The CA publishing policy consists of introducing some new mechanisms into the new games or DLC. In the Age of Charlemagne the new thing was War Weariness. I praise this solution very much: the player actually begins to care how to end a war. This is up to the old advice to the rulers: the wars start when you please, but they don’t end when you have a need. Well, it could have been implemented in a better way (there should be more weariness even if you win the war, the diplomatic relations should move slightly differently etc.), but never mind.
As we await the Thrones of Britannia, I started to wonder what can come next – both in terms of the titles (see here), but also in term of the mechanics. Here are some ideas on the campaign mechanics:
· Dynamic effect of integrity – relations between fighting (and moving?) capabilities and level of integrity (from a certain threshold, eg. below 25%). Easy to implement, I think.
· Supply for armies – one of the main un-historicalities of the game is that you don’t care about the supply of your armies both at home and in the foreign lands. The only thing limiting you is the number of armies you have, possibilities to get reinforcements after your units suffer battle/attrition loses, and the amount of money you’ve got. Yet it was the main issue for many armies. This wouldn’t be for ToB (smaller map and the raiding armies could live out of the land), but for future titles.
· Manpower – an issue that was fixed - to some extent - in the Divide et Impera / Ancient Empires mods for the R2TW/ATW: you may recruit any number of the troops given the funds you’ve got (what is an issue for smaller factions but then not really) and the imperium you’ve reached (number of the armies). If you lose your army, you can recruit it again – there’s no limit. Since this is pretty ahistorical, there should be one. This can be fixed in one way (M2TW refill) or another (introducing the population in the provinces like in DeI).
· Sieges and walls – it’s very easy to conduct a siege now: if you’ve got a piece of artillery you do it outright, if you don’t – just wait one turn. I find is ok to be able to storm wall-less towns outright, but there should be a minimum siege-points level below which you cannot storm walled cities (like in the Europea Universalis: there’s a minimum number of troops you can start a siege, and then the duration of a siege depends on the number of troops). Some generals’ traits and ancillaries could be directed to shortening of this time.
· Number of spaces for buildings in the cities – the 6/4/4 limitation makes the “growth” irrelevant from some point. It makes also provinces very similar to one another – actually they differ only in Fertility and Resources. And yet, in history, the fertile Po valley supported much more population than, say, Ireland. So I think there should be two modifications: 1. relating fertility of a province to the number of the buildings. 2. Opening possibilities of having more buildings that 6/4/4 with really high growth requirements (so that going above this limit would be possible only for exceptional provinces). This would not be pertinent to ToB, obviously.
· Internal politics – well, this is a big thing, many options possible. Too many to list here. For now, I assess it to be a rather useless part of the game (but I haven’t played the Empire Divided DLC)
· Traits – could be acquired by the generals more often and be more related to their actions. The generals should differ among themselves – for the moment each of my generals is identical as they have the same skills trees and it’s you who choose what skills are to be developed.
· TW as a Real Time Strategy – ideas were discussed in this thread. What I have in mind is: 1. shorter turns (one-day , not three months), 2. turns passing not with the stroke of a button, but as you "let the time going" (the Europa Universalis style), 3. campaign time freezes for the time of a battle (this is another "time universe", so actually it'd not be a true RTS).
However, the most badly needed change would be to counteract the "sniping groups of armies strategy". For now, the best way to play a recent TW game is simply not to play battles, but to hunt other armies. It's the most important reason why I chose to play M2TW mods, not the ATW.
Any comments?
JoC