The big IF

[seireikhaan]

Support for a sort of 'democratic' method of choosing a new faction leader; that is, perhaps having every royal general 'elect' a new leader of the available heirs. Would be used for factions like the HRE, the Golden Horde, Venice/Italy, and for the Genoese in mods like XL.

[Misfratz]

The military access could easily simply work in the same way as with crusades. In fact, you could have to create an "Alliance army" that would function like a crusade in that it was only able to move to a target province (eg that of a common enemy).

Improving the AI so that it wouldn't retreat so often, would be good. In particular I'd like it to choose to defend more easily defensible provinces in favour to less defensible provinces, etc. I'm sure there is an algorithm that decides whether the AI retreats or not (based on the relative sizes of the armies) and this could be expanded upon and tweaked.

The main change I would like to see would be to be able to play against other humans in the campaign game, with battles fought against them. This would be some undertaking...

[Ironsword]

- Oh Lordy; there has to be an overhaul of the naval battle system. Anything is preferable to the random event generator that's in place!

- Plus, I would like my troops to say more in the battle screens than the same phrase over and over again!

- Also maybe some kind of 'special' formation/attack/ability for generals/characters of a certain command level.

Crikey, judging by that lot you'd never know I actually really like the game! ;)

[jsberry]

Smaller province and movement areas. It is entirely unrealistic to assume that an army in northrern Aquitane can control southern Acquitaine - or that a control of Cordoba's Atlantic coast equals control of its Mediteranean coast - or that the entire Russian/European borden can be sealed with two "areas", etc. (the smaller areas could be combined with the "highway" idea to allow realistic movement in own territory).

Think about it, it is very easy for England to conquer all of France in ten years' game time. But in real life, it would take ten years to maybe occupy Flanders alone...

[Raz]

What I'd do? Hmm, I'd mainly do things that would help modders mod MTW. If you get what I mean... I guess I would increase the maximum number of units allowed (beyond the silly 256 limit). As well as increasing the maximum number of provinces, I'd also get rid of the dreaded BIF files and replace them with easy to edit TGA files (as well as removing any 256 colour pallets). I'd make it so, so much easier to make a new campaign map as well as improving that faction swapping debug feature when using the -ian extension (so you can play test different factions past the 20th).

[Roark]

Raz hit the nail on the head for me. I'd make the game more easily and broadly modifiable.

Also:

- Fix naval combat.
- Fix the AI factions' build/train methodology and economic management.

[Martok]

Yeah, I second Ironsword & Roark that it would be sweet if naval combat were fixed. As it currently stands, you might as well apply voodoo magic to the whole thing.

- Fix the AI factions' build/train methodology and economic management.