I decided not to play the game at launch (something I'm in habit of doing, even when knowing the game isn't fully, let's say, "finished"), but the precise set of issues people are having is actually pretty encouraging for long-term viability of the game. After all, there are issues that are very likely or almost guaranteed to be fixed (like the UI - everyone was playing with UI mods anyway, and even for base game these tend to be in the category of "easy fix", or number of civilizations per age: you can bet your ass there's going to be more coming in DLCs), and issues that are unlikely to be changed (like core gameplay systems, visuals, music, etc), and then issues that are somewhere in between (like optimization, which one would expect to be high priority for the devs, but is way more work than adding missing keyboard shortcuts).

And most issues people are having in Civ VII tend to be in the first category of issues likely to be fixed. My primary concern was the age transition mechanic making the game "not feel like Civ" (or, to put it another way, damaging the emergent narrative of "building a civilization to stand the test of time") and few are comlaining about that. Aspects like the AI that were never fixed in Civ V/VI even seem to be getting some praise (not that it's competitively viable - if the bonuses are anything like before, Deity gets 500% sort of bonuses and will still lose to expert players which is embarrassing, but the diplomacy tends to be coherent, etc, which is pretty much what you want from the AI opponents).

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Quoting: JahimselfAre the performance any good? If yes what hardware do you have? There are thousands of posts on the forum of person with High End computer running very poorly.

Before refunding the game at 1h played because it didn't seem like I would end up liking it, I didn't have performance issues despite having below recommended minimum spec setup (RX580, which was listed as the minimum requirement, and CPU below the listed minimum). With medium settings (sans motion blur and other silliness) rendered at 1080p (upscaled to 1440p using FXR) I was getting 60fps indoors, 30-40fps once I entered the open world, no framerate-instability. I've also seen videos of Chinese journalists with review copies running the game smoothly on Steam Deck, which has an even lower spec (although I guess that was 720p and minimum settings).

For a game that doesn't look very impressive in terms of tech that's not very good performance, but unless the later areas are more demanding or something, that almost sounds like above-Windows performance, it certainly can't be much worse, because I keep hearing a lot of complaints (indeed, that's the prime reason for its mixed Steam rating, along with other technical deficiencies like capped framerates, lack of widescreen support, etc).

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It does seem to run fine with Proton.

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Quoting: razing32Isn't Attila Total War , the one that came after already on Linux ? Wonder what the hold up is with this one .... :huh:

Rome 2 received a DLC for Third Century crisis a week ago so I could see Creative Assembly delaying a Linux version because they knew the engine was still going to be updated. But then again, it's been a long while since the last update prior to this DLC and I don't think they were working on it (or knew they were going to make it) for two years. So who really knows.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: TheSHEEEPI really like playing Dominions.
It would just be nice if they could implement an actual SP with some basic AI diplomacy so that it can serve for a bit more than just random testing...

What? No single player? Well there goes my interest.

It does have single player but in typical strategy game fashion, the AI plays seemingly by random and Dominions offers it a lot more rope to hang itself with than most other games. Say, the AI picks random (almost certainly unsynergistic and unfit to the present situation it's in) national ideas in Europa Universalis. Big whoop, it produces 20% less stuff or gets a decade behind in technology or whatever (the advantage player gets of course pays cumulative interest so it'll eventually snowball, but making optimal choices doesn't make you that much more powerful compared to random ones at any given moment). But in Dominions you can, for example, give a commander unit artifact gear that allows it to hard counter an opposing army and because the AI doesn't play reactively and deploy a counter, you can beat AI forces with 1:100 cost-efficiency. Or mass up an army of immortal vampires and because the AI doesn't recognize the urgency of taking you out, you'll eventually build an unstoppable force that just keeps coming back even if it's defeated. In most games the AI can barely keep up with outrageous buffs to production, but there's no outproducing an immortal army.

Consequently, an experience player wins by default once they gain an access to the kind of strategies and tactics that cannot be beaten simply by throwing more meat into the grinder. Of course, this scenario is pretty universal to strategy games, but in Dominions it feels particularly futile to continue and depending on the nation you're playing, you reach that point very quickly.

However, it does take time to learn the reins, try all the outrageous stuff you can pull off (indirectly wishing for more wishes and such like: Dominions is on-par with the best of roguelikes and games like Dwarf Fortress in terms of emergence, this [External Link] thread contains a good example from Dominions 3 in which poster summons "Eater of the Dead" unit that grows to its full power, breaks free and goes on a rampage killing tens of thousands) and explore the fluff (there's almost a hundred factions with very strong worldbuilding and compelling lore) so most people get a good few dozen hours of good single player gameplay, and while I can't understand why, there are people who have played Dominions SP for hundreds of hours. It's a very thematic game so roleplaying is an option at least.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: KimmoKMthe backlash at the time was 100% justified

People emailing me personally saying they hoped i would fucking die was justified?

Those are included in "commenters that without doubt went overboard". There is a difference between comments that stay within topic of quality of port or companies that allowed it to be released, no matter how harshly worded they might be, and commenters that leave the public forum to specifically target an individual who in all likelihood doesn't deserve all the blame.

But you know, I and probably all of us here want Linux to be a good and successful gaming platform, and while it is a fact of life we're going to be second-class citizens for most developers and one that we have to grudgingly accept, there comes a point where you have to draw a line and say "this is not okay", and a product that's worse than what was already available (Wine), in my opinion, clearly falls in that category.

As for the majority of outraged commenters, Linus Torvalds has made this same argument much better than I will (defending his harsh language in LKML with retroactive abortations and usage of Finnish swear words because English isn't potent enough, shouldn't be difficult to find) but the fact of the matter is that in the Internet you can't communicate your seriousness with a tone of voice or body language, and non-native English speakers in particular might lack the vocabulary and understanding of connotations to signify they really mean business without resorting to language you wouldn't see offline. I don't know you or remember any messages targeted at an individual person so presumably I didn't follow the unfolding drama in full back in the day, but I can imagine the language in some of the on-topic posts, and that is business as usual.

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And what's the point of having a "port" in the first place if it works worse than it does on Wine? Now, some commenters without doubt went overboard, but while Virtual Programming ultimately improved the Linux version, the backlash at the time was 100% justified. There's a good chance Linux gaming would be in a worse spot than it is now if we didn't react to terrible ports with outrage (beating Wine performance and functionality should be a barrier every single port should cross), even if we did get an official release of TW3 one way or another.

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About time, but that's great news. Fall of the Samurai in particular is the finest Total War experience to date.

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Shogun 2 appeared in Steam for me but the download is just 55MB so that clearly isn't the whole game yet. Contents are as follows

> ls /opt/ssd/steamapps/common/Total\ War\ SHOGUN\ 2/launcher/
1_click.wav  2_click.wav  3_click.wav  Awesomium.dll  awesomium_process.exe  icudt42.dll  icudt.dll  launcher.exe  QtCore4.dll  QtGui4.dll  QtOpenGL4.dll  steam_api.dll

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That's great. It's my favourite TW game (with Fall of the Samurai expansion) having played all but the original Shogun and while it works with Wine, a native version would certainly be preferable.

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