Small suggestions and wishlist items

[ebongreen]

For purposes of history, I'd love to see the ability to recruit some of the more advanced Roman units restricted until the appropriate time periods in the history. Since the Roman legion as we can game them wasn't really born until after the Marian reforms at the end of the 2nd century BCE, it's not exactly cricket to have a more-or-less fully functioning modern legion during the Punic War scenarios.

I respect the ways of the Power Gamer (I am one myself from time to time), but using the troops available at the time for historical accuracy would be a cool check-box option. You might even offer the option to convert Hastates/Principes to Legionary troops and Triarii to Praetorians after a certain battle!

Additionally, while I love to have my javeliners and velites hang out behind my front lines as artillery to beat the stuffing out of engaged enemy units, any leader using his troops in such a fashion at the time in any but the most dire circumstances would probably have been assassinated by his own troops for subjecting them to deadly amounts of friendly fire. Changing the AI to make skirmishers actuallly skirmish ("Fire! Run away! ... Fire! Run away!") would be a really neat tactical feature and radically change what I suspect is the typical use of missile troops in Legion Arena.

I've enjoyed playing both campaigns on Normal mode; I expect to go back and play through again on Hard mode in the near future. Thanks for making an enjoyable Ancients sim available through Freeverse to us Mac folks too.

[IainMcNeil]

Thanks for the feedback. We thought about limiting the purchase options for the Legionaries, but decided against it in the end as we felt you would only be able to get them very late in the game and they would never be able to gain enough experience to make them a really useful unit. We felt it was more important to let the player make real use of them.

As for skirmishing, this has been in disucssion for years as we have had similar comments on our previous games. We did try out skirmishing, but due to the size of the maps we are using it never worked out. We didn't want to change to huge battlefields because we felt they made battles last too long and didnt feel realistic as initial deployments and orders have less effect the larger the play area. One of the things we really wanted to get across was the importance of having a plan before teh battle begins and not allowing teh player walky talky control of the entire battlefield. Once we decided this, other elements had to fit around it - e.g. skirmishing.

You can manually control your skirmishers to attempt what you are suggesting but its tricky to get right!

[kleinemann]

I myself would be thrilled if there were some kind of a "custom batle" thing in this game, or something where you can create your own battle without having to find someone to play against you in multiplayer, not sure who organizes the enemy positions though... but that would be quite cool, unless its too late to do something like that now that LA is allready in the shops.