I agree with almost all of Puzz's list, with a few exceptions, and a few elaborations, and a few questions for Puzz, which I've added below. I've also taken the liberty of removing or rearranging some of the points so that they aren't too repetitive.


Battle Speed
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Make the battlespeed slow enough that you can coordinate 20 units
 - Basically reduce movement speeds across the board, reduce kill rates, and increase morale. It would seem that the current style of play is to get into battle as quickly as possible. Once battle has started, it isn't very long before one side breaks, and this tends to leave no time for maneuvering, before or during battle. This (for me and I think for a lot of players) is at least half, if not much more than half, the fun.

( Make the infantry running speed 1.66x the walk speed
Make the cavalry run speed 2x the infantry run speed
Make sure that units fight long enough so that hammer and anvil tactics work ) - are all included in the above, there's no need to repeat them.


Battle AI
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Get rid of the bias that favors the AI on auto-resolve on normal difficulty
- Absolutely

Fix the suicide general
- Again, a necessity.

Make the AI understand how to use a shield
- I agree, but again it's too general a statement. To elaborate a bit more: if individual men in units (with the exception of those in the first rank) turn to face the direction of the last missile attack, you wouldn't get the stupid situations where men are slaughtered without even trying to protect themselves.

Make the AI understand how to protect a unit's flanks
 - Only, it's another general statement, which isn't much use to CA or to anyone trying to analyse the situation. To make a practical suggestion with respect to this, the key point is that the AI needs to put holding formation as a higher priority than it currently does. It is because AI formations break up so easily and so quickly that they expose their flanks so often.

Make the AI respond better to ranged attack
- Again, I agree, but these are far too general statements, and not much use by themselves. I think this links back to the priority of holding formation. Fire a few arrows at the enemy in RTW and they will respond. The problem is that the AI generally responds by trying to redeploy most of their army, and attack with maybe 1 unit. The result it a lot of units moving around, exposing their flanks and other units getting isolated.

Some simple triggers could improve AI behavior a lot here.

AI defending: If the player only has ranged units within a certain distance, the AI hold formation and (a.) fire back with it's own missiles, and optionally (b.) send out cavalry to chase them off, without getting too close to the enemy line.

AI defending: If the player has their line up close and is firing arrows at the AI formation, the AI should either charge, or hold formation and fire back

AI attacking: Just attack, with the option of sending cavalry to attack the ranged units.

Stop AI units from walking towards the enemy only to turn around and walk away
- Once more, it's all about holding formation.

The above three points are effects of the importance of holding formation

Stop having the AI make frontal charges with units that are weaker than the target unit
- This is far far too general. If the AI has a large army of weak units, then a frontal charge is necessary to tie down the enemy units. Similarly, if they have units with generally weaker stats, but a heavy impacts (such as medium cavalry vs swords or halberds, then a charge may be the best tactic. This is too general a statement.

Stop the skirmish AI from shooting its own men in the back so often
- It's not something I've noticed particularly. However, if its a problem it needs to be dealt with. From a scripting point of view, it's hard to come up with any suggestions on this front... I'm sure someone knows better than me though.

Make the AI use the secondary weapon when it's better than the primary weapon
 - This is obviously true, and should be quite easy to implement, though I hadn't noticed it as a problem actually.


Campaign AI
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Stop having the AI sail around with a full army on a single ship until it's sunk
Make the AI provide reasonable garrisons for cities

The thing is about these two points is that again, they are the obvious effects of something a bit deeper. Here is something I've posted before, which I think I'd like to say again here:

Quote Originally Posted by Myrddraal
I think the core reason why it became a steamroller effect in RTW was the lack of co-ordination in the AI's armies, I was playing as the Romans recently. I just had a couple of armies personally stationed near my gallic borders to mop up the almost constant flow of 2 unit stacks and unaccompanied family members who strayed into my lands.

The one time I saw a nearly full stack (without a family member), they besieged a town of mine which was mostly un-protected. Right! A challenge!

Next turn, the gauls broke off the siege (my relief force wasn't even gathered yet) and marched away...


I'm sure CA aren't ignorant of these things, but a little reminding can't hurt



I think there are a couple of simple additions to the AI which would have a huge difference to gameplay:

If all stacks smaller than a certain number in the same province were programmed to converge on the town, and only leave once the army is large enough for safety.

If armies only moved if triggered to do so by a specific event or tactic (to strengthen a border here to attack or counter attack)

Battle Mechanics
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Balance the maneuver and attrition aspects of a battle
Balance offensive and defensive styles of play
- I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Some suggestions of what would make the game more balanced would be helpful.

Put back the combat penalty when units overlap
- I'm not sure this applied with RTW and the historical style of battle during that period.

Fix the group movement commands so they work so that you don't have to use drag all the time
 - I can't really comment because I'm not sure what the problem is, if you're talking about the fact that selecting a group and telling it to move will sometimes make the formation end up facing the wrong way, then

Get rid of the delay to movement orders
Get rid of the battlefield upgrades in multiplayer


Increase the rock, paper, scissors back to the level it was in STW
Now this is a tricky one. I would agree with "Increase the rock, paper, scissors" but not to the level of STW. I don't want STW with better graphics, the game has to evolve. I think a more complicated stats system is a good thing as it requires you to have a better knowledge of your unit's abilities to be a good general, and it allows for more variety in a unit's skills. However there is a tendancy in Rome for it to be as simple as "good unit beats bad unit". I think more specialised units (i.e. spear beats cav) are a good basic idea. It can be evolved, but I don't think it should be replaced.

Stop using heavy artillery as anti-personnel weapons
 - Historically inaccurate, and not much fun either.

Make crossbows use their ammo faster so that battles don't drag on for an hour with boring shootouts
 - I disagree, crossbows are not machine guns. Boring shootouts only happen if you let them happen.

Make ranged units use their ammo before they charge into melee
- I disagree, this isn't always the best tactic, in fact it often isn't. Forcing either the AI or the player to do so isn't good.

Get rid of exploding rocks
Stop using fire weapons in the rain
- Nothing to add to these

Reduce the uncertainty in combat results to the level it was in STW
- It is true that in RTW, individual unit combat is too predicatable. Unit x will always beat unit y. If combat is more uncertain, problems occur, and dealing with these problems was part of the challenge and part of the fun.

Stop horses from jumping into pikes
- I sort of agree. I don't think it should be stopped, I think it should be suicidal. A line of pikes should mash any cavarly charge that tries to break it head on (which it does to some extent in RTW, but not enough), but I don't think it should be impossible to try.

I think an excellent additional feature would be if horses had a percentage chance of hesistating from a charge like this. In which case, a charge would be broken up, but that's an extra.

Put LOS for individual men back in the game
- I'm not sure I agree. If a unit is ordered to fire in a situation where part of the unit can see around a hillock, but the other half can't, the entire unit should still fire. Direct line of sight is not needed in mass archery.

Bring back the weather effects of STW
- The weather system could be better, but it's not a vital selling point for me.


Campaign map mechanics
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Make the loyalty of a province dependent on distance and isolation from the faction leader
- Not a critical point. I think a better and slightly more realistic option would be to have the loyalty of your generals tied to the proximity of your faction leader. Generals accompanying the king are much less likely to rebel, whereas generals far from the power and decision making are more likely to try to carve out their own kingdom. What do you think?

Shorten the timespan of a campaign and provide multiple campaigns
- Even in MTW you could play from beginning to end, you could just start a bit later if you wanted to. This might be a nice touch.

Return to seasonal turns
- I haven't played the new system yet, I'm not in a position to judge. I'd like to give the new system a go though.



To return to the subject of whinging, these are the kind of comments that annoy me, and make any post loose it's quality:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Make sure the traits are working

Is there any point to this statement? NONE!

Aren't these already the case:
Provide more settings on fatigue rate, morale level, and ammo
Separate the fatigue, morale and ammo settings

Reading your list, it seems you've tried to pad it out. You repeat yourself, you make general sweeping statements. Why is this necessary? This is what I call whinging, this is the negative attitude that annoys me. Why spoil a post that otherwise contains some very valid and important points?