What they need is to check out my wall of doom and make the game like that.
A resume follows:
Resume
I make this for the people that have no time to read all the painful-wall-of-text that is made up of all the descriptions. However, to better grasp the meaning of every point/suggestion I would recommend to read at least some of the points on it.
AI:
Battle AI:
- BAI behaving according to leading unit experience.
- No more kamikaze generals!
Campaign AI:
- A little bit less backstabber CAI.
Battle:
Battle map:
- Make the garrisonable buildings come back.
- Make the towers and gates garrisonable for the first time. No more auto turrets ala team fortress and supermarket doors.
- Unique maps for every province's castle or customizable maps.
- Show building on-progress in the battle map. Nothing too fancy, just some half built walls and some construction equipment should suffice to create a even higher quality atmosphere.
- Wild life is a good addition, now I would like to see some civilians please.
- Mixed battles, real shore assaults over coastal towns and cities.
Battle units:
- Not everyone being a parkour-ninja master anymore, never again, pretty please?
- Reflect the unit equipment on the battle map. This way there will be a even higher unit variety, and it will not be just delicious eyecandy!
- Units being able to surrender (both enemy and yours).
- Been able to capture and use enemy equipment on the battle map and keep it on the campaign map, like ships.
Battle mechanics:
- The higher ground bonus for ranged units. I'm not a physics PHD, but I think that having the higher ground should give the ranged units a little bit more range, like it use to be.
- Units attacked from behind should turn and engage intermediately, unless they are already engaged.
- Being able to betray an ally or been betrayed on the battlefield by an ally.
- Capturing some enemy units that rout and all of those that surrender (if the faction and era context is appropriated) and then ask for a ransom, or even to join you on the battle field.
- More deployable defenses on battle maps. Maybe for both sides (attacker and defender).
- Better stakes, that don't kill your own horses, or better yet an BAI that take them seriously.
- Being able to assign objectives a la fire&forget to your own and ally troops before and/or during battles. This could help to manage AI allies and larger (than 20 units) armies.
- Some buildings/walls should be impervious to some attacks. Please tell me I'm not the only one whom legendary walls where destroyed by some ballistas trowing mere javelins at it..
- Battlements should be properly implemented for archers to take truly advantages from them.
- Not allowing every arrow unit to launch flaming arrows out of the blue. Allow them to use this only when in the walls of castles/towns or in the field with some sort of deployable line of bonfires or pedestals or
something like that, requiring be near this to enable the firing of flame arrows.
- Disallow the Molotov magic from most troops!
- Include the option of having blood in the battlefield, with a parental password if needed.
- Implement the option of controlling units via voice commands, having the time of response of the units delayed if the general is far from the unit.
Campaign
Campaign Map:
- A bigger, global map. This is more a rant/petition than actually a suggestion, I know that games should have a limited scope, but you almost made it with Empire!!!
- Allow renaming objects like towns, units and even armies.
Campaign mechanics:
- Optional 2, 4, 6 or 12 turns per year natively supported in the game. I think this is a pretty elemental one and honestly I'm surprised you haven't implemented something along this lines yet.
- Having truly civil wars and delegation of power. Cities with governors that auto build, recruit and defend the province if you want/allow them, but that also can rebel and try to coup on you if let unchecked or you are a lousy ruler.
Diplomacy
- Being able to force peace between to factions.
- Being able to negotiate with lands.
- Being able to ask an ally or friendly clan to attack/hold specific objectives/areas on the campaign map.
Cities and towns
- Add coastal cities.
- Improved coastal cities aka ports mechanics, deeper and more meaning full mechanics.
- Bring back the individual tax levels for every city, while retaining a global bar to adjust every province at the same time.
- Allow the moving of the capital.
- A better application of population mechanics. More close to Rome Total War, but having different kinds of population and that require a balance that affects the civil order, income and troop types availability.
- Different amounts of wealth should be assigned to every kind of population, in order to allow more differentiation between classes.
- A combination between the old and the new building system. Where you can build several buildings at the same time, but have not a limit in the max quantity of slots. Instead the labor available to build would the cap on how fast one can build up.
- Cities and building requiring labor, in order to really bring the population numbers to the strategic equation.
- Don't restrict the number of buildings every province could have.
- Every town/special building in the province can be garrisoned, like they used to be in Empire and Napoleon.
- Every town/special building in the province can be captured individually.
- Resuming the last two options In a short sentence, make the special towns/buildings essentially smaller cities, that with enough investment and time can grow on pair of the province capitals.
- Give me back the chance to look at MY cities THEY ARE MINE!. And if you don't want to make individual maps for every province, then give me the chance to customize my cities from here. (see the unique maps for every province's castle or customizable maps point)
Army mechanics
- Simultaneous movement of all the armies at the end of the turn. In this way intercepting and ambushing get a whole new meaning and we will loose some of the advantages over the AI, making the game more fun and challenging.
- Training in battalions, cohorts, legions, hordes or whoever its historically correct. The units should be trained like this to have more realistic recruitment and army composition.
- Being able to retrain/re-equip units.
- Change the max size of armies and its caps. Having the max size of a army depending of the general stats and some logistical technology tree.
- Supply system for armies and navies, this could give a whole new immersion level to the strategic map!
- Re-filling ranks in enemy provinces, as long the army is connected to it's supply route.
- Rōnin and mercenaries in other games should be recruited with the old mercenary system, and their availability should be directly proportional to the number of factions defeated, like it happen on real life.
- Weapons and equipment should be treated as finite resources (produced by weapon and armor smiths, bowers, horse breeders, etc) and quantities of them should be needed when and where training of troops occur.
- The recruitment of units should affect not only the population numbers but the balance of the types of populations. Implementing the different population mechanics will means that every kind of unit could need different kinds and numbers of population, affecting differently the population balance of the city they are recruited.
- The difference between the units (professional or not) could be given by military training buildings on the province/city they are recruited, affecting not only theirs stats, but their train cost and time, their upkeep and their look on the battlefield.
- A levy, or temporal units system, working in conjunction with the point above.
- Better troop transport representation on the sea. This has been discussed several other times. It was OK right up to Medieval 2, when sea battles where abstract too. From Empire on this is not longer the case, and now that you have bring this awesome sea battles to the series, this issue needs to be tackle with a little bit more serious approach.
Siege mechanics
- The turns until rendition should be ruled by both the food (as now) and the defenses of the location: The amount of turns until rendition/battle on the campaign map should be measured both by food against the local population and defenses vs the attacker amount of artillery capable of destroying said defenses as long the besieging armies have supplies (specially in the case of gunpowder units). Whatever counter reach zero first provokes either an assault or a rendition like the turns until rendition/battle do. Also the amount of food left in higher difficulties should be hidden to the attacker, unless he have a spy in prior to the siege.
- When besieging, both sides should take casualties: As no siege with go on without small skirmishes and accidents prior the main assault. Special units for this like the "pavise" equipped could be employed to minimize the casualties on the attacker side.
Agents
- A bit different agent mechanics, read the full point on this below because is too large to resume, also I made this point based on a criminal agent like the shinobi, other more official agents like emissaries should be recruited in regular buildings like they do now.
Moding
- Make some mod tools! For real! I understand that you may don't release them for the current game right now so you can take advantage of the DLC market, but have them ready and release them as soon you release the next game. That would increase/revive the sales of the former one. And in this way you will be able to draw a clear line in what things are legal or not to mod, while making a lot of fans happy at the same time!
Format of delivery and other stuff
- The game should have a version that don't need steam or anything like that, just a old serial and good to go. Hell you can ship it with no steam multiplayer support and price it even higher! I'll buy it over the steam one any day of the week!
- Include a LAN battle and LAN campaign option. Are you really that much afraid about piracy?! Don't you trust the quality of your games enough?
DLC policy
- Please make them more juicy, you could charge higher if they really add new content to the game... Actually the current approach is fine, two lesser and cheap DLC (Ikko-Ikki and the units one) and one bigger with new campaigns (the rise of the warrior). =oD
Yeah.. that is a resume of it.
