This is the only place I could ask!!!

[WinsingtonIII]

I have not played ETW and NTW as I am on my usual low income. However, I also have to disagree with the crowd here. MTW II KDs' strategic AI is only 3% or so improved over the Artificial Idiot from RTW as I see it. I have many a time seen a marriage allied turn on me. And the battle AI... do not get me started.

However, there are minor details like marriage alliances, Guilds, Merchants and Priests that I do like. And even if the Grand Campaign is a diplomatic mess, some of the Kingdoms campaigns are in fact quite good. I have played Teutonic and Crusades through a couple of times and they are OK.

EBII should vastly improve it though and it should vastly improve EB by being better than RTW in its own right; a marriage made in heaven.

BTW, from what I hear here I will not buy ETW even on bargain, but probably NTW- I too have a weakness for the Napoleonic era with Wooden Ships and Iron Men, and I look forwards to teaching those Brits a lesson when they come to claim the fleet of my beloved country and bombard my capitol.

I've generally found M2TW diplomacy to be a bit better, but maybe I'm thinking of when it is modded, which of course isn't an option with RTW. The CAI itself isn't really any different from RTW, but again, it can be modded. Same goes for BAI, I know that I never said the battle AI was any better than RTW.

I agree with you about the Kingdoms campaigns. I got sick of the unmodded Grand Campaign very quickly, but I actually enjoyed the Kingdom's campaigns, despite their historical inaccuracies. The thing is, at this point you can get M2TW and Kingdoms combined for only 10 US$, and there are decent mods out there, so in my opinion they would be worth getting now, even before EB2 comes out.

Don't bother with ETW, the only good thing about it was the epic scale of the campaign map (which ironically was also a bad thing because the AI could not handle fighting in 2-3 entirely different theatres), from what I've heard NTW is basically what ETW should have been the first time around.