I agree with this, whole-heartedly. I chose not to purchase ETW and NTW so I don't know how things were made different. It seems from comments by those who have played those two, that placing smaller objectives in a province only provoked the AI into sending small, two unit stacks to do raiding. Many of the players comments seem to point this out as a very annoying feature. So perhaps some other system is needed?!?but for all practical purposes, the only thing of value in a province was still the city, so "freedom of movement" really just meant the ability to move straight to a siege without fighting the enemy in the field. Because there were no smaller objectives- villages, forts, supply depots, etc- that contributed to the defense of the city and the usefulness of the province, even if you were able to move anywhere you rarely had any reason to. Since the only things worth defending with troops were the troop-producing cities themselves, battles became sieges except for occasional accidental encounters and defenses at a handful of chokepoints.
I might venture a guess that removing the feature that ties city loyalty to having the garrison inside the city could help. Just having an army 'in province' should be enough.
Another might be that any army that enters a non-allied territory must halt immediately, and be subjected to an automatic DoW. Movement can resume the following turn. This might help with some of the aimless wandering by stacks looking for something to do, or the "what the @#$% are we doing here" syndrome, seen a lot in RTW.
Placement of roads is also critical. Being the fastest way to get around, most armies will be on a road somewhere, and much of the combat will likely be in the vicinity of roads.
Much of the combat in SJ times was of the siege kind, or as a result of sieges, so I'm not totally against this form of combat (and if CA incorporates some of the original style castles built in the SJ period, castle assaults will take on a very exciting...and hazardous, twist).
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