Call me conservative, call me a stickler, call me a jerk, but I think eliminating years won't be very good. I'll wait and see what CA comes up with, but I'm not optimistic.

First of all, it will hurt immersion. How couldn't it? What sounds more medieval:

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the year of our Lord, 1105"

-or-

"Your lordship, we have vanquished the Saracens in the turn number 116"



Plus, it removes one more tie of history from the game. I don't know why they bother to give the game starting and end dates; why not just give staring "eras." "OK, MTW2 will start, you know, around the first crusade and stuff. It'll end about, like, the discovery and conquest of the New World."

Lord Ovat - you were never restricted to historical dates in MTW. "Historical" events like gunpowder happened around a certain year, but never at an exact time. You don't even have to be restricted to certain historical dates if you left years in versus turns!

There is no conflict between having a fun, playable game and having "turns" marked as clearly defined periods of time!

Yes, there are issues with distances, but CA could actually, you know, fix them. Instead, I think they're taking the lazy way out. They certainly have to do less thinking by removing years.