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[gollum]

One of the strengths of STW is the elongated shape of the country; it makes for many bottlenecks and that helps keeping up the tension as it takes much less time to re-establish a defensive line for the defender.

In MTW on the other hand, there are too many options for moving armies around (due to large province connectivity) and that effect is multiplied manyfold by navies that provide even more options. This means that, in the long run the AI has much more options, and with having more options he can make more mistakes. You can see clearly the effect of this on the AI performance in RTW where the map becomes a sea of options, as, the 60-100 squares of STW/MTW became thousands of little squares in the RTW/M2TW map that the AI really got a hard time to navigate.

In addition the eurasian/north africa map has more edges than the japanese one. playin the Russians would have been a piece of cake if there was no Mongol Horde as you are basically going straight forward with your back covered, as you are with the English.

STW also has very good art indeed - the game took twice as much to develop as it was riginally planned (it was planned for release in late '98/early '99 iirc) - from two years to nearly four - and in the process the developing team got enlarged. It was meant originally to be a typical WarcraftII/C&C clone with 2D/top-down perspective in the battlemap. This all changed when a young and able programmer set up the battlemap in full 3D without crashing the systems of the time in terms of resources and that was the beginning of TW. Very soon, gameplay was focused around realism and the morale system was born.

MTW on the other hand was caught half way in between RTW and what it finally it became ie an "evolutionary" step from STW. Initially CA intended MTW to be its full "3D men" release, and in fact you can see that in the intro sequence of MTW - that's an early version of the Rome engine. Notice the man climbing the ladder of the siege tower and his animation there - that later on was also to appear (for entire units of course) in RTW.

The unit icons in MTW also were made apparently using that same early Rome "3D" battle engine, with appropriate skins of course. You can see this in their often similar postures - probably they got the same model and applied a different skin - perhaps even slightly change the angle of shooting and voila.