Quote Originally Posted by Furious Mental
What they've said regarding "finishing moves" is that if soldier 1 knocks soldier 2 off his feet soldier 1 will plunge his sword/ spear/ axe whatever into soldier 2 to finish him off. This is a perfectly realistic addition and is a big improvement on the hilarious phenomenon in Rome where you would see soldier 1 knocking soldier 2 onto his arse, only for soldier 1 stand there while soldier 2 gets back on his feet and stabs soldier 1 in the gut.
If you increase a unit's defence skill and / or attack value (+experience bonus to both attack and defence skill), you will see that once a unit is on the ground, the attacker (who knocked his opponent to the floor), if positioned correctly, will finish him off as he begins to get up. That is at least a realistic feature IMO, because naturally anyone trying to stagger to his feet in any sort of armour would be vunerable to incoming blows, which may well prove fatal.

However, this debate regarding finishing moves and the concern over the AI is indeed that...concerning. After witnessing the berserker animations in both BI and RTW (was this included with patch v1.3/v1.4?), they were at first impressive. Especially during sieges where a berserker (once in bloodlust mode and uncontrollable) would hack his way through wavering opponents, using sending them flying into the air, even more so on walls some distance up.

However, these berserker animations soon become repetitive and almost appear as fantasy; how would anyone - regardless of weapon skill - be able to string together perfectly-timed combo attacks? Doing so would leave the attacker open and vunerable to counter-attacks from those surounding him probably on more than one occasion.

I haven't played Spartan: Total Warrior, but after reading the console reviews for XBox, PS & Gamecube, I could soon picture what audience the game was primarily aimed at. I don't want to sound as though I'm criticising an unreleased product, but I seriously hope the finishing moves to be included in MTW2 were not influenced by Spartan: Total Warrior.

On the other hand, I like the sound of the increased chances of units parrying blows and then launching their own counter-attacks. As mentioned before, if you increase the defnce skill of your units in RTW, you will see them dodge, shuffle, parry more frequently. More importantly, however, they will actually react almost instantaneously to an incoming attack when in close quarters, depending upon defence skill, unit animations and so on.

As for the AI, well it would be good to see an improvement of the vanilla AI in RTW. Although to be fair to CA, the AI was improved marginally through its patches, changes and fixes. However, as mentioned numerous times already in this topic, the AI has never really offered a seriously challenging test of skill which many would at least expect to appear in MTW2.