Quote Originally Posted by mongoose
I am not really sure why every one is so upset about it. I mean, it gets pretty boring after about 6 months...but don't most games? were the other TW games really that different?
Although not perfectly balanced, the original STW was good enough that you could play multiplayer battles every day for years and not get tired of it, and that was on tiny maps compared to what we have now. The biggest problems were the monk rush and red zoning (which was apparently a designed feature), and most players agreed not to do either. After a year, we had 100 players online on weekends and nearly that many every weeknight, and the community was still growing. The online community that built up around STW made the experience very interesting. That community has been shattered by RTW. My clan was formed in Dec 2000, and very active for 4 years until RTW was released. MTW/VI is ok and the battle engine is actually better, but it's not as well balanced as was original STW. MTW lost the weather effects and has relatively ineffective spears in multiplayer, and it lost the nice pacing of the battles due to the excessive shooting time of xbows and arbalasters. The fatigue rate of units was also not adjusted for the larger maps in MTW.

I would say the SP campaign in each of the games provides a similar lifespan of interest. However, STW multiplayer was different in that the players were not getting tired of it when the next version of the game was released. We all hoped each subsequent version would provide an improvement in gameplay, but that hasn't been the case. Even some player requested changes that were implemented in subsequent games had undesireable effects. STW/MI multiplayer gameplay was abysmal with a +12 morale on all units and guns bumped way up in effectiveness, and not fully salvaged by the v1.02 rebalance patch. There was renewed hope with MTW v1.0, but some serious gameplay issues still remain in multiplayer in the final MTW/VI v2.01 version.

The RTW demo left me physically ill for over 2 weeks. I was heavily into Total War; running a clan, playing almost everyday online for 4 years, and put many hours of work into four different beta test teams. Now the game no longer seems worth that kind of effort. The new players that have come to Total War are here due to the improved graphics in RTW. These new players wouldn't leave if the game maintained the standard of play of the previous games in the series, and you wouldn't loose the veteran players.