Clockwork

[gollum]

Its true that there is a practical problem with long battles in MTW for normal unit settings if the clock is turned off. I play in huge where this problem does not exist mostly as each stack has more men and so costs more to maintain and therefore there are less stacks. I intensely dislike battles with more than 1 stack of reinforcements - excluding of course the GH where ther is nothing to be done. This could be also solved for normal unit settings by analogically increasing the /training and maintenance costs to have less stacks as in huge but with normal unit settings (scale costs relative to the unit size scaling).

I don't find that the clock is historically accurate in MTW - nothing historically accurate about winning an invasion or defence of invasion that can happen over a year because you repulsed one wave of enemy while his second one did not have time to sweep you off the field. There was some semblance of simulating weather effects in STW that had seasonal turns, but even that was extrapolated, as you had 3 months to effectuate that invasion and hence more than one battles in practice and the Ai in any case did not understood the clock effect in deciding how to commit forces. In the end, its a matter of convention and as such, and gross historical implausibilities aside, what is best for gameplay takes precedence in my eyes at least.

Force deployments to battle are calculated by the AI in terms of where, when and how to commit to battle relative to the force that invades or defends in a province. By cutting short the time to deploy those, the calculations on which force eployment is based by the AI are rendered useless, to the player's favor most of the time. The AI should be able to make full use of his invading forces in an offensive as also the player should, within a year or within a season.