Campaign Map Recon, (What the player is allowed to see of the enemy)

[Divinus Arma]

The Total War series has always offered players the opportunity to gather overwhlemingly accurate intelligence on enemy positions and capabilities with very little investment in time and money.

The reality of warfare throughout history has been the exact opposite. Enemy capabilities, be they manpower, location, movement, etc., have always been elusive and prized components of true warfare.


What would you prefer to see?

(a) Keep it as it is.

(b) Make intelligence gathering far more difficult and expensive for both the AI and the player. Consider abstractions or partial information such as notifications of an "enemy sighted east of Paris- Unknown details at this time, reports indicate a small force having moved there from the North".

[Sheogorath]

If the AI gets an update and doesnt spam billions of tiny, tiny, armies, the second one.
If its anything at all like MTW2 AI, the first.
Dunno about you, but I'd rather we didnt have to add a second row to the message queue

[Csargo]

Like Sheogorath I'de rather leave it as in M2TW if the AI spams 2-3 unit armies everywhere it would become annoying.

[SwordsMaster]

I would reveal Europe's major cities and ports to the player from the get go, at this stage Europe is well known enough. I would only apply sharing maps to colonies, and even then i would give options of the regions that you would like to share. Say someone requests Spain to share maps, Spain might chose to reveal the maps of, say Cuba, but not those of, say Brazil.

Armies should be secret, and even the best spies shouldn't be able to estimate the exact numbers. On the other hand, the direction in which an army is moving should be provided, and this should be made more accurate depending on the spies' skill. A presence of a spy within the army could make the army's numbers harder to estimate, and it's true direction much harder to detect, and perhaps give out a wrong direction.

Also, to fulfill the historical purposes of skirmishers and light cavalry, armies that have these troops, should be easier to feed, and more difficult to detect, and move faster, as these troops would be used for recon, etc.

Anyhow, that's my thoughts

[Divinus Arma]

I would reveal Europe's major cities and ports to the player from the get go, at this stage Europe is well known enough. I would only apply sharing maps to colonies, and even then i would give options of the regions that you would like to share. Say someone requests Spain to share maps, Spain might chose to reveal the maps of, say Cuba, but not those of, say Brazil.

Armies should be secret, and even the best spies shouldn't be able to estimate the exact numbers. On the other hand, the direction in which an army is moving should be provided, and this should be made more accurate depending on the spies' skill. A presence of a spy within the army could make the army's numbers harder to estimate, and it's true direction much harder to detect, and perhaps give out a wrong direction.

Also, to fulfill the historical purposes of skirmishers and light cavalry, armies that have these troops, should be easier to feed, and more difficult to detect, and move faster, as these troops would be used for recon, etc.

Anyhow, that's my thoughts

Good point and well put.

I think it has also been mentioned that the campaign map is going to be getting an overhaul as well. We may not be seeing anything that we have seen before. I think the RTW campaign map engine was a great addition to the series and a wonderful surprise, but will CA be innovating like that again? It's certainly a possibility. And that make the potential for abstraction even better.

They have already suggested that non-military units will be in abstract, most notably spys and diplomacy. With that in mind, a "spy window" and "diplomacy window" or thereabouts are very possible. And I would consider this an improvement over the tedium of micromanaging 20 spies and 7 diplomats.

There are many ways to represent the espionage/recon/intelligence gathering capabilities of a nation. My main point is that this aspect of "Total" War should certainly be given more attention and more value than it has been given previously. I'm optimistic that this is something CA is working on, given the information we have seen so far.

[Frederick the Great]

How about having a spy ring, that is the more spy's you put in a enemies major city the more percentage you have on gathering information on defences,garrisons,feelings of the populous,troop sizes and movement and so on.
Troop mobilisation from major cities would be corps size and could not move without a corps commander and divisional sub-commanders.Minor cities could only provide divisional size formation.
Apart from spies,light cavalry could be used as scouts to patrol area's ahead of the main army on the campaign map and again the more cavalry sighting a enemy force the better the percentage of giving the correct information.
Just an idea........