CA love to use the line "A revolution, and then an evolution." They've done it countless times, in countless interviews.

That is to say they redefine the series, evolve the series, and then redefine it again. STW was the revolution. Probably one of the best games if you're going for sheer immersion. The throne room aspect with the map of Japan laid out before you, your adviser at your left and your geisha at your right. All the factions used the same units, but in a sense that made you work even harder to come up with strategies and ways to win. And the AI was vicious. If you were trying to take a bridge from the AI I hope you set your will in order. It was gonna take a lot of men.

MTW was its evolution. It took the STW series as far as you could go with a bigger map, tons more factions and units, ect. But it lost a lot of the immersion factor by taking out assassination movies and the throne room. But still, the sheer scale that was introduced as well as the polish (I can't remember any huge game-breakers, the 56 year death bug introduced in VI comes to mind but that's it) is what really made the game worthy to be STW's successor. It's also to date the only TW game I ever seriously played in MP with.

Then came RTW, the revolution again. My my, such a chance and so many bugs. We made the move to 3D and completely redefined the campaign map by going 3D as well. City sieges were introduced, as well as little things like letting horse archers fire on the more. But for all the good things RTW did, there were just as many bad. It was buggy, oh lord was it. There was the bug where if you loaded a save the AI in a sense forgot what it was doing, and took up to 3 turns to realize "Oh wait. I was gonna seige something" and then get back to it.

The AI stunk, until RTW the AI had been taking gradual steps down but it could still put up a good fight. RTW saw the end of that. Cavalry was stupidly overpowered. The battles lasted for 30 seconds because the kill speed was too high. I could go on and on. Lest I forget, Bronze Age Egyptians.

Lastly, there was M2. There was a lot of high hopes for M2 and, quite frankly, none of mine were fulfilled. As good as it looked graphically the same problems from RTW made their way into m2. Sure it was (imo) less buggy than RTW was, but the AI was still a mess. Sieges became even more common place and made up a huge portion of the battles you fought, and cavalry, while not hugely overpowered, could still do way too much. Generals were still tanks. The only thing that even kept me in the community was the mods.

This has become a rant. I'm gonna go outside.