Your thoughts on this game?

It's like crack... I can't stop

There's just too much you can get out of this game especially with its expansion.

Most of the mods for it suck and add random difficulty spikes that don't really enhance the games experience

Third Age with army spawns when under siege and stainless steel making your general get cancer for leaving a city for 2 turns

Eh. I liked Rome a lot more. The addition of cities/garrisons was unnecessary and the overall setting isn't as interesting. That and the map is shitted up with all kinds of usually useless characters.

Also Pope.

If you like it that much you'd like the mod stainless steel. You can play factions like the Teutonic order on the grand map. But only play it after playing the base game awhile

The agents aren't useless, you're just a pleb who doesn't know how to use them

Take princesses for example. Literally the most useful characters in the game if you know what you're doing.

wtf I did not post that pic...

Wish there was a way to skip forward a couple of hundred years in Stainless Steel. I want to use pike formations and muskets, but that generation is only like 100 years long and all the nations are absolutely crippled by that point at the end of the game.

Utterly meaningless if you know how to command an army. conquest is so much more efficient there's no point to half those people

>AI is too weak so you end up as a blob with zero resistance that isn't Mongol/Timurid
>2 years every turn pass, characters age 1 year every 2 turns
>Catholicism is the only fleshed out religion
>heretics always show up, basically replacing the inevitable squalor from Rome 1
M2, R1 and S2 are fantastic games but c'mon senpai, don't act like they're perfect.

We had image switching problems 3 years ago. I haven't seen it since then until now.

>heretics always show up, basically replacing the inevitable squalor from Rome 1
Oh man, I remember playing as Egypt with all these trade buildings and only a tiny portion of income coming from taxes. I had to regularly cull down the population to avoid massive riots in the richest largest cities.

I prefer the setting of Rome but on replaying these days it's harder to ignore how shittily a lot of it is handled as far as stuff like public order and buildings go. A lot more reasonable with M2.

Honestly not a big fan of any of the games after, Shogun 2 was the only one I thought was really well done but I just don't care for the setting at all.

Every other game adds in so much unnecessary shit, just gigantic feature bloat. Also I don't think guns really worked well and ship battles are so goddamn tedious.

What is your favorite unit lads?
Moor urban militia here.

musketeers
no question

You can steal enemy generals in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with princesses and start conquering with a mercenary army.

You can also marry them to their cousins and get master-race generals born with 5-stars of command from the get go if you play your cards right.

A marriage alliance with another faction is also much more likely to last the entire game than a regular alliance.

Try getting the Stainless Steel mod.

Just tell your family and friends goodbye because you won't be leaving your room for about a month

Amazing, one of the best ever. If you have any sort of boner for the middle ages or crusading history it's a black hole of fun

the most cucked medieval video game ever
stronghold crusader is way way better

The timescale should have been fixed (you can mod it yourself), the adoption thing was stupid, because Germanics didn't adopt, especially royalty. I wish different factions had different traits and structures, like Roman Empire (Byzantines) and Arabs didn't use the Frankish/German feudal system, and even though city life had decreased in Anatolia, Cappadocia, Egypt the levant, etc, they were still more city focused than Western Europe, and that should have been employed in the game. Also, the Arab/Byzantine use of a more centralized government/professional army.

I wish that they gave the Eastern Europeans, scottish, and Arabs their own battle speeches instead of the same generic shit every time

I went through this same thing years ago. Lotr mod and Stainless Steel are god tier.

This and Rome 1 are perfections of the form. Excellence incarnate.

There's nothing wrong with Stronghold Crusader, but you're a degenerate for fixating on it

Medium Missile Cavalry. Slavs, Baltic Pagans, Moors, and Greeks have some of the best.

How can you beat a unit that manages an extended skirmish and can then close right into melee combat?

Close second are pikes of any variety. 8 years old or 80, if there are enough pikemen they'll do the job.

Anything that uses javelins really, its why I love the Spanish and Byzantine factions. Since they can throw over the heads of friendly units as a close range unit, you can do shit like
>create wall of cheap spearmen
>put javelins behind
>when cavalry charges into your spears you can lay into them with javelins
Put them inside pike formations and they will knock off a fair amount of approaching infantry too.