Should CA bring back cities?

Should Napoleon Total War have large battlefield cities like Rome and M2TW?

While recognising they were less important at this time, leaving them out entirely takes some of the realism and historicity out of the game, which I feel is a bad thing.

Yes, among many other things.

The matter is at first somewhat ambiguous, because here are facing the historical accuracy and gameplay.
Historically, such a city fight si only idiotic, because there was not such a street fight with very few exceptions in this era.
Purely from the gamefun it is liked by many players, because they remember here M2TW and RTW.

Since I personally think that the historical accuracy is far more important, I have voted for no. I also find the street fighting in the predecessors is not as interesting as taht I would miss it in NTW, also I never missed it in ETW really.
The only exception here is a revolution in the style of ETW, if it would be given in NTW too. Here I find a street fight around the seat of the governor on a street cut much better than the previous solution by some stupid rebel army somewhere in the province.
But this is and could only be a section of the city as a battle map, as I told the area around the governors palace! How do you want to make a city fight in Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, etc. credible without being so really ridiculous as it was the case M2TW and RTW with this "Lilliput Cities" named Paris, Rome, London etc. in the game?
This is one point where the "yes voters" should think about too. My opinion.

Originally Posted by Mandelus

The matter is at first somewhat ambiguous, because here are facing the historical accuracy and gameplay.
Historically, such a city fight si only idiotic, because there was not such a street fight with very few exceptions in this era.
Purely from the gamefun it is liked by many players, because they remember here M2TW and RTW.

Since I personally think that the historical accuracy is far more important, I have voted for no. I also find the street fighting in the predecessors is not as interesting as taht I would miss it in NTW, also I never missed it in ETW really.
The only exception here is a revolution in the style of ETW, if it would be given in NTW too. Here I find a street fight around the seat of the governor on a street cut much better than the previous solution by some stupid rebel army somewhere in the province.
But this is and could only be a section of the city as a battle map, as I told the area around the governors palace! How do you want to make a city fight in Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, etc. credible without being so really ridiculous as it was the case M2TW and RTW with this "Lilliput Cities" named Paris, Rome, London etc. in the game?
This is one point where the "yes voters" should think about too. My opinion.

The battlefield could be only a part of say Berlin or Paris. Have a battle around the banks of a river, or on a building covered hill, or a palace?! So many options, the city doesnt have to look the same as in RTW. It an be more creative with rubble, people running everywhere, wrecked horses and guns etc.

Most forts of the time where cities, so once the walls were breached, street fighting often occured, but not in major cities, because the main army would defend the city outside the walls.

Yes. they should. I remember Lusted saying (at the release point), that cities were not working and causing all kinds of path finding problems, so we were better off without.

However, I believe the real problem was they never had anyone on the BAI long enough to fix the issues around cities so they just abandoned cities like they abandoned prope sieges.

They did a decent job with RTW and MTW2, I believe they could`ve with ETW, they just didn`t put the effort in or ran out of time or both. It doesn`t help having one BAI programmer for such a task either. There should`ve at least been three working together, one to deal with field battles, siege battle and city battles.

Instead they blew it on pretty water, etc.

Incompetence from CA.

Yes of course...
Although I have to say that cities were far too big to create it now...
So I have no idea how to do it

@ Marshal Beale

Yes, most towns had at that time fortifications, but in addition to the cities with very old fortifications from the Middle Ages (wall) had the most fortified cities had a belt of forts and fortresses.
If there were sieges, it was mostly fought at this forts, and if the attacker managed to conquer one or a key one, then gave up most of the defenders.
When a city was unfortified, then was fought off the city or in its immediate vicinity, where it played mostly at small villages in the suburbs a role.
It can be inferred to be that the sieges of ETW now in principle are realistic, although not many players like (and surely they could have done better by CA).


@ Humble

It is true that here the pathfinding of the BAI played a role. For there were prior to release of ETW a nice reception when it comes to a big fat battle in a city, the troops went and stood in front of it. This is of course a proof that it once was planned differently.
But quite honestly, I then took a picture of this already ridiculous and like science fiction and not good. But this is ultimately a personal view of the others have or have not.

In light of Empire's current system for sieges (The Ninja Assault followed by a shootout), I don't think I'd like to see large scale city battles of the kind we saw in Rome TW or Medieval 2 TW. Empire's cavalry require more finesse than previous titles and they'd be practically useless in an urban combat environment. Similarly, only mortars, rockets and to some extent horse drawn artillery would be viable in this sort of battle. I could see it working well enough with walls being removed entirely and with wide enough streets, squares, intersections etc. to provide flexibility and room for movement (and to avoid the battle coming down to a series of 1v1 engagements). The most important thing though would be a massive improvement of the garrisoning system, so that units inside a structure have the advantage to some extent and can actually pose a serious threat to enemy units. (EDIT: Also, thinking about it now, some sort of scattered formation system for line infantry would make sense, wherein they try to assume cover similar to the Light Infantry Behaviour mode for light infantry.)

Honestly, I'd rather see some serious revision of the current fort battles than the reintroduction of city combat, as Empire lends itself much more to pitched battles than previous TW titles.

Why not just have the outskirts of the city on the battle map, and the rest of the city beyond the red line... the main battle would still take place outside the city, but you could withdraw a little way into it if you wanted to.

Yes they should bring back cities !!!

Why i can't vote ???

ETW isn't fun without city battles ( i don't care about historical accuracy).
I want to change history so at least give us the option to attack full scale city maps.

This is one thing that CA did correctly. There is absolutely no need for big city battles as they did not occur in this era. The cities that are on the map are national/regional capitals and there were no major battles that were fought in them. Small outlying settlements such as are in ETW is completely appropriate. The closest example of a major city being the center of a major battle that I can think of is Smolensk and that was a rearguard action. Spain had a few examples at Badajoz and Cuidad Rodrigo but those cities weren't really large and were more like fortress cities.

"This is one thing that CA did correctly"

They did it cause they had no time

No,

1) not realistic, yes there were a few sieges during the NTW era, Toulon, Acre, Badajoz, Danzig are the ones that come to mind, but these were very rare.

2) ETW does not get it right. MTW was not bad but in ETW I hate sieges for too many reasons to mention here.

3) this is a game, if it's not fun (see 2 above ) it's just not worth the developers time ( see 1 above), I would rather CA's focus was on somthing else in the game.

I don't know what you guys are talking about city sieges being fun. They were very long grinding sessions, no tactics needed at all. Just whoever had the better infantry and stamina to keep fighting through each street won. Sure the tenseness and close-quarter combat was fun for awhile, but besieging after city in a war got boring and monotonous fast.

Also, a fully garrisoned city ensured horrific losses on your side, because even mediocre troops can take a lot of casualties before dying.

More often than not I waited out sieges and let them sally out to fight.

Originally Posted by D.B. Cooper

I don't know what you guys are talking about city sieges being fun. They were very long grinding sessions, no tactics needed at all. Just whoever had the better infantry and stamina to keep fighting through each street won. Sure the tenseness and close-quarter combat was fun for awhile, but besieging after city in a war got boring and monotonous fast.

Also, a fully garrisoned city ensured horrific losses on your side, because even mediocre troops can take a lot of casualties before dying.

More often than not I waited out sieges and let them sally out to fight.

You are forgetting something: That is the point. Walls were not built for the convenience of the besieging party.

You build walls so that you have the advantage when attacked. You lay siege to walls to cause the inhabitants to grow uncomfortable and surrender. You assault or abandon when you suspect that the besieged will otherwise outlast the besiegers (whether the men are needed elsewhere or disease and starvation are striking too hard). You assault only when the above is true and you feel that the tremendous losses on your side will be worth it. As you can see, more often than not, sieges were a waiting game... I should think this obvious. Of course, "waiting" included "constantly bombarding with artillery", but this is part of the "this settlement can last x turns in the event of a siege".

I'm not sure where you get the idea that adding a type of battlefield will make the game more monotonous. Seems to once more, go against the definition.

Yep. Street fights should be available in some zones (ex: Spain) to certain cities and in non-capital towns. But forts shouldn't be excluded either

Yes they should

Yep. I think CA said that they'll make a new garrison system, hope they'll add the "burn building" option too.