Better unit variety
MTW2 brought about the much needed improvement of armor upgrades and variety in units. In ETW/NTW unit variety understandably went down and there wasn’t much of a need for armor upgrades. A similar but slightly improved situation happened in shogun; I think however it’s time for both of these to make a huge comeback in RTW2. Here are just some of my suggestions and I’m interested to see if anyone else has some ideas on this.
Faces
With talk of going deep with facial animation, this is an area that needs some drastic improvement. Instead of having 3-4 faces per unit there should be a ‘pool’ of faces, if you will, based on ethnicity and region with a more modular design. So for instance you could have an Italian pool of faces, let us say 150 unique ones that would then be used for all units at random created by Italian factions (mostly the romans). The same faces could be used in cavalry/infantry/naval units. The vast quantity would give a unit of 250 or so almost a completely unique look and make the copies less noticeable considering you are just zoomed for short periods of time mostly in the battles.
To further expand on this, generals need unique faces that match the portrait. Having every general look exactly the same kind of ruins the experience of fighting with your favorite one, as I’m sure most people do that.
As most modders can tell you, it’s not that difficult to create this variance anymore as there are several choices in software which makes this a rather easy process. Also using this modular design would make it easier for modders to eventually add their own faces independent of the unit models, so possibly down the road we could see vast amounts of unique faces and historically correct looking generals if there was an interest for someone to do that.
Body
I’m not asking for miracles as it is to my understanding a lot of the ‘mass’ of a soldier is determined with its model, but small variances in height would do wonders in my opinion. Another suggestion could be to add a few leg/arm sets with the same modular design as mentioned above. This wouldn’t be as much work as the faces as these wouldn’t be unique to the ethnicity of the soldier but just colored different when appropriate, so 5 or 6 leg/arm sets would suffice and give a small variance to the body style. Possibly more could be done with unit types who go bare chested or have less clothing/armor on.
Armor/weapons
Obviously for a legionary and any other professional unit who used standardized equipment we should see a rather copy/paste attitude, but with small variances for attached equipment if they have any. This is mostly for the “barbarian” type factions. I realize that the game is based on a sort of “rock, paper, scissors” type of gameplay so it becomes necessary to have a “spearmen” unit or an “axe men” unit but when you’re talking about essentially people who brought their own weapons to combat there should be a slightly greater variance in them. The “axe men” unit for example, maybe a slight difference in length or a different head of the axe (if they used multiple kinds in the region).
The armor follows the same reasoning, but unlike the “axe men” example I think armor should be more modular. Instead of having armor unique to a unit it should be what was commonly used. For instance, the “barbarian” factions you would have your upper class and lower class of soldier so there would be a visual quality difference in the armor used but the general theme of the armor shouldn’t change much from unit to unit. My levy spearmen and levy axe men shouldn’t look like they came from 2 different parts of the world but should both have the same equipment that was appropriate for that type of soldier to have. The same for the upper class soldiers, my “noble swordsmen” and generals’ bodyguard shouldn’t look completely different as they both could afford the same equipment.
What I’m trying to get at is, with the other games, you have unit rosters built up that when combined together the overall theme just doesn’t fit. Some units match with the others but some might as well be dressed in hot pink when it comes to looking like an army that came from the same place.
Anyways just some thoughts, I hope to see at least some of this in RTW2.
TL;DR version: Need better variance in weapons/armor for factions, height differences in soldiers, and much more faces with unique ones for generals.
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Originally Posted by Miles Invictus
