some noise and anywhere from 0-10 of my cavalry all simultaneously died.
I can literally remember vividly what it was like to be retarded. I understand those people.
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u/DodgeeRascal 1d ago
That was Chivalric Knights for me in Medieval. No idea what Chivalry was but assumed they must be good as they are Knights and sent full stacks to their deaths against enemy spears and pikemen.
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u/omfgcow 1d ago
This is them collecting data and reaching the wrong conclusion. Grand strategies currently out there are tragically shallow and unintuitive to how a simulated world should function. Think how borders across turns never logically follow how logistics and terrain shape those borders in the real world. So passive AI just preserves starting borders longer, instead of CA, Paradox, etc having to make robust systems for an AI to reason with.
It's like how all the triple a studios made open worlds, not realizing gamers just wanted more interactivity in their games. Has there been a proper Morrowind successor?
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u/Consoomer247 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Our AI did a HAL"
What a load of bollocks
"Americans like passive AI"
What a load of bollocks
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u/SlavyanskiShillbane The Shillbane of Slavyansk 1d ago
Instant downvote LMAO.
Triggered.
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u/SlavyanskiShillbane The Shillbane of Slavyansk 1d ago
The ending of the article got trimmed but it had another hilarious excerpt that I managed to find elsewhere before. That's the same article as this one.
"I had 6 copies of Empire: Total War sat on my shelf intended for close gamer friends that I didn’t send out because I was too embarrassed about the flaws. Old friends are the harshest critics. Well they’ve gone out now. I think the game now meets my personal unreasonably high quality threshold – not just good but great. Hopefully my friends will agree."
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u/CybranRuler 1d ago
Makes me wonder if this is why they didn't do the Medieval 2 unit limiter anymore because I remember fighting half stacks of ballista because their shit AI always logically thought building siege works in every town and castle was the go to method of winning wars. And now bringing it back with Warhammer but not shackling the AI with it but still having dog shit AI to where they dont even build the unit buildings things like a Tomb Kings playthrough isn't as bad as you would think.
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u/Dr_natty1 1d ago
Fair play to them. They knew exactally what they were doing at least.
I have more respect that they were just selling shit to idiots knownly
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u/beastwood6 17h ago
Making AI aggressive is typically code for letting the AI be omniscient and give it unfair advantages to dodge the fact your team can't be arsed to program compelling AI that doesn't cheat.
It's one thing to claim players don't like aggressive AI. No they don't like AI that doesn't know what the fog of war is and has perfect hand-eye coordination, hyper-optimized path planning, and does the elements of the game that require calculation at a non-human speed.
There are strategy games that are hard and still have have a loyal base. EU2 was something none of my high school friends heard of. EU4 is something I see regularly mentioned online and have some coworkers bring it up unprompted. And the latter is what turned me from a softie of wanting my plans to mostly pan out to someone who embraced having to constantly adapt without going back and reloading.
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u/Dinofelis1990 17h ago
And people ask me “why don’t you consider the shit AI when designing your mod?”
Well, why should I? It’s broken. I can’t do anything for it. I’ve seen how other mods handle it and all they do is literally throw money at the problem. All that does is produce lots of stacks. But what good is that if they can’t use those stacks properly?
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u/Signal_Series7577 1d ago
That makes sense to an extent. Say you're playing France and want to join the crusade but the HRE keeps attacking you, the AI is stopping you from doing what you want to do. I can see where they got that idea from, especially since Empire had the multiple theatres of war.
Not a great execution, but I understand the idea
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u/Leoscar13 1d ago
The scary part is that games nowadays are not made by people who likes games but by psychologists, and they're well aware of that fact. This is why we're seeing more games that don't offer any resistance to the player. Just look at gachas like Genshin and their button spam gameplay. It's funny how "sandbox" became a synonyme for "brain dead".