hey everybody
this is many months late, but i just bought a powerful new computer (along with the latest TW game, of course), and i thought i'd post my extremely late first impressions. i also have a request for veteran TWers, and i'd greatly appreciate it if they would read this (you know who you are) and throw in their two cents.
i should probably preface this with a short disclaimer: i really, really liked rome, and i also played and enjoyed shogun and medieval 1. there are a lot of great things about m2, and i think i understand people who really love it, but sadly you won't find a lot of positive feedback here. just for posterity, the things i like about the game: the graphics are great (sort of...), the campaign map & AI seem much improved (i began on 1.2), diplomacy is much more useful, and the medieval period of history is the perfect setting for a TW game, even though they left out a few of my favorite historical battles (golden spurs, poitiers) and mangled the ones they put in - agincourt, i'm looking at you.
my principle problem with m2 is something that, more or less, makes it unplayable. ironically, the greatest leap over rome - the graphics - also handicap the game to the point that i can't have fun in a large battle. in a nutshell, when i zoom out all the way in a battle, as i am wont to do, all present armies turn into vague smeers of color. the detail reduction for distance is severe, resulting in severe "pop-in" when moving the camera pretty much anywhere. the game is both hard to look at and hard to control.
i can't my janissaries from my jinetes when this happens. even when i zoom one or two clicks, the new, awesome, non-clone armies confuse the hell out of me, and i generally have no idea what's going on. needless to say, this makes winning any sort of battle with unfavorable odds somewhat difficult. i also find it extremely frustrating.
so what should i do? wait for kingdoms? load up rtw again? i have a truckload of other games waiting in the wings, but i want to love m2 so much that i haven't so much as glanced at them yet. should i install a mod (EB or RTW or LTC or whatever), or should i finally boot up supreme commander?
sorry for such a verbose post.
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