Quote Originally Posted by Noir
What nobody managed to fix though and never will IMO, is the battles. The battle engine was degraded, many features were taken out and the controls were simplified (not giving better gameplay necessarily but better accessibility to the game).

Aside the absence of balancing betewen units, types of units, factions and the degradation of key ingredients such as fatigue and morale in their roles and the taking out of tactical options (hold position/hold formation in the new engine are condensed!), the tip of the iceberg was the removing of the squeeze penalty - essentially what gives to tactical deployment and maneuvering a raison d'etre.

In RTW it was completely taken out turning most battles into a bum rush in a massive blob within seconds from skirmishing and i mean in all versions including BI and mods. In M2 there has been a half hearted try to account for it (with secondary means apparently) but i heard that it was nerfed again since it proved... "unpopular" with the RTW fans (now most of the fan base).
All too true, I hardly mention this any more as it's been gone over many times ad nauseum. This is not likely to change. As you say the current RTW fan base will dictate the games' development and evolution from now onwards, so if they want fast arcade style battles with easy controls and plenty of toys such as warcries and druid chants, then they'll probably get them.

Concerning the controls, they weren't too much of a problem as they could be changed to the old STW/MTW kind. The exception is the annoying left click/right click controls and position/hold formation button, which may have been merged because they wanted an extra function for the phalanx ability and other abilities and possibly didn't want to confuse the player with too many buttons. There are many occasions where you'd want both turned on, but certainly not always. In MTW defensive battles I will turn on hold position for all units to cause them to return to base and not chase enemies too far, but I will only place spear units pinning or absorbing a cavalry charge on hold formation. With RTW you don't have this option it's either both or none.
Quote Originally Posted by Noir
I can clearly picture myself playing STW/MTW in emulators from now, like i do with old Nintendo games sometimes - let's just hope Cambyses II that mods will be also playable there - otherwise "woe onto thee"

Many Thanks

Noir
I don't see there being a need for emulators for old PC games, as for the most part they can still run on newer windows OS's and if not it's usually down to the hardware. STW/MTW running under Linux would be nice, but CA aren't interested in this.