Well I dunno - the more I play it the more I appreciate it for what it is. With such massive scope the faults are going to be many, and they are there - here are a few of my gripes with it so far;
- Israel and America are the most powerful predefined civs, they have more bonuses than anyone else.
- You can define your own civ and spend points on whatever bonuses you want but you will never have as many as any of the defined civs, which seems a bit unfair.
- Games take FOREVER to play. A typical RM game can keep you playing for hours unless you get a quick rush in, and the AI is made hard by giving it stupid amounts of resources - I know it's more difficult to write a smarter enemy but they went too far - in AOE the CP cheats on hardest, but in EE it's worse than that on easy.
- The English accents are not too bad, they still sound like an American trying to be British but they are passable, and some in fact are quite good. However, the French, German and Russian accents in the campaigns are APPALLING! They sound like they came from someone who was brought up on a diet of old war movies - bad ones. I'd probably be more offended if I didn't wet myself every time I hear them ;-)
- Some of the scenarios are just tedious. Restricting certain techs etc to make a given scenario more challenging is a tried and tested method of providing a good fight, but there are times when the linear direction and deliberate restrictions made them a chore to play when they should have been fun.
However the most annoying ones at the moment are
- The game's habit of kicking out to the desktop whenever it feels like it. It's as stable as a centipede on ice skates.
- The fact that as soon as you buy the game you are expected to download a patch so you can play online. Except when I downloaded the patch and installed it, it stopped the game running at all. I know I said this before but it's pretty major - It's lame enough when you spend even more time downloading a patch for a game you have just spent a lot of your hard earned cash on because they couldn't get it right in time, but then when it doesn't work...
But when the bloody thing does work it is pretty fun and addictive. And the potential for scenario design is immense. It's a more complex game and I think that has lost a lot of the audience, narrowed the fan base too much by specialising in all the things die hard fans said they wanted. You can't just be a casual player like you can with AOE, you can't just dip in for a quick game to relax. But if you want a good involving game with lots of variety and options that is fun and addictive in its own way, then EE is the game.
Have to say though that so far ROR is king and not even EE touches it.
[This message has been edited by Phill Phree (edited 01-01-2002 @ 10:05 PM).]