Dates, Seasons and Ages

[Didz]

The characters aging slower than campaign time is likely just to keep them from dying too quickly... or perhaps more correctly, one could say that the timeline moving 4x faster than the characters age is really a method to make all the important historical bits fit into an appropriately short campaign.

Another consideration would probably have been that characters can't acheive very much even in their extended lifespan, so having them age 2 years per turn would prevent them acheiving just about anything.

For example: Even travelling by sea it took my merchant 14 turns to reach his target gold resource in Africa from Scotland. If he had been aging at the rate of 2 years turn turn he would have left Scotland at the age of of 26 and arrived in Africa aged 54, just about in time to die. Even 7 years to travel to Africa is a long time to be on a boat but at least its playable, and you are likely to see some profit before your agent dies.

[Brutal DLX]

Well, you can say what you want, for players taking attention of the time frame, the movement rates just do not match. They appear to match by and large for two turns = 1 year (naval movement still too slow though). However, I admit, playing a game at the 0.5 rate is really slow indeed, but on the other hand seeing your diplomat taking about 10 years to go from Thorn to Milan at the 2.0 setting is really too much for me to bear. That's why I usually play at 1.0 for compromise purposes. Problem is, for perfect gameplay you would need to change all building time values to match the original MTW settings, which were great, in hindsight.

And for the record, I noticed this on the day I played the game the first time, it's really obvious how time flies by in-game (Mongols appearing at a time the AI just didn't have enough turns to get its economy and recruitment options at least to an acceptable level).

[Lusted]

Movement rate is unrealistic to stop siege fests, if armies could move a realistic distance you would just end up with armies bypassing defense and just oging straight to sieging cities.

[Brutal DLX]

Movement rate is unrealistic to stop siege fests, if armies could move a realistic distance you would just end up with armies bypassing defense and just oging straight to sieging cities.

Well, what you say is true only insofar as it depends on the AI coding (simply make it not to siege any city possibly siege-able [if such a word exists]) and, this would actually make it more important to guard your borders and actually build forts in strategic places. And to be honest, how often have you seen AI forces intercept an army BEFORE it actually laid siege somewhere? They just seem to try to slow the human player down (which normally is pointless as the human player only makes his move when he knows he can actually take the city, all enemy forces taken into account, and so he will fight his way through the obstacles on the same turn, whereas AI armies often take detours of numerous extra-turns, which further adds to my point), unless they outnumber him by a large margin.
Besides, movement rates are not too unrealistic if you set the time frame to 0.5, as I said before. But they are if a turn equals 2 years, desynchronising gameplay too much my for my standards.

[Lusted]

Well, what you say is true only insofar as it depends on the AI coding (simply make it not to siege any city possibly siege-able [if such a word exists]

The ai is set up to take settlements as once it's taken all your settlements it wins. So coding it to not siege settlements if its at war with you would be silly.

[Brutal DLX]

The ai is set up to take settlements as once it's taken all your settlements it wins. So coding it to not siege settlements if its at war with you would be silly.

Sigh, this is not what I said. Also that it is probably too late now to make any changes to the campaign map AI is quite possible. But during the design stage of the game it wouldn't have been too hard to implement a system that allows for "more realistic" movement lengths (that would in the first place help all factions traversing their own or their allies' lands faster and arriving in time to help out somewhere) while at the same time letting the AI select targets in a smart manner, i.e. try to take cities close to their own territory first or a specifically important city that is only weakly garrisoned and attack only if sufficient forces are available. This wouldn't turn the game into a siege-fest, as you would call it, which it already is in its current state, more often than not.

[Didz]

@Brutal DLX
I appreciate the point you are trying to make, but I don't think its very practical from the gameplay point of view.

Even if we were to stick to a very conservative estimate for the movement rate of an army we would have to accept that it could march at least 14 miles in a single day.

At that rate, an army would be able to cover 10,220 miles, the entire distance from London to Jerusalem and back twice, every turn. Ships would cover five to ten times that distance in a two year turn. In short any army would be able to reach any point on the map instantly.

The only way to avoid that would be to reduce the timescale to match the movement per turn of the armies. At the moment this seems to be about 100 miles per turn, which based upon an average of 14 miles per day would mean reducing the timescale for one game turn to a week if it is to be realistic.

That would result in a campaign from 1080AD to 1530AD needing 23,400 turns to complete.

Given that the current game length of 225 turns is already a long haul I'm not sure I'd want to play a game that demanded such commitment.