Is E:TW modable?
Ok, so i finally got the game. But there are quite a few things that piss me off. First of all, it's IMPOSSIBLE to mod the game. They've completely changed the structure of the files and encrypted a lot of them, making it impossible to mod anything other than historical battles. You can't mod unit sizes (which are WAY too small) in the grand campaign. You can't mod the movement rate (which is also way too low) of units. You can't mod the costs or turns it takes to build buildings (which again takes way too long). Basically the game runs at a snail's pace due to the low movement rates and long build times, and the battles feel extremely lame and un-epic due to the microscopic unit sizes.
Let me give you an example. I played as Sweden, and had an army stationed in the baltic. So i decide to reinforce it with a few line infantry and cavalry and artillery. So the units get built in my surrounding provinces (Finland, Ingria, Sweden and the last one i can't remember the name of). Then they automatically move to join my army. Now, the first few units that were built in finland and the baltic provinces reached the army in just 2 or 3 turns (which is still slow as hell considering 3 turns equals 1.5 years), but the ones that were built in Sweden took FOREVER to get to my army, even though i had upgraded all my roads to cobbled roads. It literally took them FOUR YEARS (8 turns) to move from stockholm to the baltic. That's a distance of a few hundred km AT THE MOST!
Of course by that time Corea (or whatever the hell their name is, they're a minor nation in the baltic with just one province on the border of my baltic province that i can't remember the name of) had besieged and completely pwned my province and taken it over. This is partly my own fault for disbanding the militia and pikeman unit in my army in that province, since i wanted to replace them with the line infantry that was on its way from sweden. I thought it would only take 2 or 3 turns at the most for them to get to my army, so i figured nobody would attack my during that time. But while they happily spent multiple years crawling from Sweden to the baltic, corea had enough time to build a huge army and rape my province.
Then there's the fact that it takes at least 2 turns to build even the cheapest and crappiest buildings. The higher level ones take even longer (5 turns or more) which means that with the excrusiatingly slow speed at which turns get processed, it literally takes 5 minutes of real time to upgrade a farm. This means that the "turtle" tactic (my favourite tactic) takes like half the game to implement. For those who don't know, the turtle tactic means you fully upgrade all your current provinces and fortify them and strengthen them before taking any new ones. That way you won't have to worry about defending your old provinces, just the new one you just took. Then you fully upgrade that province too before taking the next one, and so on. This tactic becomes impossible unless you want to spend the first 200 turns (and since each turns takes like 30 seconds to process, even on my q9450 quad core, you'll have to wait a while) of the game just upgrading your provinces before you start fighting any wars, which is what i always do. I never like to fight wars unprepared, i want to be as well prepared as possible so i can deal with anything unexpected, which becomes impossible unless you have fully upgraded provinces.
Then someone at CA had the marvellous idea of removing the prisoners feature (which was avaliable in MTW2) as well as the pre-battle general's speeches, as well as blood and dirt on your soldiers, all of which were avaliable in MTW2.
Finally, to add insult to injury, they've made the game impossible to mod, which could have fixed 90% of the suckage and actually made the game fun to play. As it stands now, the only improvements with this game are the graphics, battle animations, streamlining of the diplomacy, naval battles, a slightly larger world map and the ability to recruit and retrain units outside settlements. But these are all minor improvements, and the minimum you would expect of a whole new game. When you subtract all the negative from the positive, the net result is a game that is a 5 out of 10 at best. Obviously, once modding becomes possible and i get to mod out all the suckage, the game will be an 8 out of ten, at the minimum. But all the stuff they took out and neutered from the previous games means it will never be a perfect 10, maybe not even a 9. Hopefully all, or at the very least most of the missing features can be modded back in. But i'm not holding my breath.
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Originally Posted by Stuie
ing technology to move faster than an infant.
