An Epic to Behold but not an Epic Experience.

[mike007]

I liked M:TW better. heres why:

* The battles. I loved the reinforcment feature. I know there is one in rome, but as somone else said., you can break an amry to easily (its not hard when the stupid enemy general makes a suicudal charge at the beginning of the game!, WTF is that all about?)

*Hostages. That was an AWSOME feature of medieval. I loved breaking an amry, then watchign that little ticker climb up, then slaughtering them all at the end! i loved that slaughtering sound as well.

*The tactical map was better. i like romes map, but i liked the idea of moving 1 province at a time much better

*archers seamed to be more important in medieval & you could find great speical archers like long bowmen & itailan archers.

*ROMES IS TOO EASY! on vh/vh i still kick the ai's ass.

* The game ends after u capture 50 provinces! i want to conqure the world god damb it!

[Ulug Beg]

I will have to try the Rome Total Realism mod after Christmas when my PC has its mid-life upgrade.

I like the added dimension of populations in your cities, but because you often find yourself waiting to increase to the next city size you do end up building things you didn't intend to build unlike in MTW where you could, for example, focus a city on spearman or cavalry. Maybe RTW is more realistic though; if cities were big enough they could pretty much build everything they needed. Perhaps what RTW needs is bonuses for producing certain troop types in particular locations like in MTW, or is it already there and I've missed it? I do limit myself to only building Spartan hoplites in Sparta when playing the Greeks.

Drone you are right - those hour long epic battles in MTW are worth fighting because they are few and far between. My typical style of play is to build-up, prepare for a war, fight that for a couple of years, and then recover for 10-20 years before the next war. It would not be unusual for some of my Kings to fight only a couple of battles or none in their entire reign, whereas others would be real 'Richard the Lion Hearts'.

And I had forgotten to mention the hostages in MTW. That is a great feature. In RTW after taking cities you can sell the population into slavery or slaughter them, it would be good to have the same options after a battle.

The whole Total War series was revolutionary because you played it at two levels - the strategic turn based level and the tactical battle level. Maybe what is needed now is third level of grand strategy. Realistically, nations were not constantly at war - although a few had a damn good try - but playing one year at a time when nothing is happening can get a tad dull. What if at the Grand Strategy level you set out your nations build, diplomatic, taxation and trading policies and when you hit the BIG TURN button it would keep running until something significant happened like your King died or somebody invades you - the way Masters of Orion 2 works. You would only go back to seasonal turns when you were actually fighting a war. This would also make it practical to have more seasons as I suspect armies could actually move a lot further each season than the game currently allows them to.