Commisar#2307 wrote:

I think last time CA invested in multiplayer for TW was Shogun 2, it wasn't overly popular and didn't justify the expense of making all that content. It also runs a problem of being hard to make DLC for that which they want to keep the game supported. 

I mean part of innovation is taking risks, and just because something failed in the past, doesn't mean it will fail again in the future. Besides, its not like CA isn't going to adapt right? I mean do you really think CA can't possibly improve from their historical works?

And to top it off, these two multiplayer modes would be extremely effective. It's free to play, so you have a very large playerbase to keep the lobby full who just plays the free to play faction. And the free to play aspect allows existing players to draw their friends in to introduce them to the total war saga. 

In fact this entire system is exactly why modern free to play multiplayer games get so many players and generate such a huge amount of money. It's a system that has proven its market effectiveness.

And furthermore, these would add a nice way to balance units, as you can see which units are most often picked among the top few players.

Skill rating can be counted by how many wins someone has. For example, every win is treated as a skill rank, and you get +1 win if you win, and get -1 win if you lose. Meaning you can then set up teams to result in equal player balance by dividing the best players among both teams:

We have 6 players with a ranks of 34, 26, 78, 65, 34, 10.

First step is to order them from highest to lowest:

78, 65, 34, 34, 26, 10.

And then distrubute them among the teams alternating between which team has the least total skill points in it:

What I'm saying is: even with wide skill differences, 3v3 lobbies can be easily balanced. 

And to avoid smurfing, for every win streak of 3 wins a player has, they get an additional +1 skill rating points per win. Meaning if a player is significantly underrated, he gains more skill rating points for his win streak to quickly push him up the ladder so he gets to his skill level faster.

Commisar#2307 wrote:

torak8988#3885 wrote:
I mean part of innovation is taking risks, and just because something failed in the past, doesn't mean it will fail again in the future. Besides, its not like CA isn't going to adapt right? I mean do you really think CA can't possibly improve from their historical works?

Issue is no matter the innovation if there's not interest and demand for it, it ends up failing and being a bad investment. When they can invest that money else where which can have a better result and in turn generate a better return on investment. 

Currently the top dogs in the gaming world are all free-to-play multiplayer games, maybe the strategy game audiance isn't large enough or a majority of it prefers to take their time in single player, however if CA does it right, it can possibly make a huge amount of money. 

Besides, the mode doesn't have to be all that complicated, they can make a few small or barren multiplayer campaign maps, set up a basic skill ranking and matchmaking system and then see if it's popular. Possibly even use total war pharao as a test-bed to see if it's any popular. Or they can go way overboard on terrible design choices like dawn of war 3 did and can the project after a few months lol. 

Good grief that was a horrendous development in gaming, they were working forever on dawn of war 3 and then ended up making it a 60 dollar, full price horrible starcraft-micromanage hellhole that nobody could comprehend, with progression advantage walls and then just canned the project and gave up instead of fixing any of it. All they had to do was make it free to play, make the game less micro manage focussed and remove all the thermo-nuclear-weapon-army-whiping abilities.

But yes after thinking about it, the current total war campaign map engine is designed to be too slow for multiplayer, and maybe sticking to their guns on what was previously a succes might be wisest. Although I'd love to see them at least a little bit. And the last mode with the capture zones was extremely favoured for some factions and completely horrendous for other specific factions. I would've liked it better if the map was just one big circle that closed in over time, slowly forcing both players to the centre with a maximum match duration of 15 min.

Commisar#2307 wrote:

torak8988#3885wrote:

Currently the top dogs in the gaming world are all free-to-play multiplayer games, maybe the strategy game audiance isn't large enough or a majority of it prefers to take their time in single player, however if CA does it right, it can possibly make a huge amount of money. 

Besides, the mode doesn't have to be all that complicated, they can make a few small or barren multiplayer campaign maps, set up a basic skill ranking and matchmaking system and then see if it's popular. Possibly even use total war pharao as a test-bed to see if it's any popular. Or they can go way overboard on terrible design choices like dawn of war 3 did and can the project after a few months lol. 

Good grief that was a horrendous development in gaming, they were working forever on dawn of war 3 and then ended up making it a 60 dollar, full price horrible starcraft-micromanage hellhole that nobody could comprehend, with progression advantage walls and then just canned the project and gave up instead of fixing any of it. All they had to do was make it free to play, make the game less micro manage focussed and remove all the thermo-nuclear-weapon-army-whiping abilities.

But yes after thinking about it, the current total war campaign map engine is designed to be too slow for multiplayer, and maybe sticking to their guns on what was previously a succes might be wisest. Although I'd love to see them at least a little bit. And the last mode with the capture zones was extremely favoured for some factions and completely horrendous for other specific factions. I would've liked it better if the map was just one big circle that closed in over time, slowly forcing both players to the centre with a maximum match duration of 15 min.

Which still means nothing for TW. TW doesn't play like them, doesn't have the content options to monetise like them. Ca did try to get multiplayer more popular, the community didn't pick it up and they took it as not worth investing in.

Yeah DoW was a mess that failed as they didn't follow the previous games but tried to jump on the band waggon of popular MOBA style play. That isn't what the fans of DoW were looking for and the fans of MOBA games already had their game for that style of play. Which is also where TW would fall if trying to go F2P route.

A very valid point, but I do wish they made an attempt. And not that aweful new warhammer 3 control point mode which heavily favours certain races, while feeling completely unlike a typical total war field battle. I hope they make the multiplayer matches into maps thats have a ring-closing style design, to discourage camping, but not so severely as it does in the warhammer 3 capture point mode. 

And it would be nice if armies are smaller, or at least both players have less funds to avoid the battle becoming a micromanage nightmare with tons of units. 

In addition to each player choosing their faction and first half of their army in secret, which is then revealed to one another, and then in secret choosing the second half, to avoid death stacking of certain units or army builds hard countering one another, which is a particular problem in warhammer 3 due to each races specializations. This means at least half of each player's army is going to be known preventing players from for example making an entire army of charriots or monsters without the opponent being able to sufficiently counter it.

But the campaign map is fundamentally very difficult to make fun for a multiplayer enviroment, it's just too slow. And if you compromise on depth to speed up the campaign, the single player doesn't become as fun.