Quote Originally Posted by Silver Rusher
Damn, this is exactly what I was going to say.

andrewt, how in hell can you put five games ahead of the Total War series when you spend so much time on the Org forums? If you prefer all these other games, either go annoy some XCom: UFO Defense forumers (if you aren't doing so already) or go outside and do something. Also, how in hell can you say that battles are not balanced and tactical? So, from your point of view, charging into a silver shield phalanx with urban cohorts will win you a battle? That's how it would be if the game wasn't "balanced and tactical". The people take the small problems in the game too seriously. I think people on this board only find the AI rubbish because they spend too much time playing the game and know how to exploit the weaknesses of the AI.
I said those rankings are not in order. And if you actually knew those games I listed, most of them were made long before forums on the Internet were popular. Hell, I don't think IE even existed when Xcom: UFO Defense was made. I played it again 2-3 years ago and I had to download a mod that slows down my PC just to play it. They don't make games like that anymore. I haven't seen a squad-based TBS game with that much strategic and tactical depth ever since.

Name me the last good CRPG on the PC? It's still Baldur's Gate 2, released 4-5 years ago. They haven't made any good CRPGs on the PC ever since. Face it, most PC games now are either FPS or RTS without the S.

As for spending time here on the board, most of my posts were during MTW all the way to the first month of RTW's release. I'm just playing RTW again because of a.) trying out the new patch, b.) broadband is down for 2-3 weeks and can't raid well in WoW. I post a lot on forums on whatever game I'm currently playing. I'm continuing my 3rd RTW campaign while I did around 10 each for MTW and STW.

As for charging a silver shield phalanx with urban cohorts and winning, I wouldn't be surprised. A tactic I commonly used when I played early on was charging powerful spear/pike units using cheap cavalry. The cavalry would get slaughtered but they would totally destroy the formation of the phalanx and another cavalry charge by a stronger cavalry would destroy the phalanx. That's how powerful cavalry charges and how weak phalanx units are in this game. You can just run around using cavalry and keep charging repeatedly. By the time you get exhausted, the enemy would be in a complete rout already. Charges are also too powerful in general and units just rout immediately after even frontal charges.

There's also sieges. The AI likes to park soldiers on top of walled cities or run around the inside of wooden wall cities. You can park your ranged units outside of the range of their wall defenses and shoot at the defenders until you've run out of arrows. The defenders also love running around the inside of wooden wall cities and getting exhausted before you even get inside the city. Pathfinding is also atrocious inside cities. It's very annoying with the addition of the short timer.

The Roman legions also have to stop a long time before firing their pila. Sometimes, they don't want to fire at all until a long time has passed. Fortunately, the AI is kind enough to allow you to stop close in front of them, use up all your pila and wait for you to charge them.


Also, I liked MTW and STW's fire at will mode as well. It's a lot more tedious to turn it off and have to fire manually, rather than just turning it on and using force fire to fire at units where you might hit some friendlies. You have to turn off fire at will so much in RTW because your units like to fire at places where you have other units nearby.

I could go on and on but these are just a few problems I've noticed in just 2 full and 1 not finished campaign. Medieval didn't have so many gamebreaking bugs and balance problems. The reason I'm playing RTW right now is the strategy map, which I think is a major improvement over MTW's, though it suffers from a few problems as well.

There's a memo a few years back where Sony told game publishers to make games shorter and easier to focus more on the graphics. I guess most game studios took it to heart.