List of features i think the TW franchise should have in future installments

[Troubleshooter]

Hello fellow generals and any CA folks reading this.

I have played all TW games the past 15 years (Let's pretend mobile games do not exist, ok? Good) and it is one of my favorite gaming franchises and the only real-time historical formation warfare game with a interesting campaign component.

That said, i feel the TW franchise is getting a little stale and leaving out opportunities for evolution. I suppose it has to be kept in mind that CA/SEGA want their game to be appealing to as many PC gamers as possible and is afraid they might accidentally move away from a winning formula, but i think the features i list below would enhance the game quite a bit when combined.

1. More terrain features.
Some TW games have more varied terrain than others (Shogun2 is pretty good in this regard but Attila/Rome2 do this pretty badly), but for the most part the terrain in the game is quite featureless and bland. What i think TW would benefit from are dense forests and foliage that are impassible for heavy infantry and cavalry but not for light infantry or skirmishers. More streams, ditches, little cliffs, hills, roads, impassible swamps, villages, roads being raised highways or flanked by embankments, more drastic differences in elevation like small hills that become ad-hoc strategic points, roads that snake in between hills. Forests and grain fields that can be set on fire to burn out anyone hiding in there. Muddy plowed farmland in autumn or spring that bog down your troops, making them tired and miserable like what happened at Agincourt. Small lakes and rivers that freeze in winter, opening up new ways for light infantry/skirmishers to infiltrate cities located near lakes/rivers.

TL;DR: improvements on the battlefields so that picking the right spot to fight on actually matters a lot more and the limitations of space will affect the formation of your army. Most battle maps look like desolate steppes or taking place in The Netherlands. Current terrain 'penalties' and bonuses feel trivial.

2. Larger battlefields, intel system and improved fog of war
The battlefields are rather small, negating the need to scout and limiting your ability to outmanoeuvre or surprise the enemy, or be surprised. You want to keep your troops fresh while marching into position? Marching them in column formations allows you to make them stay on roads or flat grasslands and get to a good position faster, with the danger of being found and wrecked by enemy scouting cav, thus allowing both player and AI to launch impromptu ambush attacks. Improved fog of war / line of sight system, combined with the above terrain improvements will mean you have to remain aware of the possibility of an unscouted enemy battlegroup appearing on your flank like the cavalry force flanking the romans in the historical battle of Pydna in Rome 2.
Intel on enemy numbers and unit types should be far more vague for both player and AI. Got a spy attached to your army? Bonus intel for you. Fighting on home soil? Bonus intel. Don't have any of that? Well there is an army coming towards you, dunno exactly how much, don't know exactly what kind of units they have. Better put those scout cavs to work on the battlefield itself.

TL;DR: Larger battlefields increase the need to scout and outmanoeuvre the enemy instead of both armies seeing each others full force at the start of the battle and just march towards each other. Intel system and more consistent fog of war / line of sight system would make the enemy army less predictable and increase the odds of the player being caught off guard.

3. More meaningful morale and fatigue.
Morale, and fatigue are among the factors that set TW games apart from regular RTS games. Unfortunately in Attila it seems both these factors are almost trivial. Units die so quickly that by the time they rout they are down to 20-30% manpower and will lose many more in the seconds after they break. When they rally they are practically useless. Exhausted units keep on fighting with "eager" or "confident" morale while they should be willing to give their left nuts for a minute to catch their breath. Two units being exhausted after a prolonged melee should break off due to massive morale penalties from exhaustion but still have most of their men alive and ready to crack some more skulls after a few minutes of heaving, puking and changing their underpants. Having multiple battle lines and reserve units is now far more important. Chasing and killing routing units now becomes essential , and that old ingame hint of feigning a rout to pull the enemy out of position (like the Battle of Hastings) is now more than flavor text to make the game sound more realistic than it is.

TL;DR: More focus on trying to keep your troops rested to avoid crippling morale penalties. Less lethal combat resulting in units being more likely to break from exhaustion and morale shocks than casualties and having lots of manpower available so they are still useful in the remainder of the battle. Longer and slower overall combat as a result, increasing the need to kill routing units and outflank if you want to avoid Pyrrhic victories.


4. Bigger unit sizes and merging of units in battle.
For over a decade the max unit size has been 160 men. What i have personally found is that larger units can cover/defend more ground and thus reduce the need to have these ridiculous spaghetti lines. Larger unit sizes combat with more terrain features mean that flanking the AI is not just a matter of "move horses away just a little bit further to the left". An increase to 200 or 240 men per unit should easily be possible and enhances the feeling of commanding large unit formations, another feature of TW that is pretty defining for the franchise.
Two heavily damaged units of the same type should be mergable in a battle to form a healthy unit that is actually still useful as their morale penalty for casualties sustained gets reduced, though not completely because they are likely still a bit shaky.

TL;DR: Bigger unit sizes would result in larger, longer and more epic battles on a more realistic scale. Combined with less open terrain mentioned above it would result in deeper formations with multiple battle lines and more effort required to flank the AI.

5. Realistic abilities, formations and behavior.
Removal of fantasy micro-abilities like rapid fire, rapid advance, brace, steady, etc. These abilities feel like they were included to introduce some need to micro-manage and perhaps to make multiplayer seem more e-sporty like Starcraft 2? The only enhancing abilities should be on the general in my opinion. Rallying, enspiring, etc.
Units should have modes for chase/guard behaviors, hold formation or free-flow, and different formations for different situations. Ranged units should have different ammo selections or fire modes. Micro should be knowing and remembering to giving out the right formation/battle orders to your units, not spray magic fairy dust on your archers to make them shoot faster.
No exploding ammo for onagers, or missile troops equipped with zippo-lighters. Flaming arrows should be something only available when an archer unit is in a immobile mode that takes a while to settle into. Perhaps doing the same with wooden stakes.

TL;DR: Though TW is not a simulator or 100% historically accurate, it would imo benefit the concept and atmosphere of the TW games to focus on formations, movement and tactics and resist the urge to make the gameplay appear deeper by putting in these extra 'clickly' abilities for the sake of giving the player more to do.

[Sir Furlong]

I like your ideas with the battle map, it would be really interesting to need to find your enemy on the battle map instead of starting so close together that the main battlefield is pretty much picked for you.

[barry12]

Terrain features is a must. All the maps I play on are very samey, not to mention downright stupid at times - sometimes I have to pitch my army on a 45 degree uphill gradient. What general in their right mind would deploy like that?

Instead of trying to recreate the campaign map with each battle tile (resulting in a very silly and unrealistic micro-scale version of Europe), they should concentrate more on putting genuine landscape features on our battle maps aside from just rivers and hills.

Where are the scenarios like the Hot Gates of Thermopylae? There are no impassable forests or marshes, no cliffs, very rarely is there any terrain units can't walk on, and therefore most battles will play out relatively similarly due to the lack of choke points. They've massively missed a trick with that, or just can't be bothered to go into the extra detail. Much easier to procedurally generate than design many individual maps. However that's lazy. The campaign map is filled with choke points and narrow corridors, as if they couldn't have added some extra design into those tiles.

As for unit sizes, most mid-range PCs would easily be able to handle a 10,000 v 10,000 battle on a well optimised TW game with a 64-bit engine. It's time they moved this game into the second decade of the 21st century.

[m.minkov]

Good points by the OP.

The sad thing is - it won't happen. Why? Because those are the same things that always get fixed by moders - at least points 3-5 and this is since Rome at least and it's still the same thing in every vanilla TW since then - 1)smaller armies - because CA want to lower the already high req, although we have a unit size option for this.....
2) fantasy morale - Rome 2 had the best vanilla morale, but they saw that many players prefer a "fight to death", than a more realistic morale, where the majority of the casualties in a battle are from killing(capturing) routing enemies and not from the actual "melee". Just look at the mod forum and you'll see several mods doing exactly the opposite and that the most popular mods include better morale, increase in morale etc, even for Attila where the morale penalties are already very low.
3)fantasy abilities - don't know who got that "brilliant" idea, but it seem most of the players don't mind it/ enjoy it. Thank you CA, that we still can mod quite a few things and this 1 among it, so the ppl who want more realistic battles can play the game, as this thing as well, can be a deal breaker for sure.

Not sure how easy, if possible at all, are points 1 and 2 from OP to mod, but at least for now 3-5 can be moded fairly easy and fast.

ATM I'm just making a collection including many small mods by several moders and some made by myself, aimed for realism, longer campaign and battles and including points 3-5. I hope some ppl will enjoy it as much as i do

[jtfjtfjtf]

I'd like bigger maps and more varied terrain. The other things can be reasonably done right now with mods.

[Ozymandias Maximus]

I like the idea of merging units mid battle. That would help out immensely in battles with heavy casualties!

[Garensterz]

There's only one thing I've been wanting to see for future TW titles, is an improved unit collision for individual soldiers.