It's... it's... beautiful :O

[caravel]

Neither did my machine, (actually that might have been thieves ).

Good lord, what happened there, did I miss something??

As can be expected. But for the .Org I must say the Junior Member system does pay dividends in regard to this.

It's a good filter against those that come here with the intention of causing trouble, but it can deter some of the decent people as well. The current system of allowing them access to some of the other forums as well as the EH is a lot better IMHO.

All I can say to M2TW is that it does not impress me, but I hope that I can get it the same way I got RTW+BI+ALEX, a mate got sick of them and so gave them to me for nothing.

Well I will wait until the expansion is out and patched before I bother with it, if at all.

More than the 30£, its the amount of time spent on modding/try mods/wait for mods, outside of the main attraction that is to actually play the game that in the end makes little difference on the battlefield.

I didn't spend any time modding and only installed one mod. The only changes I made were configuration changes to disable the green markers and others. The unit highlights are horrible though. The bouncing flags of STW/MTW are much more subtle. I've seen some people complaining about those, they don't bother me at all. Another thing I disliked was the left click/right click controls on the battlefield. I really preferred the old way. They had their faults, but those faults could have been fixed without changing the button config completely. The annoying hammer on anvil or steel against steel sound and animated cursor every time you order an attack is annoying also.

i wanted to like RTW, i wanted to reach a stage through modding where i would say "that's it! that's how it should be! now lets go down to business". It never happened though; while it has happened while playing various MTW mods to which i come back again and again.

No matter how modded it is, it won't change the AI, poor diplomacy and other hardcoded issues.

RTR and EB are great, but despite their efforts, admitedly they don't reach the MTW/STW standard of battles and that is due to the engine. Campaigns play interestingly, especially in EB, although they are indeed very long.

I can't speak for EB, but RTR is a seriously good piece of modding. They have corrected a lot of the historical innacuracy (I'm not that pedantic about historical accuracy, but Ptolemaic Egypt and the Egypt of the Pharoahs are two different things. Also druids, that look like they've walked through a portal from a Warcraft game, and german screeching women, which had me staring in shocked disbelief, combined with Roman units that were so out of period, fictional, wrong, inbalanced, overpowered, cavalry that wheel and turn like a flock of birds... the list is endless. RTR fixed alot of that and did it well. They also removed the senate which though partially historically accurate doesn't really work in the game, at least for me it doesn't. I like flexibility, not being told what to conquer and when. This is probably why I never play GA in MTW, and why the pope telling you what to do was one of the most offputting aspects of the game after coming from STW.

Ultimately, unless the engine shows signs of becoming a true tactical wargame, like it once was, new TW releases aren't for me.

Same here. This is not about snobbery, or harking back to the good old days. I'm not so stupid as to believe that me not buying (or buying for that matter) M2TW is going to make a difference. I, being over 18 am probably not the target audience for the computer games market. STW and MTW did attract the more mature player, that trend has changed since the release of RTW. CA have gone where easy the money is, I suppose you can't blame them but personally I would have gone for the more "legendary" approach. CA, in their infinite wisdom, have moved with the competition. The days of the origami birds fluttering through the dark forests are long behind us.