oh no... is it really this easy?

[Zatoichi]

Hey Cap'n! I'm loving the 'randomness' - like Kraxis I thought I'd got my ERE campaign settled and was gearing up for a push on Rome, when a combination of Hordes, Eastern Roman Rebels and religious unrest conspired to whack me back on all fronts. I think that's great, and a vast improvement on the RTW dynamic!

Kudos to you and the rest of the team!

[Jambo]

Here's a thing. We had hoped that people would find it interesting to have different experiences when playing the game. *sigh* With RTW we were beaten with sticks because it was all too static, now we're in danger of being beaten with sticks because things are unpredictable.

Well, I for one, absolutely love the increased randomness of the campaign! I've lost my first two campaigns which to my knowledge has never happened to me before with any other TW title. I've also been playing on only H/H instead of my standard VH/H just to allow me some space to get to grips with the intricacies of the new campaign. So, kudos to CA for BI.

However, it would have been even more excellent had some of the fantastic BI features been backward-compatible with the original Imperial Campaign. I would loved to have experienced the randomness of hordes, rebellions and atmospheric night battles in 1.3... alas.

[Doug-Thompson]

Capt'n;

We've had our disagreements before, but this is not one of them.

The hordes do inject a very much needed dose of danger and impredictibility in the game. In fact, I'll gladly find the quote from before BI came out where I said that, hopefully, hordes will put back the "creative chaos" that Crusades brought to M:TW.

They have. With a vengence. I'm about to win the most interesting campaign I've ever waged in the Total War series, where I'll emerge victorious after being soundly beaten in every battle but one, and can thank my victory to the vital role of the ERE navy.

Also, the quote from me has an omitted word. That was corrected after Grifman caught it and pointed it out. It should read:

"I don't see any other way to account for the very wide variety of experiences people are reporting with the strategy game."

This corrected quote and the reply from Tincow was also in froggies "So ..." thread, where I put:

To clarify, I'm not complaining about inpredictability per se.

The game would have a lot of replay value if you never know when a horde will hit. The trick is to have hordes hit often enough that no faction can safely ignore them.