For anyone who hasn't read the UK PC Zone M2TW article

[Puzz3D]

How do you know there will be "less control"? And how do you know there won't be a "squeezed too tight" or "range calculation per man"?

Seems to me you are just engaging in idle speculation.

When CA doesn't say they are putting something in, there isn't much basis to assume they are putting it in. There is more basis to assume they aren't putting it in. Who would have guessed that the new "improved" engine would omit features like the "squeezed to tight" penalty. Well, we found out that CA doesn't say anything about features being omitted. You find out about it after you buy the game.

They already tried to put the "squeezed too tight" penalty back into RTW because players complained that the engine was downgraded, and they couldn't do it with this engine design. It probably entails too much of a redesign. MTW2 isn't a completely new battle engine, so what's the basis for optimism that the feature will be implimented? It probably requites parameters that aren't tracked anymore. You do know that RTW was developed with a fast track design right? That isn't the most thorough way to write software, and the plethora of bugs in RTW v1.0 was a testament to that.

Also, if the engine doesn't do distance calculation for individual shooters, then you're unlikely to see a major revamp like that in the modified RTW engine that's going into MTW2. After all, how many 12 year olds are going to notice something like that? There have been improvements such as shooting on the move, secondary weapons and stamina, but features were lost as well. I remember CA saying that the terrain effects on combat were reduced because new players would not understand how to handle the combat. The combat is simplified so that inexperienced players aren't at as much of a disadvantage.

As far as control goes, RTW/BI already has less control than STW/MTW. CA already responded to a post I made at .com where a dev told me they were not going to slow down the running speeds in RTW. So, they want the game to be fast. Where has CA said that MTW2 won't be as fast as RTW? This is a high level decision that gets made way before the game nears completion because you can't change the movement speed after things like fighting speed, ranged unit effectiveness and fatigue rate and animations have been set without messing up the playbalance and slipping in the animations. They know right now whether or not movement speed and gameplay are being slowed down in MTW2.

When a game plays well it isn't some kind of fortuitous accident. It took over 3 months of playtesting by 10 veteran players to get the 14 units in STWmod for MTW/VI balanced to the degree necessary for multiplayer, and we already had a good starting point for those unit stats. If you have 100's units it's a lot harder to balance, and CA is light years away from putting in the effort required to balance it to anything more than a rudimentary degree.

As far as balance goes, I know that CA gives this a low priority. Also, longjohn said that he considers unit balance to about 25% to be good. I don't see how that can be considered good when multiplayers are quite able to exploit unit imbalances of as little as 10%. You have to get unit balance to more like 5% when you have a system where players can buy whatever they want in whatever quantity they want. There is no basis to assume CA will balance the game to this degree because they have never done it. The best balanced units were in STW, and it's been downhill ever since then. The tax on more than 4 of a single unit type in MTW was a hedge against unit imbalance. The biggest battle engine improvement in RTW with the BI add-on was the fixing of a bug in the charge effect which allowed spears to work the way they were supposed to work a year earlier. I think that's primarily the reason that BI battles play better.

CA doesn't have unlimited resources. I wonder how many resources went into making "finishing moves"? The state of multiplayer in RTW was attributed by CA to not having enough resources.