I just bought Total War: Eras today, and installed Alexander.

For the first time in a long time I began to play vanilla Total War. I stopped after the third battle, I just could'nt take anymore of the silly movement and kill/rout speeds, not to mention the wide thin line that is supposed to represent a battle line. It's all like one giant skirmish, with units running/routing/rallying all over the place. No sense of order, no tactics, just thousands of men running around like chooks with their heads cut off.

Before I installed Alexander I watched the bonus CD of the making of TW games, in it the guy said how easy it was to apply Sun Tzus rules of war to STW and how the only thing that does'nt change from game to game is the AI. I wonder what happened, and how the TW games could end up like this.
Perhaps the fast battle speeds are to try and mask the un-polished engine or perhaps some one thinks this is what the mass market wants ??? I'm more inclined to think this type of gameplay would scare off many would be second time customers.

TW games imo are still the best pc games available, but only when the gameplay settings are tweaked. The question is how many customers mod or use mods ? I would think only a small minority. As for the AI question, when the game is tweaked I think it's pretty good and I don't mind when the AI occasionally exposes their backsides to my archers, cheap yes but I need all the help I can get sometimes, yes the AI can be that good, or perhaps I'm just not such a good player.

The CA guy on the CD seemed like a reasonable sort of a bloke and I'm sure he/they will be taking onboard all the complaints, and MTW II will no doubt be a more fun game out of the box than RTW/BI/ALXNDR is. Although those gameplay vids of MTW II showing the fast running speeds and the wide and thin unit formations are a bit of a worry, but at the end of the day there is no real alternative to TW games and the best we can do is give feedback/whine/complain/bitch etc, and hope things improve.

Now I'm off to revisit fuedal Japan and become the Shogun, for one last time. Then I'll probably play MTW for a bit before I begin to tweak Alexander.

-IceTorque