25th January 2003, 7:25 PM
Its for more than looks, DJ... sure, part of it is that battles look a whole lot cooler when you're controlling 800 guys instead of 20, for sure... but it also adds more strategy. If each unit was one guy it would make the unit facings VERY hard to do decently... you know, how if you attack a unit from the side its a lot easier to kill it? Unit facings, mode (offensive/defensive/etc) are important and make more sense to the player with more guys.
Oh... one thing those shots admittedly do is make it seem like most battles have many thousands of guys. Thats often not true. You see, it says "up to 10,000" but from my experience in the first two games, your army usually doesn't get much above 1000. Shogun and Medieval only allow 16 units on the field per side at a time... and since units are usually not full strenghth, a size 16 army can be 800-1000 guys, maybe 11 or 12 hundred at the most. Also, usually its just two sides in a battle, not 3 or 4 like some of those shots have (you can tell because each nation has its own flag color...). But there are some like that middle shot I have there of Medieval with probably 10,000 guys... not that many. Of course, once you see the framerate in battles that big, you'd be happy there aren't more of them... unless you have a LOT of ram...
Also, if you look at advertising for any of the Total War games, you'd see it has almost exclusively the battle part of the game... the other half of the game on the campaign map doesn't look as good (it being a 2d topdown map with provinces) so it doesn't get as much advertising attention. Oh well, they do have to make it look as good as possible.
Anyway, both parts (RTS battles and TBS strategy map part) are very fun, so anything that gets the series more attention and sales is good... its becoming one of the best serieses of its kind really fast...
Oh... one thing those shots admittedly do is make it seem like most battles have many thousands of guys. Thats often not true. You see, it says "up to 10,000" but from my experience in the first two games, your army usually doesn't get much above 1000. Shogun and Medieval only allow 16 units on the field per side at a time... and since units are usually not full strenghth, a size 16 army can be 800-1000 guys, maybe 11 or 12 hundred at the most. Also, usually its just two sides in a battle, not 3 or 4 like some of those shots have (you can tell because each nation has its own flag color...). But there are some like that middle shot I have there of Medieval with probably 10,000 guys... not that many. Of course, once you see the framerate in battles that big, you'd be happy there aren't more of them... unless you have a LOT of ram...
Also, if you look at advertising for any of the Total War games, you'd see it has almost exclusively the battle part of the game... the other half of the game on the campaign map doesn't look as good (it being a 2d topdown map with provinces) so it doesn't get as much advertising attention. Oh well, they do have to make it look as good as possible.
Anyway, both parts (RTS battles and TBS strategy map part) are very fun, so anything that gets the series more attention and sales is good... its becoming one of the best serieses of its kind really fast...
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