Forums / The hangaround / Visual Utopia or Total War

Would you agree that this game closely resembles Medieval 2 Total War? Here are a few examples:
1. You move your guys in precisely the same exact format.
2. It is possible in both games to block a path with a settlement, especially if it is military oriented.
3. Wherever a settlement is found, there are special qualities for that settlement.
4. You can't cross water or mountains. Trees, maybe.
5. Both games feature teams consisting of one faction for every player and a series of factions sharing alliance with one another.
6. Both have a medieval setting.
7. In Visual Utopia, magicians do not fight, but have the capacity to do special things for the faction and for the alliance. In Medieval 2 Total War, agents and retinue characters don't fight either, but provide special qualities for the faction and the alliance.
8. Both games grant special titles to main characters given their stats in whatever they do.
9. Sometimes, a particular leader plays a huge role in an alliance. Sometimes, such character is the Pope.
10.There are two types of settlements: one that is a city and has economic focus and the other is a form of a strong military defense like a castle or a wall.

I would agree that there are some differences, though.

The movement is similar and has tick marks telling how many turns it takes to move to the destination. Difference, however, is that in Medieval 2 Total War, you click anywhere on the map and it creates a path for you. You don't do that in VU.

Yes, most war games allow you to do that, most of those strategy games are RTS's where you block with particular buildings, not with entire cities or bases like in VU or TW.

Again, don't confuse the word settlement with the word building. Huge difference. besides, most of the RTS's you manually build your settlements, building by building.

That is what I meant by maybe. Total War you can cross trees and hide in them.

That is true for alliances, right.

Total War is medieval without the fantasy, exactly. That is the difference. This is a strategy game, not an rpg.

Yes, and so do assassins in the Total War installments, kind of.

Said titles are paid with roleplaying points, not with money. This means that the similarity I find here is that titles in both VU and TW are earned by character building, like the Conqueror from numerous successful invasions. Like the movement commands, VU's variant, too is a bit more manual than the more automatic variant of TW.

I didn't say that he seldom plays a role in an alliance. I said, sometimes, he plays a huge role in the alliance. Every alliance has a leader of some kind, and what I meant by alliance having a leader I meant a group of factions, not just one, which always has a leader.

What I meant by the fact that there are cities and bases, I meant that in Visual Utopia, there are cities that are built for development and occasionally, but not always, walls. In Total War, there are cities for economic development and castles for military development.

The biggest difference between VU and TW is quantitative vs qualitative.

If there is anything that separates TW from SimCity, it is that one is military oriented and the other is economy oriented along with one being about the past and the other about the present.

Total War has unusual size armies compared to a traditional RTS game. SimCity has unusual size cities compared to a traditional RTS game

Both games are based on real life experiences as an executive leader, but again, Total War is a bit more military oriented as you play as the general as opposed to a mayor.

Total War only allows building upgrades or improvements on cities. The cities themselves cannot be managed. SimCity allows the dispatching of important security units, such as the military, but the exact commands and the activity of the military zones thereof cannot be managed.

Both games are slightly turn-based, where everything happens annually. While SimCity is a bit more real-time and spread-out throughout the individual months, Total War is a bit more condensed into two seasons, being summer and winter.

SimCity is localized to just one particular settlement. Total War is a bit more broad looking at civilizations from a more federal perspective. That makes Total War more military as the federal government intends to be more military-oriented than the more local governments like the city council.

Both are based on real-life analysis of history and politics, with SimCity based on economic and local political issues and Total War based more heavily on the military aspect of history.