MTW-Redux Beta Released!

[jingo7]

Hi, friends,
Now, you know what my excitement is? To get as many of my brave guys as possible home after battle. Every lost man is my personal failure. I simply imagine a REAL battle, thinking about my men and about the country they live in, and I don´t want to loose neighter men nor land to anybody not caring for them/it as good as I do (there should be, in my opinion, even some influence increase in the game for keeping my people happy, rich and alive!). The kick is to build up, as far as possible, to have the best drill possible, and, if really necessary, to beat the enemy with the least lost men possible.
Redux does make that quite a bit harder than Vanilla, therefor I play it. And, as said quite often, con mucho gusto ;-)
daigaku

How fascinating. It's interesting how our play styles as gamers reflects some of our beliefs/idiosyncrasies/ideologies.
I share your 'getting a kick' out of building provinces/armies to the max. But as for 'bringing as many soldiers home as possible', what a wonderfully modern idea to impose on a game about the middle-ages! Less than a century ago our rulers were sending hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths for their own benefit! It's a very modern idea that at least in Western armies, there is a 'maximum loss' threshold after which you can only achieve Phyrric victories. Or the idea of a 'clean war' in which individual life in sanctified (at least in law if not in reality).
I really like a good bloodbath. That is, I favour more of a 'meatgrinder' approach which seems more adequate to my (perverted?) sense of realism. I feel it would be wrong for a faction of minimal influence to make extraordinary gains against a much more powerful faction. Although obviously history has its moments of this happening, of inspired leadership and luck etc., most of the time it's a case of raw productive/population power. More resources/production/population = the winner.
It's because of this that I could never play as a faction like Aragon or Sicily. I can't see a alternative history where these factions displace Spain/France etc.
Not to mention I also feel sympathy with these peasant revolts, since I know these peasants are the real producers on upon which my fragile pompous empire depends. Do they get a share of the 'income' that is generated through trade and production? Lol I think not.
Anyway I wouldn't play games if I wanted realism at all costs, since as Axalon has said elsewhere, games are really simplified symbolic representations of historical forces. I mention this just because some of it has a direct relationship to how I play, as it does for you, which I find fascinating.