Yes, the new content and patch has got me playing ETW again, 18 52.94%

No, I cant get excited about ETW, the horse has bolted 16 47.06%

I wondered about the normal mode for a campaign; it may not appear challenging but you will have a reasonable game with AI diplomacy. Keeping the difficulty on the battle level higher may give you a better gaming experience overall.

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Agreed. They might be finally reducing the number of bugs and issues but their reputation has hit a new low with the E:TW. It is not interesting (all factions the same). It is not challenging (silly AI tactics and strategy). Naval battles are a waste of time (former PotBS player). Very little to get excited about for me.

And as luck would have it, unfortunately for me, the latest patch now causes more CTDs than I had before!

To put this in TW context: I never played S:TW. I loved M:TW and expansions. R:TW was ok. M:TW2 with expansions was better than R:TW but not as good as the original.

In other game context: I continually load up Company of Heroes and play that over and over again. It is fun, challenging, and has a good variety of tactical solutions.

I really want to like this game, but I just can't. I think the game developers have a done a good job with the peripherals of the game but totally lost it when it comes to the fundamentals of a semi-historical tactical (and fun) game.

YMMV,
InvalidOpcode

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invalidopcode and others-

I think that for some people, the case might just be that ETW is the kind of genre that some people are into. The time period involved many of the european factions being extremely similar, so if they want to keep a general historical basis (which many people begin to rant and rave if they step out of line), they make the factions fairly similar. Some factions may have larger cavalry, some may have stronger melee stats. CA isn't going to add dozens of new units like some of the mods, but they try to make the factions somewhat unique.

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Yes I understand the historical arguments but this is first and foremost a game and as a game it needs to be entertaining not a documentary. I dont think the keeping things historical holds here, there are plenty of things completely unhistorical in the game, the sameness of the factions feels more like a short cut to me "leave it to the modders" attitude from CA.

The problem then becomes how well are mods and modding supported, and so far, IMO its not that great. The need to sell DLC has negatively impacted on modding IMO and where are the modding tools, and further why is it every time there is an update, I see a string of posts of people who cant run the game anymore because they had mods installed. This doesnt inspire me with confidence to 'try a mod', and its all because of steam, and the game perhaps not supporting mods as well as it could. But Im not a modder so I comment from the outside.

Lets hear from a modder - How well is ETW stacking up as far as moddability compared to previous titles and other games?

I look forward to playing the game again with some mods, but mods are still bound somewhat by limitations of the vanilla engine.

It really feels like Ive been playing one campaign since I got the game, against a retarded opponent with endless stacks of identical units and infinite identical provinces to take. The campaign map is in serious need of variety, perhaps it needs random strategic resources or provincial units, and factions have an identity crisis, even if they made the armies have default behaviours on the battle field for each nation, or national characteristics - yes its gamey - but its a lot more fun than fighting the same guy endlessly over and again.

I remember posting a thread about the Hungarian death trap during MTW because of the battlemap position you would get when defending Hungary (at the bottom of the hill) taking the province became a real army destroyer. Flavour! wheres the flavour? And where have the EPIC battles gone? This game no longer delivers EPIC battles which had significance to how your Campaign developed. ETW needs to get these battles back becasue a game where your bored before youve finished a single campaign is not going to have people buying the next title. It will be like - "empires yeh played that for a couple of weeks and got bored fighting the same battle over again, this next one looks like the same thing, been there done that."

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i haven't played since 1.2.

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