Total War: General discussion.

Really? Because when I was on the subreddit there were absolutely people defending it or treating it as a legitimate controversy.

It obviously isn't everyone in the community but it would be a mistake to ignore the undercurrents of sexism and other forms of reactionary impulse that exist in every major gaming community to one extent or another, and Total War is certainly no exception.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 9th 2018 at 4:32:15 AM

Especially since war is traditionally seen as a "masculine" activity.

The subreddit actually got brigaded by the usual suspects (you know the ones).

Are there some assholes in the community? Sure. But this nontroversy was mainly driven by outside actors trying to push their bullshit on people.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 9th 2018 at 10:46:51 AM

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

I don't necessarily disagree, still if it were just outside actors then it wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. I think we should be careful not to underestimate how much toxicity like that can bubble beneath the surface.

It didn't actually last that long - it flared up for one or two days.

After that any threads showing up were either made by confused users asking what's been going on or another shit-stirrer trying to make it flare up again - only for other users to tell them to piss up a rope.

And I'm not trying to downplay toxicity - I've seen the Paradox community, so I know how outright Neo-Nazis can hide behind memes etc - but I'm also objecting to throwing a whole community under the bus, especially since said community pushed back against what was going on.

There's a reason people started showing up calling the community "a bunch of CA shills/SJWs" - it's actually refreshing to see a game community not be completely tainted by this kind of bullshit for once.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 10th 2018 at 10:41:57 AM

The whole mess happened an entire month after the actual update which dropped and caused anything that could be complained about anyway, so I have to say it's pretty obvious there wouldn't have been many simple people saying "I don't have anything against women generals exactly, I just feel like a 10% chance of them makes them too prevalent and breaks my sense of historical immersion". That kind of people would have done that weeks before, and from what I saw, any who did were a pretty strong minority since, yanno, Rome 2 already allows you to make armies of gladiatrix or onagers that fire beehives anyway...

Actually, it happened 6 months after the original patch dropped. A CA employee responded to a 5 month old thread and a whole month after that some shady people - including literal Neo-Nazis - stirred the pot and essentially sicced their audience on the Total War community.

It's why I pointed out that this isn't really a community thing - the community would have complained about this back when the patch came out. Not half a year later.

In other news: The second legendary lord was reveiled and yes, it's Lord Noctilus.

Saltspite will be the third, but people are still speculating about the fourth one.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 10th 2018 at 6:10:10 PM

Ah right, the patch was in beta for a long while.

Neo Nazis think we care what gender our generals are? We don't care about that, we care if they can fight.

The female generals are a) historically accurate for the factions where they can appear; b) rare; the Kushites are the only ones who can have more than like one or two every forty turns or so, and c) Limited to specific factions. The Greek and Italian factions don't have them at all, for example. For those factions, women are politicians.

Pretty sure nobody in here was disputing that.

So, I have a question: If you confederate with Nagarythe, do you lose the ability to produce Shadow Warriors?

https://academy.totalwar.com/vampire-coast/ Yep, it's Saltspite. Skills and effects are looking pretty good, and as many suspected, she starts in Sartosa. CA has also added more provinces into Mortal Empires. Land of the Dervishes is back presumably along with Sudenberg, along with some minor expansion into the Darklands and Heart of the Jungle. EDIT: The forums have reacted in predictable hostility. All they can do is talk about her appearance, disregarding her skills and abilities, and that she's 'not pretty enough.'

Edited by MattC on Oct 11th 2018 at 2:08:49 PM

Does anyone have any advice for keeping Shogun from crashing?

This is the first Total War game I've tried. Other than crashing on exit (which doesn't really matter) it mostly works fine. However, I've run into a problem where it seems to crash consistently when loading a particular save. (It can load earlier saves, just not that one.) Is this a known bug? Is there anything I can do to fix it, or at least prevent it from happening again?

I suppose it's kind of nice that instead of having the facade of pretending they aren't sexist they just go all out, irrational shit like this is why gaming is seen as a boys club.

Meanwhile the subreddit is comparatively chill about the whole thing - you have some isolated whiners, but they tend to get down-voted into oblivion.

Also the fourth legendary lord has been unveiled and it's a CA original character named Cylostra Direfin.

She's a ghostly singer who'll have access to some undead Bretonnian knights.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 12th 2018 at 9:58:40 PM

Good to hear, thankfully in my experience, the subreddit has been shockingly decent by subreddit standards.

Heard about that, she's a really interesting character and I'm happy to see that CA is getting the opportunity to flex their creative muscles.

It's also good news for the future of the Warhammer: Total War franchise because it shows that CA has way more creative leeway than we thought.

Which might result in some relatively minor factions being brought to the games.

I don't like her design very much, but I think she could be quite interesting as a character. Plus the Dark Elves need more people to fight other than themselves and the Tomb Kings.

Here's a short video on the history of the Anglo-Saxons as it relates to Thrones of Britannia and probably totally not a Norman Invasion DLC teaser given their use of new art assets inside it.

Edited by VutherA on Oct 19th 2018 at 11:01:19 AM

Well we already get the Norman invasion in the main game.

Then again this may be the beginning of a revamp of that considering that the only stuff that they have going for them is a massive cavalry advantage

CA announces Sun Jian for 3K, or in other words, showing you how the game can definitely not be truly historical.

In what way?

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (around half way in) and historical accounts agreed on the fact that he totally got killed, though potentially by different ways. As the article says "When playing as Sun Jian, your initial challenge is to make it back safely to your family and rewrite history in your favour."

Edited by VutherA on Oct 23rd 2018 at 8:58:01 AM

SQUEEEEEEEEEE

Well, "Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected." Learning from the apocryphal great-great-great-grandad, I see.

I mean, it's hardly the first case of Spared by the Adaptation in the series - in Empire Divided, you get to play as Hormizd (who died from illness a year into his reign) and Cannabaudes (who was killed in battle against Aurelian). Or you can take functionally-generic commanders well past their IRL expiry dates, like in Napoleon where it's possible to conquer the Ottoman Empire with Jean Lannes or Horatio Nelson in 1813.

I also wonder if there's gonna be a horde mechanic in the game, especially for folks like Liu Bei who didn't own land at the start. Or maybe they're gonna make Nanjing work like Karak Eight Peaks.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 23rd 2018 at 6:36:07 AM