acurracy of M:TW and S:TW

There has been allot of complaining on this thread, and others, of the lack of historical accuracy in R:TW, while I agree that it's obivious that the game isn't exactly a comprehensive guide to the realities of ancient warfare, I still think that, for a game, it does a fairly good job. I mean, in most games all you may get to distinguish one faction from another is a couple of unique units and a slightly modified tech tree. So I was wondering, how does the historical accuracy of S:TW and M:TW, originals before the expansions, compare? I have never played those games, so if the thier accuracy was superior to R:TW then I could see the reason for the hostility. Please note that I am not trying to take one side or the other, I am just seeking to understand the opinions of the people on this board.

The previous games were not historically accurate, but STW did a very nice job of invoking the period. Both STW and MTW had units that didn't exist or didn't have the capabilities given to them in the game. CA has always given gameplay a priority over historical accuracy, and these games had good gameplay, especially the original version of STW which was by no means perfect.

However, RTW represents a further excursion into non-realism and fantasy notwithstanding the more realistic graphics. You have flying horses, exploding rocks, elephants tossing men 150 feet through the air, weird special ability units like screaming women and head hurlers, fire arrows that incinerate a horse and man in 5 seconds, fire pigs that were used only once in all of antiquity, cavalry that obliterates infantry like the French mounted knights did at Patay in 1428, units that run at incredibly fast speeds, lightning fast fighting speed, phalanx that has trouble stopping cavalry frontally, cantabrian circle that's unhitable by full volleys of arrows and nerfed terrain effects. All this stuff not only reduced the realistic and historical feel of the battles, but also reduced the gameplay.

The battles lost out on all counts except graphics, and even there CA didn't make the glow maps to make silver colored metal shine except for one single unit of archers. For all the supposed realism of the 3D units, nobody gets impaled by a spear or cut by a sword. You might as well play with 2D sprites, and even there the sprites in RTW are inferior to those used in the previous games.