Quote Originally Posted by Prodigal View Post
Right last post on this as I'm coming out of the closet, there's nothing wrong with the diplomacy. That it doesn't work the way people think it should doesn't make it broken or bugged.
Damn straight. The amount of "it doesn't work the way it does in my head/in the actual 18th Century/in films/in Sharpe novels so it must be broken" threads I've seen since this game was released actually scares me. In MTW1, there were hundreds of features not covered by the manual or that did not work in a way that a new person to the game might consider intuitive -- the game had its kinks, its surprises, its limitations. To this day, people post on the MTW forums about how this is indicative of the game's great depth, its subtlety, its replay value. I think CA have aimed for the same thing with ETW, but the bugs at the game's release have soured all goodwill toward the game, skewing people's opinions so that unreasonable expectations are set in players' minds, leading them to post loudly & disappointedly when they find something they do not like or confuses them or works in a way that is different to their opinion of how it should be implemented.

You guys need to stop a minute & try to evaluate the actual game in & of itself, rather than comparing it to some utopian Platonic ideal that exists only in your heads. If you don't like it, fine, post away, but the use of the word "broken" has turned into a code that means the person using it can immediately get take umbrage (somewhere just outside Troy, I believe) & swell themselves up with self-righteousness.

OTOH, & being less charitable, it's like people don't know what the word "broken" means. On the various TW forums, if a player finds something not to their liking, then it must be broken.

For instance: today, the sun wouldn't stop shining, hurting my eyes. Therefore I declare the weather broken & demand God fixes it to my (& only my) satisfaction. Anything less will result in a class action lawsuit.