So ...

[Bob the Insane]

I think the accusation of cinematics is a fair one... This really does play like the Hollywood school of historical film making. Not that this is a particularly bad thing in my opinion.

It is exciting, fast and full of action. With twists and turns of the unexpected...

Personally I have had, STW, MTW (and VI) and RTW and finally BI. I have played RTW with RTR from v5.2 to 6.1 and I have pretty much enjoyed it all.

Any one who argues that any one of those games is hugely historically correct needs to study more that the Greeks and the Romans... The fact is the game has always been this way.

Having said that, and stictly in my opinion only of course, RTW:BI is the best of the bunch so far. The improvements of plain RTW are many but one of the most obvious... On the battlefield, if you are defending and the enemy is moving to attack, they will attack in formation. As the AI is moving towards you it actualy manouvers. and constant checks its formation to keep units in place.

It does not do anything fancy, simply staying in formation for the attack and send cavalry to your flanks, but it does this consistantly. And it makes a big difference. This is not to say that if you know your stuff you can't break them, beat them and get a big kill ratio. But it actually takes some effort. And it makes the AI difficult to beat with a unrealistically small force (unless to do something very clever)...