Froggy’™s top tip: If you ever get invited to an event where you can preview a game before it comes out, make sure your skills with the previous titles aren’t rusty. Or you end up being defeated humiliatingly when someone suggests a LAN battle. I had a quick go at the M2TW demo and a couple of evenings invested in Goth’s BI mod, and that’s it for a year. Oh well, those who download and watch the replay will be able to have a good laugh as the frog marches into battle, gets minced, and runs away. I used to be quite good, honest! It is safe to follow my advice…

Having spent a few hours playing M2TW I find myself considerably more optimistic than I was before. When the game was first announced I shrugged and ignored it, so disenchanted had I become with RTW. I occasionally looked in on some of the previews, saw fancy screenshots and talk of flashy killing moves and improved graphics, shrugged again and walked away. It’s only in recent months I started to pay attention. For that I can thank (or blame!) the blogs, the increase in detailed forum posts by CA staff, and the inclusion of information I want to hear about in previews. Graphics, killing moves, cannons strapped on elephants and other ‘cool’ units? I don’t care. AI, challenge, detail, options, strategy, tactics, complexity…  that’s what I play for. That’s what I found lacking in RTW and, to a somewhat reduced extent, its expansion.

They aren’t things you can fairly judge on a few hours play. True, you can find something that you feel to be badly wrong in those areas in a short time. But if they are done right it takes much, much longer before you know it. So for my more complete thoughts on the game you’ll have to wait a few weeks.

What I can definitely say is that I didn’t find anything glaringly wrong. I didn’t find anything which made me worry. There was evidence that CA have heard what the veteran community said about RTW and have listened, evidence ranging from tiny things to the significant. To grab a pair of my favourites, there’s now a tick box in options for the minimalised battle interface; a tiny little change which saves me from editing .ini files and gives me the interface I want right at the start instead of requiring a patch months after release. Battles are slower, both in terms of unit movement and in killing. Cavalry is undoubtedly less godly; they can’t disentangle themselves from a melee so easily and don’t fight like a bunch of kill-bots in old armour, which means you must use more thought on where and when to commit them. I’ll throw out a few more quick examples. The music and voice acting is much improved. No more comedy kebab shop owners bawling, ‘Yes, strappy-horse!… or squeaky adolescents pretending to be Roman generals. The AI reacted far more intelligently to my moves on the battlefield than RTW’s; at one point, during the siege of a city with no walls, it held me on three fronts as it sent units to counter my efforts at surrounding it. I never saw that in RTW; I considered it good if the AI reacted at all to my attacking it from multiple directions. On average I was losing roughly twice as many men per battle as I was in RTW. I was surprised at how pleased I was to see the agent movies return after an absence of two games. Those spy movies can be quite amusing…

Some changes to the formula aren’t as the result of feedback per say. I did like the alteration to wooden walls; level 2 walls are now impervious to battering rams except at the gates, and can have units placed on them. At long last wooden walls feel worth building for themselves and not as a landmark on the path to stone walls. The new recruitment system is neat; being able to raise multiple units, mixing and matching types, in one turn much better than the rigid old system. Merchants look like an interesting agent type; on a low level they are an extra source of income, on a higher level there’s potential for economic warfare.

My stance on the game now is that it shows considerable promise, and that it may very well meet that promise. I want to play more, I want to dive in and test and tinker and discover. Above all I want it to meet that expectation it’s raised in me. My main irritation is that I’ve got a copy of the game and no days off until next week.As for those titular weddings, I had a veritable plague of them in my campaign game. One princess and two princes tying the knot in 10 turns. Hurrah! No more waiting decades of in-game time for male characters to find themselves a nice bride. Now they’re decently hitched at a more historically realistic age. I pity my poor princess; I married her off to a 43 year old chap with a fearsome moustache. He did have fabulous stats and traits though. Surely that makes up for it?