Larger and better battle map...

[Orda Khan]

I like the idea of individual maps relating to the campaign map and the corresponding terrain features. Why do people suggest that RTW maps are featureless? There are plenty of features. MTW had silly hedgerows, remember, and you could march straight over them. Buildings on the battlemap or any other model type addition does nothing but hamper pathfinding of units. I would fault RTW for its poor scale, the trees are all Sequoias.
I made loads of maps for STW and MTW and I can say that the textures of STW were better and there was greater choice. However, both games had small, medium and large map choices. I always used large because my maps were generally aimed at 4v4 MP battles. Cesare diBorja raises a good point. Manoeuvre has always been lacking, but I feel this is more because the deployment zones are too close to each other. Most battles had minor skirmishes prior to the pitched battle and with this in mind a large area between opposing armies would at least offer the chance for this. I have never been one of those impatient, let's get on with it types and have always preferred a battle to at least resemble a battle as much as possible. Above all I want the AI to use formations as it did in STW and MTW, for some reason it insists on one line formation which is inherantly weak but does at least limit the space (even though it is easy to smash the centre or either flank)
Some nice additions would be 'surprise' terrain features such as marshy ground, things that will hamper progress and possibly cause defeat if your general does not study the overall picture

......Orda

[Vladimir]

Terrain features like bogs, fords and the like would be nice. What would also be nice is if the map "moved". The cheezy tactic I like using on the defense is having my Army butt up against the edge of the map to restrict flanking. I think the map should stay the same size and as the whole of one force approaches another, the map would move toward the defender. This would force the defender into the attack in less his rear/flanks were covered by impassable terrain. Now I'm sure there are additionally cheezy ways that I would prevent this (using my fast cav to "anchor" the far side) but I would still like to see it.

[Gealai]

I'm all for a bigger tactical map, as I love skirmishing. It should be definatly be possible to relate the size of the map and the total numbers of soldiers involved. Maybe also the relation/gap between the combined prize of units of both sides can also taken into account - this way a huge army has not to chase a few horsearchers all over the place on a big map. Maybe one could even have the option to tweak the weighting of the mapincreasing or decreasing factor, would be fine for MP. We really should work this one out more and refine it, so that it becomes duable and attractive for CA.

There are few things which Iiked less than having to fight against a never-ending spread- out line of phalanxes using the "edges" of the map as a natural protection against flanking and flankshooting. One of these were the hundreds of small skirmishes were it took relatively long time to finish off the enemy. A link between map size and the number of soldiers combined with an adjustable speedslider would take care of both.

With this features you can largly decide in SP what to do in which time.


Another possible feature would be that your victories by general xy are tracked, stored and used to influence the automatic resolve of a battle with this guy. With this link gameplay would become faaar better, as you could this wayaut. calculate far more "standard" rebel-killing-tasks later on without risking to lose so many of your valuable troops. An annoyance less to tackle.

Longshank shouldn't be forced that way to defeat every Scotish bandit on his path to glory manually, but could get a far more likely result with the autocalc than before, while commanding the exciting battles directly.


One could also establish a track-record of the player Gealai and all his manually played battles. So if he was able to loose miserably with force superiority of 3:1 by Human Intelligence the battle of Antioch, this should also alter the performance of the KI in autocalc. matches. This gives an incentive to play battles by ourselve initially and to let the autocalc do the boring work more effectively later on when empire management becomes more demanding and timeconsuming.

What do you guys think?

Gealai

[screwtype]

Terrain features like bogs, fords and the like would be nice. What would also be nice is if the map "moved". The cheezy tactic I like using on the defense is having my Army butt up against the edge of the map to restrict flanking. I think the map should stay the same size and as the whole of one force approaches another, the map would move toward the defender.

Hey, that's a good idea. Then instead of routing off the map edge to finish a battle, you could just make it that the battle ends after all of one side's remaining units have been in continuous route mode for a given period of time.

However, I think it would probably be too resource hungry to implement.

Edit: On second thought, maybe not such a good idea anyhow, since there'd be no easy way for the AI to tell where the "centre" of the battlefield was anymore...

[Russ Mitchell]

It might be resource-hungry... it would also truly bring horse-archers into their actual strength, rather than being squeezed against artificial battle borders.

[Cesare diBorja]

In reality, the bordered battlefield would be a boon to any losing army. Personally, I am for a non bordered battlefield with disengagement determined by how far the enemy is away from my army. 5 to 10 gaming miles would be sufficient as chase would only tire my men and leave them subject to ambush. I am currently thinking this through, so bear with me. Imagine your army on the defensive and you need time to evacuate the field so you set a two unit ambush further afield(to the rear) while your army retreats. These men have time to recooperate and make a proper defense maybe some cavalry with them to assist in a shocking counter-strike. I wonder.........


diBorgia