What would you change about MTW?

[drone]

IIRC, the armour/weapon upgrades are per unit, valour is per man. Morale, who knows. The "captain" controls the unit's equipment. So you can merge/fill units and get "free" upgrades (or downgrades, if you are going to the desert ).

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.

You can control this. In the minimap options, you can turn auto-tidy units off.

As far as changes I would like:

Updated video support, of course.

Less hardcoding of certain mechanics for modding purposes.

Better empire management UI. In a game like MoO2, you had the ability to pull up a scroll with all planets and a summary of what they were doing, with the ability to change certain tasking from that scroll. It would make it a lot easier to manage a large empire with this.

[jadast]

1. Better dipolmacy. Being able to invite your allies to attck the same turn you do would be nice. I would like to offer smaller countries the option to become vassal states instead of being attacked by me.

2. Blockades are frustrating to me. If I have no naval presence then I can see that coastal area is under a blockade. If I have ships in the area, especially when I have more ships, I can not see the province as blockaded.

[Vantek]

You can control this. In the minimap options, you can turn auto-tidy units off.

And I have it turned off at all times. I am talking about when you take units that weren't together and put them into the same army. Say, there are nothing but 10 Halberdiers in one army and 10 in the other, given both generals don't have any command or V&V when you put them in the same army they are joined into the same unit. It's not a huge problem by any means but it's still annoying.

So you can merge/fill units and get "free" upgrades (or downgrades, if you are going to the desert ).

Oh, that reminds me: you should have the option to downgrade armour. Before battle so that you get it back later would be particularly deluxe, but just permament change on the strategic map would work fine as well.

[Caliburn]

It's easy to go overboard with these.

Some things that are moddable:

No armour upgrades! Or at least not so effective ones. Maybe the same with Weapon upgrades; gives the player too much of an edge. Also, breaks the unit balance, esp. Archers lose their kill ratio.

Arquebusiers should have more oomph.

Crossbows should have a use.

More camels! (not really)

Fewer factions with javelinmen.

Fewer peasants in AI stacks. Fewer siege engines in AI stacks; no more 12 Ballista + 4 Urban Militia armies attacking stacks of 4 Mounted Sergeants!

More small knolls on the battlemap (those that can have 1-2 units on top of them) for local missile/cavalry height advantage.


Some that maybe aren't moddable:

Agent stacks! These would bundle your two dozen bishops into one marker, so it would be easier to move...

Updating unit types to their newer versions (feudal sergeants to chivalric sergeants etc.).

AI Tech Tree optimization and specialization. It would be nice to see the enemy fielding Chivalric Knights once in a while... (Of course it can be done by simplifying the tech tree and giving factions higher level castles in the beginning, or limiting certain buildings to certain regions).

Revamped trade/fleet system.

Trustworthy Allies who actually do something for you.

[Vantek]

No armour upgrades! Or at least not so effective ones. Maybe the same with Weapon upgrades; gives the player too much of an edge. Also, breaks the unit balance, esp. Archers lose their kill ratio.

Hmm, it does get me thinking... What if Armourer line buildings were just a requirement for units that are armoured... Would make things more sensible, really. As it is, Desert Archers or Genoese Sailors can have more armour than the Halberdier and still move fast compared to their slow...

Metalsmith line always seemed a bit awkward to me to begin with (firstly if you don't have metal then where is your units's stuff coming from, secondly if your metal is low-quality or something, then why can't you still just import better?). Maybe it should make production of units, particularly heavily armoured ones, cheaper instead, probably also should be way more evenly spread out across the map. Maybe there could be some otherwise ridiculously expensive units that would become affordable with Metalsmith.

Oh, reminds me of another thing. Loyalty of the province should depend on the quality of the garrison, not just the quantity. Doesn't seem quite right to me that putting a horde of completely incapable soldiers on patrol frightens the population. On the contrary, the presence of a huge useless army would further disgruntle people, if anything. This would further tone down emergence of huge empires as well.

[MJF]

Re armour, does upgrading armour make the unit tire faster? I realise that there are fatigue penalties in the desert, but say you have a unit in central europe - will it fatigue more quickly with gold armour than bronze? Or are the upgrades simply makign the armour better (and thus probably lighter).

[caravel]

Hmm, it does get me thinking... What if Armourer line buildings were just a requirement for units that are armoured... Would make things more sensible, really. As it is, Desert Archers or Genoese Sailors can have more armour than the Halberdier and still move fast compared to their slow...

That's how it worked in the Pocket Mod. I basically made armourers as pre-requisite buildings, like the spearmaker, bowyer and swordsmith. The only thing that I left intact was the valour bonus for the Master level building. I then simply used it as a dependency for armoured units.

Metalsmith line always seemed a bit awkward to me to begin with (firstly if you don't have metal then where is your units's stuff coming from, secondly if your metal is low-quality or something, then why can't you still just import better?). Maybe it should make production of units, particularly heavily armoured ones, cheaper instead, probably also should be way more evenly spread out across the map. Maybe there could be some otherwise ridiculously expensive units that would become affordable with Metalsmith.

I renamed the metalsmith as the blacksmith and made it the pre-requisite building for all cavalry, peasant type units and axe units.

Oh, reminds me of another thing. Loyalty of the province should depend on the quality of the garrison, not just the quantity. Doesn't seem quite right to me that putting a horde of completely incapable soldiers on patrol frightens the population. On the contrary, the presence of a huge useless army would further disgruntle people, if anything. This would further tone down emergence of huge empires as well.

Oh but it does... the lowest quality peasant thug militia are the best for this type of work... On the whole I'd say that this works better than it does in RTW, where garrison size is proportional to the population size and once the population gets to a certain level large garrisons don't help much.

Re armour, does upgrading armour make the unit tire faster? I realise that there are fatigue penalties in the desert, but say you have a unit in central europe - will it fatigue more quickly with gold armour than bronze? Or are the upgrades simply makign the armour better (and thus probably lighter).

My memory fails me on this. I think it's only in the sand desert and rock desert terrain types that the armour penalty comes into play though.