What is the single most important thing to be patched?

[anti_strunt]

IMHO: First the AI, all parts of it; then the silly friendly fire...

[Maltz]

I have a minor idea - to be annexed here instead of posting a new thread.

For some reason I feel RTW battlefield is not real enough - but I couldn't identify the reason. There are corpses lying everywhere already.

Now I suddenly realize it is the "blood". No corpse bleeds, they just lie down. How about bloods on the battlefield - a reasonable amount of blood stain on the corpse, also spilling to the nearby ground. Under very high unit details bloods are also spilled on warriors who achieve certain number of kills. If he killed 10 he would be soaked in dark red, not shiny heh.

So you really get the gross feeling of the battlefield

[Mazoch]

The computer AI:

Campaign: Less small stackes, more big / high quality ones. I would much rather fight one big tough battle than 100 small meaningless ones.

The AI needs to be able to defend itself better somehow. Even on the highest difficulty its way to easy to outmanuver and slaughter armies 5 times the size of your own.

Battlemap

Pathfinding, this one really annoys me, especially in towns where theres a lot of narrow areas. Unis will stop in thier tracks (got a big army slaughtered today during a siege because none of my units were smart enough to walk through an open gate. Instead they all stoped up in a big group right in front of the open gateway.. just under that nice warm oil bath.), engage enemy units seemingly at random (just who would that unit of archers charge headling into a phalanx formation after thier general just told them to more around the phalanx formation?!)

I would love to see the units keep thier formation a lot better. I can understand a barbarian warband charging around with little order. But romes finest aught to more around in formation for the most part.

Movement speed, reduce the overall movement speed on the battle map. Futher reduce infantry run speed. Make battles more about choicing the right stragedy as opposed to having fast reflexes with the mouse.

General changes
Bribing really needs a reworking. It dosent take long before your income usually grow to a size where money matters little. Bring able to bribe great armies so easily is rather a problem. A possible fix might be to, rather then disband a bribed army its sent back to the nearest friendly city. That way you can still use money to buy you some time, but not kill off thousands of enemies.

Would be nice if sea battles was a bit more brutal / more losses on either side so you dont ahve to chase a single ship halfway across the world to sink it.

I would love to see fatigue, elevation and terrain have a greater effect.

I'd like to see a reduction of the moral bonus in a city square. Getting a solid bonus is ok, but currently it feels like its simply impossible for a defending unit to rout.