[Taqwus]

Hm. I did stop by an EB Games the other day, and noticed quite a few -used- copies of R:TW for sale. Huh. I've also gathered from the CSIPGS group that there are objections to some extremely bizarre units (head hurlers?), out-of-control population growth, and a poor tactical AI that wouldn't pose much of a problem at all if the battles weren't on hyperspeed, it seems.

I did own Shogun TW. Spiffy in some ways, but the developers largely ignored a number of bugs and design issues, and fell prey to following too many unrealistic "gamey" rules (superunits -- the Geishas; can only do one thing per province per turn e.g. train units or improve farmland; arbitrary battle timer where the offense *always* lost at the end regardless of the balance of power). It also had an AI that cheated -very- boldly and irritatingly when moving "simultaneously" but with exact knowledge of what your orders would be for that turn -- whereas the player could never get such information regardless of his investment in espionage. Overall, I got the impression during the post-release period that CA wanted to push out only minor patches, and then push out expansions and sequels, while ignoring complaints about the morale model or the absurd geishas or so forth. This is rather reminiscent of Paradox, which pushed out EU2 shortly after EU while leaving the latter with well-known issues such as AI ships blithely wandering the world without ever needing to return to port, and that fights wars poorly due to overly predictably fixating on particular provinces, and ignoring any weaknesses that the human player feels free to expose after noticing what target the AI's fixated on...

Some developers are pretty good at responding to player complaints. Illwinter's quite good at it, as is Malfador Machinations (Space Empires); the Battlefront people (Combat Mission) are as well -- those devs have to be, because many of the players are hard-core grognards that *will* notice if, say, a vehicle's armor thickness is even slightly off, and will drag out statistics and primary sources to debate the usage/availability of machine pistols and captured small arms... Firaxis isn't bad about it -- SMAC had a number of helpful fixes, and staff was actualy responsive, IIRC. Neither Paradox nor Creative Assembly strike me as being anywhere near as good about this.