Originally Posted by
Servius
In the TWC thread, Craig specifically said "features" so I'll leave the era and locale alone.
Regarding features...
1) If/when you return to the age of sail or beyond, I'd like to see coastal battles, with ships acting like off-map artillery. For example, if an army in Empire makes an amphibious landing, the army can land but uses all its movement points. So it can't move off the beach until the next turn. Well, if you're defending, and you attack an army on the beach in that situation, the battle should take place on a coastal map, with any neighboring ships displayed in the water, and you should be able to trigger a cannonade (like as a general special ability, on a timer) that brings up an AoE cursor to target the bombardment.
2) If/when you return to a colonial period, it would be nice if you included the entire globe, not just little trade theatres like the Ivory Coast. Even if it were just coastal provinces, I'd like to be able to land, take over or build a trade castle, and possibly have to defend those with regular army units. So, you wouldn't have to map out the interior of Africa, but at least have a string of colonial provinces along the coast instead of just those anchorages/trade nodes.
3) I really miss the ability to award titles to units, as you could in MTW. You've gone a long way to bringing that back, first in Empire (with the government ministers), and now even closer in Shogun 2 (with the ability to award up to 4 commissions to specific generals). I'd like maybe a few more commissions/titles for generals (for example, in MTW, you could award a province governorship AND a privy council title), and they titles were appropriately named for each faction (which won't apply in a game like Shogun but probably would if you return to Europe). But I'd also like the ability to award battle honors after particularly awesome victories. For example, right now in Shogun 2, if you have some kind (not sure if it's Heroic or Decisive, or something else) victory, a little gold monument appears on the campaign map, and you can hover over it to see who faught who, what year, what the name of the battle was, etc. Well, when you win a battle that triggers the creation of monument like that, I'd also like the ability to grant (or have automatically granted based on kill/death ratios) battle honors to specific, individual units. Battle honors would add something to the units stats (+2 morale or +1 Melee Attack). This would help distinguish individual units. I really liked how in Empire each unit was numbered and you could change their names. In Shogun 2 you can't do that. All units are anonymous, and except for experience, they're all the same. I find I don't care for my Shogun 2 units anywhere near as much as I did for my Empire units, and I'm sure it's because there's no way to distinguish one from another.
4) In Shogun 2, you named the prefecture capitals, but not the ports, farms, etc. In Empire, every building in a region had a name (Oxford, Lyon, etc.). Shogun 2 feels more anonymous because of this, and that decreases my engagement.
5) Be sure to retain the 4 season turn format, no matter what future games have as a start and end date. The number of turns between the arbitrary start and end dates is immaterial. The immersion and beauty that comes with 1 turn / season, and the added tactical variety it can add to battles, is just too good to give up again.
6) Significantly increase the default range of ships, and moderately increase the range of agents, and somewhat increase the range of armies on the campaign map. The first thing I do when I get a new TW game is see if there's a Darth Mod for it yet, because one of the usual improvements that mod makes is to increase the range of units, especially ships starting with Empire. The default ranges are always rediculously short, especially for ships, and it's SO frustrating. Please talk to Darth, figure out what methodology he uses to determine the ranges, and adopt something close to that as the default in future TW games.
7) Brainstorm some way of incorporating the Avatar system into the single-player game. As a diehard SP player, I'm never going to use MP, but I like where you were going with the customization and personalization of an avatar on the MP side. It would be great if the SP side could benefit from that too.
8) The Ninja movies are great. I'm so glad they're back. They're a lot more attractive than the ones in RTW and M2TW and more interesting in their settings, methods, etc. Please retain these in future TW games.
9) If multiple generals are present in the same stack, allow all of them to get experience from victories. Even if you set up a heirarchy, where the top guy gets 100%, and the 2nd highest ranking guy gets 80% and so on, that would be cool.
10) It would be even cooler if allied units on the same battlefield could benefit from the bonuses of their general. For example, in S2, you can develop your generals to be good with cavalry vs. infantry, offense vs. defense, etc. Let's say I have 2 stacks from my own faction one that's mostly infantry and led by a general with infantry bonuses, and another mostly cavalry with a general with cavalry bonuses. They both fight in the same battle, and since they're both from my faction, I control them on the battlefield. Well, I'd like the infantry to get the bonuses from their general and the cavalry to get the bonuses from THEIR general. Conversely, you could allow for all general bonuses to apply to all units in a stack if a stack has multiple generals. This would be similar to the way some of the Commissioner bonuses apply to all units while some apply only to units in a stack led by that particular general.
11) It would be cool if you could add in some kind of dedicated troop transport ship class. In Empire, it always felt a bit unfair that I could transport 20 units on a single Sloop, or in Shogun 2, on a bow kobaya.
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