Let's Say That...

[VOP2288]

Let's say. however extremely unlikely it is, that CA pumps out (or has plans to pump out) another Rome: Total War what would you want it to include or look like.

So what I'm basically asking is what changes, additions, reworkings, etc would you like to see in a hypothetical Rome 2: Total War?

Here are some of my changes and such:

Factions -

1) MAKE ALL FACTIONS PLAYABLE! None of these campaign map only factions which you need to mess around with txt. files to be able to play - how bout making every faction in the game playable with depth to them?
2) Keep the main factions the same but split the Gaul faction into either two or three different smaller tribes, maybe split the Germans as such as well, add Baktria, split up the Greek faction into city state factions (via Roma Surrectum and the XGM), and rename the Egyptians the Ptomlomeic Empire permanantly

Diplomacy -

1) Just in general enhance it's use in the game. For instance fix the situation when faction has just suffered extreme amounts of causualties and has gone from a 35+ province empire to a 2 province empire and yet they still spit in your face when you ask them for a ceasefire or to become their protectorate...I would think most factions would agree with you as long as they dont get exterminated. Another example is how you could be defeating another faction and them come to you wanting a ceasefire but for 80,000 Denarii - i dont think so.
2) Include the ability to execute diplomats...thus starting instant agressions and trouble
3) Rather then bribing troops to disperse how bout bringing them over to your side?
4) Anything else could be fixed by the enhanced diplomatic system from M2TW

Events -

1) Marian reforms happen at 100 BC - not depending on when a majority of your cities has reached "HUGE CITY" status
2) An incorporated civil war event for Roman faction - the game starts at 280 BC as Rome being one full faction but around 49 BC you have a simulated civil war resulting in two different sides appearing throught the roman empire

Misc -

1) Incorporate the 1 v 1 fighting animations of M2TW
2) Improved graphics (obviously)
3) Incoporate "dread" and "loyalty" traits for generals and leaders
4) Be able to make governors, generals, and captains
5) City specific units for the Greeks (Athenian, Corinthian, Spartan, etc hoplites)
6) Specific legion numbers and locations (ala Roma Surrectum)
7) Larger unit numbers (i.e. more units on the field at once)
8) Include a "terms meeting" option pre-battles - meaning that before a battle takes place a terms meeting can be held much like the diplomatic screen where generals, family members, or cpts can have the last minute option to retreat, defect, surrender, or fight the enemy
9) Include the M2TW ability to release, ransom, or execute captured routers during battle but then also include an "enslave" option
10) Have the # of battles won or lost recorded in generals, family members, or cpts screen...
11) Create a ranking system for military leaders


These are just some ideas thrown out there if they ever make another RTW for any reason, before anyone has a chance to say it: yes, I know that a majority of these ideas/options are available via the many mods floating around but I'm talking about condensing these ideas and such into one, professionally made and distributed, game

[Jubal_Barca]

Kingdom of Tyre would be quite cool as a faction.

ALSO

Make it really easy to mod.

[Hader]

I would really only want a better engine for cooler battles, and easier to mod, though that might be hard for a good engine. I dont mind much other things, as those things would be modded anyway.

[sentinel37]

Agree with a lot of things you said.

I also want to add a couple of things ...

1) the merchant system in M2TW is really not implemented well. A lot of people complain about this too. It's really not worth it.

2) I think the whole marriage/princesses thing could be done a little better from standard ROME. There is no alliance with marriage, which use to be a big deal.

3) I like the whole city specific units (spartan units only from sparta etc). But I want to go one step further, I think there should some way to recruit various units without going through the whole mercenary thing. Perhaps a diplomatic approach where I ask my allies or a neutral faction for a unit of war elephant or silver shield pikemen for a price, obviously an expensive one, but obtainable nevertheless. When I start playing vanilla Rome, I always thought "military access" means that your allies can let you train their specific military units, but of course I was completely wrong.

I wanted to add that I think Seleucus or someone was able to barter with India and get a couple hundred war elephants that way. That would be fun.

4) On a similar topic, I have mixed feelings about mercenaries. Without any kind of cheat, mercenaries cannot be retrain, so aside from combining them, most of them are "use and refuse" types. Furthermore, there are only several worthwhile merc (cretan archers and elephants), and the rest are pretty useless.

5) Pre-battle formation should be a little better without me having to tediously change the position of every unit for every freakin battle. This alone is enough for me to do auto-resolve. I heard there are mods for this, but haven't try it out yet.

That's it for now.

[William the Bastard]

Perhaps it would be to hard to make but if anyone will make it Totalwar will be first. How about making the map a hell of alot bigger and so on the campaign map you can actualy see the men of your army and mix real time somehow with the turn based system more. Greater combination of campaign and battle maps to summarise. A little more town planning eg. placing of buildings and choosing the architecture of the building not too much as an Imperator can pa someone else to worry about that. Rome has 7 hills and I'm not going to bi*** about it but I always feel a little sad when I see every settlement is on flat ground and looks just like the rest.

[Little_Mikey]

I could see Rome 2 Total War. But they will have a Napoleonic or Shogun total war first.

[Plutarch]

Greece: Total War!!! ftw

[Erwin Rommel]

it will look like these
http://youtube.com/watch?v=a0dB2fMkYAg
hahahaha
hope so!

[VOP2288]

Agree with a lot of things you said.

I also want to add a couple of things ...

1) the merchant system in M2TW is really not implemented well. A lot of people complain about this too. It's really not worth it.

2) I think the whole marriage/princesses thing could be done a little better from standard ROME. There is no alliance with marriage, which use to be a big deal.

3) I like the whole city specific units (spartan units only from sparta etc). But I want to go one step further, I think there should some way to recruit various units without going through the whole mercenary thing. Perhaps a diplomatic approach where I ask my allies or a neutral faction for a unit of war elephant or silver shield pikemen for a price, obviously an expensive one, but obtainable nevertheless. When I start playing vanilla Rome, I always thought "military access" means that your allies can let you train their specific military units, but of course I was completely wrong.

I wanted to add that I think Seleucus or someone was able to barter with India and get a couple hundred war elephants that way. That would be fun.

4) On a similar topic, I have mixed feelings about mercenaries. Without any kind of cheat, mercenaries cannot be retrain, so aside from combining them, most of them are "use and refuse" types. Furthermore, there are only several worthwhile merc (cretan archers and elephants), and the rest are pretty useless.

5) Pre-battle formation should be a little better without me having to tediously change the position of every unit for every freakin battle. This alone is enough for me to do auto-resolve. I heard there are mods for this, but haven't try it out yet.

I like those ideas except for the princess and merchant one...personally I dont use or find those options very interesting in either M2TW or if it was in RTW.

Also to comment on your pre-battle formations idea I strongly agree with that...if I remember correctly it was either Shogun, Medieval, or both that actually had a formation button with a series of formations you could set your troops in.

[Scutarii]

I think that they should have way more faction slots than there are factions, so that modders can add facions without having to destroy existing factions.

[Dulce_et_Decorum_Est]

I have confidence that such a game will eventually be released. RTW was a big winner, I expect CA completely to try and repeat it, as well CA ought to.


Anyhow, let me get out my laundry list...



1) Revamp the "faction" system. It's standard for strategy games, I know, but it doesn't represent the fluidity of history.

I want to see Kingdoms combine into confederacies, and see those confederacies break down again. I want to see rebellions rise and fall. I want to see royal marriages, and I want to see the difficulties of holding fractious empire together represented.

I want to see barbarians rise from the dust and become great agrarian empires. They're not going to stay uncivilized forever if they've got lots of money and land. If you look at the earliest Parthians, or the earliest Romans, or even the earliest phonecians, they weren't that much different than their neighbors. The game needs to stop treating their superior infrastructure as an inherant property of their culture.

I want to see unit types evolve over time. Spears will get longer or shorter as fashions change. I want to see armor evolve and proliferate, the way it actually did. If there's an especially intelligent general in command of the armed forces, I want to be able to design my own units.

Many of these things have been implemented, but only clumsily.

2) The game needs to keep better records of what's happened so far. What's the fun in weaving an alternate history if that alternate history isn't being recorded? Each face on the family tree, for insance, ought to have a dynamically updated biography.

3) The city view was fun... but completely useless. Any army view, allowing us to see the army on the march, encamping, and doing all those other things ancient armies did would be much more fun.

4) There simply must be some sort of logistics system in the next game. It's ridiculous that a full five legions can move over the entire hostile province of Helvetica in four months but not be able to transfer from Illyria to Hibernia where I bloody need them! Simply providing alternate movement points for units in hostile and friendly territory would be a great improvement.

5) Spherical map. When I say I want to conquer the world, I really do mean the whole world.

6) There needs to be combat engineering. Half the fun of being a Roman was holing up the enemy in a little hidey-hole somewhere, and then building huge ramparts and walls so you could methodically slaughter them.

7) The building system needs revision. Does it really make sense that the rate of construction of public works has nothing whatsoever to do with the economic conditions and population of the province? Will all aqueducts everywhere always take 18 months to build? This is silliness!

8) Make the women do something! Right now they're just a mechanism for generating heirs. I'm not just referring to female leaders, where that would be faction-appropriate, I'm thinking of people like Livia Drusilla. Surely their influence is worth noting?

9) A really slick interface. It was a pain chasing down all the sorts of odds and ends I needed to run an empire. The agent interface in particular was difficult to use.

A simple change would be making the minimap like it is in every other strategy game; a multifunction display that can show the positions of various classes of objects.

10) Better group AI. I don't mean I want a computer AI so brilliant it trounces me all the time; although that could be fun. I mean that I want the guys in the big armies to stop doing egregiously stupid and illogical things.

I want my cavalry to be able to locate and kill off five guys running away, instead of endlessly running nearby them.

I don't want everyone's IQ to be halved when they have to walk near a wall or a gate.

I don't want horse archers that whip out pocket knives to fight the enemy phalanx because one of them brushed up againt it.

11) When I seige a city, I want to see some civilians running around screaming and looking for cover! I also want to squish them with onagers!

[Archer of Sparta]

I agree with Dulce_et_Decorum_Est. That would be a dream.

Here's some of my thoughts:

1) Creating your own "republic" Say... you, an ally, and another ally are very good friends, true homies. So good that they trust you with military acces and you trust them. It is time to take deplomacy to the next level. Suddenly you and your allies are a republic. The strongest faction in your alliance gets to control the other factions. Kinda like the senate thing. You can send crusades, force trade rights and other diplomatic things, ask for military support. Until ofcorse the one of your AI friends get stronger and try to run your empire. The whole rome civil war brakes loose, but with non-roman factions, and this time you can boss the others around, (or they can boss you).

2. Blood and gore is a must in the next game, I meen come on if you get chopped by a chariot you are going to bleed to death, ahh we all have seen war movies what's the harm of a little blood.

3. Creating your own unit like the other guy said would be great. Like maybe you have alot of succes military wise and the game rewards you with "army points" Which you can use to create a new unit type, make them strong, more relyable, and decorative.

4. SEA BATTLES!

We all want them.



Archer out

[Dulce_et_Decorum_Est]

4. SEA BATTLES!

We all want them.

Oh Piping Hot Apple Pie Ahura Optimus Mazda Maximus One-Eye, that would be lovely!

Who doesn't want to send their crack teams of trireme rowers through the enemy blockade to attempt a daring relief of the beseiged seaside trade center?


VOP2288, have you seen Barbarossa82's Armenian AAR over at the guild? It pretty much does just that; and with a heavy helping of humor as well.

[VOP2288]

The game needs to keep better records of what's happened so far. What's the fun in weaving an alternate history if that alternate history isn't being recorded? Each face on the family tree, for insance, ought to have a dynamically updated biography.

I agree with all your points strongly - that would such a deeper and better game if it included all those but I like this idea especially...

If you ever want to have some fun that'll slow down your RTW playing and make you take notice to events, diplomacy, the family tree, etc then try actually recording your own history via paper and pencil....

I did this will England in M2TW and actually wrote up a comprehensive fact sheet for the royal family from 1080 to about 1200 (by my dates). This fact sheet included brith dates, death dates, how they died, who married who and when, who became king, who became faction heir, etc etc. I also have something like 30 pages of paper outlining the events and such within each turn from 1080-1200....try that out and you'll have lots of fun...I was just straight up bored at the time so I tried this out and it actually brings you closer into the non-military aspects of the game and makes you use your imagination.

[The Good]

I have written a thread like this in the past.
Needless to say, I agree with the thread creator, CA needs to listen to its fans more.

[VOP2288]

VOP2288, have you seen Barbarossa82's Armenian AAR over at the guild? It pretty much does just that; and with a heavy helping of humor as well.

No I havnt seen that, where is the guild at?

Also as far as sea battles though...it would be pretty sweet but I could def see myself getting bored with them after the first 10 or so times and just end up pressing the auto resolve button....this is unless you would be able to have boarding parties and such...that would be awesome.

[megaflus]

I would wan't there to be some kind of law system like there is a list of laws and then each year or te years you can choose 5 lawqs and then it will change publicorder and stuff maybe even youre faction leader will die and maybe worse...fall of youre empire

[Dulce_et_Decorum_Est]

No I havnt seen that, where is the guild at?

Also as far as sea battles though...it would be pretty sweet but I could def see myself getting bored with them after the first 10 or so times and just end up pressing the auto resolve button....this is unless you would be able to have boarding parties and such...that would be awesome.

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=71457

[zedestroyer]

Only have access to bad units, to have better we should retrain this bad units by upgrading armour or by gaining experience and/or battles...

PS:Sorry for my english

[VOP2288]

another idea I have is in the example of when the Roman faction goes through Marian reforms you should be able to retrain and reoutfit your old Republic troops: ie change Hastatii, Principes, and Triarii into legionary soliders through a retrain + money option.

Also - if there are specific legions or if you're in a region where you cannot retrain a special unit I would love to see you be able to retrain that unit for a given number of turns (but not be able to recruit that unit in that region) and maybe a price - the number of turns and a set amount of money would reflect say transporting Spartan troops from Sparta up the coast to Segestica...the further away you get from the unique unit's city the more turns and more money it cost to retrain the unit