I played from Shogun release date to when Rome arrived, absolutely insane amounts of hours on Shogun, some played even more insanely though I'm pretty sure JstFeared used to play sometimes until he fell asleep on the keybaord.

It did get to the point where you were so fluid anticipating what your oppenent would do or making them make mistakes looking for openings to attack etc.

Shogun was a joy to play 1v1 due to all the different army styles you could face. MTW brought lots of new good players and the field of competition got a lot tougher. Great times though shame Rome was so terrible online.