Should the second patch be applied over a clean install?

Installing M2TW is a bit of a chore because of its size, and is a special pain because of the serial code.

I have nothing against serial codes, and don't even mind entering them from time to time, but what really bugs me about the one on my version of M2TW is the anxiety I experience when trying to figure out, with my failing eyesight, whether the 0's and O's are O's or 0's. I really wish they would use null set instead of zero, and put a note on the code labels about it.

Many games I have dealt with work much better when patched over a clean install rather than an install with earlier patches (to say nothing of mods). Given the magnitude of the new patch, I would assume that this is going to be like those old releases of EUII or IL-2, where you're better off ripping everything out and starting from scratch.

I'm seriously tempted to uninstall M2TW for a few weeks and come back to it later. My original plan was to wait a year for the expansion with all the bugs worked out, but I made the mistake of playing Broken Sword and started missing the Templars.

[The real secret of the Templars, for anyone who cares, is that they were the only international bank in the world at a time of expanding economies, and weren't subject to reserve requirements because central banks hadn't been invented. They were also the mainstay of the money markets of the day, which were conducted in the open in the town squares on tables and doors set across sawhorses. Because the Templars were taking deposits like crazy from travellers heading off on Crusade and lending like crazy to Pilgrims in the Middle East (and wool merchants in northern France and Flanders), they seemed to be fabulously wealthy -- and to some extent they were, but only on paper. They were probably the real inventors of double-entry bookeeping (usually attributed to a Venetian monk), and the magical machine which was responsible for their well-being was nothing more than a dusty pile of ledger books. That's what the French king's troops found when they burst into the back rooms of the Temple in Paris looking for what they later described as the head of Baphomet and a magical golden goat. They just couldn't wrap their minds around the concept that if you take deposits and make loans in an expanding economy without reserve requirements, your balance sheet is infinitely expandable (and the same holds true on the way down!). But since most people today can't understand that either, we shouldn't task the medieval French with being too superstitious and credulous].

I think all of the previous patches(for MTW and RTW), were made so that you had to have the previous patches installed to install the newest one... Can't remember for sure though.

As for mods, well, that really depends on what you have done. If you have installed a full mod, just delete that mods folder. If you have tweaked the game files, just throw the old files out and replace them with backups. Then install...

Can't see any real reason why it should be necessary to reinstall the game to patch it.

CA have said that 1.2 will include 1.1, so you do not need 1.1 to install 1.2.

Indeed. But my question is whether or not 1.2 will work better if you don't install 1.1 first.

It shouldn't make a difference as 1.2 will include 1.1, if you already have 1.1 installed it shouldn't make a difference.

Installing higher version is OK, but if you want to install or repair an install from a lower version is a real pain with the Total War games series. The uninstall and reinstall requires almost a PhD to follow the instructions, which moderators posted.

That is why I always make two copies of each previous install one on a DVD and one on the disk if I want to play some mods, which are not ported to the higher version. E.G RTR Gold remained on RTW v1.2.