Quote Originally Posted by Jambo
Hi,

I suppose in defence of the TW online players, the one thing they should expect from subsequent titles is progress. I'm not talking about the provision of MP campaigns, etc, but rather that the improvements made in the patching/expansion process of previous titles should be carried over into the new title, that being RTW.
It doesn't seem you can expect it. It's a new game written from scratch, and CA has said that RTW is the game they always wanted to make. I don't know what that makes STW and MTW. Something they didn't want to make I guess. It appears to me that RTW multiplayer has been conceived primarily as an solo player game rather than a team game with support for an online clan community. Of course, this was not made clear by the marketing of the product and the blackout of info on what MP was going to be like, but there were signs that things had changed. For instance, movement speed is no longer rooted in realism. It has become an arbitrary variable. I remember longjohn refusing to increase the speed of cav in MTW by 20% because it would be unrealistic. What happened to concerns like that? I remember longjohn saying that the overhand hoplite spears were left out because of collision detect problems, and yet the game was released with all kinds of clipping problems. What happened? I've never seen a major release with clipping problems this bad. The frame rate isn't even close to MTW, and yet it was claimed that it would be just as good if not better. What's up with that? The only way you can get a lag free game in RTW MP is to play with armies that are smaller than were used in MTW MP, and yet there is an RTW info shortcut on my desktop which supposedly shows a "multiplayer" castle siege game with a massive sieging army. I didn't count them, but it looks like 10,000 men in the sieging army, and it says 8 player capability.

If you axe MP then what you are left with is SP with that flawed AI. The AI is going to make the same mistakes over and over unlike human players who learn from their mistakes with the exception of Elmo. Balance issues in MP could be addressed if CA took player feedback and made adjustments, but they don't do that consistently prefering to end of life each installment of the game. The SP strategic game has improved a lot, but the tactical battles are the reason for this game to exist. I'd hate to see the tactical battles deteriorate to the point where auto-resolving is the prefered way to play, but that's the path the series seems to be taking.