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Any fans of Warhammer 3 or Victoria 3 here? I’m not a serious gamer at all, picked them up on a Steam sale and just find them confusing. Only game I’ve played seriously is the last three Civilization entries and even then I only have 600 hrs on Civ 6 since 2016.
I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.
I bought it because I was somehow led to believe that the Imperium of Man would make a good stand-in for the Total War: Thirty Years' War that I always wanted but never got. Well, to nobody's surprise, not even my own, I was sorely disappointed. I came from Total War: Shogun 2, itself a limited-but-agreeable entry in the series, and what I find with TW:WH3 is a giant mess of a game that I thoroughly hate. I have written a very long, very negative review on steam and I would have many negative things to say about the game if anyone cared to hear them.
I'd like to hear it! Negative criticism is fun to read.
One copy-pasted very negative and entirely subjective, making-no-attempt-at-fairness steam review that may or may not be mine coming up.
tl;dr: Heavily overrated, actually a mess.
Aesthetically it's ugly, garish, tasteless. Fans of the setting will be unable to notice this, but all that I see is random colors and nonsensical designs. The setting is shit and it's mildly depressing that CA/Sega made three installments for it instead of giving the Thirty Years' War a shot. But people like it and buy it and review it positively. People who hate history. People who watch superhero movies. People who are many, but have no taste.
As for the setting itself, what's even to be said? It's trash. Trashy trash. Worthless. Unsalvageable. Do you need an explanation why? Then stop reading, reading is not for you.
Mechanically, to be charitable, it's functional. It's also by far the least enjoyable Total War title I've played, and I've played most of them. The TW formula hasn't evolved at all, you're still playing the same basic game as back when, but now it has a bunch of Warhammer-related additional systems slathered on top that don't really add to what the game is actually about. The actual tactical battles are perfunctory, messy and poorly manageable, with none of the elegance and legibility the series had at its peak. The UI has degenerated as well and looks worse than ever. UX is unpleasant.
Strategy layer:
Tactical layer:
Eh. It's not worth going into the details of it. The Total War series has gone to shit.
I regret giving them money for this. Everyone who recommended this as "well if you want to play a strategy/tactics game set in renaissance Germany, just play this!" was wrong to do so and should feel bad about it.
...And now I want a game that is all about army logistics.
On the shallow but higher-production end, Hearts of Iron.
On the extremely crunchy and lower-tech end, Shadow Empire.
Are you referring to Darkest Hour, 3, or 4?
Personally, I play 4. I would not be surprised if an older one delves way deeper into one or another logistical element.
The reason I feel it's worth mentioning, despite the many, many non-logistical elements to the game? Aircraft carriers. I'd been playing Endless Space 2 and especially Stellaris while complaining about the portrayal of carriers. Far too often, strike craft are treated as a glorified missile. The point of a real-world carrier isn't to shoot missiles at enemy capital ships. It's to project force via strikes, recon, and air superiority. I wanted my Stellaris carriers to be spaceborne bases, dominating their entire star system without ever having to show up on enemy scopes.
I'd also been playing Ashes of the Singularity and its far superior predecessor, Supreme Commander. At least those games tried to give aircraft radically different movement and constraints than land units! But they were still just big blobs of hit points, because they had to play nice with the existing RTS paradigm of bubble-shielded turrets and fog of war. They couldn't implement realistic force projection without breaking the assumptions that kept all the rest of the game functional.
So I started brainstorming a true logistics RTS. It needed supply depots and convoys, because aircraft benefit from a distributed attack surface rather than a single all-or-nothing megabase. It needed more robust intelligence gathering to allow decisive tactical advantages without disregarding all pretense of counterplay. It needed to model equipment and supplies and the effects of their absence on an army. In short, I wanted to focus on ways to pressure the enemy beyond the traditional method of "make all his hit points go away."
Then I tried HoI4. Supply centers and railways, check. Production and stockpiling of materiel, check. Aircraft that are actually modeled as flying missions rather than continuous close air support, CHECK. A naval game of cat and mouse that I didn't know I wanted. The game is janky as hell, and it doesn't always live up to the mechanics I'd like. But it's trying for something so different from a traditional RTS that I can't help but love it.
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Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2 may qualify. This page describes the game's logistics system.
Thanks, that's quite interesting. I was more interested in pre-railroad warfare, though, back when they had armies and not fronts.
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