Quoting: tmtvl0 A.D.?
Battle for Wesnoth?

Just saying, they are very good.

Quoting: KimmoKMI'll have to with Dominions 4. I've barely played anything else for a year.

Not that it matters in terms of playing it, but it might also be interesting to note that the authors appear to have been using Linux since the release of the original (Dom 1 through 3 are completely replaced by their successors and obsolete, mind you) in the beginning of 2000s.

Well, I kinda like the customizations in Dom 2, like the one which changes default Ulm into a vampire race. Small things, but they can catch your fellow players off guard.

Well, if you go into minutiae, you could also look at something like Dom1 having dynamic map visuals (it looks awful, but the effects of scales aren't seen in the Dom2+ map system so it does have something going for it). But overall, Dom4 is the same but with more content (~100 factions compared to 20 something of Dom1), better UI, better mods, active MP scene etc. The vampire Ulm is still in the game anyhow, just as a separate faction (Late Age Ulm) rather than a theme.

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I'll have to with Dominions 4. I've barely played anything else for a year.

Not that it matters in terms of playing it, but it might also be interesting to note that the authors appear to have been using Linux since the release of the original (Dom 1 through 3 are completely replaced by their successors and obsolete, mind you) in the beginning of 2000s.

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Quoting: FredO

Quoting: KimmoKMIt would have been nice if Creative Assembly did a first-party port but my fears some months ago appear to have been unfounded. The performance is fine.

If you want to try a Creative Assembly first-party port, try TW:Attila. It's been rock solid, but the performance is borderline at best.

It has crap performance on Windows as well (ie. overall it's right in line with most Direct3D->OpenGL ports). Relatively speaking Attila actually performs pretty well on Linux. That was the fear I mentioned, that Feral port would be worse than that.

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It would have been nice if Creative Assembly did a first-party port but my fears some months ago appear to have been unfounded. The performance is fine.

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Great news to hear it's still alive.

However, I must say I don't share your enthusiasm about it being ported by Feral (as opposed to being first-party port like Attila). For starters, it would be nice if more developers took upon porting the games themselves (because that's steps towards making them platform-independent from the start), but I'm not impressed with the performance of some of the Feral ports I've played (like Empire and Medieval 2 Total War). After all, many of them are old or otherwise graphically unintensive so good FPS should be taken for granted on modern hardware. If you actually start looking at the performance compared to what it really should be like, it's not at all impressive anymore, kinda bad actually. Conversely, while Attila port was heavily panned, the fact of the matter is that it's a far more graphically intensive game and performs well in comparison to Windows (not at the same FPS, but the difference was 2/3rds or something along those lines and better than OpenGL rendered on Windows, not 1/4ths or less of Windows performance).

But at any rate, I hope my concerns are unfounded and while I want to maintain a healthy dose of critical approach towards their ports, I gotta admit they've all performed at least adequately and given that their audience has computers from 2016 and not 2010 or earlier, it's understandable that performance wasn't a top priority and I trust they'll get Total Warhammer to this "adequate" standard at least. We'll see if performance in relation to Windows is better or worse than Attila, I of course hope for better but I fear it's worse.

Moreover, this demonstrates Feral is still in working relationship with Creative Assembly/Sega so there's hoping we'll get Shogun 2 as well (already has OS X version).

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Nice. Medieval 2 isn't my favourite by a long shot by itself, but it has stellar total conversion mods such as Third Age: Total War.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismWasn't Rome II pushed out a bit early and had major issues? Has that changed? or was that another Rome game.

Rome 2 had gamebreaking bugs and outrageous glitches at launch (be it missing textures, ships starting on land, utter retardation from AI or what have you), in addition to awful balance, scrapping a lot of features from previous total war games (like family trees and city governors) and other faults.

Nowadays Rome 2 "works" but fixes are limited to bugs and some balance changes: the controversial (if not outright bad) designs and lack of polish are still there. And more importantly, Attila fixes a lot of those issues or executes them in tolerable fashion while being a more polished game that introduces a number of other improvements. Once the Ancient Empires mod for Attila is released, Rome 2 could be considered utterly obsolete.

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Quoting: maodzedunWith the terrible performance of Attila - is it even worth it?

Well, the benchmark results certainly were appalling, but there's a few things to consider.

Firstly, a lot of Windows users are also complaining about appalling performance (the greatest issues probably are related to certain hardware, I've seen Windows users with better hardware than mine claiming the game is unplayable). I'd actually say it's a pretty good port considering, We tend not to get games with cutting-edge graphics so you might not even notice if the performance was truly awful in relation to Windows version while Attila is one of those demanding games where you DO. The performance on Linux is worse (barring some of those isolated cases that I mentioned) but it's not THAT much worse.

Secondly, and the point that actually matters in terms of playing the game: benchmark isn't the whole story. The benchmark scene contains both large forces and zooming in to view the units up close and this isn't a realistic gameplay scenario (as with large armies you don't have time to zoom in). I have GTX760/i5 4670 and with the recommended "quality" (in more common terms I'd suppose it'd be high) settings with AA and army size turned to max, in actual play I've been getting stable ~30fps even with the maximum of 80 units on the field (~10k soldiers), which I think is an acceptable FPS for a game of this type as long as it's stable. That's playable and the game looks good. Don't get me wrong, a game that looks like Attila should be expected to run better on both Linux and Windows (you don't even have to look outside the series or even engine for comparisons, Shogun 2 ran better), but it's not unplayable or anything, at least in my experience.

It's worth noting that Intel/AMD cards aren't officially supported, though, and some Windows users are experiencing far lower performance than others (an effect that might translate to Linux as well) so be prepared to take advantage of Steam refund policy in case you're one of the unlucky.

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Quoting: FredOI would read "There's no updates" as meaning that he has no news on it. Anyway it would seem a strange move to release only Attila and not Rome2 as well.

Yeah, it does seem strange to abandon a game that has already been worked on and uses the same engine as a more recent game that WAS released. When thinking of the state of Linux gaming, it's not nice for developers to cancel almost finished games on a whim and not even have the decency of announcing that they were cancelled.

But thinking from my personal perspective, I'd argue that mechanically Rome 2 is pretty much a direct downgrade to Attila. I know some people like Divide et Imperata mod for Rome 2 (I personally don't) but then again, Attila is going to get Ancient Empires mod that will probably do largely the same thing with a superior starting point. Being one of the worst Total War games and having a game that does the same things as it does but simply better (even Empire has things going for it, like much wider scope than otherwise similar but more polished Napoleon), Rome 2 is the last on my list of Total War games I'd like to see natively on Linux. Shogun 2/Fall of the Samurai is the one I'd be most happy about.

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Quoting: maodzedun

Quoting: Hori

Quoting: maodzedun

Quoting: lvlarkApparently it doesn't perform much better under Windows, so it's probably going to get performance patches. How much those will affect the Linux version remains to be seen.

The series is notoriously sluggish, but judging from Phoronix's tests it's almost unplayable on Linux. I'd recommend people to abstain from buying it for now.

I only played Rome 1 and Medievel 2 but I think I agree. I tried Shogun 2 as one of the first games when I bought my laptop and it was unplayable (under Windows) and it was a really expensive laptop. Most games ran very well, except for that one. I didn't even bother trying Rome 2.
Rome 1 and Medieval 2 ran exceptionally well on my very old desktop PC. Yes, I know they are old games but the PC was even older and medium budget
I think they got lazy after those...
Also tried Empire on Linux and it was pretty laggy. But I only tried it for a brief moment, haven't even got to messing with the settings too much. Maybe it's fixable, I can't really say... I hope it is, because I want to play it someday. I also don't know how it performs on Windows so I can't compare it

Haven't played it, to be honest, but a quick Google search shows that even on Windows it drops below 30fps on most cards if you crank everything up on 11. Still, what Mike at Phoronix found was just unacceptable. The Linux performance is crappy for an alpha release, let alone a supposedly finished product. Devs should learn from GTAV - delay it twice if you have to, but put out a polished product. Gamers will be grateful.

It seems to me the slowdown is most prevalent in large battles when zooming in. The things is, while the benchmark might do that, that's not a realistic gameplay scenario. You might zoom in to your troops on smaller engagements when nothing much is happening but in the larger ones you'll obviously be directing forces from afar rather than holding the "cinematic view" button.

Yes, considering games like Shogun 2 from the very same series have definitely proven you can do better, this is not performance that the game should have. And I suppose it's worse on Linux than it is on Windows (even though there's a LOT of complaints there as well). But it's far from unplayable or looking like crap and relative to Windows performance we've got far worse ports before.

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