"A Total War Saga: TROY" has been out for almost two weeks now. Steam reviews are mixed. Otherwise I haven't heard anything about this one.
If you have played it, what are your thoughts? Asking for a friend.
I dabbled a bit when it was free on Epic. Unless you're really hankering for Total War in yet another costume, I'd say give it a pass. I found it to be a significant step back from Thrones of Britannia, and even that one struggled to retain my interest.
Quote from: al_infierno on September 16, 2021, 02:19:19 PM
I dabbled a bit when it was free on Epic. Unless you're really hankering for Total War in yet another costume, I'd say give it a pass. I found it to be a significant step back from Thrones of Britannia, and even that one struggled to retain my interest.
Thanks, it does sound like a "pass"....heck, its already on sale.
Quote from: ArizonaTank on September 17, 2021, 09:13:09 PM
Quote from: al_infierno on September 16, 2021, 02:19:19 PM
I dabbled a bit when it was free on Epic. Unless you're really hankering for Total War in yet another costume, I'd say give it a pass. I found it to be a significant step back from Thrones of Britannia, and even that one struggled to retain my interest.
Thanks, it does sound like a "pass"....heck, its already on sale.
Which says something because checking on the remastered version of RTW 1 shows that it's still at full price and has not been on any of the recent Steam sales.
Quote from: ArizonaTank on September 16, 2021, 12:15:49 PM
"A Total War Saga: TROY" has been out for almost two weeks now. Steam reviews are mixed. Otherwise I haven't heard anything about this one.
If you have played it, what are your thoughts? Asking for a friend.
I dunno. The reviews on steam are so varied it makes you wonder if there's not something interesting buried in there somehow. I might look at it in a few years.
No interest in yet another TW. They still have yet to fix problems floating about in most of the current TW games.
I own it on Steam because the myths and legendary units they brought in interested me, and I also know next to nothing about that period of history. Haven't fired it up yet but will be 'soon-ish.'
Quote from: Gusington on September 20, 2021, 02:00:01 PM
I own it on Steam because the myths and legendary units they brought in interested me, and I also know next to nothing about that period of history. Haven't fired it up yet but will be 'soon-ish.'
It's kind of sad that the whole TW thing is slowly popularizing itself out of existence by trying to situate itself in front of an audience that is presumed to have "heard of"...say Rome or Attila or hey!
The Trojan war. You've heard of that, right? When it might be better if they just calmed down and focused on putting together games that made sense on their own. The problem with the Trojan War for them is nobody really knows what the basic economy and society of the Aegean was like in say 1200 BC. All that is known archaeologically and from the Egyptian regime that survived the catastrophic mess at the end of the Bronze age is that nearly anything you can name completely fell apart. Now that might make an interesting game (going down hill with the Hittites or the Assyrians or whatever regimes were in the Aegean (plus Crete -- always a weird case, plus Cyprus always an even weirder case etc.). But you know gamers are not going to like late New Kingdom Egypt or the Shardana and no one knows who the Sea People were or if they were just an Egyptian expression for people burning down empires around the Levant.
It makes for a pretty good-selling book (which I have not read, yet):
https://amzn.to/2XvNgIW
IIRC the Trojan War is the most ancient history I was taught in school, in literature class...along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Haven't read them or anything similar in 30 years but I am going to start, and probably play Total War: Troy at the same time.
I like pairing my reading and gaming when I can.
Quote from: Gusington on September 21, 2021, 08:23:23 AM
It makes for a pretty good-selling book (which I have not read, yet):
https://amzn.to/2XvNgIW
IIRC the Trojan War is the most ancient history I was taught in school, in literature class...along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Haven't read them or anything similar in 30 years but I am going to start, and probably play Total War: Troy at the same time.
I like pairing my reading and gaming when I can.
Wow! The book looks compelling! I was educated as an archaeologist so I tend to wonder how objects got transported to all the odd places where one finds them more or less piled up. The problem with the end of the Bronze age is you have a coherent trading system in the Levant that makes some sense and you can find where things came from and where they went. There are even inventories in the Mycenean citadels that note what went where and why (Linear B)...then from about 1250 to 1150 that all collapses. A few of the big empires (Egypt and the Assyrians) survive more or less but everything else suddenly disappears only to re-emerge rather fitfully and very differently with iron-armed warriors running things very differently BUT with some traditions that seem to go back to the world before the collapse. So things changed radically -- but not totally. Kind of an intriguing set of problems.
I did not know that you went to school for archaeology! Can we call you Indy?
I admit that I never really knew how sophisticated the world was around 1300BC. Other than some basics about the Assyrians and Egyptians, I thought everyone else was running around and smashing each other over the head with rocks.
I now know...that I was wrong :)
Now that we're talking about it I will probably get that 1177 book sooner rather than later. It is the first exposure I have had to the 'Great Cataclysm' and does sound really interesting!
Quote from: Gusington on September 21, 2021, 09:00:23 AM
I did not know that you went to school for archaeology! Can we call you Indy?
I never adopted the whip, but the hat and jacket descend from
The Secret of the Incas (Charlton Heston 1950) and that I could manage back when I did some archaeology.
So yes, the big collapse ( starting in say 1250 and running quite a while after 1177 even) is intriguing. There's just enough evidence on either side of the event to suggest there's some way to get a handle on what happened. As someone trained in the American Southwest, I would say its possible that nothing much happened except that elite consumption stopped and people dispersed back into less intensive modes of production BUT there are some of signs of major destruction, refortification and/or progressive abandonment of large sites and a lot of small remote defendable sites coming after that. So some kind of shift in warfare was involved and weapon technology did change (though exactly in what way isn't all that clear). Trade also shifted dramatically and you get Phoenicians all over pretty fast taking up the slack after the collapse knocked out the big players or made trade more rewarding or something. So something fairly major happened. I guess I'd better read 1177 and see what the new take on all that is.
Sounds like you're suggesting it was man-made catastrophe like a massive ancient world war.
I didn't know you were an archeologist, Indy. That's pretty freaking cool.
Indiana Jiaones? :-"
;D
Quote from: Gusington on September 21, 2021, 12:44:49 PM
Sounds like you're suggesting it was man-made catastrophe like a massive ancient world war.
I suspect it was something like -- little quasi-empires (eg, Troy or the Myceneans or the Hittites) were economically running very well and stuff was accumulating, the trade networks growing everything running well even with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, when somebody noticed that these little peripheral regimes were actually really vulnerable and they had lots of stuff and not that many warriors.
Once somebody knocked off a big fortified citadel or two, there was a 100-year free-for-all that brought in more and more plundering forces (they wouldn't have to be big or even have regional bases) and everything that was not adequately defended (apparently The Egyptians and Assyrians and maybe the Athenians and Phoenicians (unless they were more on the plundering side)) got plundered and the plunder went into accumulating more plunderers in a ever-spiraling downward spiral of spiraling more and more out of control. Well, once everything is plundered...what then? Even the plundering has to stop. You have a "Dark Age" (due to the collapse of trade and the dispersal of populations and the disgust of plunderers) that lasts from say 1150 to 950 before things start to recover. So not a world war, but probably plundering run amok and not necessarily by incoming raiders but possibly by internally-generated opportunistic factions.
The Athenian case is very weird -- there are Mycenean remains there, but apparently they held on and were never abandoned, though the recovery bypassed Athens at least to start with. Euboea is the first area of Greece to come drifting up out of the Dark Age.
Quote from: Toonces on September 21, 2021, 12:49:23 PM
I didn't know you were an archeologist, Indy. That's pretty freaking cool.
Well...just in grad school and I gave up without a MA or anything. I ended up making computer models (the first ones were Archaeological in grad school) and that's been reasonably fun, though a bad day in archaeology probably beats a good day in computer modeling.
I have at least heard of the Greek dark ages. Probably caused by aliens dressed as Zoroaster or something :)