Tripwire rivals Valve in slowness. The upside is that they support their games for a very long time but the downside is that it takes forever to get their games at their most polished. I say this as a RO and RO2 vet and occasional KF player. It's not too surprising though when you consider that they're ex modders working with a very small development team. I wouldn't buy this in early access even if it was on Linux. As fun as their games are, I just want the finished product and for it to work well.

Edit: As for microtransactions: I trust them not to be stupid about it. KF1 had them too - in the form of skins. From what I read their plans were basically the same, just cosmetic stuff.

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Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Segata SanshiroLOL the patch has made the game pretty unplayable. Everyone in the kingdom hates me and without the DLC it seems there's no easy way to get them to like me. Gifts and honorary titles only give half the points as they used to...

So Paradox gimps the game to force you to buy the DLCs, or is it an honest bug?

No idea. It might be different if you start a fresh game, but this is for one I started a while back.

EDIT: OK, so even the "hold a grand tournament" decision is missing for me... Essentially all of the mechanics for getting people to like you are either missing or severely reduced.

You should start a fresh game since things like crown laws were reworked and thus will be reset/messed up in an old save game. If you need to finish your game, try rolling back to the previous patch in the 'betas' tab on Steam.

I know that opinion modifiers have been generally nerfed but in return your heir gets 50% of the positives you had upon succession. I'm not sure how everything else works because I haven't played a proper game yet.

Oh and feasts and tournaments definitely still show up for me and I haven't bought the expansion yet. They've been reworked somehow but I'm not sure of the details.

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Yeah, I never finished this when I played it on consoles because reasons too. I look forward to finishing it on Linux.

As for the porter: first guess would be Feral, since they also did the OSX port. But given their current workload, that's not really a guarantee. Hope it's either them or Aspyr regardless.

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Can't say I'm too surprised. I've never regarded Ars a good source for tech news. Sadly, the tech news world is in a very sorry state.

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While I wasn't much of a fan of Medieval II by itself, there were a few really great mods for the game that I look forward to revisiting. This is good news and I hope that feral keeps porting the backlog of Total War games. I'd love it if Shogun 2 were ported, since that's the best entry in the series.

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Thanks Samsai for your hard work benchmarking. Unfortunately I can't send you $70 for your work as I can't even afford Grid right now ;) . I'll pick it up come this winter sale for sure now that I know it'll work alright on radeonsi.

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Quoting: Segata SanshiroHow would you say the transition is from something like EU4 or Civ to the total war series?

I can't say much about Attila in particular, since I've only briefly played at a friend's house but I have probably accumulated at least several hundred hours in the Total War series over the years. Basically put: it's much, much simpler than Civ or a Paradox game. With each passing game they flesh out the strategy map portion of the game more, adding internal politics, characters and stuff but it's still incredibly rudimentary in comparison to those other series. But that's not a bad thing necessarily! It's easy to pick up and still offers quite a bit of challenge and stuff like managing taxes or choosing what to build (both can be automated) and using agents to do covert stuff or spread influence works well enough.

The meat of the game is in the real time battles and everything that leads up to them such as training units and positioning armies. This is where the game really does its own thing and where most of the challenge comes from. Battles can be autoresolved if you're ever bored and in the newer games you can delegate units to AI control too so it scales to your level of interest in microing things. I'd recommend the series in general to anyone who has a passing interest in strategy. I've been playing them since the first shogun 15 years ago and generally they've gotten better with each release.

There's usually a lot of problems around launch so I wouldn't recommend anyone ever preorder a Total War game. Luckily for us Linux gamers we're getting the more polished versions with the last two ports so it stuff like big AI stupidity ought to have been fixed. Not to mention all the great mods that come out and really make the games great. As a history nerd I like to have my more realistic unit types :P

Quoting: ajgpIm hoping on Shogun2 coming across to Linux as that is my favourite of the series so far, but then again I also looking forward to the warhammer version

Shogun 2 would be great! It was tons of fun and was probably their best release overall to date. Just the right mix of silly stuff, historical stuff and solid gameplay.

Quoting: AnxiousInfusionRelease calendar still shows Attila for the 17th. Who's in charge of that thing?

I'll fix it now. I'm guessing that was a "best guess" instead of a hard date since this was sort of a surprise release.

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Ticket to Ride has had its SteamOS/Linux Icon removed. That's a game that works with Java.

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@Segata Sanshiro
Sorry, but to claim that they intentionally cut content to put it in an addon later is disingenuous. Pray tell, what did BE cut from Civ 5 that then made its way into the expansion? Or what did Civ 5 cut from Civ 4 that then made it into both of its expansions? In the former - nothing and in the latter: the only feature that was in civ 4 that eventually made it to civ 5 through expansions was religion. Corporations didn't make it in, neither did vassals nor splitting up empires with colonial nations. Not to mention that the religion mechanic was radically different in purpose and focus anyhow. So yeah, I still think that it's an argument that doesn't hold water. You can say that vanilla Civ 5 or BE weren't very good, and I'd argree, but there is zero evidence to state that they intentionally gimped their games.

It's funny that you should bring up Paradox - I'm a big fanboy of theirs. But still, even I can recall all the bitching from the player base with the CK2 expansions adding playable factions like Muslims and people complaining that they should have been playable to being with. I think that their DLC model is superior to most but you have to realize that many of the arguments people are using here about the game not being 'complete' applies to them as well.

Firaxis could stand to do a better job with their games on release but I certainly don't think that they've tried to deceive and con anyone. Reading through interviews, it's clear that their designers have free reign to do what they like, which doesn't always work. XCOM reboot was great but the departure of the Civ 5 lead designer shortly after release showed that not all of their experiments pan out. Ultimately though, you're free to vote with your wallet. I know that I don't feel too burned by the thousands of hours that I've gotten out of their games.

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Quoting: Segata SanshiroI'm glad they've improved the base game (which was pretty underwhelming), but it's still a huge slap in the face to have to pay almost £50 in total to get the features which the base game itself should have had. Civ 5 suffered from the same apparently intentional lack of content when it first came out and then became a very good game with all the expansions.... But the standalone game was still better than the standalone BE.

Quoting: oldrocker99If it takes a non-free DLC to make the game playable, I say fie on that. Fie, I tell you. That's the province of free patches (see Wasteland: The Director's Cut, which will add a ton of new content, and which will be free on release to all owners of W2), not DLC, which is supposed to add more content and tweaks, not just to make the game playable.

The game was playable, just comparatively (to Civ 5 + expansions) bland. I think that calling it an intentional lack of content or claiming that they owe anything else beyond the patches they release for free is disingenuous. Games cost money to make and once you define your project scope you can't go adding in features late in development without risking to screw yourself financially. Like I noted in my review, I still got 60ish hours of gameplay from the product they previously released, so I can't with a straight face say it was bad or unplayable. Was I disappointed that they squandered potential? Sure but I feel like that about most entertainment. If I hadn't had any fun, I'd have stopped playing much earlier. If it had been an 8 hour long AAA FPS for that price, then yeah, I guess I'd have felt I wasn't getting my moneys' worth.

As for the "Free DLC" - they're really not doing that just out the goodness of their hearts, you know. Much like the upcoming Divinity: Original Sin revamp, Wasteland 2 is getting that update because of financial reasons. Mainly that their launches coincide with console release dates. If it wasn't for that, I very much doubt that these studios would just hand out radically improved versions of their games. One way or another studios have to recoup the money they spend on development. Money, sadly, still makes the world go around.

Quoting: KeyrockI'm going to wait a bit more to see if another expansion comes out and then for the inevitable Complete Edition. Once I see the Complete Edition for 50% off or more on sale, I'll scoop it up. Until then, I'll continue to stick with Civ V.

You'll probably end up waiting two or more years given how Civ 5 went but, yeah, patient gamers get all the best deals.

Quoting: GuestIt's a real shame performance never got optimized for this game. [...]
Of course, devs only focusing on OpenGL from the get go, and Vulkan, will help fix this.

I get *acceptable* performance running on mesa with my 7870 and I imagine it's much better on Nvidia from what I've seen in the forums. It's a turn-based strategy so I don't need 30+ fps to have a good time on large maps. Still, it's nowhere near what I'd get on Windows, sure. Beyond Earth was one of the few games to use AMD's Mantle on that platform and it runs like butter on hardware like mine. It'd be interesting to see if future Firaxis games get Vulkan support, I think they'd be open to it.

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