Any unofficial patch? I love this game but there are so many bugs

[Spajjder]

Ok list of things that break the game for me.

Battlefield:

Spearwall does not work. it is buggy and often when an enemy touches the pikewall the pikemen will often switch to their swords running your defense against cavalry and making themselves very vulnerable; as polearms/pikemen do not have shields they die quite quickly in melee

Wedge formation: A wedge formation is meant to increase a units ability to charge but it doesn’t matter because with a wedge only a few men hit with their charge bonus and the men at the back are wasted, as less men get into the killing phase of the charge and so less enemy die on the charge. It also results in the men at the front being isolated from the rest of the unit and usually killed. The men at the back also take a while to get into melee because of the depth of the formation so the unit can’t focus its attacks properly and fights very infectively. Given all this it is not worth using wedge at all, just stick to standard formation.

Cavalry in M2TW sometimes have pathfinding problems and they don’t seem to do too well against infantry in melee. Cavalry attacking infantry will often just sit there with their nose against the infantry instead of trotting past to attack. They sometimes just sit there and don’t strike at them or other cavalry and are generally sort of buggy.

Crossbows - Guns. Often stuck reloading, It is especially important to keep Arquebusiers and Musketeers out of counter fire. There is a bug in M2TW that causes Arquebusiers and Musketeers that get hit with missiles to get stuck in reforming or just keep shifting men around uselessly instead of just shooting.

Two handed Axes and polearms and to some extent two-handed swords:
The problem is that one patch for M2TWfixed the shield bug (which caused units with shields to receive negative defence for their shields rather than positive.) that has plagued the series since Rome and this unbalanced the game towards units with shields, as the game’s balance was originally designed for units with the bugged shields. This is coupled with the fact that polearms and axes have very slow attack animations and they can be blocked just as easily as one handed weapons so polearm troops spend a lot of time slowly attacking, getting blocked and having to start their slow attack animation over again, all the time getting attacked the by one handed weapon units’ fast attack animations, getting stunned by the fast attacks and flinching rather than attacking back over and over and then dying.

Also archers are generally too weak in my opinion. Both archers and crossbowmen shoot an awkward angle straight up in the sky which doesnt really deal damage to the enemy and is too slow. Archers I can perhaps forgive it seing as it would be possible, but crossbows simply does not work that way.

This makes me build armiers avoiding polearms, pikes, twohanded units, archers, guns, and crossbows. I only use mounted missiles, javelins, heavy and light cav, swords, but overwhelmingly spear units, since they actually work and have stable defense for pinning the enemy.

Further AI problems:

Chasing routers: All of the unit is chasing one guy in the enemy unit instead of spreading out to kill units. This means an enemy routing unit can have one guy running one direction but 100 running the other. Yet all my units are chasing that one single guy

Sieges: Archers are shooting upwards instead of downwards towards the enemy, rendering them less useful

Enemies do not retreat once all their siege equipment has been destroyed. Making them easy targets for archers etc although not that easy targets because of the above mentioned point.

In sieges again, units only engage with the front row and only with the unit furthest into the street. I can manually tell units to run through behind the enemy through my own troops to get more units into the battle but the AI doesnt do this on its own... Dont get it.

In campaign. Diplomacy generally doesn't work. Alliences doesn't mean much. Maybe im not understanding the system though.

Mongols: They do not start attacking cities, they just stand around, sometime move around a bit but never engages. whats up with that?

Anyway, is there any patch or mod which addresses all these problems? Someone else than me must have found these issues annoying as hell

[eugenioso]

dear sir/madam:

these bugs have existed unfortunately since the game came out. Mods have attempted to fix some of these issues, and some mods have succeeded, but overall the bugs remain. you must understand, the game was rushed to hit the deadline, with the result that normal units and situations that worked for RTW, which is essentially an earlier engine and, might i add, far more stable, are working wrong in MTW2. Archers dont fire at the enemy like they did in rome, they fire in nice arches so they inflict zero casualties. spear/pikewall doesnt work either, barely so against cavalry. the wedge formation is worthless, doesnt break through anything and kills less. chasing down enemies doesnt work quite as intended either. the 2 handers werent a problem in Rome, at least not in Barbarian Invasion. the diplomacy is unfortunately broken as hell, and its a constant source of humor for the forumites dwelling here (in MTW2's favor, its not as horrendously bad as the one in Empire Total War). and finally, the mongols are a wildcard; sometimes they attack, sometimes they sit on their ass waiting to attack someone.

-this has led to the awesome situation of seeing mongols fight timurids, but only once in my games-

in other words, there isnt really a super fix for this. maybe there is a line of code that can fix the archer's fire, if it can be set to emulate the firing animation of arquebuisers, as they fire in straight lines and in volleys. im not an expert on that.

[Sitalkes]

An interesting list of bugs, but most are not game breaking and have work-arounds. Try the Retrofit mod for a mod with minimal changes except for bug fixes and Kingdoms features or Stainless Steel for a major upgrade.