Things that I'm excited about:

Larger unit cards! The S2TW ones were simply too small, and the typeface was small as well on a full HD resolution.

Custom animations, zooming in and out, better graphics etc. I'll probably need a new graphics card as even S2TW ran on a lower frame rate than what I would have liked and my graphics card is almost 3 years old. I hope a dual quad core I7 and 16 GB of ram will be otherwise enough.

Disengage after multiple clicking - no more of one single retard from your stack of cav being caught by the edge of an enemy phalanx and then usddenly your whole cav unit is bogged down in a melee with the enemy spears, and you click and click and click and they still want to fight... This is good.

Difference between fights - this was probably my biggest gripe with RTW and M2TW apart from the stupid AI. Every battle eventually became one of these:

1. Hammer&anvil them
2. Pelt them with arrows by archers/Ha, then charge with cav.
3. Storm city with heavy infantry, put archers on their walls once you take them.

That's it. I am excited for new field battles, sieges and defences with different objectives and smart implementation. I don't want to start autoresolving past turn 30 due to boredom. I also don't want the super efficient autoresolve of S2TW which made two fullstacks of ahsigaru beat a fullstack of elite samurai with moderate losses.

Berserkers! Need I say more? No, I seriously liked them in RTW despite their ahistorical stats and throwing units around. If the size of the men in the unit plays a role in combat that'd be even more awesome.

Things that I am excited about if implemented correctly:

Tactical map ambushes - this sounds good for PvP but I am a bit sceptical about the AI portion of it, since tactical map battles I usually play versus the AI. Giving me one more way to royally massacre them without giving them an equally cunning commander is not what I want. Hiding spears behind a 15 meter hill (30 foot? Or 45 lungs? Stupid imperial system...) to wait and stab the enemy general to death is not what I want if the Ai can't do the same to me reliably.

Diplomacy - what they meant (but the PC Gamer guy is obviously not a TW veteran by any means) was that people were complaining that the RTW/M2TW Ai liked to break off aliances by blockading some remote port with just one ship for no apparent reason, or liked to backstab you but did it ineptly - like laying siege wtih a halfstack of peltasts or something. I also didn't like realm divide, though it provided for a strategic challenge, by the time I took Kyoto I already had the production capacity to smother the rest of the map. Early game was what's hard in the highest difficulty setting in Shogun.

I am especially excited about the lessened tedious burden that is late-game mop up of remaining factions. Stainles Steel's AI scripts pumping out endless stacks out of thin air when I already own half the map was not my idea of increased difficulty, it was just annoying. I suppose EB does this too, though I never had the patience to play it extensively due to the historical unit names and the very laggy campaign map.

Civil wars and someone "crossing the Rubicon" - that's great. But how will you challenge a player who owns all the best trade cities and has 10-12 fullstacks to throw around? Even if rebel Caesar pops up with a scripted stack or two of elite legionaries, if this happens 200 turns after the start of the campaign the player will probably be able to stomp him with endless masses stacks. It will have to be something like the Mongol invasion in M2tW or Stainless Steel for it to have any meaningful effect, but some upstart general can't be equal to the biggest invasion Europe has seen since the Huns. So I'm sceptical about this too.

Also, in the previous games each tile had it's own tactical map associated with it, and that's defined in a text file for the map/mod. It's not "generated" and there was no risk of the game "not saving it". This guy doesn't know RTW or M2TW.. Perhaps in Shogun 2 they were randomly generated? I wouldn't know, autocalc broke combat for me there.