Quote Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
Well, your mileage may differ. But the scope of BI was far greater than either MI or VI. In MI, you had only two factions and a very simple (not to say hypothetical) strategic situation. In VI, you were stuck on a damp insignificant island with some squabbling primitive factions that lacked even decent cavalry. By contrast, with BI you got a full RTW sized map and a great choice of varied factions covering an earth shattering period of history. I personally think BI was almost a RTW2 rather than an expansion. Rome's fall has always captured my imagination more than the its republican period.

And the really nice thing about BI was - unlike the previous expansions - you were not forced to buy it if you wanted to patch the vanilla game.

Um, maybe this would be a good subject for a poll?
The real advantage of BI over RTW was in 2-3 new features. The rest was the same. The same bugs plus new ones. The same stupid AI. The same weird fantasy units fiesta. The same poor GUI graphics. The even more acid colors of units then in RTW.

BI was so poor made that I even suspect it was made not by CA itself, but by temporary hired unknown studio or just amateurs. It is level of standard fan modification, not the level of professional product. I was going to mod the map and just after quick look at it I noticed so many bugs. We all saw holes and dislodged textures in models of units. Did you see Berber units? Even my grandma could make better models and textures! And many many other things too. Who the hell did test the game before release? ...if it ever was tested. It was made anyhow, in a slipshod way, just to make more money out of nothing.

RTW itself was quite disappointing product. Though it had some really great and innovation features, the other things was disappointed. It inherit all weak aspects of previous TW games (ancestral damnation?), but some aspects became even worse. And this tendency was continued in BI. It was so disappointing and wretched that I played it just for few days. After this fault of CA I'm not going to buy MTW2 right after release, but will wait for community impressions. Moreover I'm not going to buy Alexander expansion at all, 'coz I'm sure there will be nothing really interesting in it. To say more, after reading recent articles about MTW2 I have big suspicion that this game will be just development of game graphics, not the real improvement of gameplay and quality of product.