Generals/Retinues - something I wish CA had done differently

[Grifman]

Firest off, I'm not bashing CA, I really love the game. But there is one thing or two I wish CA had done differently:

1) It's too much of a pain moving generals to their cities, just to much micromanagement. I wish I could assign them to their city from the family tree screen - pick the city, open the family tree, and drop/drag. To keep this from being abused (moving 5 generals to a city about to be attacked), let it take 3 turns for any assignment to take effect. That would relieve the mm on this.

2) I love the roleplaying aspect with retinues - but they are just too much of a pain to make use of. Again, moving generals around is is too much mm. You almost have to keep one general around as a errand boy to do this. Again, I'd like to assign retinues from the family tree screen, open family tree, find general with retinues I want to move, drop/drag to new family member on tree. And once again, it could take a couple of turns to take effect.

Retinues and generals are fun - but managing them currently isn't. And if something in a game isn't fun, then the designers need to come up with a way to make it easier to manage, or abstract it in some way.

Just my opinion, YMMV. And again, I do love this game

[Antagonist]

I'm not sure about 1), personally I like having to ship people around occasionally, even if it's a bother sometimes. I definately agree with 2) though. Since Ancillaries are not actually characters in the game, it makes sense that you could tell them to go to x person and have them make their own way, perhaps over 2 or 3 turns depending on the distance. This limitation is particularly noticable in BI, when the Ancillaries system is expanded to things like Offices: I really missed being able to drag and drop titles & offices, as you could in MTW.

Antagonist

[Mooks]

Nice ideas.

Heres a example to add this idea, Archimedes adds seige bonuse's,I think its
1+ when attacking a castle and 100 extra building points YET the generals that most likely get this are the ones governing city' with ludas magna, and by then they are to old and to far away from the combat to do anything with the guy.

But on top of this idea I think you should have a pool of potential retinues, say you got a cilviled slave, It should cost you XX amount of denarii to get him/her to Hergoth the Hungry (Or whoever). Then other retinues you cant recruit, like priests...But you should be able to dismiss them.

[Ludens]

I agree with you that the micromanagement required, especially in the later phases of a campaign, can be a bit too much, but I don't think abstracting it will work. Armies operate on the campaignmap so general have to that as well; governors are generals, ergo they need to be on the campaignmap.

I think a better solution would be to lower the number of traits and retinues gained. It should be possible to get a full eight-member retinu, but rare. This would decrease the amount of MM required while not making the system infunctional.