First Impressions

[andrewt]

Did shogun total war suffer from not having a tech tree? MTW? M2TW? Not in my opinion.

Total War games aren't meant to be "civilization". To me, they should be: Here is a historically realistic sandbox. Go change history.

Building requirements were the tech tree in previous Total War games. It took forever to upgrade to the top line castles, armores, stables, etc. You couldn't build your top soldiers early on in any campaign.

200 turns using the same type of weapons and units would be boring. I like the progression of starting out each campaign with smaller battles that get bigger as the game progresses.

[ArtillerySmoke]

Building requirements were the tech tree in previous Total War games. It took forever to upgrade to the top line castles, armores, stables, etc. You couldn't build your top soldiers early on in any campaign.

200 turns using the same type of weapons and units would be boring. I like the progression of starting out each campaign with smaller battles that get bigger as the game progresses.

Same...

The gradual ascent leading to the climactic battles near the end of a campaign are what it's all about.

[IsItStillThere]

Building requirements were the tech tree in previous Total War games.

Yeah, but the pure tech tree is a new feature. So why not start the tech tree at a historically accurate level? Its arbitrary anyway, so why not let history be the guide? It seemed about right in MTW and M2TW, you were starting in the dark ages (1100's) and your starting units seemed to reflect that. So why pretend that the foremost navies of the world in 1700 had nothing larger than a frigate just for the sake of making the tech tree deeper? If your making a history-destroying design decision like that, you better be getting a heck of a lot more benefit than just a few more techs to research.

I really don't see why CA couldn't come up with a perfectly reasonable tech tree starting from the actual technology available to each faction in 1700!