The Lava Lamp

[tim]

Creative Assembly’s sequel to Shogun: Total War was, to me, something of a disappointment. The most enjoyable time I had playing it was choosing which faction to play, reading through the huge quantity of historical data in four time periods with some spectacularly inspiring music playing in the background. From there on in things just petered out, and despite playing it for about four days straight I’ve yet to finish a campaign or derive any real satisfaction from playing it – a classic case of disappointment burnout. There’s a lot to love in this game – personally I don’t have a problem with the 2D sprites and I think the battles are really good fun (zooming in close to where a siege weapon is firing it is particularly satisfying). Most of my complaints are with the strategic section of the game.

The primary problem as I see it is one of confusion – the game doesn’t really know what it’s trying to do, or be. I’ll clarify. Shogun: Total War had its problems, but fundamentally the game worked. The fascinating thing about the Sengoku Jidai period (the setting of Shogun, where feudal warlords battled for control of Japan) is that it’s a period of history which really worked just like a wargame (for example, Risk). A finite territory, filled with rival factions, erupts into all-out war where one power grows stronger and stronger until it dominates the entire area and war ceases. Shogun models this perfectly, as this is how virtually all wargames work.

Conversely, the Medieval period was not like this. Most of the conflicts, even up to and including the Mongol invasion, didn’t even approach the ruthless domination of a wargame. Empires rose and fell, Byzantium was gobbled up, the Muslim world collapsed and the European powers rose to ascendancy, but no one won – there were just a lot of losers. It took roughly five hundred years of squabbling for the Spanish to unite their peninsula (and even then they didn’t take Portugal), and in the same period France and England fought endless wars and never really achieved anything. Medieval makes no real attempt to model this actuality. Playing on normal difficulty, it’s easily possible (I’m not tremendously good at this game, so anything I can do must be pretty simple) to unite France by 1100, seven turns after the game commences. With this in hand things proceed as usual, with one nation after another falling and eventual tedious supremacy.

Two balancing factors (the exponential danger of rebellions and re-emergences as your empire grows, and the way one other empire is matching your performance somewhere on the other side of the world and will eventually meet your armies with other armies just as large, if not far larger) make world domination more difficult, but these are obstacles which are supposed to be overcome, not things that should stop you (not to mention that they’re both very unsatisfying ways to be challenged for most people).

Now, I’m not a realism nut. Why should I care whether it’s an accurate model of medieval warfare? Risk, Diplomacy and most other wargames are based wholly on the “what could YOU have achieved?” principle, rather than the idea that you have to accurately duplicate some historical sequence. The simple answer is because the game itself does. As far as I can tell, the developers just couldn’t decide whether they were making a wargame or a historical simulator, so they sort of decided to do both, with the obvious result that it does neither very well.

This aim is evident in a number of ways. For example, as with most such games you choose a nation to play, and that nation has certain strengths and weaknesses, based on historical data. The longbow was the definitive English weapon of the medieval period, therefore only the English can build longbowmen. This in no way of course takes into account the fact that the longbowmen are actually Welsh, and that the English faction doesn’t even start in control of Wales. Playing as the French, it is easily possible to sweep into England and take control of Wales, and yet still be unable to build longbowmen. Historically, the French didn’t use them, but then historically the French never took control of Wales, so the logic is daft. It gets worse – historically, the Catholic factions of Hungary, Denmark and Sicily never took part in Crusades, therefore those factions are not allowed to Crusade. Now there may be game balance issues involved, but that’s a damn silly reason. Historically the Hungarians never conquered Spain – should my troops be prevented from moving into Spain?

In the late Medieval period only the Germans and Italians can build Gothic Knights (the guys wearing massive ornate armour) – no matter that by that point in the game, if you started early, it is highly unlikely that either nation even exists, let alone controls their own homelands. On a similar note, “Chivalric” units (which represent the more advanced, and also more decadent, warriors of the middle medieval period) simply cannot be built until 1205 when this period is judged to have started. It doesn’t matter how large your empire is, how culturally advanced it is, how much trade you engage in, and so on – chivalry happens everywhere in 1205, and that’s that. Finally like most modern wargames there are random events – plagues, heretics, influential leaders appearing and so on – but unlike Shogun and most similar games, these events are mostly not random, but match historical events. In 13-something a new religious movements sweeps through the Almohad portion of Spain, and to hell with whether there are any moors left there, or indeed in the world at all.

Some special units are specific to a region rather than specific to a faction – Swiss Pikemen, for example, are to spearmen what longbowmen are to archers. Obviously (?) these superior troops can only be built in Switzerland, because, well, historically Switzerland had better pikemen. Now some would say that these little details add vital flavour and authenticity to the game, making it less dry. I’d be inclined to agree, if it weren’t for the rest of the game not following this principle. This is what I mean about it being confused – in places it makes illogical or irritating restrictions on behaviour for the sake of historical accuracy, whereas in others you are free to do what ought to be impossible deeds (given what any empire was capable of during the period).

Others would say I’m being stupidly picky about things that aren’t actually that important, and yet the game clearly (and deservedly, for the most part), prides itself on atmosphere. Anyone playing the game without either doing very, very badly, or playing on a difficulty level too high for them, or specifically restricting their behaviour in absurd ways, will find that they are rapidly the custodian of a vast, unwieldy pan-European empire riven by internal strife. This is quite a nice model of late Rome, but bears no real resemblance at all to the feel of the Medieval (at least for the European Catholic nations). To make matters worse, you’ll be beset by events and statements that continually assume that the world looks much like it did historically, rather than ruled by a single nation as you have done.

Now to be fair, I think the developers realised some of this problem and made an attempt to alleviate it. At the beginning of a campaign you have the option not to aim for world domination, but instead to achieve various historical or quasi-historical goals for your country. There are a couple of interesting ones (such as dominating trade as the Italians, or as the French having to build a succession of large buildings including a huge castle in the Holy Land and Notre Dame cathedral). As far as I can tell though, it’s too little, too late. Very few countries have any really interesting objectives – defend your homeland, capture a couple of bits of adjacent territory which your people consider theirs, try to get a crusade or two off as a Catholic nation, and after that just start bloodily conquering your way across the world as usual (capturing extra territory being for the most part the only real way to get enough objective points to win).

All well and good to smugly lambast the game, but what would I have done about it? I think the most straightforward thing to do is just split the historical simulation and the wargame right down the middle. The same basic engine can easily handle both, the only difference is in the details. Rather than “domination” and “glorious achievements”, have a “wargame” mode and a “history” (or something better named) mode. In wargame mode everything is up for grabs – the idea of the game is to take an evocative period of history and turn it into something it isn’t, but something which a lot of people really enjoy. Cut out the most of the historically accurate events and unit restrictions amongst similar nations (you’d maybe want to keep a few for the sake of making the nations play differently, but to be honest the wildly differing starting locations do this already) and let the player have at it. Make heretic uprisings a truly random event, not something that only happens in the south of France. Let people develop technology as they will – who cares when gunpowder was actually discovered? Keep some of the feel of the period without restricting the player on an apparently arbitrary basis.

Historical mode would be the opposite. The most important thing is that this shouldn’t be a mode where the aim is to “win” – the aim should be to play an evocative, inspiring simulation of the period. If there needs to be any real goal at all, it should be to slightly outdo the achievements of the nation in history, not to take over the entire continent in a wildly implausible way. The game is easily capable of doing this – your first objective as the English is to take France, but having done this you stand no real chance of totally destroying the French faction and retaining control of it should be your goal for the rest of the game. Depending on taste (not my kind of thing, but some probably like it) there could be a massively expanded set of objectives – capture this province by this date, build this size of building in this city, and so on.

(As an aside, this kind of endeavour would almost certainly require some of the “Dramatic Management” philosophy that’s being investigated by interactive narrative researchers and which desperately needs to be considered by the developers of large wargames – Shogun was one of the original inspirations for my University project, which can be found elsewhere on this forum if you’re interested. The basic idea is that the game world should arrange itself in such a way that it presents challenges and situations of interest to the player, not challenges and situations that simply make realistic sense. To put it really plainly, the hardest fight should always be the last one.

One other place where this is important is regarding the interaction between the strategic and tactical portions of the game. There are two ways to view this relationship: either the tactical battles are a more entertaining way to resolve the conflicts that result from the strategic game, or the strategic game is a good excuse for tying a series of tactical battles together. For me, both relationships fail. The strategic game very rarely generates entertaining scenarios for the tactical battle, and in the same way it’s often a mercy that battles can be automatically resolved. A bit of dramatic management would help immensely here.)

Now you might be thinking that even if I’m not finding the game a very satisfying pure wargame, and even if I’m not finding it a great historical simulation, surely I can still just get on and play it? It’s not like there’s anything resembling an impossible jumping puzzle stopping me from actually carrying on. Well…

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I have one other issue with the game which isn’t a minor matter of taste, and it’s one that plagues many or most of the wargames ever made (Twilight Imperium was the first one where it became overwhelmingly obvious to me that it was a problem, but looking around at others it’s plain to see it’s endemic): logistics. Most simulations of war include the notion of cost – better troops use up more resources and you can therefore deploy less of them. Different games represent this is different ways (paying for them from a bank balance being only the most common) but almost all include it in one way or another. It’s pretty much essential for game balance as much as realism – often unit costs etc are highly unrealistic but vital to make sure the game works. This isn’t what I’m referring to – as a handy label, let’s call this unit economics. Medieval, as a fairly typical wargame, includes a fairly typical economic scheme – all units cost some amount of gold, with the amount increasing for more powerful units. One small unit of powerful knights can cost as much as much as ten unit of peasants. Working out whether that unit of knights is more or less useful than the peasants is part of the fun of recruiting them in the first place.

Also slightly separate is what I will refer to (after the Magic: The Gathering mechanic) as upkeep. This is the idea that not only do military forces require substantial investment to create, but also to maintain. Not all games include this concept. Some games only use it for certain units to add an additional balancing or flavour factor. It’s certainly more common in computer games (such as Medieval) than it is in tabletop games, where such things tend to be more bother than they’re worth. Medieval includes a typically linear upkeep scheme – each unit has an upkeep cost, generally something like a third to a half of the purchase cost, which must be paid each turn out of the bank before any new units can be created. This rate makes for a very interesting economic balance on Medieval, one that makes armies incredibly expensive to support, and one that adds a lot of flavour because it means that the cost of garrisoning a province has to be weighed against the benefit of owning that province. Sadly as usual in games this gets exploited around in various ways, particularly as the domination objective virtually requires such behaviour.

(This illustrates another balancing problem with the main game – accurate reflection of the medieval situation should make it virtually impossible to support any nation larger than something the size of France – that’s the whole point behind the fall of Rome and the collapse of the Byzantines. However, permitting the game to be played as a wargame requires that it be possible, so once again the balance is somewhere in the middle making vast empires just about possible, but frustratingly unwieldy, and not much fun at all. I think Civ’s corruption mechanic is a much smoother way of resolving this issue than the Total War rebellion problem. In brief, in Civ the further a city is from your capital the more of its productive output is wasted, which neatly models Constantine’s reason for moving the Roman capital to Byzantium. In the Total War games, provinces require garrisons to stop them revolting, and large empires require larger and larger garrisons, with too fast an expansion resulting in the cost of garrisoning potentially outstripping the income of the empire. This is a fascinating game mechanic, but again with little basis in the medieval period. In practice when something was too difficult to hold, the conquerors withdrew rather than throw all their resources into it because they needed to control X% of the world in order to be able to win.)

Again, this is not what I mean by logistics. Logistics is the problem of supplying troops, but it isn’t just how much support they need, but where they need it. In practice, armies require immense supplies, but the more centralised those supplies are the more difficult it is to get them to the right place at the right time. This is a really, really boring subject. No one wants to be worrying about supply trains when they could be taking heads (or names). However, the absence of any concept of logistics is a hugely dangerous problem for any wargame because of one problem: the massive army steamroller.

Anyone who’s played Risk will recognise this beast. Put a hundred armies down in one province and steamroller your way across the board. In Risk, it’s fun. It’s how the game works. It’s silly, but then if you want to play something that isn’t silly you shouldn’t be playing such a silly game. Risk includes costs and benefits to such behaviour, and crucially it’s so quick to resolve that much conflict that it doesn’t really matter. Take a more involved, time-consuming wargame (Risk is time consuming because it goes this way and that, not because it actually takes a long time to resolve anything) and this is a nightmarish problem. The worst offender I’ve ever seen was Master of Orion II, and anyone familiar with the game should know the phenomenon I’m referring to. One of the potential enemy empires were an alien race of technologists, and if the player didn’t eradicate them from the universe early in the game they would inevitably produce a monstrously insurmountable horde of immense spaceships that would gradually raze everything in existence to the ground.

The problem for games without logistics is that this kind of behaviour – building one immensely powerful army and rampaging about with it – is the only sensible behaviour to adopt. It’s a typical arms race problem. In theory the players could agree not to behave like this, but if one player does so (which is inevitable with AI opponents) then everybody else has to match them or be crushed. It therefore becomes a lumbering battle of manoeuvre where each player has a single juggernaut of destruction and the objective is to steer your juggernaut towards the enemy capital (or HQ, or whatever) before theirs reaches yours. Should the two juggernauts meet (and of course their juggernaut can only be stopped by yours) then they generally mutually annihilate, and some third player will destroy the both of you, assuming there are any others left. This can be entertaining once or twice, but after a while I crave something that bears the slightest resemblance to a real war – one that has fronts, and garrisons, tos and fros, that sort of thing. Not even the Mongol Hordes behaved as bizarrely as these game juggernauts.

(I’m reminded of Precedence’s pretty silly Aliens vs Predator card game, during which the players spent half an hour shuffling about in their decks trying to get their characters equipped properly, and then ten minutes rolling dice to see who won. I’m sure there can’t be many wargamers who haven’t seen a similar situation in a wargame, but you might have to substitute much longer times.)

The Total War games suffer particularly badly from this problem because of the way the tactical battle engine doesn’t handle battles with more than about a thousand men a side very well. I’m sure there are crucial technical reasons why the player can’t control more than sixteen units at a time, but having nine tenths of your army only available as reinforcements to replace casualties is not much fun. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that as stated, the strategic map pretty much encourages this sort of situation to occur. In short, the game does the most what it is worst equipped to handle.

Playing the Viking Invasion expansion as the Welsh, I discovered to my horror and amusement that in the time it had taken me to secure the Welsh homelands and build up enough of an economic base to support more than a skeleton garrison, the nearby Angles had parked an absurd army of over 6000 men on the juncture between me, them and the Saxons. The basic situation then becomes, if I attack those 6000 men with enough of the right kind and right quality of troops to win, then slog through the four hour tactical battle it would take to resolve it, then I either win the strategic game or I get smashed by someone else’s army of 6000. If I attack a province nearby instead, then I have to ensure that every province has a garrison sufficient to fight of an assault by those 6000 (not realistically possible) when they counterattack.

Some handling of logistics, no matter how simple, helps with this problem, because clashing titans isn’t a very rewarding or because the game in question doesn’t handle large battles. As far as I can tell, the most utterly basic system of logistics is the one in Diplomacy – only one army per province, and all armies have the same strength. Many board wargames use a “stacking limit” – units have different strengths, but you can only include some small number in each province. Typically battle casualties can only be taken from among the units in the battle, meaning that focusing all of the most powerful units together means that some will inevitably die even though their strength is greater. Fantasy Flight’s recent A Game of Thrones – The Boardgame includes a relatively sophisticated system where each player can only support a very limited number of armies that include more than one unit. Medieval itself includes such limits in the sense that every army on the board is limited to both 960 men and no more than 16 individual units. However, since any number of armies can be stacked together in a province, and during the battle itself any sixteen units from the combined armies can be used, this limit is effectively meaningless.

So, how would I deal with the logistical problems in the Total War games (I consider this Shogun’s primary flaw)? Very harshly. As a simple solution, we could say that the cost of supporting armies should be multiplied by the number of armies in the province. Three armies together therefore costs nine times the cost of one army, rather than only three times. Combined with the prodigious support costs already in the game, this would make forces larger than one army basically impossible except in the most extraordinarily important circumstances (which historically makes perfect sense – especially given that even the Mongols behaved like this, and they were the original juggernaut). For sanity, a separate garrison should be allowed in each province to avoid the tedium of having to shuffle units in and out of armies to avoid paying increased upkeep while still retaining forces in each province. As an elegant solution, any forces inside the province’s castle could be exempt from this additional upkeep cost, which has the added benefit that the improved capacity of the larger castles would actually make a difference in the game.

(Curiously, Medieval actually includes a system bearing vague resemblance to this in its naval system. As far as I can tell, ships don’t have a simple linear upkeep, but one that is dynamic based on how many ports you have, and how far away from them they ship is.)

This problem is really the reason I won’t be playing Medieval any more, at least in strategic campaign mode. In a board game I can agree with the other players to behave sensibly, or make subtle rules adjustments to force them to. In a computer game like this I have no way to stop the computer players doing it, and short of fighting the same tedious arms race again and again all I can do is play something else instead. Troubled readers should note that I get burnout a lot faster than most people seem to. You’ll have to wait for the Black & White vivisection for the worst of it.

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For the sake of completeness, and because I’m a whiny git, I’ll mention the little things. To clarify, these are things I didn’t like. Arrogantly I consider the above mentioned problems serious game flaws, this is just stuff that bugged me, or that I didn’t like, but nothing game breaking. There are a large number of other minor irritations (as there always are in games of this scale) but they seem to be quite well agreed upon in what I’ve seen of the Total War community.

Having played for four days straight, I never saw a single siege. Looking online at veteran player’s experiences, this seems pretty normal. Castles under siege fall so quickly when starved out, and with so few casualties for the attackers, that there is almost no point storming a castle under any circumstances. On a couple of occasions I wanted to eradicate a garrison because the Pope had given me two years to get out, but because sieges are so rare I hadn’t built any catapults so I just had to suck up the casualties. No sieges = bad, whether we’re playing for historical accuracy or not. My copy of Kingmaker says that in the Medieval period castles couldn’t hold out for long under siege, but it strikes me that if there was no point to besieging a castle (and 99% of the time it was quicker and easier to starve them out) then nobody would ever have done it, and all the technological development that went into cannons and boiling oil and round towers and star forts wouldn’t have happened. Something is wrong here.

Simple solution: massively increase the time that castles can hold out under siege. Maybe allow some kind of building which gives increased food supplies. Coastal castles with friendly adjacent fleets should really be able to hold out for an effectively unlimited period. As it is now, the only real reason to get involved with siege equipment is because you engineer a situation which is inefficient for yourself just for the sake of seeing it.

I don’t like the way generals work. At first I thought it was great, flicking through my units, finding the high acumen and high loyalty generals, giving them titles, building Admiralties, giving them more titles, and so on. As things went on, though, it became clear that things were a bit silly. My best military commander was the leader of a group of peasants, and despite the passage of centuries he couldn’t be extricated from that unit of peasants. Flicking through hundreds of units trying to locate the best general is quite amazingly dull after a while, as is tracking down all your existing generals and sending emissaries to the rubbish ones. I like the basic system of stats, governers, dread and so on (plus the vices and virtues), I just don’t like the interface issues of getting through it, and the silliness of having a unit of peasants accompany an army of Templar Knights.

Simple solution: remove generals and have generals built as a unit. In fact, there’s already a unit in the game which would be ideal, the Royal Bodyguard (or Ghulams for the Muslims), which is a bit of an oddball in the game otherwise. If only Royal Knight units included generals, it would be much easier to keep track of them all, their battlefield deployment would seem more sensible (exactly how many generals can you remember that lead from the front of a unit of spearmen?) and you could build more whenever you wanted them. A possible sophistication of this would that Royal Bodyguard units can’t be disbanded, meaning that getting rid of a troublesome general actually does require having them assassinated (perhaps attempted assassination could be implicit in a click of the disband button, with appropriate consequences). Backwater garrisons probably wouldn’t include generals, but again this seems sensible. It also makes princes effectively become a kind of free general, which seems wholly appropriate. An obvious exploit of this is that a player could just keep building Royal Knights to get good generals, and a good fix for this would be only permitting one general per army stack. In combination with my logistical suggestion, this would make generals a double-edged sword, as you should never really have more of them than you have armies to command, and if you build too many you have to have the excess assassinated (perhaps there could be a more reasonable solution as well, such as buying them large estates and retiring them – in effect paying them to go away). It would also mean that you really had to give your princes armies to command, which sounds like a lot of good clean medieval fun.

The tactical battle interface is a bit of a pig. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve tried to select a unit in combat, and instead clicked on the guys they were fighting, thus ordering whatever other unit I already had selected to rush over and join in. Dragging formation boxes works reasonably well, except when looking down a hill (don’t get me started on the painfully restrictive camera, even with “restrict camera” turned off, it’s a nightmare – maybe some people like that kind of thing, but that’s no reason to stop me getting a bird’s eye view of the battlefield so I can actually see what’s goddamn going on if I want to), and the game’s tactics require you to spend a whole lot of time looking down a hill. Deploying a three-deep line of spearmen in front of a two-deep like of archers at the top of a steep hill is an intensely frustrating process. I know there are a variety of hotkeys and alternatives to help (I could solve my first problem by always deselecting the current unit, or by using the unit icons at the bottom of the screen) but they only stab at the problem rather than really solving it. I couldn’t with any honesty claim that I could design a better battle interface but I do know that this one doesn’t really work very well a lot of the time. Perhaps the old left click to select, right click to do something trick would work.

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To sum up, I was really looking forward to playing Medieval. Friends had told me that it solved some of the things I didn’t like about Shogun, and I was awestruck by the wealth of historical detail involved. At heart though, it’s just a wargame, and when evaluated as a wargame it comes out pretty badly because of a confused basis (not sure whether it’s a wargame or a simulation) and one severely flawed mechanic (the way large armies are inevitable but poorly handled). In a typical burnout scenario I played it, and played it, and played it… and played it… and finally realised I wasn’t actually enjoying myself.

I’m sure for many people the majestic scope of the game and the genuinely overwhelming sense of period that affected even nasty old me to begin with will massively overwhelm what I see as critical flaws, and for them it will be a highly satisfying wargame, or historical simulator, or whatever they’re trying to get out of it. I am happy for such people rather than in any way condescending, and actually a bit jealous.
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