Is this post directed at me? It seems to be as it has to do with what I wrote, but you didn't quote me, so I'm not sure.......
The Spartan hoplites were really ridiculously strong in the unmodded version of Rome Total War. That while Sparta was already way beyond their prime in the time period of RTW. It's still fun to slaughter a huge army with a small elite one of course. At least, it is fun to do it once, but in the end, I will go for challenge instead of the 'cool' factor.
Yeah sorry, it was immediately after you posted, so I assumed you'd know.
Personally, I played for epic battles and I actually found Greece really quite challenging on V Hard / V Hard with huge size units.
The Romans would be in your face on about turn 2 and it would be an endless war from then on. Spartans would die horribly in the field, but in a settlement or in a nice area of the map, you could really punish an attacking army.
I beat the game with all the civs on V hard / V hard - so I really got my money's worth long before mods were released. I definitely had more than 2 weeks worth of fun out of it!!
If a developer makes a game that doesn't operate properly on video cards it claims to support, it's the developer's fault for claiming to support that video card when they really don't.
When it works on a large number of people's pcs with that exact card but doesnt work on other people's pcs with that card.... yep, I would call that a user problem. Firaxis will still try their best to address it, just as all games companies do.... but customers are such a pain in the ass in the pc software business!
You're not playing multiplayer. You're relying on an AI that simply isn't up to the task of managing such a complex game making mistakes. Honestly, Civ is way simpler, especially if you compare EU2 to Civ3 (which came out the same year), in which a friend of mine makes a regular practice of simply founding cities almost adjacent to enemies and taking over their entire empire by culture. I mean, what makes Civ3 so complicated? Convoluted rules that are easy to take advantage of? Wars that essentially boil down to spamming your best offensive and your best defensive units with some siege thrown in depending on which patch you're on? Europa Universalis forces you to manage actual diplomatic relations and stability, which is simple enough against the nigh-braindead AI but becomes much more complex when you need to worry about actual human opponents.
Also, the Aztecs are one of the easiest nations to play as since they have no competition at all for a few hundred years. You're a lot more hard-pressed as a small European nation next to a behemoth.
Hold on here, your argument is very dodgy!
You are saying that playing MP makes Europa Universalis challenging and that I shouldnt judge the game by its SP play.... and then turning round and judging Civ by its SP game!!

That's hardly fair is it?
And any game against a human is always going to be more challenging if they are capable... again, that's not really the point we were talking about and is more than a little of a non-sequiter.
Of course I was talking about SP - they are both predominantly SP games and I only play SP due to time differences and problems getting people to play for extended periods of time.
In SP, EUIII is only challenging if you play an underdog and really - I'm still not sure that you have outlined any actual complexities involved in the game.... managing diplomacy? What, you mean sending diplomats every now and then? Hardly complex or deep.... all you do is click a button and select from a very limited list. And actually claiming that Civ is more simple for the AI?? I dont know where to begin but you are most assuredly wrong, there's very tight restraints on what can and cant be done in EUIII, while in civ, the board is very open and the AI has to forge an empire out of it, specialising or acclimatising to what they find.... EU has a fixed map with fixed provinces and fixed relations and fixed fixed fixed EVERYTHING..... if you really wish to insist that it is more complex, then you're going to have to accept an "agree to disagree" because there's no way on heaven or earth that you are going to convince me of this!!
Furthermore, Aztecs are one of the easiest nations!!!????

That's hilarious! There are 2000 people on the official forum complaining that any non european civ is incredibly difficult to play (as it should be given the name of the game) and here you are telling me that everyone's wrong. There are at least 30 nations vastly more powerful than the Aztecs.... the Aztecs probably are top of the 3rd division if you set the types of nations up into leagues.
Any non-European civ is more of a challenge due to the incredibly poor government, the slow tech speed (wait 100 years for stab and govt increases) please dont even compare them to European civs and in the same breath tell me I dont know how to play the game - that's comical!!
Add to that the fact that the Aztecs have plenty of challenges with the surrounding native civs and immediate invasions from Portugal and Spain and later from France and England.... while having vastly inferior troops, land, manpower, tech and of course, no boats.
As I said, I personally find EUIII to play like a board game and it's about as deep as most board games too (naturally playing against good human players makes it more difficult) - its scope is much larger of course, but the depths of it is mostly due to the inherent RPG qualities - your imagination fills the vast gaping blanks.