FAQ Message from the Shogun

[screwtype]

Not many replies to this thread are there? I guess most of us have moved on from RTW by now. I had a lot of suggestions at one stage but it's so long since I played the game I just can't remember what I'd like to see changed.

Anyhow, here's one I thought of today. If you assault a city and lose the battle due to the timer running out I don't think the siege should be broken. The siege should only be broken if your army is actually routed off the map.

Also, it would be nice if you could decide whether or not to have the timer on at the start of *every* battle, because most of the time I'm happy to have the timer on but for some major assaults on cities I'd prefer to have it off. I don't want to fight a huge, long battle only to have to fight it all again because some lone spearman I missed pops back into the city square a few seconds before the timer runs down.

Which reminds me of a third suggestion. I think after you take the city square in a siege assault, enemy units should no longer rout to the city square, they should rout off the battlefield.

[screwtype]

Here's another suggestion I've made numerous times which I probably have little hope of seeing implemented but there's no harm trying I guess.

I'd really like to see a strategic movement option in the game. It's really silly that armies can only march about one province in a six month turn. Not only silly, but it slows down the action and makes the game more tedious.

My suggestion has been simply that an army should be able to move, say, six provinces per turn provided that army does not start in, or move into, a contested province at any time during its move (a contested province being one which contains an enemy army).

This would enable both you and the AI to move your armies around much quicker, but not so quickly as to alter to a great degree the game dynamics. For example it would take 3 to 5 turns to move out of an enemy contested province into another enemy controlled province - 1 or 2 turns to move out of the province, 1 turn to use strategic movement to move 6 provinces, and another 1 or 2 turns to march into another enemy controlled province. So you wouldn't be able to switch too quickly from one battlefront to another.

Also it would also encourage the use of reserves - armies held away from the borders which you could march relatively quickly to any point on your border - paralleling real life tactics. These are not original ideas BTW - they are well established wargame rules which emulate the difficulties in disengaging and re-engaging with the enemy. I think they'd work very well in a game like RTW, and also make much more likely the possibility of those large "decisive" battles which were a feature of the earlier games but which don't occur very often with RTW due to the much larger and more detailed campaign map. It makes sense with the new style map to facilitate the movement of armies in this way.

Secondly, I'd like to see a return to the system where sea units can move any distance on the map in a turn. Once again to add realistic limits to ground units utilizing sea movement, just make it so that a sea unit can't move any further in a turn once it has taken on board ground units in that turn. That means it will take at least two turns to move any ground unit by sea.

Sea units should be subject to a possibility of interception in any sea zone into which they move which contains enemy sea units, with surviving ships being returned to where they began the turn if they lose the battle.

Rules like this might also encourage players to defend their coastal zones with shipping.

Oh, and although the Shogun has already said there will be no stacking limits to ground units in ships, I'd encourage him to reconsider. It really is stupid that you can move gigantic armies on a single ship. I think each ship should be limited to carrying 2 ground units. These limitations should at least apply when you are mounting a seaborne invasion of an enemy province, if not at other times.