Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Where do I even begin...? Pathing is horrible. Unit collision is almost nonexistent. Mosh pit battles that make it impossible to form or hold a line. Defending a town? Lined up pikeman three units deep on a narrow street? No mas; the barbarian hordes will RUN RIGHT THROUGH them like water through a sieve. Want to regroup and counterattack? Can't do that either; some of your pikemen will stick to the rampaging enemy like glue until you click on a given unit and see it's strung through half the town single-file..... oh and God forbid you try and turn a corner. The entire unit will stick to the corner and feed a worker-ant trickle of troops at an enemy that will gobble them up as they arrive. Get two or three units stuck on the corner and they'll mill around until the battle is over. Can't ravage your enemy's lands without taking the town. Can't intercept enemy armies -- they go right past you with all the ease of a naked Celt running through a Macedonian phalanx. Armies build their own transports on the fly and literally skate across the water, destroying any actual FLEETS OF WARSHIPS you so laboriously built because they're so much stronger for some reason. Gone are the various seasons -- turns are a year long now, so no more worries about freezing in the winter, and it takes a couple of decades for you to explore the Mediterranean. No more family trees... just anonymous blocky faces of people who, you are informed in some abstract way, are in your 'faction' of your empire. Rebel armies that are tiny and easily crushed. Random civil wars that spawn twice as many armies as you are allowed, all with top-notch troops that mysteriously appear in your capitol -- oh, didn't I mention that the number of armies you have is arbitrarily limited to the size of your empire? Not money or food supply or anything. Oh no. Oh, and if you're on the offensive in a field battle, there's going to be a capture point plopped down somewhere at random. Fail to get to it in time, wherever it may be, and your whole army will panic and route and be slaughtered even if they were beating an inferior enemy half their number. Taking advantage of the terrain? Maneuver? Plugging holes in your (utterly porous) line? All those things that make you feel like a general..? Heck no, just make a beeline for the cap point or get wiped off the earth. Conversely, if you can somehow figure out how to hold the cap point in a town for the requisite amount of time, an entire stack of enemy armies will suddenly freak out and start running, and you can happily butcher them... if you can get your pursuing troops to do anything besides job alongside them in loose formation and occasionally pick one off. Isn't that fun? This is just off the top of my head, and doesn't even take into account the most buggy launch I've ever seen. I'm not even going to talk about the hundred-plus AI factions, every Tom Dick and Harry tribe, city-statelet, and emergent splinter factions that ALL eat up CPU time to figure out what they're going to do (even after the latest patch it still takes two or three whole minutes whenever you press the FINISH button. Bring a good book). I'm not talking about ships sailing through dry land. Oh no. I'm not talking about technical issues. Those can be fixed. Maybe. I'm talking about GAMEPLAY. Most of the mechanics we've been accustomed to over the past decade have been stripped out and the ones that remain are dysfunctional. The resulting steaming pile of fail isn't just dumbed down. It's dumb, period. I have the horrible feeling the developers were aiming for a console port and fouled everything up. I'll reinstall after Christmas to see if they're managed to salvage it, but until then? Save your freaking money. EDIT 10/6/13: Out of 157 reviews, 97 are one or two stars. Only 43 are five or four stars. And yet it's rated as two and a half stars out of five. What manner of industry-driven chicanery is this, Amazon?