Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
I do feel short changed in RTW with respect to periods.
How were you shortchanged? Did you willingly buy the game knowing what it was like or did CA fool you in some way, or twist your arm into buying the game? Did you sign a contract with them for them to develop the game to your specifications?

In RTW we effectively have one period vs. three in MTW.
The periods are irrelevant and artificial. I could also add that we have two periods in RTW, pre-Marian and post-Marian. Two periods make sense in a game about Rome. A third logical period would be the Hellenistic one before Rome, but well, that wouldn't be about Rome so it kind of defeats the purpose of the game :)

I don't see the variety of units, because everything is happening in the earliest phase.
What do you mean? You clearly have variety among factions, and pre- and post-Marian for the Romans.

The game is effectively over before signature units take the field even in the early period.
You have the game won in the pre-Marian timeframe? Maybe so, but that was true to the same extent in MTW if not more.

I don't see much difference in terms of army composition style between RTW and MTW--in both you have major "culture types" with shared units.
So now you are complaining the RTW is inferior to MTW because you don't see a difference? I guess they can't win :)

In MTW you have more region & culture specific units, rather than just culture/religion specific ones.
I disagree. The various factions in RTW are far more different than those in MTW. MTW generally had W European factions with a few different units, the unique Russian and Byzantine factions, and the Muslim factions with a few different units. Oh, and the Mongols.

RTW has the Romans, the Hellenistic factions, the Egyptians, the Parthians, the W Barbarians (Gauls, Spanish, Germans, Britons) and the E Barbarians (Dacians, Sythians), and semi-Hellenized factions such as the Pontites and Armenians. And then you have the Seleucids which have access to almost everything - if they live that long :)

How could CA miss out on doing a detailed "early Rome" period and map with Etruscans, Samnites, etc.?
Quite easily, it doesn't fit the map scale very well. You could just as well ask why did MTW miss out on the uniting of France under the Franks. Or the uniting of France and Germany under Charlemagne. Both games deal with large scale maps of roughly the W Europe/Med world, not single regions.

A rise of Epirus (ala Switzerland or the Mongols) as a regional force would be interesting.
Same problem. The MTW expansion did this to an extent - it gave you the unting of England - but it wasn't part of the basic game. And Epirus didn't rise all that much really - they just got famous because of the Romans, after all :)

It is just a shame. Looks like CA got limited by the number of factions, etc.
No, it looks like they wanted a game with a different focus than you did. They wanted an epic game about the rise of the Roman Empire, not a series of small campaigns about single factions that the majority of people don't care about.

I can understand not wanting to step back all the way to Alexander, but making a more regional map about the time of the Samnite wars seems obvious.
No, it's not obvious at all. I would not be interested in your game at all. You would not get my gaming dollar. Is that obvious? :)

RTW screams out for at least three major campaigns before the barbarian invasion: early Roman expansion into all of the italian peninsula, Rome of the Punic Wars, Rome around the time of Marius.
Funny, I thought we got the last two of those - just in one campaign. Again, the game is epic in nature - an early Roman expansion fits more into an expansion pack like Viking Invasions, not the main focus of the game.

Look, you're entitled to your opinion, naturally. But all this talk of this being "obvious" or the game "screams" for feature x gets to me. No, it's not "obvious" or even wanted by many people, maybe even most. I certainly haven't read of an outcry for smaller scenarios such as you have proposed. They may be what you would want - which is fine - but they're not "obvious" by any means - and to me the reasons that they aren't "obvious" are . . . well, "obvious" :)

Best wishes . . .