With all the talk of making another Rome instead of Shogun I've seen I was wondering why no one seemed to bring up making a Renaissance Total War, which would seem most logical after M2 and Empire/Napoleon. I then thought about Shogun2 though and remembered later in the period they were essentially fighting this way and I led to recall another problem I've always had with both the interface and the AI in total war games.
Essentially, the problem is it takes *a lot* of micromanagement to overlay/stack units of multiple types in a single line or formation and keep them that way, which is required to produce a realistic and effective pike-and-shot formation (spears, gunners, and maybe infantry packed together). You can't just get around this by making mixed unit types though, as there would still be many times when you wouldn't want your spear/pikes and gunners, and maybe infantry, all crammed together like that.
However, the AI never does this, at least on purpose, itself so against the computer, which is how most people play, it's almost kind of cheating. Therefor, it appears to me that people should start getting it across to CA that grouping and forming multiple units of different types into one clustered line or square needs some more functionality added to it and that the computer needs to start to make use of this itself, especially when employing pikes (which we should definitely see in Shogun2).
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