RTW demo - looks like fun

[MosesPresley]

Overpowered for the purposes of game balance. Although I enjoy history, I don't nitpick for historical accuracy in my games.

My beef with MTW II is that the campaign, which is the reason I bought the game, isn't enjoyable.

The game might be good for MP.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

I love the MTW2 campaign and played many long hours with it, though it has to be noted CA are terribly slow patching their games.

Ive played with the stainless steel mod for a few months now and ive found that to be an excellent mod, adding new regions and the Templar faction in the holy land. Lots of new mercenary units and some very nice tweaks to the game.

[MosesPresley]

How's the AI in that mod?

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Not perfect but better than without, patch 1.2 made improvements but stainless steel helps further by adding lots of flavour.

The AI is actually better if you play medium campaign difficulty, on the harder settings its spams so many troops it can never afford to upgrade its settlements, but stainless steel helps a little with that too as its scripted to give the AI some financial help.

I dont think id still be playing the standard campaign now, well not as much for sure, Stainless Steel has helped keep the campaign alive in my case.

[Wiglaf]

RTW is great. get the latest patch and it is a lot of fun. only big glitch is that diplomacy doesn't work very well, but it's a war game anyway.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


By too strong or too weak, do you mean A. Overpowererd or underpowered relative to historical accuracy? B. Overpowered or underpowered for purposes of balanced gameplay or C. Something else entirely?

If B, yes, since thus far I only play SP, an exploit isnt that huge a deal, since the AI presumably wont exploit it, and even if I find out about it, I can choose not to use it.

B of course, which amongst other things makes me right.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by DrSpike


B of course, which amongst other things makes me right.

well it depends then. If I play a game a LOT then at some point it might make a difference, even to me, in SP. Im thinking of Civ2. Now I only did ICS once, just to check it out. Howie rush, I did only to finish up an otherwise tedious end game. Camels, I used alot, but then I liked to play peaceful perfectionist, which is quite hard, esp with the TOT AI, and I didnt feel to bad about using them. I guess Civ was the only game I was really getting polished enough at that it mattered.

Most RTS' I just play the campaigns, and dabble a little in skirmish mode.

Moo2 and SMAC I never got far enough into to really get to issues of unbalance.

Simcity 2000, ISTR, had unbalance wrt choice of powerplants, but that was a sand box game anyway.


So I would say that for me it would depend on how overwhelmingly bad the balance was, and how deep I got into the game. And if my focus in playing moved more to playing "to win" or to RPing. In EU2 for ex, I mainly RPed. Civ2 was one of the few strat games where I got into measuring my achievements.

[Standup]

I've just re-installed MTW on my XP machine (didn;t work on Vista) but I get a lot of CTD. Looking at the forums it seems to be related to the Nvidia drivers and generally for MTW the older the better.

It's fun for a while but i found the strategy screen just too limiting. So far as I can work out there;s not much point to diplomacy and it's main function is for you to move your armies around.


Tempted by Rome but only if it adds some depth at the strategy level.

[Kataphraktoi]

Originally posted by Kinjiru

Medieval (I) is easier to get into than Shogun, but lacks in atmosphere. The family dynasty aspect adds some flavor though. Trebutchets are fun!

IMO Medieval1 is by far the most atmospheric Rome TW is bland as cardboard.

Tempted by Rome but only if it adds some depth at the strategy level.

Same game new graphics\battle engine. Battles are far superior IMO in RomeTW

[Traianvs]

Don't bother with RTW vanilla. Install the mod Rome Total Realism (or some other, there are plenty of good ones depending on what you want). The depth of the game increases greatly, with more cities and historically correct factions (instead of the 3 Roman factions + Rome) etc.

The regular units in RTW are plain silly. Anyone with a historical interest installs RTR

+
it's simply a lot more fun with the mod installed.


PS: Expect to lose a LOT of time. I quit playing it because I played for hours straight, and even then I had played a relatively low amount of turns...

[lord of the mark]

As info, I finally finished the Battle of Jaffa, the last part or the MTW demo/tutorial. I do like the series, and am still contemplating buying it, although im also fooling around with the Age of Wonders2 demo.