RTW diplomats were at least useful for bribery, M2TW made it pretty much impossible. There are no diplomats/princesses at all.Easily the biggest improvement is huge reduction in micromanagement. treating civilians well gave you negative reputationĪnd these are just outright bugs, not minor issues like crappy AI, lack of balance, or far too much micromanagement.Īnyway, let's focus on what was improved from (patched) M2TW to (patched) ETW.during sieges you couldn't move your armies into many large empty places.ballista/cannon towers didn't shoot what they were supposed to.

having shields made units much worse at defending than not having shields (animation again?).

soldiers with two-handed weapons would just stand around confused (attacks in M2TW were based on animation system, and they lacked sufficient animations RTW just ignored animations so had no such problem).

pikemen preferred their crappy swords to pikes.

cavalry couldn't charge (pathfinding issues?).

Which is highly believable considering how atrocious M2TW 1.0 was, and about half of these bugs were fixed in vanilla patches (and not even all in mods): By the time ETW came out I was smart enough to not play it for a year or so I've only heard all users universally complaining how bad it was. I have no idea what were the main problems of 1.0 ETW.

And as I said - patches fix most of the most atrocious problems.

Let's better not think about it too much. Like one which might involve going outside more. So you might wonder - why do I even bother playing then? Well, the thing is video game industry like all content producing industries is a oligopoly - there's a really small number of video games made, so the choice is between highly flawed ones and finding another hobby. Patches fix most of that.That is, the versions which reviewers fap over so hard are worst. Initial releases of all Total War games are bug-infested piles of shit. Yay, another post about Empire Total War, plus some Rome and Medieval 2! In case you're wondering - I don't intend to even look at Napoleon Total War for let's say another year or two - that's because the first rule of Total War is:

Medieval total war 2 tutorial bug