who thinks a World War Total War would be cool?

[avers]

hey guys, I love the Total War series, my current favorites are Empire and Napoleon, but Ive been thinking it would be neat to see a World War total war, here's my idea of hat it would be like. The game would take place from January, 1900 through December ,1945 and the map would include the continents, South America, North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and there would be modern things of the time like battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines, plus historicle events like the Wright bros first flight and the Dreadnought. I don't have all the details worked out like how the subs would work or the Aircraft (also Aircraft Carriers should be included), but I would like to see a Total war game that takes place in the World War era, who else thinks this is a good idea?

[Stealhead]

I don't think that the Total War system works in a post industrial revolution setting.

[Oberon]

I think it could be done, but it'd require a lot of work and be rather outside of the standard Total War fare. I think the biggest problem would be scale, the sort of maneuver warfare that developed post-WWI would mean that you'd need massive battle maps in order to allow flanking maneuvers. Then you've got to figure out how you'd represent the air warfare side of things, you can bring in ground attack aircraft like any other RTS but things like air interdiction would be harder to replicate. I guess you could probably do it a bit like Wargame and have it as a strategic maplevel element only.

Then of course you've got the industry to support the war machine, and how to model submarine warfare (probably in a similar manner to the aerial interdiction and strategic bombing, strategic map level only) and of course have to make maps big enough for the shell lobbing battleships and carrier aircraft to feature in. I guess in a way it would be a little bit like Hearts of Iron crossed with Rise of Nations.

Do-able, but the hardware requirements would be crazy...and knowing our dear Total War developers, it'd probably be barely playable on launch.

[Dowly]

I don't see how it would work in a Total War game without so many changes to the core mechanics that it should not even be called a Total War game anymore.

[Betonov]

Plus WWI was a too complex period in terms of diplomacy, internal politics and the connection between the economy, while TW games usually either avoided or grossly dumbed down these mechanics.

A WWI Men of war, that would work a lot better.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Betonov

A WWI Men of war, that would work a lot better.

That takes me back...I wonder whether I still have the screenshots...





It wasn't exactly accurate because it was a very basic mod, but between it and the map I made, we managed to do a passable First World War battle...certainly in terms of casualties...


Although...casualties wise...I don't think anything, anything will beat that battle...Arclight, Raptor, Task Force and Hunter will know what I mean...for those who don't...here's a couple of screenshots:

[avers]

Yeah i also know that a WWTW would be tough, so is there a TW game that has to do with ancient China? That could be interesting.

[Betonov]

Sun Tzu Total war

I like the sound of that

[cultist]

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-great-war-mod

[ikalugin]

What I would really like is extended Victorian era set game, say from 1860s to pre WW1. There you still get point battles, up to around Mukden.

[avers]

I think a way for subs and planes to work would be if they used a system like in Pacific Storm, that game had real time battles with planes and subs, and it kind of worked, just improve upon that and it could work.

[CCIP]

What I'm more worried about is how trench warfare is going to actually work. There's virtually nothing decisive to be done on the tactical level, in a form of warfare that is overwhelmingly dominated by artillery and its related logistics. Most of the meaningful input would be in managing resources and coordinating timings, not clicking on things that you want your units to shoot right that second. Any meaningful action would be on the operational level, but how do you model anything on that scale without reducing it, for lack of a better word, to a theme park ride? Any decisive operation in the trench warfare phase would be on the scale of hundreds of thousands of troops and take weeks of time. As for tactical actions, you'd be looking at a battlefield mostly dominated by concerns of fire support - on the attack, you assault a trench line, dig in, and wait for your fire support to move up, which would take hours or days. On the defense, you would retreat, reassess your fire support situation, and either counterattack or keep retreating, again usually on a scale of hours-to-days. Everything else on the battlefield, from boots on the ground and trench fortifications, to airplanes in the sky, is actually at the service of one mistress, and her name is artillery. And that's a form of warfare that has more in common with tax accounting than leading lines of spearmen into battle. I just don't see how that works in a TW format without really misrepresenting that form of warfare to begin with - and it's a very interesting form of warfare, but just not in that same way as Total War games.

Then again, maybe that's my issue - I want a faithful representation, and that honestly, I've lost a lot of faith in the Total War games because they seem to be firmly entrenched in that "theme park" mentality where you ride the rollercoaster into the gates of Carthage with the help of flaming pigs, after beating the screaming barbarian were-druids and Egyptian pharaohs whose dress sense is a couple of millenia out of style. It already seems to rely more on a view of history that's informed mostly by a mashup of the Gladiator, the Mummy, Asterix and Monty Python rather than actual research. I'm not especially interested in a WWI version of that either. Actually, to answer the original question, I think that would be pretty lame.

[HunterICX]

One just has to look at the ETW and NTW to know why it wouldn't work.

Scale, Mechanics and in the Diplomatic area the TW Engine would never be able to accurately deliver a WW1 game.