Quote Originally Posted by Grimmy
I'd be happy if the computer game industry would finally cop to the concept that there's often zero need for a time limit in such games.

In TW we play against ourselves. How long we choose to take in exploring and expanding should be up to ourselves and not forced by turn numbers available.
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A game like TW, since it's single player campaign, has no need to be limited by specific turn numbers and should be open ended so that the player has full freedom to decide how much time and effort to devote toward success or when to give up and start over.

If they'd catch on to the reality that computer games have no reason to be bound by boardgame conventions and how a player goes about playing the game is his/her own dang business, then that'd free up many of the self imposed constraints on game design.
At that point though, someone could complain that events stop happening after 15xx, or that they are in 1975 with feudal knights. All of the Civilization series (at least the mainline series, not Call to Power) stop at only modern stuff (ending with the Alpha Centuri mission) likely for this reason. The game's gotta start sometime and end sometime content-wise. That's just a rule of design.

Quote Originally Posted by Grimmy
If they'd get away from set total turn numbers they could have much more flex in how much "turn time" needs to be invested in building and such. The turns could represent months or weeks or seasons or whatever suited the desires of the designers for purposes of having specific climate induced travel bonus or reducer, events triggers etc.
That sounds a lot like a Real-Time Strategy, while Total War is a turn-based strategy on the campaign-level.