Kage is giving 9 out of 10.
I have played the games from the release of STW and i think that M2TW has something that quite wasnt there specially in Bi, atmosphere. I love how the game looks like and little things like battlefield weather give a lot to the atmosphere. Last night in my HRE campaign i danced around an army of three reb units with my single generals unit on hilly terrain on complete fog. Charging out from the fog and vanishing in there again until they were all running to their mothers. Today i played a custom battle between HRE and Spanish with late units in thunderstorm. The artillery fire and arquebus barrages on advancing tercios was awesome with thunder and lighting above my rain soaken germans. The units look great and most of them realistic. The cities,castles and the battlefields are just plain beutifull. The AI is not as bad as it was in RTW/BI,but ofcourse its not up to against an human player unless it outnumbers me significantly. There are still many bugs and fine tuning but i hope some will be fixed on the patch. To be honest i bought the game in order to mod it,but now i have been playing the vanilla version with on big smile on my face. Im satisfied.