Mid term reviews thread...

[GFX707]

Right now I just abandoned my second campaign as Scotland as it was bogged down in the way RTW got on VH in the campaign, i.e stack after stack besieging your cities resulting in endless, boring repelling of AI assaults only to have the next AI country declare war on you, then another, then another.

I really enjoyed the game at first, but that was probably just because of the differences between M2TW and RTW....then I began to see that the campaign was still much the same - try to achieve something while opponent after opponent breaks alliances with you to commit suicide by declaring war on you....wars the country in question has no chance of winning because they are already at war and your country is twice the size of theirs....sigh.

If it's not that it's the hour-long 3fps city assaults where the AI tries to insert its entire army simultaneously onto 1 siege tower or ladder and you basically have the choice of waiting 2 hours for the battle to end, or just quitting the game. Fun.

As someone who has played since Shogun I am still finding the TW series going downhill. I think it's just that 3D campaign map, it just doesn't really work. If it went realtime in the next one that might solve the problem, but I am so sick of having to babysit my 10000 agents past the "path blocked" spam or watch the same animation of an army/agent walking at a ridiculously low speed backwards, only to lose my place if I try to right click it to speed it up, or have to wait for the diplomat animation to play every turn when they are standing outside one of my cities....it just adds up.

There is still one battle every once in a while that makes it worth it, but most of the time it's just the first few battles of a campaign that feel exciting and challenging, like you're actually achieving something, and then you realise you're just going to be in for more of the same suicidal AI and moronic decision making by the computer. In my current Moors campaign I am watching the Spanish walk around on the map with about 10 1-unit stacks while at war with me, and garrison their cities with 1 general's unit, etc. etc.

Not to mention the completely pointless alliance option. That's probably the number one annoyance in the TW series.