From Playing MoO2 on Hard and winning all the time outside of the most unfair starts to getting my backside tanned a hundred ways on Easy in this. The base game crashes all the time, so I'm not critiquing that, though saying that is a critique in and of itself. The community patch just reams you. You're lucky to get a few towns up and your opponents are up to half a dozen. Try to get enough forces up to take over nearby neutral settlements to try to catch up and your economy stagnates because of it. Watch the AI win fights it has no right to, thus compounding the settlement issue and running off with all the nodes/treasure too, because you need more kicks to the nads. See them somehow have over half a dozen units in each of their cities and you're lucky to field two in each of your own. Auto-resolve makes naval battles in Total War Shogun 2 auto-resolving look fair, as your wizard won't cast jack unless you manually control them while the AI will use their own wizard spells. And some of the spells are ridiculous. Touch of doom? bye bye one of your units without any chance of save. And yep, some of the wizards get that right off the bat. Must be nice having your wizard nuke 2 units of the enemy each fight with ease. Not to mention spamming your home with volcanoes and corruption which sends your stagnant economy into the red and you can't counter and either won't be able to counter (if volcano spammed and you don't have nature, or nature refuses to give you the spell you need, because rngesus hates you) or have to build up/roll the right race to start clearing it (priests clearing up the corruption). Add to that archaic, nonsensical controls, a poor UI where I didn't even know about tax rate until I started googling the game let alone some of the other features hidden away, the lack of saving my last custom wizard, autosaves and all the other modern options/QoL stuff and I just can't see the fun in this.
