Remember all the posts over the years by MTW afficionados who struggle to explain the many ways in which MTW is superior to its series counterparts? It often comes down to the "feel" of the battle field, the "immersion", or other slightly intangible factors which can be hard to put into words...

So anyway, I got a major system upgrade and thought I'd have another crack at RTW:BI now that I have more than 256mb of RAM.

Man, it's depressing... It looks really nice at first, and you've got a whole bunch of attributes for characters, but once you hit the battlefield WHOA. Chaos. Heavy cavalry can steamroll pretty much anything, even spears. When you charge into a formation, there is no cohesion on either side. Just a mess of mixed troops. Kinda hard to play the "genius puppet-master" in that situation. A 3 star general is pretty much guaranteed to slaughter any army with no command stars, regardless of size. Archers are freaking deadly!!! You can deplete a unit by half with just a couple of rounds of missile fire!! None of my battles have lasted more than 5 or so real-time minutes, and I've never lost more than 30 troops in any battle.

I thought that maybe, after this long, some patches might have been developed to improve the game to the point where it might be enjoyable or a little closer to MTW, play-wise, but it seems like the basic game mechanics are profoundly flawed.

Sorry for the whine. I posted it here because I didn't want to offend any die-hard RTW fans. I just needed to offload some of my chronic depression...

So many cool iron-age European tribes... So many interesting units... Multiple siege options... Sweet looking campaign map...

It could've been so cool if they just tarted up the graphics for the MTW battle engine and firmed up the campaign map AI...

Anyway, you've heard all this before. I hope I haven't given anyone the irrits too badly.

Anyone know any games made by other developers that are comparable to, or better than, MTW:VI?

Thanks for listening.