As you all know since Empires is mostly in the gunpowder age with few factions still using swords and bows, melee combat might not be seen as much. I will admit out of all forms of warefare this has interested me the least, probably because I don't know much about it I still don't. I always looked at it as lines of men blindley shooting at eachother but now I relise there is more to it than that. The only things Im hoping for this game is that the ground battles don't lack that epic feel that previous total war games have, with thousands of soldiers clashing in a battle. I just hope the gameplay doesn't become some-what boring to watch if it involves you choosing when to aim your weapons with no melee combat what so ever. What I really hope for is every single ranged unit in the game who use muskets also having a melee ability with all of the melee stats being different for each ranged unit. I hope they give the player an option to just charge at an enemy unit with bayonets fixed if they don't want to use there ranged ability. If there is huge crowds of melee fights like in previous total war games I just hope they are some-what long like in Rome:Total war instead of a pack of soldiers rushing in to stab any enemy they see with the bayonet. I wanna see soldier's struggling to survive actually pitting there guns against each other sort of like swords in an effort not to get stabbed. Another good feature would be for some melee units to actually have a small sword along with there musket like a sort of speciality for that unit in melee combat. Such as the unit having a sword holder (I don't know what it's called) on there belt. Im not speaking of a large sword, just a large dagger or a short sword, something very light.
If features such as this arn't in Empires I fear the ground combat could become sort of boring lacking that great feel Medieval 2 and Rome had. I just hope they pull threw with it, the ground combat will be the deciding factor in how good this game will be, other than that Im sure it will be great. I just hope they don't all focus on this new naval feature which is great and fail to include ground combat features such as the one I just explained.
Non-cavalry units better have some defence against cavalry even when there charged at and there formation is broken they can at least fight, such as a strong non-cavalry unit fighting against a weak cavalry unit, they should still stand a chance even if the enemy is on horses in melee combat.