Spartan / Gates of Troy

[Boron]

Taqwus said:
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.

Paradox gives imo really damn good patch support : If you count the beta patches as well for eu 2 there are out already about 15 patches . Now it is at 1.08c and soon even 1.09 will be out .
And especially 1.08 changed many of eu2's game mechanics , e.g. inflation .

I own the combat mission series as well and enjoy it a lot . But the patch support is compared to paradox games worse imo :
You still can't mod armor + penetration details to your own liking . This way you can't include some new interesting special units like the "10,5 cm mittlerer panzerzerstörer or the maus panzer or the JS IV tank" e.g. .
You even can't change the weapons from infantry squads like an experimentary squad with only k44 sturmgewehren etc. .
And for CMB2B e.g. there are only 3 patches out afaik .

You are correct that the ai in Eu 2 or HOI is not really good . But in combat mission e.g. it is similiar as well .
You can make a trap with wire e.g. and then kill most of the enemy infantry with cheap 81 mm mortar artillery and similiar .
But given the complexity of eu 2 or hoi or victoria they run now very well . A ctd happens only in ages .

With CA i fully agree . They give only 1-2 minor patches per game in average . Still their games are very good though

deccan said:

That's strange. In M:TW, the AI was smart enough to use archers as skirmishers and withdraw behind the lines of their heavy infantry if they get rushed, will frequently try to flank you and when on defense, will reconfigure their formations in response to your formation and movement.

I was thinking of getting it soon, but this puts me off. I may still get it anyway just for the cool graphics.

Get rome .
Soon there will be a patch which is in development for about 2 months already .
CA said that they try to fix as many balance / ai issues as possible .

The bad ai is my only gripe i have with RTW .
The battles are really cineastic and fun .
A hint if you buy it : Your first action is to turn unit size on huge because as standard it is on standard :
On huge the units have 4x as many men , this makes the battles look really good ( a urban cohort e.g. has 160 men on huge compared to 40 on standard and 80 on large ) .

I really enjoy the huge battles . Especially cavalry and elephant charges are nicely animated .
I ordered today battle for middleearth as well and am tensed to see if it is graphically even better then rome .