Has anyone else noticed this ?
From totalwar.com-"New Settlement Types
Build through six levels of settlement ranging from humble villages to vast cities and wooden forts to mighty stone fortress. Develop your faction as a feudal aristocracy using you castles to keep the peasants in check whilst conquering your enemies with your powerful armies. Or build cities to develop a wealthy urban society, and battle your foes with diplomacy, bribery, assassination and armies of mercenaries."
It sounds to me that you now have a choice with what you want your settlements to specialize in. Castles for military and possibly agriculture, Cities for commerce and agents. That could also be a way to show some of the changes that took place between the middle ages and the renaissance, Castles could be more important early on when your trying to expand and protect your empire, but when you have yourself established and secure you'll need the commerce from cities to support your empire. Also, castles might give you access to better units earlier on, while cities eventually give rise to well disciplined, professional soldiers. This is all speculation, but i think it is a good possibility something like this will be implemented.

Quote Originally Posted by Jebus
Any game that's announced as EPIC!, THE BEST EVER!, HUGE! etc. is bound to suck.
All games are announced like that, its simple advertisement, what did you expect them to say "This game improves on some of the flaws of its predecessor"? The reason they are toting the graphics instead of the features is because the game has just been announced. First of all, allot of the features probably haven't been finalized or completed. Second, Pretty graphics are probably more likely to attract NEW players (not just us familiar with the series) to the game. Things like "improved A.I." and "historically accurate units" are less likely to pique people interest initially, especially if they haven't played any of the previous games.
I'm not saying that MTW2 will be the best game ever, that yet to be seen, but I don't think we should be taking every turn of phrase used by CA as a bad omen at this stage.