Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On

> All of this led to quite a vicious backlash against me personally, with countless angry comments about and directed at me across YouTube and social media, which included many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint, i. e. I did not have actual reason to fear for my safety).

While I understand how, from the public perspective, you can be despised by the work and influence of powerful individual that can shape collective narrative and "destroy the things you love", I'm always a bit confused about death threats. I get this come from a vocale minority, not the majority of the mob, and maybe linked to a Flanderization of view on a public yet anonymous space that most often than not have no real will to be executed, but still, how you end up being that kind of a person ?

Total War games confuse me a good bit. I have played a couple mostly blind. The combat seems interesting but the game loops seem really, really bad for campaigns. Like, the game inevitably snowballs as you grow in power and after a very brief period you have little incentive not to to just auto battle everything because whatever mechanical advantage you might get from being better than auto battle; you’re going to lose less time irl just tanking the loss and spending a bit more game time to regroup (which rarely had a consequence). And it becomes a huge grind because you need to be constantly clicking on cities to boost income that you don’t really care about.

I’m curious what fans have to say. It seems to be that the experience would be vastly improved if the campaigns focused on small scenario sections with little to no kingdom management and just a series of planned battles that you must get through with predefined set of resources.

I played a ton of the Europa Barbarorum mod, which had a heavy focus on historical factions and accuracy (for a Total War mod, anyway).

I’d been meaning to play the “new” Rome game one of these days. Thought it came out a year or two ago. Jesus, time gets weird as you age. Enjoy the first third of your life, folks, it’s 80% of your life apparently.

I love the Total War series, but clearly some games in the series are very derivative and were just created to fill a certain historical time slot.

The first games seemed pretty unique (Shogun/Medieval/Rome) as they coincided with significant graphic and gameplay improvements.

Most games after TW:Shogun 2 in 2010 seem pretty derivative, with the possible exception of Three Kingdoms, and the game loop is still essentially the same (get early advantage - build up provinces to advanced units - steamroll everything).

Having spent hundreds of hours in that gameplay loop earlier, I just can't bring myself to play it again, despite better visuals.

What you're missing is the notes from the prior meeting where someone told the lead of the programming team "the delivery date is ABC, there will be no delays". The time to finish development was already bounded by that, so saying "please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z" is like showing a cow a card trick.