Yesterday I had my final experience with the balancing of units in M2TW. It was my first battle against the Aztecs (playing as HRE on H/H). They had two stacks, I had two stacks, one consisting of the most modern army HRE can field, the other of indian allies. In the turn before I had beaten a superior Timurid army with my B-class troops in a forgotten area of my empire, so I was rather confident. That was a fault.

First the game warned me -as usual- that my bad new pc (C2D 6600, GF 7950GX2) could not handle so many troops at the same time. After I broke one Aztec army the other stack arriving in full order beat me because my allies came to the battlefield one after one. Perhaps I could have won the battle nevertheless but I had too much of the most useless troops in M2TW (6 units of cavalry) with me.

In the early stages of battle phase two one nice incident took place. 59 of my gothic knights charge one of the aztec archer units standing far in front of the heavy Aztec infantry (as usual). The conditions were perfect, open terrain slightly downhill, a single click. The knights walked slowly to the point of no return, stopped, charged but the lances did not come out. Doesn't matter I thought as a third of the archers were eliminated with the first attack and, hey, that were gothic knights clad entirely in the best plate available with heavily armored horses. But the archers, perfectly equipped with their cloth armor and stone knifes or clubs, decided to wage the fight. Then another unit of archers who were reduced to the half from the shooting of my pavise crossbowmen and arquebusiers attacked my knights. Double-clicking like a maniac to remove the knights from that terrible anti-cavalry foe I watched their numbers drop dramatically. Only 20 managed to get out of the thick of the fray. Hmm, I was not very pleased.

I got used to the fact that two units of peasants (one if in a town) can beat my gothic knights. I said to me that many of the peasants may be retired veterans and that they are wielding heavy long agricultural tools, axes or halberds, so it's ok that they succeed against the dumb knights. But Aztec archers with flimsy stone weapons? Even in melee heavy plate cavalry should perform better against them. Or not? Ironically I was one of them applauding to the fact that cavalry was quite weakened compared to RTW. Shame on me.

After that battle I stopped the campaign. Two (cavalry and artillery) of the three military advantages the conquistadores had over the native americans are more or less not simulated in M2TW. So may the Aztecs enjoy their liberty for long. I will start again with another nation and hope for a patch. Or try RTR again.