Having just finished the Americas and Teutonic Order campaigns in Kingdoms, I was thinking about changes for the next revision of the Total War series.
The #1 thing that emerges is the desire to have fewer battles, but to have those battles at a slower pace and with greater strategic importance.
Looking back on RTW, M2TW and Kingdoms, I realized how much time I spent "smacking down" stack after stack of enemy troops. Defending a territory meant enduring a constant stream of stacks, while invading meant wading through a similar # just to get to decisive cities.
This leads to literally hundreds of battles over the course of a campaign. I believe I was at 173 battles when I finished the Teutonic Order last night! The problem is that very few of the individual battles were "make-or-break". If you beat one stack, there'd be another right behind it. Very rarely in either game was there the kind of battles I remember so fondly from the original Medieval Total War - the single battle where all the chips are on the table.
In MTW, you had one major battle to break into a territory, and another major battle to take the fortified settlement/castle at the core of that territory. This led to far fewer battles, but each battle was at a slower tactical pace that allowed development of a wide range of tactics, and was infused with a sense of drama because this battle would often be decisive for that region.
Knowing that CA is reworking the campaign map for the next engine, I hope they can return to "fewer but decisive" in the number of tactical battles. Does anyone else share this hope? Has there been any word about this yet in any of the previews?
Thanks,
Chris