I can't comment on M2TW or ETW, but in RTW (at least the way I played it) there was rarely a reason to leave the roads. This often meant the battles were fought on boring flat maps with little in the way of terrain. With the Risk style map of STW/MTW, you were forced to fight on a variety of terrain: hills/mountains/valleys, forests, rivers.

The map looks gorgeous, but I was a little disappointed that it was a RTW style map as well. However, I will reserve judgement until later. I like the return of the videos and the increase in possible outcomes. The family tree is a cool idea, but as I recall from RTW, it started getting too unwieldy trying to keep track of all your faction relatives and generals. Again, I will reserve judgement until later. I hope the geshia is toned down. They were an agent I would have loved to use more but they had such a powerful impact on the game. It was not fun when your daimyo had to play tag with an enemy geshia knowing that if she tagged you, you were almost guaranteed dead.

Overall, it was nice to see some more of the game, but I wish the reviewer was someone with experience playing STW and idealy all the TW games.