I wanted to make a thread about how important melee should probably be in an Empire 2, but I decided to just to this shorter thread for the time being.

But I really think that an Empire 2 has a truly great amount of potential for multiplayer fun, and not just because of the gunpowder and such of the era, but because that with all the different factions, you could easily get a lot of crazy matchups and all. But CA would absolutely NEED to do a few things to make it work as well as they possibly could.

And that would be things like reasonable unit balance and well designed maps and such things, because it wouldn't really matter all that much if CA designed well designed units and such if the battle maps don't allow for tactical options to be pursued, especially in multiplayer.

Now, I won't go overboard in talking about all the different ways that CA could design every map, be it for land or siege battles, but I will say that it should be fairly obvious that either attacking or defending a basic star fort should really feel pretty different from attacking a Native American forts and other styles of forts and such. And I will say that CA should also really strive to make the land battle maps more than just the old grassy plains maps and such, and make them varied and numerous enough to where players have a lot of options to play around with without them getting stale.

I'll also say that CA should really rework how the unit rosters to be more efficient like in Wh3, like in this somewhat old screenshot

Empire Army Roster

but with obviously the missing categories like Line Infantry and maybe renaming Missile Infantry to Light Infantry, to distinguish them from line infantry. But you guys get the idea.

And maybe instead of the Extended Roster thing, they could rename it to Mercenaries and Auxiliary Units, for more regional units that a certain faction might have access to, like Great Britain having access to at least some of the more basic Irish and Scottish mercenary units, but not all their potential variants and such.

Now, I'm not one to normally lump any groups of people together and all that, but I think for the sake of gameplay potential and such things, but there is one group of people within the period of an Empire 2 that I would make an exception for that. 

And that would be that when they're added into the game, instead of trying to have every major tribe of Native Americans be their own separate sub faction in MP, I would say that I'd just say they should all be lumped together in the multiplayer as a single "North American Tribes" and kind of pull a Pharaoh with them, and by that I mean to give them a bunch of different unit categories based on the region, or more likely, major tribal group they come from.

I mean, there's so many famous tribal groups, like the Iroquois Confederacy,  the Comanche, the Apache, the Seminoles, and even the Tlingit in Alaska and the Haida in western Canada, among many others. 

There's a lot of them, but I really think that CA shouldn't end up weakening any one of them on the MP side of things just to give them their own faction with a tiny roster in multiplayer. And I think that such a potentially large army roster could be balanced out with smart and effective use of unit caps, kind of like a better version of what they did back in Empire 1 and Napoleon.