Your retrospective views of RTW:Alexander???

[Davonator]

I just want to see looking back what peoples thoughts are/were on RTW: Alexander. The game always seems to be the black sheep of the Total War world, it's rarely mentioned on here, and divided many people with it's challenging campaign (some felt it was too restricting and hard so didn't like it, some liked it for being a hardcore challenge that proved your were a skilled TW player).

Personally I didn't really like the campaign, but I kind of respect what CA were trying to do. As Alexander acheived such a conquest in a relatively short space of time against the odds, they set up the campaign to try and mimic that so you'd get a respect for what he acheived.

but I really liked the historical battles mode, that was well weighted difficulty wise, and often you had to really do what Alexander did in real life in order to win them. The mini movies chronicling Alexander's path were really well done, and well narrated by Brian Blessed. They were hard enough that you failed once or twice, but not so difficult they got boring.

On the negative side I always got the feeling maybe the prodution values were a bit cheap. Someone like Alexander the great deserved a game with a bit more polish and scale. The game doesn't have an intro cinematic or an outro one if you beat the campaign (just a cheap summary of what happened to Alexander), not does it have any speeches from Alexander pre-battle.

Overall I think it's a good game, but perhaps not as epic as it should have been.

[|Sith| Max]

Not as good as RTW but definately not bad. Very nice historical battles with epic voicing. Good mods like Lord Of The Rings Total War.
Shame that they dont host Lord Of The Rings Total War on TWC because it uses the movie's units and music which goes against copyright..
by the way.. there is a subforum for 300 Warlords of Sparta, and it also uses the movie units and movie musics? and i think Ran no jidai uses stuff from The Last Samurai

Thats TWC's ing policy for ya.

[Medusa0]

It comes with RomeTW-Alex.exe, the latest incarnation of the RTW engine, worth every single penny if you mod...

[wheninrome]

I tried the campaign and while I would like to say that I quite because the battle were too repetitious, the truth is that there was no way I could finish in time. Some things about the expansion it seems CA spent time on: the Brian Blessed narrative scenes you mentioned, the Alexander skin, and the feel of the "urgency" of the campaign. Yet, other things they did not spend time on, like the annoying fact that merc. units and recruited units look the same.

It comes with RomeTW-Alex.exe, the latest incarnation of the RTW engine, worth every single penny if you mod...

What makes the Alex.exe special? Did anybody mod for Alexander? This is just my ignorance.

[shikaka]

pros:
+ the best AI since medieval 1 (considering everything between Shogun - Napoleon). Still not too bright, and I think it is partly scripted, but it works best
+ a new, better map (R:TW and BI would be great with this part added. Think Parthia, Sassanids or Selucids)
+ very good and challenging historical battles!


cons:
- not too much replay value (I played it once...)
- not good for online play (4 or 5 factons only)
- no new concepts (like hordes, or smaller mini-campaigns like in kingdoms)


Overall it is like a bit below average campaign disk. I don't really mind it though. I (and I think most folks) didn't buy it separately, but got it only because it came together with RTW and BI. I don't mind an extra campaign, but I wouldn't pay for it alone.