Suggestions for Expansion Pack

I am not a Forum veteran, obviously, so I may be in the totally wrong forum. And I'm SURE that this topic has been addressed out there somewhere. But I haven't been able to find a thread that discusses substantive suggestions as to game content - as opposed to bugs that need to be addressed. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I certainly would appreciate it. In the meantime, here are a few substantive suggestions.

1. There ought to be a way to convert (through an appropriate expenditure of denarii and in a city with the appropriate infrastructure) the old hastati/principes/triarii legions into Post-Marian cohort-based legions. I HATE playing the Roman factions, gathering hard-won experience, and having my veteran units whittled down over time with no opportunity to retrain once the Marian Reform occurs. I realize that this phenomenon does have some basis in history: Marius opened the ranks to any citizen, regardless of property, and propertied men from the old-style legions might have been disinclined to become professional soldiers with long-term service commitments. However, I feel certain that at least SOME of the new Marian legionaries were drawn from the ranks of the existing army. Make the cost high, if you must, but there should be a better solution than having to create wholly new armies from scratch.

2. Similarly, there should be some mechanism to convert Early Legionary Cohorts into Late Legionary Cohorts. According to the game stats, the only difference is the armor, i.e., the lorica hamata vs. the lorica segmentata, as opposed to better training, different weaponry, or higher numerical unit strength. That said, what is the justification for requiring an additional infantry building? If anything, the tech tree requirement should be in the form of a blacksmith/armorer/foundry. And there should be a way to convert to Late Cohorts, unless the Late Cohorts are not made available until after a certain date.

3. Does anyone know when/if the expansion pack is coming out? I’m totally out of the loop on that. If there is going to be a RTW expansion, I’m sure it’s well along the development pipeline. For those of us with neither the computer savvy nor the time to do mods and to create campaigns and such, I would like to see a Late Empire campaign (see my screen name to find out why). I also think an Early Republic campaign, properly researched, would be interesting, perhaps with the object of conquering the peninsula (new factions: Samnites, Phoenicians, Greeks, Epiroits, Sabines, Etruscans, Picentes, and others?).

I have a feeling the expansion might add a totally new timeline/Campaign...

Personally I think there are two candidates:

1) Alexander the Great map, with factions and such.

2) Attila and the Huns, and maybe up to Justinian and Belisarius, IE 400-550 AD.

I hope they make the other factions playable as well, although fixing that is easy.

Make Diplomacy a bit better, or tweaking it a bit. I think its silly when Egypt only has one province left, and when I call for ceasefire they demand 51000 denarii and all the conquered provinces back.

But the single most important thing is to add periods to the game, like in Medieval:TW, so the starting position is different. I loved that in Medieval, although the only factions that got seriously "altered" due to it, were the Russians, Byzantines and Islamic factions.

I want more ear candy. More pre-battle speeches for all the factions. I was looking forward to a good one by my crazy as a loon greek turned selucid general, but only got the same boring old selucid one.

mfberg