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Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead Episode 502: A Total War Saga: Troy

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I've made peace with TW problems with balance between battles and strategic map mostly cause 3K got it right. I was optimistic about Troy cause I thought it would be just like 3K but with characters I knew before that game.

 

But as you've said the combat is extremely confusing. Colors are very hard to read for a person with even light color blindness. Icons show you unit type except they don't; defensive shielded cannon fodder spear units have the same icon as elite striking force with two-handed spears. Shields and armor might be the most important qualities of a unit but you don't see it in icons. You have to mostly rely on the shape of an icon to know if the unit is heavy or light.

 

I liked strategic map better but it has the same problems as all TW games before 3K: I actually win the game in a middle of the campaign, then I have to go around and auto resolve dozens of battles. And those are not curb-stomp battles, I still need to replenish my armies so I'm sitting there waiting for all the Greeks to move. Agent spam is back too. Your peaceful envoys have to spread influence just to get levelups for passive bonuses to resource production. A pair of spies can cripple both defending army and city garrison making it viable to be obliterated by a single army. Most of those battles are not enjoyable to play manually cause sieges are always boring in TW. Especially now that you can't shoot a hole in enemy wall.

 

Another thing I've noticed is that since Rome 2 there's a deep contradiction in game mechanics. Empire added built-in garrisons to every city so that you can't send your hussars capturing towns behind the front line. However Rome 2 severly limited number of available armies. You can send a couple of units alone anymore. Especially in Troy having more than 3 armies means you're in endgame. So those big garrisons are somewhat moot. They only make sense when enemy army is present in the city. Otherwise they exist just to give you an easy autoresolve battle, something that would probably be better represented by attrition.

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On 8/30/2020 at 6:16 AM, ilitarist said:

I've made peace with TW problems with balance between battles and strategic map mostly cause 3K got it right. I was optimistic about Troy cause I thought it would be just like 3K but with characters I knew before that game.

 

It's very clear that Troy is on a heavily modified version of Rome 2's engine and the best innovations post-Rome 2 have been backported in with mixed success. Certainly, the political and diplomatic systems can't remotely match Three Kingdoms for their lack of extraneous clicks and other bullshit. I'm playing the Furious Wilds DLC for the latter right now and it's incredible, after a win as Hector in Troy, how much I keep expecting agent spam, hiking across the map to deal with a sudden declaration of war, and tedious sieges when Three Kingdoms largely dispensed with that (and hopefully someone's taking notes there).

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