The Warpath Campaign Expansion DLC

[Prussian to the Iron]

I believe you are wrong on several fronts:

Speaking as someone in the American market, I wouldn't like to see a Civil War expansion, for many reasons:

1) It's been done before, many times, and in ways that don't require jerking around a game engine that was designed to cover a much larger part of the world with more factions. A good Civil War game really needs a more focused approach, with much more local detail than we see on the campaign map.

really? I haven't seen any recently, or at least not RTS's about it. and it's not like nothing has been done about warpaths setting or time. AoE and empire earth are 2 notable examples.

2) What I've enjoyed the most about the Total War series are the battles between dissimilar armies. For me, it's just more interesting to see something like barbarians vs. Roman troops, or desert horse archers vs. armored European soldiers. It's tactically interesting, in the earlier eras where gunpowder didn't level the playing field and make armies nearly identical. ETW is already a much less varied game; in many battles you're fighting an army that looks just like yours except for the color of the uniform. The U.S. Civil War is like that, only more so. You have two armies fielding the same units with only very small variations. It doesn't matter which side you choose to fight, it's just a different colored uniform.

I have a big beef with this. They did not have the same units in any way. Confederate soldiers were generally less trained, and worse at ranges, but better in a melee. they also had worse weapons (many had muskets) and more patriotic fervor.

3) By the time of the U.S. Civil War they were using rifled weapons, which means much longer engagement distances. The game engine would have to be re-worked to handle that, and the battlefields should also be larger. I don't see CA making that big a change. And it would be ludicrous to have troops with rifled weapons just plopped into the current engine, where they can't fire until they're right on top of the enemy.

No. just no. every single soldier did not use rifles, in fact far fewer than generally thought. most rifles were given to the more elite units, and even then that was almost exclusively in the north. cannons mostly had rifling though.

4) The Civil War was the start of a shift away from Napoleonic tactics (disciplined ranks in open field warfare) and towards the start of trench warfare, fighting from heavy fortifications, sappers to undermine those fortifications, etc. The game engine doesn't support this type of combat.

this has never stopped TW from portraying native american units as well-organized, professional military units (see M2 kingdoms americas campaign and ETW american theatres)

5) It doesn't bring anything interesting to the naval combat side of the game, other than eye candy (Monitor, Merrimac, etc.). The South didn't have a real navy, and the North blockaded the Confederate ports for the duration of the war. A Confederate navy would only be interesting if it was completely a-historical and much stronger than it was in reality.

while that may be true, lots of people have complained about the naval combat in the game. I honestly wouldn't mind having the option to take it out.