Am I nuts? MTW is the still the best!

[HistoryProf]

I must be crazy, or old school, or crazy old school... but I have played every thing from MTW to Kingdoms and the games keep getting worse!

I love Europa Barbarorum .81aV2, and possibly Deus lo Vult 5.0 (it has a MTW feel to it.) but I will never forget my first love.

MTW made Civ 4 look like Space Invaders.

But now they get flashier and flashier skins and stupider and stupider gameplay. Merchants!?!? LAME!

Anywho... just venting...

Oh, and the soundtrack , THE SOUNDTRACK is just bad-ass!

I had this next comment on the same line as my soundtrack comment, but M2TW doesn't deserve to be on the same line as MTW VI Gold : M2TW soundtrack blows giant chunks of half-cooked chicken.

[joerd9]

We congratulate our newest neophyte on having seen the light. May he follow the path of the righteous, that is lined with the remnants of the ignorant, straight and steady; and may he spread the Word...

I only wish I could get MTW to run stable on my comp...

[Erwin Rommel]

Ave!
maybe you just pwned by peasants

[HistoryProf]

They should fix the stability and re-release it with a bigger map, better diplomacy, more factions and new skins: it'd rock. The feel is so much darker and creepy.

I like moving the characters about the map, like in RTW, but sometimes I just want to drop a stack of troops on a territory and hit 'end turn'. Know what I mean?

[joerd9]

Some claim that the stability can be improved by installing very old graphics card drivers and other suspicious measures but that's hardly worth it. I mean, nothing else will work properly then...

[HistoryProf]

Balls to that! Re-release it. It deserves some respect. It was a bloody good game. Ever play the Scots in VI? It was amazing, for it's time.

If people spent have as much time on the AI as they do for skins...

I don't think I've ever lost a battle in M2TW. What a shame.

[joerd9]

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=107245

You're not alone...

[christof139]

MTW-VI is the King!!! Long live the King!!! Chris

[Kaidonni]

I'm back to playing MTW. The XL mod (the new v 3.0 XL that VikingHorde has just released - just when you thought it was perfect, it got better than perfect!). The first TW game I played. Not too simple, not too complex. And if you're thinking of the abstracted elements, just role-play. The element of imagination the game allows you is great. You can role-play the reconquista, and then play some backstabbing to further your immersion. Sometimes breaking alliances is good for the imagination.

Not that I didn't like RTW. That was a good game. But MTWI takes the bait. The mods make it even better.

Battles are indeed harder in MTW. There is a lot more to them. The AI can pull off deceptive tactics to lure you in. And with the mods, the AI builds stronger armies and better fleets. Imagine having to face armies of the nobility, both on foot and horseback, with primarily viking units! Then, watching as your forces are slaughtered brutally by the French......that happened to me in a previous Scottish/XL/GA/Early/Hard campaign, at the end of 1205...

It's also hilarious to watch as superpowers crumble from civil war - or better yet, when their king dies without an heir. LOL! But then, it's not so funny when they reappear and look at you owning one of their provinces and decide to launch a massive attack to re-take the province...but it is funny to send dozens of assassins to kill their leader, hoping that you can hold off wave after wave of enemy soldiers, while the assassins try to complete their mission.

[HistoryProf]

Re-emergent factions was he best thing about VI, I thought. Seems realistic to have a guy with often dubious claims and aspirations to the throne pop up out of nowhere.

("I'm his mother's brother's cousin's best friend's former roommate...")


People are always complaining about some faction going nuts and steamrolling the whole map, well if re-emergent factions were around, that would would either slow down (needed garrisons in the conquered territory) or stop (watch a faction disintegrate from over-reaching.

More realistic.

[joerd9]

Also, you had that threshold (don't remember, like 30 provinces) when you or anyone else that big, faced horrible internal problems. Province loyalty in free fall. That could literally destroy an empire without external influence. So sometimes you could sit in your corner collecting GA points and watch the french take over the map and wait for their inevitable downfall. Muahahaha.
In RTW or MTW2, if an empire is big, it stays so, apart from the 'distance to capital' penalty.

[Dr. Croccer]

MTW owned. It was the first TW game I got and the TW game I liked the most. I liked RTW too but it didn't catch my attention so much as MTW did. M2TW didn't hold me for long.

The soundtrack was suberb. Way better then that of RTW or the Renessance-ish stuff from M2TW.

You also actually needed skill to win. Ever since Sega started making TW games, something has died in the Total War series.

[Metellus]

I find it has a lot to do with nostalgia, and as far as sountrack goes, that's very subjective. People like different kinds of music based on a lot of different factors.

I must be brain-dead or something but I have had some decent challenges on RTW and M2TW but I admit that a good AI isn't at all comparable to a player who is experienced with the game. Nowadays I can easily rout an AI army unless I'm significantly outnumbered and/or the unit makeup very much favours the AI (like some desert engagements I've had with Mongols in M2TW - lots of horse archers - where I've had lots of heavily armoured infantry).

The best battles I've had in RTW and M2TW were those where I was outnumbered (but not heavily so) and the battle had some sort of strategic significance. Battles where my more experienced troops simply must inflict more than 1:1 casualties on the AI foe. These often became desperate engagements that were decided down to the last man, and/or where a good general was invaluable.

I fell in love with RTW because it was my intro to the TW experience, and still thoroughly enjoying RTW and M2TW. Simply couldn't get into MTW or STW (and I tried, because I bought the TW Eras box set) because of the (honestly) terrible graphics. And I've been playing PC games for some years now, I'm used to limited graphics (I'm no teen fanboy ). Although back when MTW and STW were hot, I was playing turn-based hex-map wargames where the focus is less on graphics and more on strategy. For me, TW in general blends both aspects harmoniously, although its never been a create-your-own-battles sandbox, which I miss. Then again, I simply can't get enough of empire-building (and Civ's battle graphics suck in comparison).

[Hellmut34]

I have to say that overall this is the best game of the lot.

I have all the TW games and this is the darkest/canniest of them all.

Also the fantastic NTW1 v7 resides happily on this version.

With the XL mod installed MTW is fantastic.

Nuff said

[zedestroyer]

Some claim that the stability can be improved by installing very old graphics card drivers and other suspicious measures but that's hardly worth it. I mean, nothing else will work properly then...

You can make a new partition and install a older OS (a older windows) in it. This way you will be able to play ancient games or not. It's just an idea.

[AmbrosiusAurelianus]

Installing an older OS isn't the problem. Nvidia series 8 graphic cards just don't want to run MTW.

Yeah, MTW is still the best, but CA should do something to make it run on modern machines.

[Orkunion]

I think still best game BI and Rtw.mtw2 has bad era and not interesting

[czePowerslave]

MTW is indeed a GREAT GREAT game, but still it lacks some of the features of the lets say RTW (fe - ambushes, outmaneveuring enemy armies in terrain, etc), but still, some units there and the fighting....gotta love it

its been some time since I played it last, but the magic remains...

[Codims]

I agree in some ways.

When I first got into RTW after playing MTW (totally vanilla) I was rather annoyed at the campaign map, having to move each army and the silly animations that went with it. It just seemed a bit too much, having played MTW and just simply 'dropping' the units in a province and ending turn.

The battles in RTW are much more fluid than MTW, of course the graphics are better but the hard, gritty feel of a difficult battle isn't really present in Rome. There did seem to be more strategy involved in MTW and the battles meant more.

Maybe its just all those years I spent at my computer, building my evil empire and plotting my terrible deeds in a dark room speaking after all. Hehe.


-Codims

[Metellus]

but the hard, gritty feel of a difficult battle isn't really present in Rome.

Hehe often my Roman battles have been so hard-fought I've got up from the keyboard afterwards checking I still have all ten fingers!

Anyways... to each, his own.