I'm sure you all remember the view city feature from Rome: Total War and a lot of you will have enjoyed seeing how your small capital grows to be a prospering metropolis over the course of your game just as much as I did and were sad to see it gone in M2TW.
Well, don't fret anymore. I found a way to script something that allows you to check out your cities again, and with the new graphics it's much more impressive than in RTW. I couldn't reproduce the peasants running around, but that's a small price to pay and you'll get to see your army there instead.
From a player perspective, the feature will look like this:


As you can see, I made a fully built-up English city to show off my wealth. It even has a huge cathedral which really dominates the skyline as they say in the description

The first step is to open the construction scroll for the settlement you want to view



On that scroll, you have to click on "Locate position of settlement" which will open an advisor asking you whether you want to view the city on the battle map or not.



If you click on "Show me how", you will immediately be taken to the battle screen. You'll have to start the battle as normal (start deployment, then start battle)



But afterwards you will be able to roam your city freely:



Of course you'll have to pay an obligatory visit to the Pleasure Palace:



To remiss your sins afterwards, you should also have a little prayer in the Cathedral:




When you're all done, you simply press Esc and the battle will end after a short while (you'll win it, but don't worry, our trait triggers won't react on that):




Nothing changed on the campaign map, either:




Okay, now on to the explanation:
As most of you probably figured out by now, the script works by spawning an army on the campaign map and giving it the order to attack the settlement. Once in battle, the AI for the catapult will be disabled so it won't attack your precious city walls:



When you hit Esc, the catapult will be killed and the battle ends. Then you go back to the campaign screen.
The only problem is that the stats will show you won a battle more than you actually did, but if that overly annoys you, simply refrain from using the city view feature.