Turn Time & Aging

[Daveybaby]

I honestly don't understand everyone's problem with the aging. Your generals get to stick around longer, and that's always a perk.

I agree, this is almost certainly why it was done.

Dont forget that this is a GAME, not a simulation. Games need to be FUN, so the designers had to try to balance a number of incompatible things:

At 6 months per turn a game would take *forever* to get to the end
Castles etc would take AGES to build
Game would be probably be over before invention of gunpowder 99% of the time

At 2 years per turn castles etc are built at a reasonable playable rate
But generals, kings, assassins etc wouldnt last long enough to build up any decent stats. Players wont get to keep them long enough to build familiarity with them.
You would have to increase movement speeds (if you wanted 'realism') to a point where strategic movement of stacks becomes pointless, because you can reach anyone anywhere
You wont get clearly defined seasons any more. They could always do something like they did in MTW1, but that removes another strategic element IMO.

So what to do? CA clearly decided to have the best of both worlds - sensible movement speeds (in gameplay terms), kings etc alive for a decent amount of time, regular seasons, but with reasonably paced progress through the tech tree. You've got a contradiction there, but you will either have to live with it or mod it. Trouble is, you will also have to mod build times, income, pop growth, in order to keep the game balanced. I can see why the purists are moaning about realism, but IMO CA made the right decision for gameplay reasons.

FWIW, the year progression (and tech progression) feels a bit rapid to me. I would rather have a slower paced tech game, and take my time a bit. Once the patch comes out i will probably mod the game to 1 turn per year, double building build times, halve pop growth (or even cut it a bit more than that, cos it feels too fast right now), halve income, and halve the number of recruitment slots for each castle/city size. This still wont be realistic, but thats not why i would be doing it. I'm doing it for gameplay pacing.