I got ETW right after release and played it through the major first few patches until the ginormous money nerf. If you're on a multi core computer, you need to screw with CPU allocation to fix ETW lag (most of it, anyway. It involved assigning certain cores to certain things, unassigning them, and then reassigning them, but I forget it now.). Medival two was so much better than the first one. The first big M:TW game I got into was as the Egyptians and I was about 30% of the way towards a victory when my ridiculously old king died of natural causes and then his son died the next year of natural causes and his son of 15 years died of natural causes... game over.