so they are done with major patches.

[Fisherking]

I think it needs a patch to put back in what they seem to have taken out.

Diplomacy is still not right and not working as well as it did when the game was released.

Don’t get me wrong, 1.4 & 1.5 were improvements but having to basically kill a faction to make it a protectorate is silly. Some elements of the economy are restrictive and heavy handed. There are still things that are unenjoyable.

They will never be perfect but they still need improvement.

If the AI is functioning at less than half its potential why would anyone be satisfied with it?

[Dead Guy]

The game is still a flip of the coin whether it will make it through the AI's turn or not after 1730 or so for me, in every campaign I've played. I don't pay to sit and try different saves to get past a AI turn CTD.

"I think the game now meets my personal unreasonably high quality threshold"

This is simply insulting for those who can't even make it to 1799, something that should probably be above anyones quality threshold you know.

[Zenicetus]

If the AI is functioning at less than half its potential why would anyone be satisfied with it?

Well, here's what the cynic in me thinks. The pattern has been for CA to get two major releases, plus expansions, from each ground-up rewrite of the game engine. ETW is the first release of this new game engine. I don't think NTW counts as the next in the cycle, since it seems more like a major ETW modding project than a full release. CA may think they have two major game release cycles to really "get it right," with the first one (ETW) only being "good enough" to make some profit. With the large gamer market they're shooting for now, just providing flashy battle graphics is enough to sell a ton of games, and they have two full game cycles to work on optimizing the AI in this current game engine.

I hope that's not the case... I hope someone over there at CA still cares about improving the current state of ETW. But game companies are driven by other concerns than just doing the best possible job on each release. At some point (if it hasn't happened already), they're going to have to pull the programmers off tweaks for ETW and put them on the next Project X after NTW.