Ideas about future MP campaign Totalwar

This thread has nothing related to the "current, playable MP RTW", so I post it here. Dear moderators please feel free to move it, though.

I was just discussing TW game with a friend, then I started to think "why the heck CA hasn't made a MP campaign after 3 years?" Well I know it is hard, but at least worth a try. Now in RTW even the battlefield-only MP is criticized ~ :dizzy2: Anyways, I got some ideas so I will pull them out of my sent mail box:

Let our imagination go wild: :balloon2:

***

Say, every player is a general and controls a "virtual land" in a province
under a country of their choice. They all start with 0 soldier, basic rank
and some income that gets updated every turn.

Through fighting they gain "experiences/credits" so they can be promoted, meaning more income as well as honor among the players. The country pays for their income. Watch out for those lazy pigs ~;)

For example, let every real day be a game year, so every 1 hour is one half month -- a turn. Every turn players can issue a new order, like "hiring X number of army type Y", "train army", "build X structure", marching from point A to point B (there are only so many "points" on the campaign map), and of course, "fight". They can also issue many orders in advance, say, 72 for 3 days if you want to be absent from a long weekend. There will also be more general plans so the AI can follow out such as "attack city A and if win, stays, and if lose, retreat back to city B", or "totally listen to the order of the commander".

Some generals will lead armies to defend strategically important places, while many will stay in the city to hire more troops. Some might pick a different path - to be a professional city manager that builds bath houses and be the first one who jumps in.

There will be a faction leader (by default the fonder) who has the final say on diplomacy. There will be virtual meeting rooms so all generals in the country can chat about their progress. There can be online chat for serious meetings, too.

Battles start when hostile armies meet at a single point and one side intiates the attack action (if not then they will camp against each other like a stalemate). As you can see a battle can start at any time of the day!

If the players are currently online, they will be able to command their own army, or else their army will be controled by a good AI (not the retarded AI as we have now).

If no party is present, auto-calc will take place with reasonable results. One
can also lend the account to somebody else so their friend can help them babysit the army.

There are some problems as I can think of now, that is the flexibility of gameplay time. Many battles will carry out when the player cannot control personally (thus have to trust the AI or use auto-calc). While the player does want to have good battles, there might be no battle happening at all. I guess Creative Assembly must have also thought about this. I don't know how you can overcome that... :)

If anyone has any idea, please feel free to discuss, too.

Said it before but I'd love to see a 2 player campain played exactly the same as single player campain. No autoresolve. Only 2 factions, one player controling each and no rebels so that all battles are player vs player. Limited map areas with say 10-20 provinces split evenly at the start. Chose region of map, chose factions and flip a coin to see who goes first.

Different victory conditions could be things like complete elimination, elimination of the opposing factions leader and heir or hold one initially unclaimed province with a wonder of your choice for 5-10 rounds.

Host can save/autosave at the end of each round so that you can reload and pick up from where you left off another time.

It wouldn't be that hard to do, surely. It wouldn't take forever which is the main pissweak excuse CA use and it would be a lot of fun. Plenty of people play RPG's like NWN cooperatively over long periods of time. I can't see why RTW would be any different.

C'mon CA. Time to pull your finger out with regards to the multi campain. It should have been made obvious to you over the years that many of us want it. You've got the single player nailed, now do multi justice. :)