Quote Originally Posted by Martok View Post
Also, I -- along with many people, I suspect -- have a hard time dismissing my long-held impressions that warfare in the time period covered by Empire almost always consists of men simply lining up and shooting each other. (Which you have to admit, sounds pretty boring on the face of it.) Intellectually, I realize this is an unfair assessment, and that combat during the era was actually quite a bit more complex than that, but it's difficult to internalize to the point where I truly *believe* it.
I had an immediate negative reaction to the game announcement for the same reason. It's not so much the use of gunpowder per se, but the way gunpowder armies lack the diversity of units that we had in the earlier periods. Vastly different ways of outfitting soldiers with melee weapons, armor, and minimal ranged weapons in close-range combat means more possible tactics, more interesting ways to play the game, compared to the "level field" of gunpowder combat. I know that armies in this period had some degree of diversity in the units. But unless CA is going into the a-historical fantasy zone, they're going to be less diverse in style of combat than we had in the pre-gunpowder era. As a strategy gamer, that's just less attractive to me.

Gunpowder armies might be more attractive if the game included a maneuver phase before combat... i.e. use of terrain and positioning of forces in the day or two before the battle. That's something I always missed with the earlier games. But I haven't read anything that indicates there is anything like this on the strategic map before combat.

For a while I thought the saving grace would be the new naval combat engine, until I saw the latest in-game clips with ships sailing directly upwind (sigh). Maybe it will be better than it looks, so far. If CA has massively improved the strategic map level, I can enjoy a game that isn't everything I want it to be on the tactical level. Maybe.