Your top three issues with RTW 2 (constructive criticism)
I’m a great believer in constructive criticism and wanted to make a thread that would provide useful feedback without descending into heated argument. The idea is to list, with a short description, your top three problems with RTW 2. I know that there are a lot more than three problems, but the plan is to give focus to the most pressing issues. Please be brief since long rants will make the thread harder to read and detract from the purpose of it.
So here are my top three….
1. Too many unit cool-down abilities that don’t make much sense. In my opinion these introduce too much micromanagement and detract from the realism of the game; one should not have to click a button to tell their troops to fight a bit harder. Ultimately this takes away from the tactical elements of the battle and gives it to micromanagement skills. “I’m sorry sir, we did outflank them, but they pressed the fight button and we did not so we lost” or “Our plan to wear out their heavy infantry through fighting and marching would have worked but their general kept pointing at them and telling them they were not tired”.
2. The battles are too fast. I can appreciate they want to create a frantic feel to the battle but this again takes away from the tactical planning once again emphasising clicking skills over tactical planning skills. I’m lucky since I have not suffered the performance problems that others have but it is not like you can appreciate what the game looks like since you spend all your time zoomed out clicking like a madman to make sure your units react to the situation and try properly in the fights.
3. I will be controversial and say artillery (I know diplomacy has issues, but it’s too early to be sure of their exact nature). Quite early on in my Iceni campaign (within the first 20 turns) I have ballista. Not being an expert on the Iceni I can perhaps accept that it is possible they developed such a weapon, there may be historical evidence somewhere, but I cannot accept that they developed a weapon of such rapid firing, accurate explosive power that it puts the cannon in ETW to shame. I know that there are arguments about historical accuracy and its place in games but surely this is beyond the pale
So there are my three, what are yours?
-Edited part-
This thread has had long enough to accumulate most peoples opinions so I have made an attempt to compile it into statistics. This was not easy for a variety of reasons so I have sometimes combined similar criticisms together or divided them when several issues were listed under one heading. I will list the criticism with the numbers of people mentioning it and any noteworthy comments.
1. Battle speed is too fast - 80 people.
2. Optimisation - 39 people.
3. Battlefield AI - 30 people.
4. UI - 29 people.
5. Poor historical representation of units - 29 people. (Note that this is particularly ambiguous because the complaints here were very wide ranging and often very specific for example javelins go too far, units can easily burn down gates or unit X is too powerful)
6. Units unable to maintain formation - 29 people.
7. Campaign AI - 21 people.
8. Too many unrealistic ability buttons - 19 people.
9. Poor city information and management - 19 people.
10. Character development and family tree - 19 people.
11. Time between turns is too long - 12 people.
12. AI army composition - 12 people.
13. Limited number of armies on the campaign map - 9 people.
14. No guard mode for units - 9 people. (This could have been combined with number 5 but enough people mentioned it specifically)
15. Only one turn per year - 7 people.
16. Faction politics - 5 people.
17. Battle maps - 3 people. (This was mostly the siege maps)
18. Lack of cinematics - 2 people.
19. Too many factions - 1 person. (There could be some overlap here with AI turn length)
20. Bugs - 1 person.
One should take care when interpreting this data since people were asked to list only their top three complains. Therefore, just because an issue didn't get many mentions does not mean it does not have a consensus opinion and the opposite could also be true. People should feel free to continue posting in this thread although I will not keep updating these statistics for the sake of my sanity.
Finally I want to thank the people that contributed to this thread, the tone has remained respectful and mature at a time when certain people are criticising these forums for the manor in which opinions have been expressed. Cheers!
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