So why am I always fighting on the same battlemap?

[Jacobin]

In fact I started on STW and loved the battlemaps as they were huge, full of tall mountains and cliffs (remember Kaga and Shinano?) and no two battles were ever the same.

I also loved the RTW and M2TW maps where you could carefully position yourself on the terrain to start off at the top of some huge mountain pass (or if you were unlucky find yourself at the bottom and the enemy on the top).

But these are crappy little maps with a couple of hills and some trees that seem designed purely to not give anyone an unfair terrain advantage in MP.

In fact they even make me long for the NTW maps which at least seemed larger and had some interesting terrain features like walls and farms (the only ones I've seen on STW2 are on the castle maps and never feature in the action).

Are we really to imagine that Sengoku Jidai Japan's countryside was largely flat and uninhabited? Where the hell are all the little villages, the flooded rice paddies, the temples and shrines - above all the steeply forested hills and mountainsides that hardly anywhere in Japan is very far from.

In fact except for the castles there's nothing visually Japanese about the battlemaps at all - how can they have spent all that time getting the campaign map to look just right and none whatsoever on the battlemap?

And that I think is at the root of the TW franchise's problems - each game has been more focussed on MP and consequently has got blander and blander so as to offer 'balance'.