BI is good compared to rome, if rome was released with the same balance as BI it would have been great, but BI was released after the game was dead, at least to the mp community (but was a big change for the good for SP campaigns, even over RTR), it just never picked up with the same enthusiasm shogun and to a larger extent mtw did
I disagree on BI quality. I've played RTW/BI long enough to mention that when people found out all exploits (well most of them) of BI it was more a spam then not. Heavy upgreaded archers, axes, romans, clibinaries, etc. BI was only playable with a lot of rules and many disliked this. BI was far from being balanced.