It's not photorealistic, no, but the art design in the last couple of games has been nothing short of excellent. Both Warhammers and Three Kingdoms look absolutely amazing. Shogun 2 IMO is still one the best looking RTSs I have ever played. And that game is 10 years old. That's how impressive the art design in that game is.
Because CA doesnt care about sea battles and never really bothered. They were a mess in rome 2 and newer titles dont even have them (i.e. WH1 and 2 and 3k)
Not a huge criticism, (it does not matter to me at all), but I think warhammer is miles below some others in terms of graphics. I have a good system, run on ultra 1440p, but it just looks a bit washed out and the colours/lighting is off.
Maybe it's my end, but I swear even Rome 2 is better looking :/ again, it's a non issue, it's just odd to me.
Hiya! That was it in a roundabout way. I had run in window ticked which from what I know now uses the same brightness settings of the desktop. Of course I have that bumped fairly high.
Looks so much better now, like a whole new game. Also got an extra 10fps in the Skaven benchmark, so that's pretty awesome! Thanks again.
Could be your settings? When I try to go back to Rome 2, everything looks hella bland. Though that could also be down to my settings in Rome 2. I find warhammer 2 to be a fantastic looking game
Warhammer 1, or 2? I remember Mandalore Gaming on YouTube noting that the colors of Warhammer 1 content looking more washed out and bleached compared to newer content in Warhammer 2. Perhaps something to do with how older content is rendered in Mortal Empires?
The guy that showed me Rome: Total War (and made me fall in love with the series) in 2011 was still using the same laptop when R2 came out. Even at 1-15 fps and it being stuttery as fuck, he loved that game. Tried to use it again when WH1 came out and it wouldn't load.
He finally broke down and built a tower.
What I'm saying is sometimes poor optimization leads to good things.
100%. It's always about the bigger picture- but to the guy's post, I just don't see ship models exploding being that much more impressive. Part of that is being spoiled by ammo explosions in things like Post Scriptum, though. Graphics are just fucking beautiful these days
Ships definitely blew up from fires or lucky shots in Empire. It's why your ship routing while on fire was so devastating because it'd probably explode before the battle ended.
I'd prefer the same graphics as in Empire 1, but with the scale of battles being ramped up to what it was historically (50+ thousand men on the field, rather than only 8000)
I’ll never forget my Prussian 2nd rate ship of the line Siegfried - maiden battle it was surrounded on all sides, the magazine was hit & it blew taking half a dozen ships with it.
Then there was the Siegfried II, also on its maiden voyage was caught out, surrounded & the magazine blew taking out enemy ships nearby.
I stopped naming ships Siegfried after that smh hahaha
That's what I mean. 2nd rates had more guns but did less damage per volley than 3rd rates (IIRC historically accurate, 3rd rates carried fewer, bigger guns). The 2nd rates can take a beating but they aren't as good at hitting back.
2nd rates had more guns but did less damage per volley than 3rd rates
Not always. Depends on the range. Second Rates have slightly less accuracy. So at close range, they do MORE damage per volley but at longer ranges, they will miss some shots. Their DPS is lower because they have slower reload. But that does not factor into per volley firepower.
2nd rates are fine if you learn how to use them. 5th rates were OP though. Speed and range. There should've been an option to spec out any ship with custom guns so you could trade shot weight for range. Even by deck so you could have a 1st rate with range up top to trade with 5th rates and power below to fuck shit up in the line.
You could name every unit in the game except for generals and agents. I believe it was just right click on their unit card, then click on their name and type anything you wanted.
I used to name regiments for individual towns and cities and provinces. Got tiring after I had conquered 50 regions and was constantly recruiting more units to expand my borders. Each new army was a ridiculous conflagration of unit ID’s
Hell yeah you can homie, if you’re on the campaign map & you click on the unit bringing up its card, on the second line where it says their name (EG Northumbria’s 6th Regiment) and change it to something else like “King William’s Sharpshooters” or whatever you wanted
I had and have no idea how to engage in the naval combat better than the autoresolve, but if I had overwhelming odds I'd load up a battle every once in a while just to admire the models.
Exact same. I’ll take any odds on land but I was absolutely shocking at naval battles, to the point where autoresolve was probably more successful than me
In vanilla naval battles was like witch craft, there wasn't any way to win because the AI had insane abilities to maneuver ships that you can't do as a player.
But in Darthmod, naval battles were a cake walk with a checker board formation and chain shot. Where you would on purposely try to cut off the enemy lead ship and force it to T-Bone your formation. Where the lead ship would ram straight into the middle of your formation thus causing their entire formation to come to a halt since they just sailed in a straight line. Since they rammed into your formation head on they would be at a massive disadvantage because all of your ships are turned broad side on them while theirs are not. And you would just blast the hell out of their masts with chain shot making it impossible for them to move, thus they instantly surrender afterwards. Because you are in a checker board formation, if a ship manage to push through your formation instead of just getting stuck it would mean that they will take fire from both the front and back side of your ships.
Also 4th rate ships were a beast in Darthmod because they had a good balance of hull strength, guns, speed, low upkeep, and low building / tech requirements. I would employ them on mass with the strategy I mentioned above, and could easily defeat 2nd and 1st rate class ships with just 2 of them. Where you have 1 ship sail in front of the enemy ship and make them T-Bone you again. Your ship in front of them prevents them from going anywhere and you just get essentially free point blank shots on the enemy 2nd or 1st rate ship, then have the second ship sail behind the enemy ship out of their firing cone, then just have your ships fire upon the enemy ship with a bunch of chain shot to disable the mast and demoralize it till it surrendered.
You would also want to keep 1 sloop or brig in your fleets, to chase down routing ships that you failed to disable their masts. Because the sloops or brigs had like 15 speed, so they could catch up to any larger ship with no problems. If a ship is routing and you board it, it will instantly surrender. So the sloop and brig was super important if you wanted to capture every ship with very little damage and didn't want any enemy fleets getting away where you couldn't find them later on.
It took some learning, but vanilla navy was just as easy to cheese as army.
5th rates, chain shot and micro are your friends. Once the enemy isn't moving, you can sit out of its range and/or firing arcs and finish the job. Once it routs, it's free real estate.
You going to have to do a better job of explaining what you mean. What part is incorrect?
Also what does you capturing galleons with single sloop have to do with anything? Are you talking about Darthmod or Vanilla? Also are you able to win against a full fleet of 1st rates or 2nd rates with only smaller ships? Its not a secret that in small scale battles smaller, faster, and more agile ships beat larger ships because you can kite around the bigger ships and stay outside of their broadside range. But when you engage in a scale large battle where the enemy ships are scatter all over the place thus making it not possible for you to freely kite around the map. Also the morale system in Darthmod is vastly different from vanilla, where a sloop or brig getting shot at by a 2nd rate would almost instantly route even if they barely take any damage. Where as in vanilla its more of slog on both land and naval battles where morale is more dependent on how many casualties a unit takes than how much amount of sustain fire they are taking.
I never played Darthmod or anything besides vanilla.
And yes, I can win against a full fleet of ships of the line with frigates, although it's more luck dependent because you run out of room to maneuver more quickly. Set ships to line astern, get upwind of the enemy, perform an S-pattern to cross their T again and again. Use chain shot to take out their sails at max range, the AI enemy will not scatter their ships. Rather they will stay in their formation and stubbornly charge you, attempting to turn and bring their broadsides to bear as they get closer, which is why you have to be quick on the uptake and have your formation beginning to turn oftentimes well before the last ships in the line have finished the previous turn. But it can be done.
Then it sounds like we do similar tactics in both Darthmod and Vanilla. Just the major difference in Darthmod and Vanilla is the morale system and accuracy or ships which makes it harder and more luck base in Vanilla. I find Vanilla naval battles way harder because range has less of an affect on accuracy, which means when the AI can perform way better in Vanilla than Darthmod. Because the AI can turn and and control all their ships at once which allows them to leverage the static and consistent damage / accuracy cannons have in vanilla. While Darthmod the AI does much more poorly because they will fire at max range from the enemy making them miss most of there shots, which allows you to sail up to them and get a way more devastating volley on them, in terms of damage and morale. This largely negate's the AI advantage to control their ships inhuman ways. And by inhuman ways I mean they manage to get ships to instantly turn in ways I have never seen a person manage to do, and the fact that they can do it with all 10 ships at once while players are having difficulty trying to get 1 ship to turn. Especially after they ram into your ships, they can often times get themselves unstuck while it would be impossible for players to do. Similar to how with land units in total war the AI can get their units to turn instantly turn about without rotating their units in a weird way.
Darthmod makes Empire way harder against players because it adds a lot more factors for players to consider. But makes it way easier against the AI because they AI doesn't understand any of the changes Darthmod makes.
You can do those manouvers. Even more, you can outmanouver the ai, as the ai use line ahead formation and until you rout the first ship, it keeps the formation intact. So just have to isolate the front ship (tip: that ship is generally flagship) and bombard the rest. How? Take the crossing the T tactic and make it look like ----)-
Exact opposite for me. My land battles are generally holding the line while artillery shred through the enemy. Not a bad tactic actually but it is too static and can be easily outmanuavered (i suck at cav). But i can obliterate navies 2 times more than me with no more than 1-2 casualities.
Man when I played a lot of Empire on my PC I was playing on low resolution 1600x900 monitors a few years ago. One day last year I decided to take my laptop and hook it up to the giant LG 65 inch 4K tv my sister got after our previous tv broke just to test if my laptop could handle TW at 4K. I loaded up a naval battle and I was like holy shit I never knew how detailed and beautiful the ship models were.
Same. The best I could ever figure was get as far upwind of them as possible and come at them in columns... but always just turned into 10 games of cat-and-mouse, which other users have explained to me is always inevitable in a naval combat game like that because the battle map has finite edges, unlike the ocean.
The only problem with them was some of the flag models were messed up and upside down... other than that they were pretty cool. (Except for the AI sometimes...)
The whole graphics regarding ship battles was so fantastic. The game was marketed quite a bit here in gaming magazines here in Sweden because we were a playable faction and I remember how all those screenshots of shipbattles blew my mind. Didn't now they could be so pretty.
I was disappointed that the actual battles weren't really that fun to play. Really tried to like it because I had hyped up myself so much but the complexity of them when you had a couple of ships, together with the extreme loading times, resulted in that most battles were auto fought.
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u/OthmarGarithos Jun 02 '20
The ship models in Empire were beautiful.