What would you change about MTW?

[caravel]

Hmm, it does get me thinking... What if Armourer line buildings were just a requirement for units that are armoured... Would make things more sensible, really. As it is, Desert Archers or Genoese Sailors can have more armour than the Halberdier and still move fast compared to their slow...

That's how it worked in the Pocket Mod. I basically made armourers as pre-requisite buildings, like the spearmaker, bowyer and swordsmith. The only thing that I left intact was the valour bonus for the Master level building. I then simply used it as a dependency for armoured units.

Metalsmith line always seemed a bit awkward to me to begin with (firstly if you don't have metal then where is your units's stuff coming from, secondly if your metal is low-quality or something, then why can't you still just import better?). Maybe it should make production of units, particularly heavily armoured ones, cheaper instead, probably also should be way more evenly spread out across the map. Maybe there could be some otherwise ridiculously expensive units that would become affordable with Metalsmith.

I renamed the metalsmith as the blacksmith and made it the pre-requisite building for all cavalry, peasant type units and axe units.

Oh, reminds me of another thing. Loyalty of the province should depend on the quality of the garrison, not just the quantity. Doesn't seem quite right to me that putting a horde of completely incapable soldiers on patrol frightens the population. On the contrary, the presence of a huge useless army would further disgruntle people, if anything. This would further tone down emergence of huge empires as well.

Oh but it does... the lowest quality peasant thug militia are the best for this type of work... On the whole I'd say that this works better than it does in RTW, where garrison size is proportional to the population size and once the population gets to a certain level large garrisons don't help much.

Re armour, does upgrading armour make the unit tire faster? I realise that there are fatigue penalties in the desert, but say you have a unit in central europe - will it fatigue more quickly with gold armour than bronze? Or are the upgrades simply makign the armour better (and thus probably lighter).

My memory fails me on this. I think it's only in the sand desert and rock desert terrain types that the armour penalty comes into play though.