never said it was… only that there are aspects of it that have city planning characteristics. By the way, money is not the only core mechanic in TW, not by a long shot. You have to manage sanitation, happiness, religion, commodities, food, corruption, loyalty, population, integrity, political influence, etc.
and not always true. Some cities require more money to maintain than they give out (if you play on legendary or with difficulty mods)
Though, I’ve never played those titles so I don’t know what you’re standard even is lol
By buying buildings - with money, right, as you yourself write
Hey, we have different views on the subject. Such a thing happens sometimes. 
Too bad, were at that time (about 1990) Megaseller
No way, Anno and Caesar III must be well older than 1990, I remember playing them when they came out (I would have been 2 in 1990). Must be around 2000ish!
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Anno and Caesar (never played the others) are definietly way more city builder type games than TW. Total War is a Grand Strategy game mixed with RTS at it’s heart. The object is to expand, control provinces and beat the other factions. Anno and Caesar are really about economic prosperity. Ideally you could try to play Anno without ever going to war (or at least War beyond protecting your ships from the odd pirate ship that might cruise around). I think in both you couldn’t even make soldiers until the late game. It was all: Put a mine here, build a blacksmith next to it, right so where do I put my farm for maximum efficiency? Is it setting up a production line for dyes or can I get by buying them from another settlement?
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I had the same reaction, as I remember being older than a first grader 
Caesar III was '98 (same for Anno, I checked).
The Patrician was 1992, though, and Lords of the Realm '94.
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I never claimed TW was a city builder at its core. Only that it has some basic city planning elements in it. i would hesitate to say [quote=“Dernwine, post:27, topic:347”]
The object is to expand, control provinces and beat the other factions.
[/quote] Because it depends heavily on the difficulty, mods, and objectives you’re trying to accomplish. Some objectives are for specific buildings, a number of settlements, technology, etc. So to reduce the game down to a simplistic steamroll game-style wouldn’t be quite accurate. Nore would I say it was a city builder.
To maximize profits in TW, you have to plan out your settlements. For instance, a core province with high fertility should become an agricultural province, meaning building food producing sanitation, wells, aqueducts, farms, food markets, agriculture-focused religious buildings, agri-settlements (radius for Attila). Where as a province located in the mountains with multiple resources would focus on industry, mining, administration, and strong sanitation. And provinces on the borders of your territory without any specializations would be military focused with barracks, siege workshops, equipment boosting buildings, etc.
But, like I said, I never played these titles and therefore can’t comment on them… But, I trust you when you say they were more like city builders than TW, which I said was not even a city building-focused game in the first place, lol.
Well you kind of did lol, but no matter, I was just pointing out the difference between TW’s very rudimentary economy (all Grand Strategy games have a rudimentary economy after all) which mainly serves to allow the player to get a bigger army, and conquer more of the map, compared to Anno or Ceasar where having a strong economy is the entire objective of the game. Just sort of trying go get what I think Tschuschi was trying to say across more clearly.
edit for the record I really like the TW games, and there is a reason I’m still playing them and not Anno (which has seriously gone downhill since… maybe the third game?).
edit another way of putting it: In TW you express yourself by the way you craft your empire, where you fortify, which cities you build around religion, and the way you compose your armies, what units, cavalry heavy? Infantry heavy?. In Anno you express yourself by the way you craft your cities, where am I going to put this building? Is it better to have the street go this way, or that way?
the fact that you can’t tell the difference between there is a city building element in TW and it is a city building game is frightening… TW at least in some part is a city building game because you build cities as I have described above. Again, not sure about those games, but from the small selection of games I’ve played, I would think all games would have a rudimentary economy by your standards… so, what is so complex about those games that TW didn’t have? just curious
agreed, but how you define yourself is through buildings which let you fortify, spread religion, recruit specific units, etc Buildings which you have to coordinate with other buildings in the province in order to maximize their potential… You have to craft your settlements to be the best they can be… you wouldn’t place three religious buildings in one settlement, would you?
like, I would also say that there is a city building element in CK2 as well, although it’s much more intricate and linear.
And the fact you can’t tell the difference between “you kind of said that” and “you absolutely said exactly that” is in itself terrifying but I digress. As you said it’s about maximizing the province to it’s potential, hence it’s more about Grand Strategy, rather than the more narrow focus that city builders tend to have.
Anno is more like City Skylines, but City Skylines with a more sophisticated scarcity economy (Cities Skylines operates heavily on the assumption of a post-scarcity economy, ie no matter if you don’t produce food, we probably import our steak from Argentina and our Llamb from New Zealand anyway).
In Anno, a lot like the older settlers games, every resource counts. You want to build houses? You have to source tools, either set up a production line, or find someone willing to sell you tools (and not just by making a trade pact with them, you’ve got to physically send someone to them, buy tools at their asking price, and then bring them back). Then say you want to get more revenue of your people, you need to improve their living conditions, so they’ll have specific wants you need to full fill, one might be Sugar. So you’ve got to find the resources to set up a sugar cane plantation, then you’ve got to build a place to refine it, then you’ve got to work out how to get it from your refinery to the people who want it (roads usually work, but you might have to build a new ship if your production is separated from the village by water).
In total war you can customize your settlements, but only in a very limited fashion compared to these games, and the main point is how your settlements affect your empire as a whole (eg you can easily turn around and go “I’m going to build a skirmisher range, a cavalry coral and an infantry training ground in this town and that’s it full” and yet the town will be able to survive even though you haven’t build any trade infrastructure or agriculture, because the economy is very abstract). Even if you do build your city with for example agriculture, it makes no difference where in the city you put it aside from maybe build order (assuming you aren’t ripping things down to replace them), while in Anno and Caesar where you build things absolutely matters.
As you said most games these days have very rudimentary economy systems, or ones that are at least very abstracted. I think this is partially down to games becoming easier as time has gone on (hell I remember in Anno you could have a perfectly functioning economy but have buggered yourself because you didn’t invest in one crucial resource early enough in the game. Sure your settlment is in the black, and the people are happy, but you’ll never get beyond the early game because you forgot you need a quarry.
Another point: In Anno, less so Ceasar, if you did go to war with another settelment chances where that (even if you did win) your economy would be buggered by the difficulty of the war. And while you removed a competitor you might also remove a potential market for your goods. Caesar had less of that problem, combat was limited to occasionally some local uppity tribesmen would turn up and you’d need to round up a few legionaries to keep them from burning something to the ground.
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Setting the personal digs aside, those sound like things that Tropico does right, and yes Tw does wrong.
Yes, although I only played Tropico briefly it did feel like a spiritual successor to Anno. And to be fair TW doesn’t do those things wrong. If TW had that kind of gameplay mechanic you wouldn’t be able to focus on the “Total War” bit. As I said, going to war in Anno usually meant things had gone horribly wrong, and was a horrendous risk (Imagine if the ship bringing food to your settlement was sunk for a “worst case scenario.”)
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if you pissed off the rebels too much in tropico, then they would burn your palace to the ground and game over…
In Anno it was more disassociated, you weren’t embodied as any individual so it was more about the settlement and the economy. You couldn’t be killed. But if you didn’t feed the city people would either starve to death or leave and everything would irreparably collapse in on itself. Same end effect.
You are right, Anno 1602 - 1998
Lord of the realms -1994
Patrizier 1 - 1992
Caesar 1 -1992
Knew no exactly the year, but in the 90th
@Tschuschi can I make a suggestion? Having read some of your posts in the German forum I notice you often use umgangssprache. If you are using google translate I’d suggest switching into proper Hochdeutsch, because a lot of the umgangssprache you use is probably confusing the translator and making it a lot harder for people to read in english.
For example: “Knew no exactly the year but in the 90th” I suspect you wrote “Wusste nicht genau das Jahr aber in den neunziger” which makes sense in German, but “Knew no exactly the year, but in the 90th” is almost nonsensical in English (it’s not so bad here because it’s just one sentence but in a larger paragraph it can get very hard to read). If you’d type “Ich wusste nicht genau das Jahr, aber ich wusste das es in den neunzigern war” the program can make better sense of it and provide a more readable translation “I didn’t know exactly which year, but I knew it was in the 90’s.”
Sag bescheit wen ich das auf Deutsch sagen soll 
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