Can't wait for some more player company!

[Gregoshi]

I'm sure I'll be having my share of questions too.

[Kadagar_AV]

I'm sure I'll be having my share of questions too.

Easytarget, may I suggest you try a campaign without the mods as we do this? That way, it will be easier to answer your questions.

Then, once you learnt the initial game (a loooong process), you can go ahed and install the mods again :)

I found that vanilla M2TW has a LOAD to offerm specially when you start to role play your characters. I have so many great campaigns, and great happenings, that you have no idea!!

A situation where I had my general and 2 of his retinue remaining, 11 pikemen, 3 handgunners and 14 swordmen - facing off at least half a stack - comes to mind ;)

This really (I believe) was the best TW game to RP the characters, give it a shot.

[easytarget]

The campaign I'm active with right now is just running retro, I don't believe that changes much, it just takes vanilla and makes it like the changes they came out with Kingdoms are a part of it, which gotta say, doesn't look terribly different to me.

And I agree, there's a ton to explore in just the base game, I've still got a lot to learn! Hence all my threads with questions!

[Rex Somnorum]

The Mongols shouldn't pose much of a threat to England. By the time you expand to their borders, they'll still be bogged down fighting other factions.

To be honest, late game Vanilla is pretty boring. What difficulty are you playing on?

[easytarget]

Ah, well good to know then, I've sent a few diplomats out that way just to see if they can recon where exactly these party animals have gotten themselves to, and I've recently noticed they declared on Hungary, which gives me a bit more to go on in tracking them down. I wanted to lay eyes on them because I want to make sure I've got diplomatic relations set up in case I need to bribe them and because I wanted to see what kind of armies they are fielding.

As for difficulty, same one I always use first time through, normal. So I didn't expect anything too strenuous to happen, but then I said the same thing about Shogun 2 and got up to my eye balls in all kinds of trouble when realm divide kicked in. I was really just checking to confirm this was not some similar device where upon the Mongols announcing their arrival every other Muslim empire in the game proceeded to pile on (given the Byzantine empire is rather robust and the Moors right at my southern border) it had occurred to me things might get similarly hairy.

Oh, and as for boring, that complaint in TW games has never resonated with me, neither has the fact that apparently many players don't finish campaigns. For me the end game is the dessert I enjoy because I earned it, so steam rolling the world is my reward for a well executed early and mid game. And given the fact that I typically do not save scum my way to these endings, I've often never made it to dessert. In fact the number of campaigns for example where I made it to the end in Shogun 2 is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the number of times I was wiped off the map.

[Gregoshi]

Okay, I've played through the tutorial just to get a feel for the game. Had to do some troubleshooting to get the launcher to work.

Right off the bat I'll say I like slower speed of the battles, at least in the tutorials. That blazing fast battles were what turned me off from RTW. Now I just have the difficult decision of picking which faction to start with. I'll have to play a bit more with the UI in battles. I felt like I didn't have the control over the units I'm used to. I just need to figure out how to do what I need the units to do.

[easytarget]

There's a great replacment launcher someone made that allows you to choose at launch which if any mods you want to run (and it doesn't hang the game or music):
http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=2500705

100% agree on the slower battle speed, it's fantastic