So ...

[frogbeastegg]

Well. I've got it. I've played about 2 hours in one go, a rarity for me. And ...

Oh, blimey, I hate to say this but I see no difference between this and the old RTW except a shedload of graphical glitches! Oh, and the obvious things, like different units and map.

I'm playing Saxons very hard/medium. I started out with the plainly crazy sum of 15,000 denarii, and from there's it's been a gentle ramble along, building up 2 small but decent armies, stomping the odd crappy rebel army, and capturing a couple of extra settlements. All effortlessly. The AI is still passive as a wet sponge - no one has attacked me at all. No one! It's summer 372AD, and the only battles I've fought are those I've chosen. I’ve hardly seen any diplomats coming my way. Or anything, of any sort, besides rebel armies popping up when my public order is nice and high. So I don’t have the income to build larger armies or buildings in my cities, but so what? I simply don’t need any of the benefits, better units, larger armies, more armies, or anything.

Maybe in battles the AI is a tiny bit better ... but I can't really decide on that yet. I guess maybe somewhat better, if I'm forced to decide, and that is good.

Let me dedicate a paragraph to the entirely too much money I started with; it’s probably the second big problem here, the other being the passiveness of the AI. I built up 1 new army and expanded the one I started with. I constructed a whole lot of buildings in my starting city and the first I conquered. I peppered my lands with watchtowers. I didn’t need to work for any of it. I didn’t need to worry about money until about 370AD, and even then the worry was a very mild one, created mostly by my extravagant spending and lazy expansion – in other words the cash problem was entirely my own fault. Even in RTW I needed to work for my money and what it gave me in the beginning. It was the one slightly difficult part. BI removes even that.

So where is this very different game everyone was speaking about!? Really, because I’d love to know. I played Saxon because I didn’t want to ‘waste’ the hardest faction by using WRE for my first game, and be left playing the easier factions afterwards. If I have to play WRE to get any semblance of a reaction out of the AI and game then I can’t even see the point.

The graphics ... let's see. The first time the new camp map loaded half of it was black. As in pitch black, night time, can't see a dratted thing black. Moving my view so that bit was hidden and then going back fixed that. After roughly half my battles I get dropped back to a map which makes me feel I took drugs, because it's that classic 'graphical glitch multicoloured madness' type mess. Again, moving the view away and back fixes this. I just quit because I came back from another battle and found everywhere had turned into ocean ...

I'm blaming my drivers at this point, though they are the latest ATI catalyst ones and supposedly very good. I shall try rolling them back and see.

I'm also more than a tad fed up to find that once again my LCD's monitor’s very common native resolution is not included, so I have to edit files to get it. 1280X1024. The game's presets cut off at 1280X980 which seems to me a far more freakish and uncommon res. The edit is the second possible source for the graphics issues, but it’s the same edit I ran RTW with since day 1, and without a single issue except the infuriating tendency for it to drop back to 800X600 if I ever needed to alter any of the graphics settings in-game, requiring another bout of preferences.txt editing.

Oh, and while I think of it, a big frown and a rap on the knuckles to CA for not fixing the pause/game speed toggle problem/bug/issue/whatever which quite a few people, myself included, kept on reporting with all past versions of the game. Yay. I love not being able to pause most of the time; it's great when the phone rings and I have to leave my battle running. And watching my army being massacred on the highest speed setting while I frantically punch ctrl+t over and over trying to get it to slow back down is great too! Serves me right for trying to speed past the opening phase where my army marches in a mostly straight line, doing not much, in a bid to actually play more of the interesting parts of the game.

:cough: Perhaps that was rather abrasive, but I'm Not A Happy Frog after watching half my army get annihilated on top speed while I hammered buttons trying to get it to slow back down. Nor A Happy Frog after finding that all the aggressive AI and so on appears to have been put in other people’s copies of the game. I feel like I am playing on ‘super easy’ level, not very hard.

Now, if I’d been started with much less than the crazy 15,000 denarii, and had been attacked – or reacted to even a bit while attacking! – then it would have been tougher. But I did have way too much cash, and I was totally ignored except when I forced the game to notice me. Yawn.

So to sum up: after 2 hours the frog’s opinion is basically “Gggrrrrr!!” and perhaps “GAH!!!”

EDIT: Oh, and for the sake of reference, I'm hardly what you could call a strong faction. Any medium sized army of half decent units would cause me real trouble. If I lose an army I've got nothing to replace it.

I also forgot to expand fully my rant on those confounded rebel armies. I hate them, always did and still do - pointless little messes of peasants even 2 decent units can run over easily, which do nothing more than force me to divert an army and then fight another boring battle. Half the time I just smack them to death with my general's bodyguard and nothing else. Which turns him into a super general. Making other battles easier.

But while we're on the point, I suppose I should be glad I saw a rebel army of 2 peasants, 1 hunter and 1 spear warband! Wow! That's probably the best one I've ever seen.