Total War: PHARAOH announced - Linux port from Feral Interactive (UPDATE: incorrect)

Quoting: Deleted_UserI can't understand where you got these statements from. Neither CA (which wouldn't include Feral sales) nor SEGA released any relyable numbers on the sales of the titles.

Steam reviews provide all you need for a good ballpark estimate of sales.
The amount of reviews for games is at something around 0.5-1% (some very good recent titles have even gone up to 1/60 and indies regularly get a lot more).
From that you get the rough sales numbers.

3K did indeed not sell badly. Afaik, it was the fastest selling title CA ever made?
But you need to look at what really rakes in the cash for games like that over time: DLC. And those need concurrent player numbers.

Now, I don't know if any of CA's games made them a net loss - in fact I doubt it, they are much better run as a company than they are as developers - but it is very clear from player numbers alone which titles did well and which ones did not.
3K basically dropped down to around 5K players just a few months after launch - and still sits there. With DLCs not having made much of a dent.
And the other historical titles fared much worse (though again, hard to say what kind of EGS deals were made for Troy). Troy and Thrones Of Brittannia sit at like 300 people playing.

Meanwhile, WH3 - despite a launch so terrible it will be remembered forever as a complete fumble - sits rather comfortably at around 25k players a year after launch. With DLCs definitely making a dent.
So there really can't be much of a discussion if fantasy-themed games are doing better than historical ones.

But I must admit, to my surprise the older historical titles are still doing surprisingly well, with player numbers in the 2k region:
https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=total+war
I did NOT expect especially Empire to still have such a stable player base. Despite spending a lot of time in TW communities, I've never encountered anyone talking about Empire.

So, who knows. Maybe they can afford to just play the long game here with the historical titles after all.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 24 May 2023 at 12:40 pm UTC

While I do enjoy historical settings a lot, unit diversity and faction asymmetry are things that it doesn't do that well - and the tactical combat benefits a lot from the former. The main reason I enjoy the Total Warhammers is that, in terms of interesting setting I prefer many (but not all) of the historical ones. I think it would be wise to account for that by focusing on other elements, both on the strategic layer (political and economical elements) and also more tactical elements (promotions for units, more terrain/weather effects, battle setups, etc).

But I don't think this is a "games do poorly when there is no fantasy" situation. The series did fine with many (if not most) of the historical games, there is a lot to the games besides unit selection and diversity (some people prefer to focus on morale and terrain over army composition, or might play more for the strategic layer and fight few battles). If they did want to sacrifice the "realism" for more diversity, there is a million ways they could do it without mythology and monsters. And there are several other genres of strategy that make even better use of those fantasy elements (due to not relying so much on formations with large numbers of figures, for example). Warhammer was exceptional in many ways, but most of the games that did poorly were the smaller spin-offs - Troy (also Epic exclusive, lol), Britannia, Atilla. Rome 2 was very successful and had a long life, 3K did quite well despite being up against Warhammer 2/3, Shogun 2 I remember being well-received...

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: GuestDisgusting. I hope they don't add monsters and mythology. That ruined troy for me, since I want to play a real historical general and relive an alternate history where the particular civilization survives the odds.

Maybe they won't do that.
And then the game will die as quickly as 3K did...
Or maybe this is meant to be a quick-ish cash-grab for them like Troy was.

The LARP that you want is much better served with 4X games of the Paradox kind.
Those where you never really enter the battlefield.
Or something like AoE that is "mostly" historical, but the small unit size enables a very different kind of gameplay.
But in the Total War style of gameplay, being restricted to historical units only is just plain boring. Because there isn't much you can do wrong, there isn't much you can do right, either.
There just aren't enough variables to keep the gameplay interesting - otherwise you'd still see people playing it.
There's also the issue of units looking identical at a glance (from a distance a guy with a sword looks pretty much the same as one with a spear/shield/zweihander/etc) - now a big-ass troll, that one always sticks out and helps readability on the battlefield.

Quoting: GuestPlaying with monsters is just childish rather than the chess game its meant to be.

Do you ever listen to yourself or do you just blurt stuff out, fire-and-forget mode?
"My historical make-believe is so much less childish than the make-believe with fantasy creatures"
"RPS combat is like chess, really, huehuehue *sips wine, tips fedora*"
Dear lord

Why would historical games die fast? Attilla, Rome, Shogun 2 where all amazing historical games. Everything was easy to tell apart. And you actually felt like a real battlefield commander from the ancient era.

If you want silly troll units, play Warhammer 3 TW. At least this is a serious game. I hope they combine the complexity of paradox campaigns with the battlefield tactics to TW (and even expand it further). WW1 total war would make an amazing game. Or even a WW2 game.

OK, on one hand I have nothing against "pure" historical games and I think TheSHEEEP is being a bit over the top in claiming they're automatically going to be rubbish. Although to be honest, I think ancient Egypt, being at the dawn of organized warfare, is if you go strictly historical likely to be a bit sparse on interesting unit types.

But you're being ridiculous too. I mean, effectively you're saying the artwork decides whether a game has tactical interest. Has it occurred to you just how shallow a stance that is?

It's certainly as easy to create interesting and balanced warfare and units in a fantasy setting as in a historical one; why would it not be? And it does increase the range of possibilities.

Meanwhile, surely it should be possible to have an optional "mythic" mode that would have sphinxes and whatnot if you select it but not if you don't. No reason everyone can't be happy.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 25 May 2023 at 5:22 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think TheSHEEEP is being a bit over the top in claiming they're automatically going to be rubbish.

I never said that.
I think there are some great purely historical games out there.
And I also think CA's more historical ones are pretty good.

What I did say is that they are going to get boring a lot faster than fantasy ones due to the limitations of sticking to history, but I'm not sure if that has much to do with overall quality.

It's just a simple fact that they aren't doing as well as fantasy ones because the audience that tends to favor that stick-strictly-to-history isn't big enough.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 25 May 2023 at 6:06 am UTC

Quoting: GuestI hope they combine the complexity of paradox campaigns with the battlefield tactics to TW (and even expand it further).

You should look into the Crusader Wars Mod. This project let you jump from a CK3 campaign right into highly modded Atilla battles. I was blown away from the scripting when i saw videos about it on YT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIvCLh4523Q

A cross game mod feels like a whole new era of modding. Didn't check Linux compatibility right now.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: GuestDisgusting. I hope they don't add monsters and mythology. That ruined troy for me, since I want to play a real historical general and relive an alternate history where the particular civilization survives the odds.

Maybe they won't do that.
And then the game will die as quickly as 3K did...
Or maybe this is meant to be a quick-ish cash-grab for them like Troy was.

The LARP that you want is much better served with 4X games of the Paradox kind.
Those where you never really enter the battlefield.
Or something like AoE that is "mostly" historical, but the small unit size enables a very different kind of gameplay.
But in the Total War style of gameplay, being restricted to historical units only is just plain boring. Because there isn't much you can do wrong, there isn't much you can do right, either.
There just aren't enough variables to keep the gameplay interesting - otherwise you'd still see people playing it.
There's also the issue of units looking identical at a glance (from a distance a guy with a sword looks pretty much the same as one with a spear/shield/zweihander/etc) - now a big-ass troll, that one always sticks out and helps readability on the battlefield.

Quoting: GuestPlaying with monsters is just childish rather than the chess game its meant to be.

Do you ever listen to yourself or do you just blurt stuff out, fire-and-forget mode?
"My historical make-believe is so much less childish than the make-believe with fantasy creatures"
"RPS combat is like chess, really, huehuehue *sips wine, tips fedora*"
Dear lord

Why would historical games die fast? Attilla, Rome, Shogun 2 where all amazing historical games. Everything was easy to tell apart. And you actually felt like a real battlefield commander from the ancient era.

If you want silly troll units, play Warhammer 3 TW. At least this is a serious game. I hope they combine the complexity of paradox campaigns with the battlefield tactics to TW (and even expand it further). WW1 total war would make an amazing game. Or even a WW2 game.

OK, on one hand I have nothing against "pure" historical games and I think TheSHEEEP is being a bit over the top in claiming they're automatically going to be rubbish. Although to be honest, I think ancient Egypt, being at the dawn of organized warfare, is if you go strictly historical likely to be a bit sparse on interesting unit types.

But you're being ridiculous too. I mean, effectively you're saying the artwork decides whether a game has tactical interest. Has it occurred to you just how shallow a stance that is?

It's certainly as easy to create interesting and balanced warfare and units in a fantasy setting as in a historical one; why would it not be? And it does increase the range of possibilities.

Meanwhile, surely it should be possible to have an optional "mythic" mode that would have sphinxes and whatnot if you select it but not if you don't. No reason everyone can't be happy.

Because including monsters, etc sets a bad precedent for future games, waters them down and makes them look and play childishly rather than being serious warfare sims.

I was initially against TW:Warhammer even being released and I played it but already in the game we saw diplomacy die and "interesting unit types" all were essentially different forms of cavalry with different models.

Why ruin a perfectly good historical series with this childish crap? If someone wants to play a childish game they should go play CIV, not ruin TW with it.

That's not a reason. It's just a vague assertion. You're equating "non-historic" with "childish" but you are advancing absolutely and exactly zero reason for that claim. I would say it's in fact a rather childish claim. If things aren't running on the rails you want them to run on, that's "childish", "childish" apparently meaning "you don't like it". Aside from your personal prejudices, "childish" in what sense?

You can say the different unit types are "essentially different forms of cavalry", which I'm not sure if I buy (except in the sense that infantry are "essentially slow moving cavalry" or artillery are "essentially slow moving, long ranged cavalry"--that is, if you make the term largely meaningless, it becomes true) but even if I do buy it, as opposed to what? Fewer forms of cavalry. It wouldn't make the tactics less complex, just not as much more complex as might seem from units' appearances.

What then? People thinking of things is inherently more "childish" than people trying to imitate things?

You know, my background is in English literature. I've read starting from Beowulf, through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Swift, the Romantics and through to T.S. Eliot and such. It is my considered opinion that the greatest work of literature of the 20th century . . . has trolls in it.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 25 May 2023 at 11:20 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou know, my background is in English literature. I've read starting from Beowulf, through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Swift, the Romantics and through to T.S. Eliot and such. It is my considered opinion that the greatest work of literature of the 20th century . . . has trolls in it.

My dude.... you are reading books that are not a 1-to-1 portrayal of historical facts.
What a childish thing to do!