Quote Originally Posted by antisocialmunky View Post
It would be nice if the end game was actually fun - that the business of actually going from getting to the world domination stage to GOD EMPEROR OF MANKINDS isn't just a bunch of tedious grind.

Lots of Strategy Games have issues with this but some have solved it by adding in special win conditions. I just don't see ETW being able to implement anything truly interesting in the state its in right now. It would be awesome to be able to coordinate a massive alliance to fight another massive alliance liek hte Napoleonic Wars but the AI just isn't in a state to supply the player with any sort of meaningful coordinated challenge.
Well, modders have had quite some success tweaking the diplomatic engine in the previous TW titles: AI does seem to form alliance blocks against the player in Broken Crescent for example.

One of the biggest gameplay drawbacks of the previous titles was that in order to win you really had to conquere most of the known world. It just did not leave enough space and resources for a meaningful counter-power developing. End-game was just that, as you mentioned just a tedious grind.

I believe, the idea of ETW was exactly to solve this problem by NOT making the player conquer the known world, but rather maintain his empire against other powers (or alliance of powers) of similar size and capability. The problem is: it's not happening in the game. Once the player has gotten his win condition 'assigned provinces', his economy is the most powerful in the game, while the AI is busy fighting each other and ruining their treasuries in decades old wars in which actually nothing is happening.

The latter is happening because the AI has suddenly (compared to the previous TW titles) lost ability to make peace with other AI factions.