A couple of thoughts and suggestions:

1. Faction specific historical maps as pre-battle loading screens. Playing the Romans it would be cool to see some historical maps of their conquests. Playing another faction would mean a set of maps for that faction is presented etc.

2. Can background music be geographically bound? Moving to certain areas on the strat-map would activate music for that region.

3. Can "small wonders/ region specific buildings" be present in or just outside the battle map like the larger wonders? Would be cool to see the rock temple on Baliares or fight along the big Sabaean dam near Maryab or beneath a hindutemple in the Indus region wouldn´t it?

4. I miss the fact that any seabattle were soldiers are transported should result in some casualities even for the units not only the ships. Seabattle was fought man to man so its realistic but can it be done?

1) not a bad idea
2) no, impossible.
3)I'm afraid that's about impossible. If not for the game mechanics it is for our few modellers.
4) impossible, I think. Unless with scripting, tough I doubt it.

I had tried to do a roman expansion one load screen. Actually I did a Baktrian one first, with direction arrows of migrations, etc., but it was incredibly complex. The roman one was simpler, but still ended up looking like crap. Here was the last stage I had on it before I stopped working on it (a year or so ago).
https://img237.imageshack.us/img237/...sionnb5.th.jpg

I don't know how else to try and depict it actually.

Maybe if instead of different years, just progressively lighter shades of red could be used. I really like that idea with the maps on the loading screens, but understand that there are probably other areas that you guys would like to focus on other than the loading screens.

TA, you should do it the way expansion is presented in historical atlases, like Ambiorix says: a couple of shades. It doesn't have to be that precise.

As for unique buildings on battle maps - it is definitely possible, but we lack workforce. They won't be visible outside the battlemap, so if you fight a tile away you won't see anything, but they could be visible on the battlemap if you fight directly on them. All we need is modellers who could model these babies for us. (not all of them are actual single structures, of course, so not all would work like this, but most could)

...also, is it possible to script the maps to appear at certain times? Playing around 200bc will give you a set of maps that corrulates with that time period etc.

Instead of several colors, how about just one date and several maps? Can there be faction specific images loaded? or does it get mixed into one big database. If nothing else, it would keep it interesting. The quotes below could certainly use some more variation. If one were able to play through an entire campaign you could probably recite a few at least by heart.

The loading screens get chosen at random from one big directory. Also, we have actually more quotes than vanilla.

Historic events however could perhaps give you an update of what happened.