What would you change about MTW?

[Vantek]

I always like to look at computer games, especially strategy games, with the eye of a designer. Usually, even in overall great games, I can still pile a large number of spots that can be improved and even plain mistakes. Or especially in great games, because there every hiccup stands out. Such is the case with MTW. I have thrown together a list of such things for my own fun.

There are three bad faults that could be repaired with little work.

One - not being able to select directly exactly (from a drop-down list, I imagine) which unit to call in as a reinforcement at the moment you're going to call it. Before VI it was downright horrible and pretty much made me never take personal command of battles where I would have to use reinforcements. Still I just see no reason whatsoever why you shouldn't be able to choose the unit to bring in at the very moment when you are going to give the order. It would be easy to fix too.

Two - lack of information on units. This annoyed me to no end before I found frogbeastegg's unit guide. Now it annoys me just moderately, and it has no justification. There should be a display of units' charge, attack, defence, armour, speed and morale stats, much like the display of generals' loyalty, dread etc.

Three - a single peasant sitting in a Fortress sucking horseshoes so that it is unstarveable causing hundreds of casualties among the siegers is utter lunacy. The castle and siege element of MTW is poorly developed overall, but this particular thing is just outrageous. The defense machines don't run on magic. The men operating them should be represented by an inherent defense crew to the castle that would work as a garrison meaning that they make it unnecessary to add the crack-brained old goon with tree bodyguards just to make it impossible for enemy to simply walk in (worse yet, with an unhinged loon of his own) and take over the province along with the castle; they should also be bribable. This garrison team would probably need to be trained instead of popping out of nowhere. You know what, why don't we make it a regular unit (that in field battles would have the strength of slightly beefed peasants perhaps) just to keep things simple. In tactical combat, I guess the coolest way to represent them would be adding some sort of a door to the inside of every arrow tower, that can be destroyed by your men (like the gate), after which they would rush in for a moment and cause the tower to emit a bunch of screams :)

Several smaller shortcomings that could be fixed easily:

It should be possible to loop unit production and it should be possible to queue buildings that aren't available now but will be available after buildings that precede them in the queue are finished. What I mean by that is it should be possible to, for an example, queue Watch Tower AND Border Fort; say, so that once you queue Watch Tower, a greyed out icon of Border Fort appears in the buildings list.

It's annoying when depleted units always get automatically joined when you put them in the same army. This can cause a loss of a decent governor, as well as armour/weapons upgrades. They really shouldn't join unless you tell them to. There's the M key for that.

Actually, armour and weapon upgrades should be counted individually like valour. It's a little silly how 1soldier that has golden shield and sword can give the same upgrade to 99 more men if you're lucky, and how 99 men who have golden shield and sword can lose their prescious just for happening to land into the same army with a lone lunatic.

Especially once latter is the case, I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to actually chop or redistribute units entirely as you please (with newly generated generals being very incompetent, obviously). Furthermore, you should be able to select portions of men by valour (or armour/weapon upgrades). Valour is such an awesome thing to micromanage.

Instead of the unpredictable retreat of units after a defeat, you should be able to manually select (in some sort of temporary limited mode) whom to retreat into the castle (if there is one) and whom to retreat to which province. The battle deployment screen should instead of the "if you retreat your units will attempt to" yadda yadda say wether or not there actually is a friendly province nearby! Am I supposed to memorise it?!

It should be possible to lay automatic routes within your empire for all produced units. Armies following such an automatic route, as well as armies who have been directed to a province that is more than one turn away, should be marked somehow so that you would recognise them and wouldn't break their route.

It's corny how you're much better off bribing the armies in a well-developed province just so that you wouldn't lose buildings (especially if it's a handful of peasants -_-). To counter this, I think bribing the whole army in the province should be as if you had conquered the province with a battle, i.e it should get pillaged. The exact same goes for the enemy abandoning the province, you shouldn't be given motive to spray the province with peasant hordes just to make the enemy leave without a fight so you can keep the buildings.

Which brings us to another point, that the AI counts unit numbers to decide wether to fight or not and ignores their quality. This would be very easy to fix: he could make the decision based on autocalc (not that it would necessarily mean that he'd never take a battle he would lose with autocalc, or always take what he'd win).

Ship battles are just tooo crazy. They are a pure gamble. Some consistency would be appreciated here.

In battle mode, it should be possible to rotate the formation of your whole army. For a group selection, the alt-right click shouldn't rotate the units around their each centre, it should rotate the whole selection around its collective centre. This would make management of big armies MUCH more comfortable. It can be annoying to micromanage as it is.

In battle mode, there should be some indication of how big portion of a selection of ranged soldiers can "see" a given location, not just wether anyone at all can see it. It's very hard to figure out sometimes, yet can be crucial. For an example, there could be a circle next to the along with the green-and-red-blinking bow-and-arrow icon, which's clockwise filling would represent this percentage.

Arbalesters make Crossbowmen completely useless. Completely useless units are not good. To counter this, Crossbowmen should have lower reload time and perhaps Arbalesters should have higher cost and upkeep, about the same as Halberdiers. In my opinion as it is Arbalesters are a bit overpowered anyway. Maybe even their current reload time should be increased.

Some units are just completely useless to begin with. Yes, I'm talking about you, Ballista and Arquebousiers. The quickest thing I can think of is giving a unit of Ballista four machines. Arquebousiers, I don't know, they should just be better heh. Some other artillery units are suspect as well.

[obvious]The AI is really stupid.[/obvious] Lulz. But seriously. I just can't see how it could be that hard to make at least strategic AI quite a bit better. If even just fans of the game can significantly improve AI's percieved intelligence by mere modding, then you know the designer of the program definitely way underperformed here.

Phew, quite a list. There must be some things I missed, as well as the bugs and tiny things like contradictory vices and such, but at the moment I can't think of much else that I could call straight mistakes or shortcomings.

MTW is overall an awesome game. In fact, the idea behind it is brilliant. I would go as far as to say the idea behind it has the potential for the creation of a perfect computer strategy game. The execution, while good, still doesn't come close to achieving that. If 10 was perfect, I would rate the game design at about 7. With the listed changes, I would raise this rating to 8 or even 9 (depending on how smart that AI would be...).

The design could be improved yet further without altering the leading idea behind it (especially regarding castles and sieging, also diplomacy, things might center more around valour and so on), but that is impossible to do just in your head without seeing your ideas in action, and also is likely to be more of a matter of personal preference.

There's only one such funny idea I had that I'll mention: perhaps the map edge syndrome could be cured by putting the map edge slightly further for the attacker than the defender. Not a whole lot, maybe the length of a three ranks deep unit of Arbalesters. Now again I can't predict with certainty how this would turn out without seeing it in action, but I actually feel that it might work beautifully. It could probably be at least a worthy option in the game settings menu. Chickenhood must to be punished!

Oh, in case you're wondering, if we set the rating 10 as the highest rank of games that actually exist, then somewhat obviously MTW gets a 10/10 from me. On a relative scale, it's simply brilliant.

What would you change about this game?