League of Legend’s Dominion is out today. Hopefully the servers don’t totally explode.
I think Dominion is a nice break from the traditional map (SR), certainly much better than the 3v3 map, but at the same time I don’t think it really plays like a MOBA game (if we define MOBA as DoTA, which I do). The total lack of a laning phase, while nice for game speed, really takes away a lot of the strategic depth, and when the game ends I just don’t get the same ‘feel’ as I do from a SR match. That said, I think it might be fun to play a round or two along with my daily ranked game, and hopefully Riot does not screw SR balance based on Dominion changes. Yet if they don’t, I expect some heavy cheese strats to dominate Dominion, and more than a few champs to rise to OP status.
I downloaded the demo for Total War: Shogun 2, and after playing it for a bit, realized how much Mount and Blade has spoiled me in terms of RTS games. In TW, much like in most RTS games, when two units fight, animations play out while numbers drop off a stat sheet. Eventually one of the units hits zero, and you win. But if you want to focus on one soldier, or see just how one specific terrain feature is impacting the battle, you can’t, because while the units are there graphically, for the combat engine it’s all just numbers and dice rolls, and to me that just looks/feels so shallow now. Can anyone tell me if it’s possible to play the TBS part of TW without ever playing the RTS portion? Like can I auto-battle everything, or does doing that really screw with the game/balance?
Finally our group of four finished the main game in Borderlands, and while the game as a whole was pretty good, the ending is terrible. Just makes zero sense and is a total letdown. Hopefully the DLC that we also have is fun. I’ve heard good things about it.
Hardcore Casual 
Firstly: Shogun 2 is crap. Get M2TW and Kingdoms, get mods, and enjoy the hell out of it. Preferably one with improved AI, set it to VH/VH and play a hard faction. Anything else is basically just a game of “when will I win”, not “if”.
You can auto resolve everything, but I don’t really know why you’d want to. Some battles are a real drag, it’s true, but the battles aren’t that bad. Certainly if you don’t turtle they can be a real challenge, and the aim of TW games isn’t to be the hero, it’s to be the general. If you just want to whack shit with a sword M&B is great, but there the principal option is “both sides charge eachother, person with more/better units wins.” Hard TW battles are very easy to lose if you just zerg your units.
If you want to game the system (this stuff was accurate when I played, unsure if it’s been patched and/or would be corrected in mods):
In battles you’re controlling: cavalry, archers and armour-piercing units win the day. Avoid pre-gunpowder artillery and early gunpowder units unless you want to turtle a battle.
In auto resolves: composition doesn’t really matter, you just want high value, high attack, high defence units.
“””If you just want to whack shit with a sword M&B is great, but there the principal option is “both sides charge eachother, person with more/better units wins.””””
lulz… um, you are doing it wrong.
In all fairness, vanilla warband you can basically do that once you get enough knights. In PoP though that will get you slaughtered.
My homogeneous 300-man army of Knights of the Black Gauntlet disagrees.
I recently finished Borderlands with two friends. The ending isn’t terrible. Calling it terrible would be a disservice to the word “terrible”. We killed the beast in all of 8 seconds, without taking any damage, and then we were treated to the Claptrap and space satellite nonsense that loosely tries 9and utterly fails) to piece the piecemeal (see what I did derrr?) story together.
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is a good expansion though. Play that next if you guys have it. Decent story, new locations, cool-ish encounters.
Can’t wait for Borderlands 2 though!
If you enjoy the map mode, you can easily autoresolve your way through Shogun 2 without too much trouble. If you play that way, pay attention not just to troop types and numbers but to the level of the Generals involved. Close battles are close battles though — they will go either way.
Yeah, you can auto-battle everything. But you have much better odds of holding an unlikely defense if you play the battle out. The computer rushes in too easy and ends up climbing walls to their death. You can practically take on 1 to 4 odds if you play it out.
Also your generals do stupid things in auto-resolve that get them killed all the time. So, don’t get attached to generals if you use autoresolve.
Try the demo of Sengoku by Paradox Interactive. Much more strategic, and no RTS battles!
Yeah was just going to post the same thing as Anonymous.. Paradox’s “map mode only” games are far more detailed than the campaigns in the TW equivalents.