M2 is terrible in the battlefield especially if you view it from a MTW perspective. The vanilla campaign plays best as a sandbox - set your own goals and pursue them - yet even so it gets very predictable and immensely boring once you are secured - that is after 100 turns at most no matter how slow you take it.

In order to deal with this you get to go to exotic *new worlds* and you are visited by cannon elephant and rocket launching eastern overpowered horrors - the Mongols and Timurids. The challenge does not come *heaven forbids* by the aptitude of these opponents but by the sheer power of them in terms of numbers, stats and command stars.

There are plenty of mods; Stainless Steel and Broken Crescent being amongst the most popular.

I of the storm says the whole story in terms of atmosphere and feel - the game feels indeed like a disney movie and throws all pretense that CA kept in the past to preserve the slightest element of historical plausibility. M2 is a mish-mash of eras, units, names and events held together in the most loose manner possible.

To get the idea how much CA is selling out the TW concept - take a look at the cover; you ll see King Richard having over his shoulders Western Europe as far east as Italy and Germany and the indispensible for the Medieval era... American Continent.

M2TW is simply, in my opinion, not worth the CD its played on. RTW at least had a decent atmosphere and preserved historical plausibility.

!it burnsus!