Total war had hundreds and thousands of men walking and interacting on the map.
Okay let’s accept that is truely a limitation unique to RTS. It has been more than 20 years and nobody ever came up with a solution?
If the no player or dev in the RTS genre ever think of making any attempt giving it a more “modern” look then it deserves to be obsolete. No wonder why this genre died.
Literally EVERY SINGLE UNIT in the game slide when they turn. It looks dumb. They should float on the ground.
Most units never hit the target when attacking. It looks dumb. Make them bump into each other instead.
BTW, “the game is not realism simulator” and “it looks unrealistic so do not add it at all” do not fit into the same logic.
And here we have the genius solution: add ACTUAL GHOSTS on them!
Do you know AoE III? And how they handle siege operators? Thats how I want it, thats how its possible.
No siege operators are more immersion breaking then the MAA targeting the siege equipment instead of the unit operating it. Heck you could even make an mechanic out of it that you need siege operators to operate the siege equipment and they can be killed rendering the siege equipment obsolete untill the enemy has trained new siege operators. Also have you seen AoE II intro? There the knights target the trebuchet which collapse on the operators, which is exactly how you could do it in the game.
And if not such mechanics its still better to have them then to have none at all, like in AoE III.
Total War is kind of a bad example. When zoomed out (which you can zoom out incredibly far) the units are compressed and there are only a few moving parts. For example, if you have some National Garde in Napoleon: Total War and zoom out, they become nearly 2D at a distance.
But, the argument of the siege crews not being well optimized or having too many parts is kind of invalid too. A few dudes on a cannon isn’t going to be a problem. Even the (honestly pretty bad) crews in AoE3 don’t really have an impact on optimisation. It’ll require more animating unfortunately but it’d be cool.
I don’t care if they don’t add crews, but I think it’ll still be cool to have them.
That’s the problem though, they’d have to be tiny. Obviously ships are not properly scaled to land units and never would be, but putting little men on them would make this even more apparent and the little men would look silly next to regular sized ones on the shore.
In Total War, you control dozens of men in a single group as a whole, you can’t control each single one individually. Generally in a battle, you only have 10-20 (long time haven’t played Total War, I didn’t remember the exact number) unit groups, that’s equivalent of controlling 10-20 units in AoE while not having to manage the economy at the same time.
This is one more reason against manned siege. Same as ships, large siege weapons like trebuchet would have to be too big if you put some men operating it in.
Yes, I am aware that it’s a huge challenge. they will have to make ships huge and entire scale will change, the other buildings, maps, everything will have to be even bigger. Implementing this is incredibly hard, but that’s how history is made and critical acclaim comes. Everyone loves to see something grand which was thought impossible. and then no one can call the game overpriced.
There’s honestly a limit to how much realism you can and should add to the game.
To have little men manning a ship and stuff, you have to give up the scaling argument. Which I’m all for lol. I don’t really care about unit scales.
The ghosts in the construction site are like half the size of not a third of the size of the units. I don’t mind that at all.
Have little tiny men on a ship doing ship things, ghosts perhaps. Don’t need to make ships bigger. I think they are big enough. Almost as big as the bloody buildings!
In AOE III, you see random native tribes in campaigns. These tribes play absolutely 0 role in the gameplay. You just see some chick coming out of her tent and doing the washing or something. Yet it’s such an amazing touch to the scene. And the people are tiny as well.
To me, the less static images the better.
I love to see a game and city come alive. Especially during times of war and battle!
“Suspension of disbelief. The intentional avoidance of critical thinking in relation to a fictional piece of work in order to fully believe it for the sake of enjoyment”
I was sceptical, but this for me is a confirmation that they just didn’t care enough.
Everything that has anything to do with siege units in this game is just half-baked/extremely rushed/underdeveloped. This clearly isn’t in any way “artstyle” related.
They didn’t even care to give infantry basic villager build animation. Instead we have our infantry summoning some ghostbuster tier crap.
Yeah, the designers couldn’t just make unmanned siege. They had to add the golden ghosts as a distracting element…that’s the cherry on top.
It basically is an acknowledgement from their side that there should be something more to add flavour to the rather bland siege engines. But all they could come up with were ghosts, directly bound to the animation speed, leading to weird flashing stuff happening between attacks and on pack/unpack.
I bet all that looked smooth and interesting when played slower, zoomed in and isolated in some 3D modelling environment. But ingame it’s just weird and adds nothing to the scene.
All other points you bring up were NON-ISSUES in previous titles and other games of the genre. Nobody asked for the crews to be physically engaged in actions against their siege engine. They don’t have to react at all apart from dieing together with it. Nothing has changed in AOE4 that would now require such interactivity. You basically created that problem out of thin air to then use it as a counter point for having siege crews.
This is such a weird attempt at countering this point of criticism. The rhetoric alone (“these little men running around”) makes me think you never played (or thought about) other RTS games with crewed machines in it. None of them handle that differently. Even CoH has individual crew dieing directly bound to the crew-HP of the overall unit (e.g. an AT-gun). They don’t really get engaged as individual units. They are there for immersion and to convey information to the player (reload/attack/pack/unpack-status and damage received).
Each “unit” still has ~100 models that act on their own. They do not overlap with each other or directly walk over obstacles.
And I know it is different from a “traditional” RTS. Fine. So only the RTS genre got this maybe NP hard optimization problem that prevents any aesthetic improvement while every other genre could solve theirs right?
If so that’s why RTS died.
yes curious thing I also watched it and thought exactly the same, does it make sense to have the infantry doing nothing while some (who knows where did they come from) ghosts build it instead? … cmon dude there are not valid excuses. I would rather see the infantry with the villager build animation, like seriously who took those decisions? is not unmmaned siege and poof destroying animation mediocre? compare it to the incredible beautiful art and sound design, it does not match at all…
they can tell a lot of excuses, but still for me it looks more like a bug than a modern addition. Seriously its so annoying to see and add nothing to the composition, it distracts and looking ghosts reapearing and dessapearing is hella annoying. You know, like if there were squirrels mocking you out lolol…
