Can't really discuss ETW/NTW, but the campaign map for Rome/Med2 killed the games for me. The tile-to-map thing worked fine, but the AI was unable to manage it's agents/armies on the map, and the non-simultaneous movement made it too exploitable. Spreading everything out also made managing armies, agents, and cities a chore, each turn became a job. It took me a while to figure out a decent way to handle it (the GUI lacked a multi-town management summary screen), but it was still not fun.
But the AI's inability to cope with the map was the main killer. Picking off 1-2 unit stacks over and over again got tedious.
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