Quote Originally Posted by Meneldil View Post
If I play a game with a whole lot of factions (how many are announced for ETW? 40 or 50 right?), it's not to end up fighting the 3 same ones in every campaign I play, or to have half of them destroyed in the first 20 turns.

In MTW, every campaign was doomed to end up in a clash between the player, who owned half the world, and another faction (Egypt, Byzantium, France, the Almohads or Britain) who owned the other half.
In RTW, it was Rome, the Seleukids or Egypt.
I have never played a whole campaign of M2TW (for reasons explained in other topics), but from what I heard, the powerhouses were France, Egypt, Byzantium and Poland.

Things got even worse in RTW and M2TW because of the lack of reemerging faction and of the poor AI.

So yeah. I understand that, for the player, the perspective of conquering the known world might be entertaining. But for god's sake, I don't want to have to fight the same 3 factions in every game because all other ones have been annexed in less than 20 turns.

Furthermore, given how warfare evolved after the middle age, I think it would be about time to have peace treaties a la Europa Universalis.

I can support not having to fight the same few factions over and over again. Hopefully the fact that the AI is less dubious about alliances will go someway to stopping one faction rolling over the entire map.

I would hope that half way through the game the majority of the starting factions are still around, I like my map to have variety.

Med 2 wasn't so bad for having one paticular faction always win. Most campaigns did end with very few factions left, but usally because of the player rather than the AI.

I'm reasonably confident that factions won't disappear too easily in ETW. Especially given the ablity of factions to re-appear in loyalist rebellions. We shall have to wait and see I think.