Rome 2: A constructive wishlist

[Bramborough]

Awesome job, OP. I agree whole-heartedly with 99% of what's been expressed in this thread.

Some comments:

- Naval transports. From a "streamlined gameplay" perspective, I rather like how armies can go to sea on their own...I don't necessarily think removing this feature is the best idea. Furthermore, I don't think this is the real problem, for me or for most others. The issue isn't their ability to do so, but rather how powerful they are at sea relative to true warships. This does need to be fixed. Right now it's perfectly feasible to play an entire campaign and never sink money into a single naval unit, even as a maritime-focused faction that spends a lot of time trucking around the Mediterranean. It's also a secondary issue that armies seem to be able to go waterborne too easily...there does need to be a bit more of a "cost-benefit" decision involved. There's several ideas already posted above that sound pretty sensible to me for resolving these issues. Personally, I would advocate:
1) Greatly increase movement penalty for going waterborne, something which reflects an army sitting on the coast for an extended time, cutting down trees, building/procuring ships, etc. Perhaps requiring them to sit still for an entire turn to go to sea; no land movement allowed prior, no sea movement allowed til next turn. Meanwhile on subject turn, the army is in an increased vulnerability state, similar to "forced march" mode.
2) Substantially decrease transports' at-sea combat capability, perhaps to the point of nearly eliminating it. Bottom line, a fleet of true warships ought to be able to destroy any similarly-sized fleet of transports with impunity, and to be at least on even terms against a transport fleet 3 or 4 times larger. Right now that isn't the case.

Victory Points. Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily a supporter of victory-point flags in open-field battles. It wouldn't bother me if they went away. I gotta say, however, that I just don't understand the huge problem so many folks seem to have with this. I've played 200 turns by now, and fought dozens of open-field battles...and I've never once had to defend a stupidly-placed flag in a field engagement. Why not? Because I've been pretty careful about not force-marching armies in areas where there was a reasonable chance they might get attacked. A few times I have had the enemy army have to defend a flag...because I was lucky enough to catch them in forced-march mode. The solution to avoiding the victory-flag problem seems pretty simple...don't put an army in forced-march mode in areas where they might get attacked. I certainly agree that the feature could have been implemented much better, and definitely support ideas to improve such...but I don't see this as nearly the game-breaking, top-priority issue that so many seem to feel it is. What am I missing?