Celebrating the Greatest Total War game ever!

**DaVinci** · February 21, 2009, 05:02 PM

Well yeah, speaking of vanilla TW games lol... M1TW with expansion VI are the best TW games imo., in every aspect except just the "3d"-battle mode.

I personally went back to play M1 and VI after RTW was released at the end of 2004 and as i played it to a degree, and even as i discovered mods like RTR in that time, and became a fan of RTR and created my own Rome mods and become member of at this time famous Rome mod projects like The First Triumvirate (TFT), i got bored from time to time by the Rome engine with its typical capabilities, and from time to time went into VI (mostly).

A slight "fix" for M1 fans who do not hate the Rome engine is actually Chivalry TW and now also VI2, because these mods keep the atmosphere (and gameplay slightly) of M1 and VI to a degree.

Anyway over the times until todays, there are actually a lot very good RTW mods, and for people who like to play actually the 3d battle mode, M1 fails with the time, for me at least. ***

But as said, strategy and gameplay wise, no other TW game matches M1 imo., in this regard i sing with this choir

... M2's result was very disgusting in this regard. But even in the M2 department we have some good mods in the meantime.

***So here it was a big anger to see that the M2 dev team wasn't able to create something that could match up to M1 with a proper battle mode, they failed. the reason is, the old M1 dev eam doesn't exist anymore, and the nowadays CA teams have no interest to bump up this old M1 engine to a modernised achievement. As we all know M2 is rather a bumped Rome engine.

Anyway, true is, that M1-VI is the TW game, that is a top game in the vanilla version, all other TW brands i do not play in vanilla ... uuuhh, of course not (Shogun is naturally the other exception).

The main issue seems to be with the newer TW games, that those CA teams give not much on the strategy part of the game, but just a focus on eye candy.

Nevertheless, Rome etc. are perfect games as modding ground, and in this view actualy fantastic games with halfway great engines, just no other strategy games can come near to that.
There is one exception imo. 'Knights of Honor' although there is the battle mode a nearly still more rudimentary thing as with M1, but KoH has a fantastic strategy engine with a quite superbe AI. a much underated game, not anymore supported by the publisher (it came out at the same time as RTW).