Quote Originally Posted by Hollerbach View Post
What do you mean by 'exploiting'? As the OP suggests, it is frustrating to have to intentionally play dumb in order to get a challenge (which is what was required in RTW/M2TW), actually doing that is not really a challenge is it? It is not like there is some great glitch that can be exploited in an unrealistic way.

I agree that a diverse game where you need to use trade, diplomacy, research AND war is ideal, but if the game CAN be beaten using war alone, then the other features become meaningless. This was the case with say the Pope and merchants in M2TW. I at first used merchants and made lots of priests go and convert the heathen so I'd have high piety priests to control the vatican. Pretty quickly though it was clear that this was completely unneccesary as steamrolling the map was so simple to do.

To me (and I think many others) the fun of a game is in trying to simply beat it by whatever means neccessary. It should be sufficiently challenging such that even a veteran cannot beat it easily at the first try. Take CivIV for example, it took weeks for the community to collectively compose a playing style that could beat the hardest level, and for many players doing so was never possible, no matter how hard they tried.

With the TW series (from RTW on) you could either play to win, and do so easily and boringly using very few of the features, or you could 'role play', i.e. intentionally play sub-optimally to 'give the AI a chance'. The problem with that approach is that when the going gets tough you can also bend your own rules a bit and stay on top, there is never the seat of your pants thrills of *really* having your back against the wall.

I still don't have ETW (and probably won't for a year or so for various reasons unrelated to the quality of the game) but if ETW doesn't prove to be an interesting challenge maybe I won't bother getting it (or wait till it is a bargain bin game that will run on my future computer with ease!).

To summarise, I love the idea of all the complex features in ETW like trade, genuine diplomacy, research etc, but I want to HAVE to use them to succeed, rather than them being ignorable micro-management and flavour unneccesary to the path of victory.
BANG ON!! very well said!