Not so tough Roman armies... :\

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/up..._Carthage3.JPG
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Please can someone who played Shogun: TW tell me is there any reason RTW is much better? I might try it though but still not sure. I've played STW a lot while waiting for the Civ3 to be patched and don't think can play more of a similar game it is does not have some things really improved.

I played STW quite a lot, and imo RTW is a much much improved engine. The battle engine is really good, like shogun but fully 3d sprites, and spectacular (even on my pos computer) urban maps/siege battles.
The campaign game is a lot better with a more sophisticated economics/happiness system and the map is radically improved, but its all familiar enough city/unit wise. Characters play a much larger role in running cities as well as leading armies and the whole traits/retinue system is pretty fun.
Apply mods for more 'realistic' (tactical rather than twitch) battles and more historical campaign game.
Overall, much improved 'next-next-gen' STW (you know you missed MTW right?), but a similar beast at heart.

OK, you better be right. Because I had a gift certificate to Target for $25, I went and paid also my own $25 and got the game. Have not installed it yet, need to finish with Civ3 and take a couple of days off work before going to try this one. It should be very addictive, iirc I played a couple of straight 24-36-hour non-stop sessions with STW almost right away. Guess this might mean the end of my Civ3 SP games (GOTM mostly).

1 hour later: I can't stand it. Opened the box, and the disk and the manual and will install and try it now.

3 hours later. It is very addictive. Back to game now. :)

First impression:
Very pleasant graphics and very realistic. Complex strategy with many factors to consider.

What sucks:
Horrible pathfinding. Worse than in STW especially during the siege and on the city streets. Seems that AI also has a problem with this. Very "sensitive" camera with way too many redundant controls. Same problems with battle outcome resolution as in STW. Stupid AI especially during the siege. Problems with sound and sound card detection (why not use what DirectX tells?). Very annoying "advisors". Ridiculous tutorial. Very resource-consuming game overall, need to upgrade memory and processor for good quality play (same as Doom) but graphics card and other things are fine.

Got the game, played the tutorial. Some crashes, but overall nice performance. Nice game as well, though it took me some time to figure out how to set up a proper economy (lousy tutorial). However, the game just doesn't work in the imperial mode. At all.

So I browsed the net, and I found, for example, the official R:TW forum, filled with complaints about the worthless performance of the game. At first, the game crashed after 3 seconds in the imperial campaign. After I installed new video drivers and the 1.1 patch, I could play up to one turn. A nice one: apparently, performance goes up with Windows Media Player 10. Unfortunately, wmp 10 doesn't have windows 2000 support... bunch of assholes.

Anyway, I might try some quick battles (though I play for the management part...), but I'll let this game lie until they're releasing a new patch.

I use win2k and have very few problems with it crashing (maybe 1 random ctd a week)... and I have a shitty (old geforce2mx) gfx card too.

I didn't say it made sense :)

the media player thing espeically dosen't make sense... the only movie is the intro isn't it?

you might just get some use from these command line switches:
-nm = no movie
-na = no audio
-show_err = when the game crashes you get an error message, if a ctd then you might get the message the next time you exit the game (so restart and exit to see it). particularly good at catching erroneous game files.

here is a full list

alternative RTW fora - better than the official one - I've linked straight to the tech forum in each:

The Guild (forums)

TWCentre (forums)

Show error, that might be especially helpful. I already spammed the guild.

Just finished my first campaign and conquered the world on the easiest level (to find out how things work). I now started a new campaign as Carthage and the game started quite interesting with invasions from Rome and Spain. I really had to use thenavy to get my troops from one island to another fast. I'm starting to really really like it :)