I just started playing RTW for the first time yesterday. Didn't do too well in the Prologue (I was spread out too far with too few troops and I had two huge enemy armies attacking (one in the north, one in the south)). Currently playing the regular campaign as the Julii. Doing better, but I'm running into a wall in the North called the Brittons, and in the west the Spanish and Gauls. It did take me a little while to get comfortable with the campaign map. There are some things I like about it, some things I miss, but nothing that really bothers me.

I like how the terrain plays a factor. There are only so many ways to get to a particular location, and that you can have a good defense setup at the choke points to protect your homelands. Of course with that comes travel times. I miss the ability to drag units from one province and move them half way across the map. Reinforcements can quite a while to get up to the front. Fortunately upgrading your roads can help speed things up. Then come training units and teching up. So much relies on your population level to get to the higher level buildings. Of course, with higher population comes greater squalor.

There is definately increased micromanagement. I like the idea of RTW's rally points. Where new units will then move to a location. It got tiresome in MTW when you have 30 provinces pumping out units to have to manually drag and drop them from one side of the map to the other. Ships work better. Now instead of a single ship blockading your entire chain of ships, the enemy has to send ships to your ports to setup a blockade. In MTW it always felt that you were always disadvantaged by the sea zones than the AI. Of course, ship combat is entirely random, though helped by having superior numbers, or better captains.

I don't particularly like how when you want to queue a building or a unit up, that you have to pay for it upfront, even if it won't be built for years. I would like for it to be easier to queue up multiple units in an integrated interface. For instance if I want to train a unit each of Hastati in each of the cities that I can train them in, a couple clicks should be all it takes to queue them up. It could be as simple as selecting a unit, select a number, and the game will queue them up in as many provinces as you need to. If you have say six provinces that can train Hastati, and you only have the money for 4, you can have the game prioritize where they get trained to say your frontier provinces first. In addition, you should have the ability to prioritize a province for particular units, so if I want Patavium to prioritize Hastati training, then when I queue up Hastati, it will fill up the provinces I've selected first, then other provinces afterwards. Just some ideas.

Another thing I found bothersome is that when you have a scroll open and you have to scroll down through a list, the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't work. This means that I have to click on the up and down buttons on the window. The scroll window zooms in and out of the campaign map (not something I want or need to do when the entire screen is filled with building and unit description windows ;)

I don't much care for the real time battles. I usually autocalc, unless a particular battle may appear to be close, and I've had far too many where I'll have the number advantage, but just lose too many troops. of course, quality of troops makes a difference, but I've had heavy losses on battles that I might have actually won. That leads me to one thing I have noticed. Cavalry seem to just dominate when it comes to the real time battles. They are fast, and unless they are severely outnumbered by troops that can defend against them, can do quite alot of damage. With that said, I had a couple embarrasing battles at the beginning of my Julii campaign where I charged my faction leaders unit into what I thought would be a soft target, but in the intial charge or shortly thereafter my faction leader got himself killed. That was my very first battle... then two years later in my second battle Faction Leader #2 did the same thing. In any event, my faction leader stays back until after the battle has commenced and I can maneuver him into a better position.

So, for my opinion, I like both games. Unfortunately I have to do alot of reading to figure out the game, whereas I've had MTW for about a year or so.