Rome 2: A constructive wishlist

[Myth]

A list for things to be fixed, removed, added or changed. Let's try and provide CA with something that can help them see at a glance if they're headed in the right direction according to their fans and customers, and if they have everything noted down. I'll edit the original post as you guys contribute more things.

Things to add:

- True hotseat mode

- Bring back the Family Tree from RTW and flesh it out even more, ATM generals aren't very interesting and easily replaced.

- City view in peace time like in Rome 1

- Naval transport ships that can carry a set number of troops at a maximum

- An astrologer/seer type of agent who has to do with research: speeding it up, stealing technology from more advanced factions etc.

- Seasons (preferably 4, but atleast 2...) and seasonal effects.

- Walls or some other way of stalling for minor cities.

- Generals & admirals should gain traits based on their battlefield tactics & tendencies as well as their record of success in battle (with appropriate bonuses). They should gain reputations according to these factors and successful tacticians should be renowned and feared for it. These factors should be taken into account by the AI when fielding its own force. The AI should account for powerful enemy generals on the Campaign Map as well when facing them with inferior forces. The mere presence of a renowned tactician leading a powerful army in an enemy region should affect public happiness for the duration.

- Factions should be able to negotiate peace agreements between their clients/satrapies and other aggressive states, or use the threat of military action diplomatically against aggressors if they don't back down.

- Bring back 'Give Settlement'.

- Bring back Fire at Will for all missile carrying units.


Things to improve/change:


Campaign Map, campaign map AI, factions:

- Campaign AI more cunning and with its own long-term goal whicih it aspires to. The AI must make better use of building slots, especially in newly conquered settlements or we will never see any AI faction expand to become an empire. If the AI is not sophiticated enough for that, let's give bonus and cheat to the AI factions to compensate.

-The ability to zoom out further on the campaign map

- Improved starting positions for "major" factions. No 1 province minors making super empires, no Epirus being wiped out by turn 10. The playable factions should be factors the player has to plan for and work with/around/against for at least the first half of the game.

- Allow us to manually enter amounts in Diplomacy -> Offers -> Payments box

- The AI calculation of force strength on the Campaign Map should be adjusted by taking into consideration that it's always fighting at a disadvantage to the human player, not simply factoring the comparable unit strengths when it comes to a battle. Understandably this is used to assess auto-resolve results, but as it stands now, it grossly misrepresents the AI's fighting capability when it comes to actual real-time battles. This may help the AI from bankrupting itself trying to replace its best units by sending them into battle with little realistic chance of winning. Maybe in cases where the player chooses to manually fight the battle the AI will withdraw after recalculating its potential for success when factoring in the human player as well, and look for additional strength from supporting armies before it reengages.

- Aggressive, Expansionist AI factions should act that way, regardless of campaign difficulty.

Battles:

- Better / expanded shortcuts for battle commands (we should be able to decide if we want our cohorts to waste their pila or not)

- Marines who fight onboard naval vessels for a living should get bonuses versus land-based infantry, especially when actually boarding. Marines should board faster and more effectively, while land-based infantry should suffer penalties during the first phase of boarding when only a few men have made it onboard the enemy ship and are surrounded by the bulk of the enemy unit.

- Cavalry units should not commit suicide by charging headlong into spear units under all but the most desperate circumstances.

- Elite units should be more aware of vulnerable flanks, and should respond to outflanking maneuvers/attempts when possible.
Skirmishing mode that works, based off closest threat proximity. Skirmishers should be much quicker to react to directional changes and have significantly faster acceleration and speed than any line infantry for 'Skirmishing Mode' to work effectively. When a unit is in 'SM' and an attack command is given, they should quickly close to firing distance, release their volley, and then immediately retreat back some distance to repeat this when facing a threat from the front. The effectiveness of this should vary with unit experience and quality. This would greatly reduce them being caught flat-footed by line infantry.

- Guard mode to be switchable and not " by default " as it is now. Guard mode can even replace the discipline concept from previous TW games ! For example, barbarians or non professionnal units could loose this ability when out of the general radius or when the battle is prolonged.


- Ability to zoom into the minimap during battles.

- The ability to line up troops on fences like in Empire / Napoleon.

- More diverse and more beautiful battle maps.

- The collision model. Units often melt into each other and have no sense of solidness or mass at times. There is significant clipping, where pikes in a phalanx will poke out the center of shields in the front rank. Horse heads clipping through the bodies of infantry, getting them stuck together. Boats clipping through ports, beaches and settlements, etc. and disappearing.

- Battle animations are often out-of-synch and units stand around looking at each other and not engaging. Men fall down and die when no one is attacking them, etc. This is a huge step backwards from Shogun 2!


Gameplay:

- Expanded technology tree with more options and longer research times (this will make the +research buildings more valuable). Possibly tying reseearch to knowledge points or other such resources generated by library class buildings. Make technology tied to the resources and provinces a faction holds. If you have no iron at all (not even importing it) it's not feasible to be able to discover better smithing and ironworking techniques. This will make trade and strategic localized conflicts for the obtaining of a particular resource more important. The tech tree should be complex with many smaller discoveris along the way, instead of a 1-2-3-Marian reforms approach. Play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and see how tech research is done there - it brings atmosphere and excitement in the game to the point where technology itself becomes more important than military expansion for most players.

-The ability to search for another unit while viewing the statistics of one, thus comparing them. For example, comparing Oathsworn versus Berserkers.

- The cities of historical significance should have more building slots - Rome, Carthage and Athens should be more imortant, big and full of high-tier buildings than a backwater provincal capital in the northern steppes of barbarian Europe.

- The political system should be refined and tied with your family tree and the family trees of your rivals. It should be more intuitive and the player should be incentivized to care about it by tools other than the potential game-breaking civil war. Every step of the way should make the player connect with the characters who are in power or striving for it and the decisions shoud have tangible results for the entire kingdom/republic/whatever.

- Civil war armies should not starve to death in 5 turns after they spawn.

- Allow us to garrison agents within cities. When an agent is garrisoned they are considered 'Deployed' until they leave that garrison. Add a visual icon to the towns name that someone is in there.

- Champions, and dignitaries have a lot of cohesion when combined with an army. The spy in my opinion is greatly lacking. With the current way the ambush mechanics work there is a % that you will successfully spring an ambush when in that stance. Let the spy increase that chance.

- More information regarding politics in the form of event messages. If my family is losing constituents (at a big rate) let me know. If I'm close to civil war notify me beforehand.

- Armies should not simply be allowed to traverse the seas with cost-free transports, and the ability to build them should be tied to the Tech Tree. This may help the AI with amphibious assaults, but it's a highly unrealistic gameplay device, ATM. At the very least, clicking a spot on the water to move your army should trigger a ship building animation or device which represents the building of the needed ships for use next turn, and deducts some monies from your treasury (costs should be carefully evaluated for purposes of AI use). It takes a turn to recruit a naval unit, why not a transport? ATM you can get instant navies on the cheap.

- Add a stance that has to do with the building/obtaining of boats to use as transports. It has to drain two turns' worth of movement points while the army assembles the vessels it needs to sail the seas (this is if you don't add actual transport ships). Also, if we are to use this system, make it so that provinces with prots will generate boats the army can "borrow" from the firsher folk and merchants, thus the process could be faster, while being stranded on the Lybian coast with no port in sight, with 1 tree per 10 square km. would make this process agonizingly slow.

- Fixe is the never ending blockades where you cannot attack the city from the land even when it is being blockaded by your ally/client state. For a few turns this may make sense, but there needs to be a time limit or stronger penalties for long blockades to force navies to give up.


Unit balance and Multiplayer:

- War dogs should be an exotic and niche unit, not the end-all, be-all destroyer of all things light and unarmoured

- Add a limitation on unit spam in multiplayer battles. 19 units of Spartan Pikes should be an atrociously sterile army composition that should lose to a better balanced one or one that "hard counters it". You can add two modes, a ranked ladder for MP and an arcade mode. Arcade mode will allow any unit composition and no limit on funds, and will have no capture points (you can corner and hill camp as you see fit). Ladder mode will have increasingly prohibitive costs for spamming the same unit or same type of unit, will have mechanisms to prevent camping and will naturally be ranked. Ranks will be held by battle size (10, 15, 20 and 30 k denarii), and can be filtered by faction and player. Thus we can see which factions rank where in the different battle sizes and so on.

- Add the Avatar Campaign map back to MP. I thought it worked well in FoTS, I imagine it would actually work better in this. You can create custom legions with custom setups.

- The capture point mechanic should stay for mutiplayer battles to prevent corner camping.


Things to remove:

- Armies conjuring transports out of nowhere and basically walking from Rome to Alexandria

- Units being able to destroy gates without siege equipment.

- Remove the unit limitations in Single Player. If I want to recruit 19 Royal Spartans or Hero's of Sparta why shouldn't I be able to?

- Ship-to-ship superjumps. Units should not be able to leap 20 meters through the air to board a separating ship.


Graphics/performance/UI:

- Add a way for us to choose which DX version we run

- Fix rain dropping frame rate dramatically for some players (again)

Unit balance:

- Add a few UI customization options. Nothing too crazy, but how about an option to shrink the size of the UI.

- For those of us with dual monitors - "Confine Mouse Cursor" so that way it stays on 1 screen.