BlackAdderBG
Arcane
Do you still have to activate the script? I played last week and never saw the prompt to activate it and I remember it been there last time I tried EBII a year ago.
100% agree, going to 3d map was biggest decline and root to 90% of the problems with all post Medieval games. One cool feature would have been to choose from 3 different battle maps when attacking a region if your general had better command or something like that. With 2d map there is so much more potential for better campaign play. Kings Crusade have a system where you can pick different plans before battle that changes them dramatically (to bad the game crash like crazy). It's a shame Neocore Games don't have a budget or interest to make more strategy games in the vein of Kings Crusade.
And most importantly the AI can actually play on the map, something it has never done since moving to 3d, even in Shogun 2 where the map was designed with choke points been all over the map it had to cheat and create armies in the fog. The battle AI is actually way better, as the CAI can't play the game at all.
I've been playing early Total War games recently and the difference between the first two and later ones is night and day. Getting rid of the simple risk-style strategic map was the worst mistake Creative Assembly ever made with the series. It went from something quick and simple that existed to contextualise the battles to this incredibly dull waste of time that takes forever and only throws battles at you occasionally. Which is a real shame, because the actual battles in Rome and Medieval 2 aren't bad at all. However, there isn't just more time between battles in the later games but the battles themselves are very negatively impacted by the strategic map redesign, because they are less likely to be somewhat even or take place in interesting locations. If for example in Shogun you have a region with a bridge then you know it will be a pain to take over and rather easy to defend. But what are the odds of you having to cross a bridge in Medieval 2 or Rome? It almost never happens.
MTW is better than Shogun in some regards, it was more stable and had more varied units and maps. There's something to be said for the minimalism of the Sengoku era of Japan though, it makes the game extremely balanced and it had an elegance to it.
100% agree, going to 3d map was biggest decline and root to 90% of the problems with all post Medieval games. One cool feature would have been to choose from 3 different battle maps when attacking a region if your general had better command or something like that. With 2d map there is so much more potential for better campaign play. Kings Crusade have a system where you can pick different plans before battle that changes them dramatically (to bad the game crash like crazy). It's a shame Neocore Games don't have a budget or interest to make more strategy games in the vein of Kings Crusade.
And most importantly the AI can actually play on the map, something it has never done since moving to 3d, even in Shogun 2 where the map was designed with choke points been all over the map it had to cheat and create armies in the fog. The battle AI is actually way better, as the CAI can't play the game at all.