Who's still playing?

[caravel]

No amount of modding can fix RTW, mods like EB and RTR are for history buffs, not old school TW players that started playing back in the days of Shogun. EB or RTR may be an "historical experience", but they're not an experience in tactical war-gaming.

The RTW (and onwards) campaign map is just an exercise in micro and resource management - I don't particularly enjoy that aspect of the game (or I would have bought a Civ game) and found the new map to be total ing disaster for the series as a whole. But that wouldn't have been so bad if it had actually worked. I gave up after the first campaign of painstakingly walking the animated giants around the "disneyland" style map - M2TW's map was even more disneyland (It might as well have been called "Shrek: Total War"). The sheer idiocy of the campaign game in terms of the piecemeal armies that head for the nearest settlement (without their general) to lay siege while their emissary is also on his way to sue for peace... (rinse and repeat - that's the game) In two words: utter crap. I revisited it some years later in the hope that, as people were advising, patch 1.5 and some mods would make a difference - I also went out and bought M2TW... guess what...? The end result was ebay. Good riddance.

The best part is that after RTW they spun M2TW as something totally different, reworked and fixed. Good lord it was even worse... and I had doubted that was even possible. I gave up after that and from what I've heard from trusted sources about the newer games (also spun and hyped as totally different, reworked and fixed) it hasn't gotten any better.