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[Zrk2]

I played as Spain and I ended up just holding Toulouse with a pile of knights and roflstomping through the Med, GG Milan.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Majority of my MTW2 experience is with Stainless Steel (RR/RC submod included), so it may skew things a bit. I liked playing with England and use longbow men rather offensively. I'd hold the enemy line with militia, sergeants and knights, circle behind the enemy and fire them with direct archery fire. All but the most heavily armoured units would take serious casualties from near point blank longbow fire. Extra hilarity would ensue if I forgot to forbid them from firing a 10-man enemy unit that's right in front of my 100+ unit.

Another fun faction was Sicily. Early alliance with the pope covered your land border, and from Southern Italy you could go anywhere in the Mediterranean. They also had a good combination of eastern archers, Norman knights and other knights of the crusading orders.

Kiev was also pretty fun. East Europeans are pretty cool to begin with, they had awesome late game units and started out fairly small. I like my factions to not be too big when I start the game, it's more fun to conquer a big empire and it helps keep things manageable.

I had some fun with the Ottomans, who in late game get a nice selection of units. Besides it's always fun to play the scourge of Europe. Too bad that (at least v6.1) Stainless Steel downplayed the power of most non western Europeans (my only real gripe with the mod, aside from MTW2 engine specific stuff).

[LoSboccacc]

In my campaign with the third age mod the free people of eriador are pretty busy fornicating. My two full stacks of generals are lolling all over orcs.

I have almost no other unit. The recruitment turn limiter is awful. Mousehovering to know when I can build a unit is pretty boring, so I'm abusing the generals spawn rate.

[Delta Foxtrot]

That's my biggest problem with TATW, I want to charge the orcs with knights. Not some scrawny peasant militia. I want to trample the men of the west with my mumakil, not with desert rabble. Dammit. It's fun to play with high end units. And even though I agree that it's good to limit unit production in some way, hard turn limit is not the way I would go about it. Probably the best case I've seen was Europa Barbarorum for Rome where high tier units were prohibitively expensive to start and even later on having a full stack of companion cavalry would be financially ill advised. It afforded you with some elite units per army, but at least I counted majority of my forces  to be very mid level stuff. Knights alone aren't awesome, knights in a canvas filled with peasant militias and lower class professional soldiers are awesome. Ultimately the best choice would probably be to just allow everyone to recruit everything from the get go and put turn limits and such as additional sub mods for those who are into that sort of thing.

But then again I tend to play like that. Even if given the chance to use all elite, I would prefer if the game wouldn't penalize me for using less than the best offered. Even if I could have a stack full of heavy cavalry, I try to keep over half of my force infantry, and of the cavalry a certain portion will be light even if I could afford to solely field the high end stuff. When everyone is special, no one is. It makes the elite units stand out, and that's what makes them elite.

[LoSboccacc]

Rome was so much better in that regards. Unit balance came from recruitment time and maintenance costs, and it worked: even at endgame I had some militian taking the first assault efore sending the elites because their recruitment and replenishment was costly, slow and required specialized cities of whih there weren't many to begon with

[Zrk2]

I can't seem to get Stainless Steel to work, even though I did follow their bloody directions to the letter.

What you said about units makes sense, because I know in M2TW I find all (western European) factions end up fielding the same army as I always can field the very best of everything in the late game.

[umiman]

Don't forget that there are special instructions to running Medieval 2 mods in Steam. They should be on the mod's forum.

[Zrk2]

I have a hard copy, but I still have problems. Oh well, turns out my friend has RTW, so I'll get to compare them soon.

[LoSboccacc]

my two cents:

medieval has a greater unit selection, more interesting abilities for special characters (spies, merchants, etc..), the jihad/crusade mechanism is nice, castles and citadels are awesome, multiple recruitment slots are useful and free upkeep slots help a bit too

on the other hand, battle maps feel pretty generic and uninteresting, hovering the mouse on the unit you need on each city to find out when the first one will become available sucks, AI cheating when a faction is down to a couple of territories gets boring and adds noting gameplay wise, battles are quite arcadey, AI features tied to game difficulty means you won't see interesting stuff happening unless you also give them game bonuses too. also, lot of feature badly developed or missing when compared to the first medieval (no oil gates, map forts broken, other stuff too)


rome as a nicer campaign map, with better thought starting points for factions that keep each faction interesting and fun to play and better control points for strategic placement of armies, you can recruit any unit as long as you can pay them, balancing taxes is harder and city can lose money, maintaining order on larger cities is harder and require to actually plan out build orders, you can't build everything so you need to make decision and take commitment on strategies, influencing the campaign on long term and actually adding to replay value, army upkeep and retraining costs actually have game consequence so you'll find yourself use more of militia as front lines to avoid losing high value units.


on the other hand, roman factions are quite overpowered, it may be quite unfun to fight them on very hard with lame factions; AI is quite crude when it comes to attacking, a lot of features are just hidden and no one tells you about them (blockades nets you money, I think. maybe. can't remember if it was a mod or something), economy is badly broken (two nations with two region each trading generates way more income than a four nation state not trading, meaning that when you're big enough and no one want to trade you your economy is screwed)

and lot of other things

[ThtblovesDF]

Play ze mods, fools!

[LoSboccacc]

seconded. darth mod for rome is very enjoyable. still, one should compare vanilla with vanilla.

also, most mod can't really solve the recruitment limiting model of medieval, because the AI cheats sucks without money cheating and with money cheating it ends up building only elites.

(see, for example, the discussions regarding rate limiting in the TATW Mod for kingdoms)

[Delta Foxtrot]

I tried both Rome Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum and ended up liking EB more. Another good mod I found for Rome is Fourth Age Total War. A LOTR game set some ~200+ years after the books.

Not to steer too far away from the subject of MeddyII, the other mod I've had fun with on MTW2 (aside from SS) is Broken Crescent. Very good work, and it brings a fresh new setting (from the eastern side of the Byzantines to the western half of India). It brings a new kind of depth to the eastern/muslim/arab units and factions that the more euro/west centric vanilla games and many mods have not achieved.

All the mods I've mentioned so far are all very good in general quality. While at least FATW is still in development, and my experiences with SS and BC date back a few version numbers, they are all in a very release worthy state and lack any game hampering signs of being work in progress.

[Flare]

Does anyone know what the trade buildings are even for? In most provinces they don't seem to be even worth the cost of construction, or at least won't recoup the cost of the building until several wars are over and 30+ turns have past. Is there something about them that I don't know about? Like, are their effects cumulative in that when you build more of such buildings the returns become higher and higher?

[Croquantes]

I think there's two aspects to trade, provincially generated and empire-wide. Trade buildings increase both, and allow you to make more money from trade but the effects are greater in provinces that have good resources and lots of people. You should have specialised trade cities and try not to recruit from them unless necessary.

The more trade one province generates, the more your other provinces benefit. Also, keep trade cities away from front lines. It -hurts- if they get sacked.

[Zrk2]

That sounds about right. Marseilles and Antioch seem to be exceptionally productive.

I just installed RTW, and my God, Warbands are shit. It's actually funny watching my generals gallop straight through entire units.