Newbie with some questions re: which game to start with

[oliverh72]

Hi all,

Well, I'm a bit of an avid collector of games I *might* play one day when they go on ridiculous sales on Steam (or if I miss the sale, sometimes on Impulse or D2D). Generally, I get them on Steam.

Here's my dilemma. I'm a total newb to these games, though I've owned M2TW for quite some time. Recently, I've been playing some Civ4, GalCiv2 and Civ:Rev and felt that the combat was lacking... clearly - there isn't any. Then I started thinking about the TW games and discovered that pretty much all of them were on sale. I originally got M2TW for $5 and decided to pick up E:TW, N:TW, and R:tw for a total of $17.50. I'm sure it'll be a steal if I play them.

Anyway, I have a Dell laptop with a P8600 CPU - 2.4ghz Core2Duo, with 4GB RAM and an 80gb SSD. Because of the tiny hdd size, I really can't have that many games installed simultaneously... especially ones the size of these TW games. So I more or less have to pick one to install.

As for video, I've got an external GFX card with a 1GB AMD HD5770, so I should be fine with whichever one I choose to go with.

I've done some researching and many people seem to prefer M2TW or RTW over the newer games. I'm a bit more interested in the gunpowder / naval era, but not overly concerned, really. I've read that if I go with ETW, then the DarthMod is pretty much a must due to bugfixes. Not sure if I'd bother with DM:UC as I really would prefer the 'vanilla' experience, at least at first - also, it's really big, so hdd space is an issue.

I've looked at the Roma Surrectum II mod, which looks fantastic (graphically) and seems to make RTW a bit faster paced?

The Stainless Steel mod for MTW also looks great, but frankly, is enormous - 3.5GB before extraction even. Ouch.

N:TW is a 21gb install, so that would require me cleaning practically everything off my laptop to even run.

So that's my thought processes so far... so I guess you could say I'm leaning either towards E:TW+DM or R:TW+RS2.

What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance!

Oliver

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that I have King Arthur: the RPG Wargame which is awfully pretty and you can cast spells as well, which is really cool.

[Nosjack]

It's really up to you.

Rome and M2 are built on the same engine, and are completely melee based. Plus you have TONS of mods to choose from.

ETW is a completely different game, different engine, different mechanics. And somewhat limited mods to choose from.

Personally, I love ETW, both for the time frame and the mechanics. If you do end up playing Empire, I suggest you play one vanilla campaign and then check out Darth Mod, (Click my dooku pic in my sig)

[oliverh72]

Hi Dooku,

Thanks for the response. I'm definitely leaning towards ETW - damn my 80gb HDD!

The reason I'm wanting to use DarthMod is mostly because everything I've read indicates that it is simply still too buggy and unstable without it.

Thanks again..


Oliver

[Nosjack]

Not sure what you mean, I use Regular Darth Mod as opposed to DMUC and it's rather small download and install. And I don't get any more crashes then I did with vanilla.