Campaign Starting Years

[RuleBritannia]

I've just recently gotten active again on the forums, so I have no idea if this has been suggested, confirmed, etc. yet, but looking at the recent official campaign map reveal, it's looking to be truly gigantic. However, there's one feature I've always felt that Total War has missed; custom starting years. The game Europa Universalis III is what comes to my mind first. In that game, you can select any starting date you choose (within the game's timeframe), and nations and regions are formed, given ownership, or destroyed according to historically precedent of that time. If there could be some way for TCA to do this, to allow more freedom on where to start, I think it'd be amazing; start at the most primitive origins of the Germanic Tribes, start at the height of the Persian Empire, start at the collapse of Rome itself. The problem I see is the ending date and turns-per-year issues, or turns-per-season, or however they're doing it, so starting late means less time to act, but if a workaround could be made for this, I think it'd be a great feature.

[Xerrop]

Well in some TW-games we had two or three starting dates available.
STW1 offered 1530, 1550 and 1580
MTW1 offered 1087, 1205 and 1321
and finally Empire:TW with two campaigns 1700 and 1783 (although the later was only available as US - but with mods you could play any faction).