Empire Total War ACW Mod....

[alexjack]

...anybody here played it? I bought Rome Total War a few years ago and thought that although it was good from a graphics point of view, there wasn't much depth to the game itself. Just my opinion of course. I was wondering how the Civil War mod compared to Scourge of War.

[Jack ONeill]

A,

The general consensus here is it is pretty much crap.

"Molon Labe"

Jack B)

[Squid_UK]

It shares the same problem with all Total War games, in that whilst it looks and sounds amazing, there is no real depth or accuracy to the game play.

Now, if we could get SOW with ACW mods graphics, that would be amazing

[tim]

The thing wtih Total War graphics is they take up so much memory that you only get a few thousand troops represented in a battle. We stick with the 2d sprites because you can repesent thousands more troops. Its a trade off between flash graphics and a resonable respresentation of the battles in terms of size.

[Leffe7]

Recently I gave Napoleon Total War another go, but I got bored again after about 3h. I played RTW and MTW2 before (IMHO RTW was the best of these and the engine is best suited for that era). I must admit I haven't tested any NTW mods yet to see if there is an improvement.

The Campaign mode looks good, but the AI behaves irrational, shuffles around tiny units from A to B and from B to A without any other meaning than to slow down the AI's turn.

In Tactical battles, the soldiers look gorgeous, but gameplay is rather stupid. Artillery is firing into their own troops and doesn't care. Artillery shoots into elevated ground when the enemy is behind the elevation and doesn't care. Infantry runs out of ammo already after 20min. IIRC if units are flanked they shoot at the new threat but do not change their facing. Generals have a bodyguard unit (heavy cavalry) and can join the fight, this makes sense in RTW, but in NTW era???
Also the game slows down when zoomed in on my PC, so you have to zoom out to play fluidly, but what are the good graphics good for then? There is no fog of war, just close in and fight it out.

I saw some pictures of RTW2, the terrain graphics look excellent, but I wonder if the gameplay will be really an improvement. They even want to include the nonsense dog unit and the burning pig unit :S

[Saddletank]

Combining SoWs gameplay with N:TW's eye candy would make a really beautiful game. You'd need a monster PC to run it though.

What makes me so sad, and even cross, is that SoW's modding community remains small, while TWs is simply huge with 100s if not 1000s of very skilled researchers, coders and artists just wasting so much talent on such a terrible game. Grr!

They should all come here and make beautiful sprites, maps and scenarios.

[Little Powell]

A Total War gamer and a SOW gamer are two different types of gamers (although I happen to be both). SOW is a tactical battle simulation that strives to re-create history as accurately as possible (just ask the US Army who uses our game for training). The Total War games are all graphics and simple gameplay, paying little attention to historical accuracy. You play SOW to immerse yourself in a simulation. You play TW for a quick fix of arcade style gaming (which definitely has its place).

As far as graphics, yes we have 2D troop sprites but again like Tim said, they are necessary if we want to re-create the battles accurately, showing thousands of troops. The Total War maps are beautiful with lots of bells and whistles (lighting effects, advanced shadows, etc.), although SOW maps have come a long way since the first release of GB. Referring back to accuracy, we use actual photos for terrain, vegetation, and building textures. Total War's textures are graphically designed which look great, but again have more of an arcade like appearance.

This article pretty much sums it up:

http://www.academia.edu/1003881/Realism ... _Total_War

[alexjack]

Yes in many respects SOW has great graphics too. I've only been playing it a couple of weeks but I've ammassed a couple of dozen screenshots many of them of just marching troop columns and I use them as Desktop wallpaper. Even my wife has remarked on some of them.

[Trig]

Hi guys,

Apologies in advance for the tl;dr wall of text. Hope some of you make it through it.

I am one of the modders of ACW, having joined the mod after v3.4, and am mainly responsible for the graphics upgrades for v3.5

While I would not wish to be rude to come tooting our horn to another (excellent) game's forum, I see you are quite harsh towards the mod, so I feel responsible for defending it just a little bit.

I've not played SoW yet, but have back in the day spent many hours on Bull Run (and because I had no way of purchasing it in this country, I had it delivered to me from the US by a visiting friend, so probably it is the winner of the award of "most trouble I ever went through to acquire a game"), but even without playing SoW and even with investing quite some time in modding ACW, I can concur that as far as authentic Civil War combat goes, it likely has no rival in authenticity of Civil War tactical combat.

However, as Little Powell (albeit a bit patronisingly) put it, these are two different types of games. I also have several of my own chips on the shoulder with all Total War games, when it comes to their historicyl fantasy approaches and oversimplification.

However, that being said, most of your criticisms are directed at the mechanics of the vanilla game and the less than optimal AI behaviour... With most being hardcoded so there isn't a whole lot we can do about those, but we are trying to circumvent them with other modifications and other appealing points to gameplay.

The game's main strongpoint should definitely be the campaign play. While, again, we're limited by the vanilla game's map being practically unmoddable, we have to make due with what is available, but with that, I believe, we have made significant progress.

The initial versions of the mod basically just tried to transfer the American Civil War graphics and some mechanics into an 18th century game, then they progressed to adding more custom content and more campaign play. Now we've gone into trying to make it make sense historically, but also be fun to play, with a bit of attachment to troop development, etc.

The unit roster has been greatly expanded to include as many historically recognisable units as was practicable for implementation (before hitting certain ingame limitations), which are now recruitable in their respective states/areas, all with custom icons, uniform graphics, etc, and in very limited numbers, so the player develops an attachment to each company or regiment as they battle their way through the course of the war.

We have started implementing naval combat, for that strategic aspect of the war, but so far the game does not enable us to add new ship models (which we already have made), so we'll have to stick with vanilla steamers for that. Still, the naval invasions and blockades work, so that part is there.

We have reworked the buildings system for more complex gameplay, are introducing culture to replace the vanilla religion effects (so that states with a Seccessionist majority will be harder to govern by a Unionist invader and the other way around) and we are working on completely reworking the minor factions, with (bending history a wee bit) the Mexcican Republican-Imperial war taking place too at the same time, possible British, French, Dutch or Spanish interventions, etc. All for a grand geopolitical experience of the war.

The generals are now not an elite cavalry unit anymore, but actually do their work of providing morale and other bonuses to the army, and the values governing combat have been entirely reworked to offer more dynamic battles, with less immediate casualities, but more morale impact, with units breaking, reforming, attacking again, breaking again, less suicidal AI tactics, etc. Friendly fire is still an issue if not managed by the player, since this is, again, the hardcoded AI, but with basic sane maneouvering it can be avoided. We have added skirmishers and sharpshooters to the game, for battle variety, each with own (dis)advantages and impact on the battlefield.

We are also introducing the different weapons and their effects, from smoothbores to repeating rifles. Low framerate at close up has been addressed by some texture and model optimisations, as well as several different smoke-effect packs, with the ligther of these having a very positive impact on the game speed. A whole civil-war related tech tree is being developped. And several other features that we hope will make our ACW mod a more realistic and fun experience.

The current 3.5 open beta is available already for testing (though, we admit, because of the game's limitations the mod is a bit of a chore to install) at our ModDB page, so welcome to have a go.

But to conclude, the reason why I got involved with this mod (and only purchased Empire TW for the mod) is, because outside of USA (and even there probably) ACW afficionados are considered to be somesort of nuts with their obsessions over regiments, historical battles, etc, and a very popular game, such as the Total War series is a very good medium of introducing this period of history to people that may otherwise never get into it, therefore getting them interested in trying other games on the same topic too. Over ten years ago I was modding Operation Flashpoint to the Civil War topic, while playing the likes of Bull Run and Forge of Freedom, now it's Empire's ACW mod, and in a few years it'll be something else probably.

As one big nutty family of Civil War fans, we all always look forward to try new ACW games (and usually end up b***hing about historical innacuracies of most of them too), to see how some aspects were covered in them.

For this reason, any of you interested in scrutinizing our work or just enjoying some friendly Civil War banter with likeminded people are also invited to our forum, and if you promote SoW along the way to people interested in the topic, all the better, I say.

Thank you for reading and best regards,
Trig

[Marching Thru Georgia]

First, welcome to the forum. Thank you for giving a very insightful description of the modding efforts you and your talented friends are putting into TW. The significant hardcoded limitations must be frustrating. Of course SOW suffers from that too in some areas.

Given the difficulties your group is having in making TW a better game, the natural question arises; why don't you and your group abandon TW and move your considerable abilities to SOW? The game was specifically designed to be highly moddable. If your interest is in reasonably accurate mid-19th century warfare, then I am confident this game will satisfy that interest and give you the option of modding the game to reflect your own personal view of how such battles should be fought.

I encourage you to download the demo and try it. The demo is the full game, nothing has been dumbed down. If you find it interesting, pass it on to your friends. Who knows, it might open new avenues for your group's creativity.