Sicily doesn't exist

[Stefanoski]

Starting a campaign as Sicily i noticed there is no actual 'Sicily', it's called Palermo Region. Nor is there a Tuscany apparently it's correct name is Florence region. Crete? No silly, it's Iraklion region. Surely it would not have been too hard to have named the regions correctly..

Venice is, in the grand campaign description and in most other descriptions, advertised as 'the city of canals'. Do you see any canals when defending the city? The only 'canal' anywhere near Venice is a single river which barely poses any threat to attackers due it's distance from the city. Let's be realistic. Nobody expects the real Venice to be portrayed very well in MTW2, but it's identical to every other southern european city.

I'm going to quickly reiterate what's been said earlier: Not only does Venice play like any other faction, it runs into more conflict than most other factions and is in an almost constant state of siege. Not only this, playing as 'The Most Serene Republic' on very hard, i managed to survive and out muscle, Milan, Sicily, HRE and the Byzantines. Is anyone getting this?

Here's the history of Venice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Venice
Tell me if the Venice in MTW2 is portrayed with any shred of realism.

Apparently all Rome's... Well Rome has since dissapeared. Is there a forum? A colliseum, or any remanence of it's former prestige? I'm not talking anything to dramatic, just a prop or two, an eagle atop a pilar, anything? Nope.

You'll also notice the inadequacies of the settlements have been veiled by the deletion of the zoom settlement feature, where you could gaze upon and explore the settlement on your own accord.

To conclude. As some have mentioned earlier, the factions are hugely lacking in character. Playing MTW2 sometimes seems like a giant game of Risk, same ****, different colors.

Sorry to rant guys, it's just a shame that game of this caliber has such let downs.

[danes]

meh.. m2tw did not claim realism afaik. u want realism play europa universalis. m2tw is the next iteration in the TW series. that means a lot of action (now with an emphasis on siege warfare).

anyway thats your opinion and you're entitled to it but i just think your rant is a little shallow and nitpicking.. canals in venice.. island names.. eagle statues in rome.. nitpicking. thats my opinion.

also playing VH/VH is not a "realisitc" setting. it just means that the AI hates you more and will war on you more.

[Stefanoski]

Comon, they havn't been bothered naming the regions, i'm hardly nitpicking.

[vindex246]

You can easily rename any region you want -- either the settlement name or the land surrounding it, they are independent names. They are all in a file in the text folder. You don't even need the unpacker, just download the text data files and set up a mod.

Yes, CA appears to have been a bit lazy in this respect.

None of the cities' battle maps are customized in the way you would like. Maybe someday. But not now. Like RTW, all cities are permutations on the same basic plan plus some surrounding scenery.

[Woolygimp1207]

Venice has a river immediately to it's left. It's great for defending...

[Lavastein]

Venice has a river immediately to it's left. It's great for defending...

he already established that. Hes saying it looks nothing like it did in real life and i agree. I would have loved to see more life in the cities.

[Sher Khan]

Well, I would welcome a pioneering mod to discover how we could create our own cities, mod them in the campaign, and then be able to view it with a city viewing option that does not exist in the game.

Once that happens, I'll go buck crazy with making cities.

[General Dissaray]

I don't know much about Sicily but I do know there is a setalment called Palermo there. Perhaps it is just easyer to code the name of the provence and the name of the setelment there as the same. I think the question: Dose it realy make any diferance? applys here. I konw I don't cair what the place is called. I am far more conserned with what I get from the place.

[Rommel]

I dont know about you guyz, I don't play total war to gaze upon a city, and say WoW look its gorgeous! I play so I can turn a city into rubble, kill everyone that resisted, and make an extra amount of gold for the next turn.

but hey, I mean some people want more.. I'm satisfied with the game tho

[EmperorJulian]

I have yet to determine why CA would omit historic region names from the campaign map. I modded the names myself and once I knew what to do it only took a few minutes. Do they think the average total war player is so stupid they'll be confused by the city of Palermo being in Sicily? or Milan in Lombardy? I can't think of any other reason to omit this feature entirely.

[aves]

you don't even need to edit a text file... click on the name in your management screen and change it to whatever you want... I rename about 50% of the regions as I conquer them.

[elbasto]

The names displayed in the settlments are the names of the cities, not the names of the provinces although these may be the same in several cases.

Examples of the first case (in addition to those already posted) are Toledo (should be castilla region), Alexandria (should be lower Egypt) and Yerevan (should be Armenia). Try hovering the mouse with the right mouse button clicked to have the true name of the province... I believe this worked on RTW.

Examples of the second case are London, Rome, Paris (although technically it should be Ilde the France and this was the case in MTW 1), etc.

[greatjoe15]

erm, how exactly do you do the thing where you change the names of the provinces? i dont know jack about fiddling with programs but yeah...

[Zenith Darksea]

No, I think he realises that the names displayed under the cities are the cities' names. But if you hover the cursor over the province on the minimap in the bottom left corner, it gives you the province name. Many provinces it seems are named things like 'Jerusalem region', 'Venice region' and so on. I don't have M2TW, so I can't comment too much on it, but it does seem to be a bizarre regression. In all the previous Total War games CA at least attempted to give a reasonably historical name to each province, but this is just so lazy it's comic.

[Odovacar]

Well, the whole system is messed up at a degree that you cannot even criticize it!
The map is divied into main provinces, as saying that only these cities existed would be idiotic. But those main provinces which fill the map are actually cities!
Their names totally incorrect. (baddest case: Budapest)
So, CA used a mixed system of provinces/cities, but neither option is really true, the cities are provinces, but the provinces have city names.

[Zenith Darksea]

Well the original idea was in Shogun when there was a Risk style campaign map. You would invade a province, and you'd have an auto-battle on a preselected battlefield. If you won that battle, you'd be left besieging the fortress. You could either sit it out or you could assault it. The fortresses all had the names of real historical fortresses and were placed in the correct position (so Yamato province had a castle at Kyoto and so on). Then this system was the same in the first Medieval Total War, and in Rome the only change was that now the cities and their names became much more *noticeable* and the provinces names were less so. The concept was that each province of the map had a sort of capital city that would give overall control of a province to its owner (though there would still be bandits wandering about the territories sometimes), which is a sound enough idea in itself. But now CA seem to have just decided to sack the idea of having province names, and are just concentrating on cities.