Hello from suprisingly sunny Karlstad, shout out to the Black Sea team`s amazing work so far and to THQ for helping make this game possible.
I see a lot of good posts here, I`m not familiar with KoH2`s current trade system but I am familiar with KoH1`s. Here is a hopefully easily implementable idea:
Use the same trade system as in KoH1 but adding trade routes. After you select a country and resource to trade with you are shown a dynamically calculated sea and land trade route that you can choose between and your possibility for trade and amount of profit is based on whether you have signed a trade agreement with all factions along the trade route. Land trade should always be possible, sea trade should require ports along the way.
If you have time to implement more you could add more complexity to the trade routes such as: profit calculated based on infrastructure along the route, possibility to diplomatically motivate trading partner nations along the trade route to improve their infrastructure in exchange for gold or other diplomatic goodies.
As for the army hiding idea +1 to that. Imagine areas like forests and mountains with hiding bonuses (+ general hiding ability), offset by the size of the army being hidden with a random chance of the army being found increasing over time.
Two hopefully useful points in general:
- what many modders found lacking in the campaign map of the first Rome Total War was the pre-battle scouting, maneuvering, attrition warfare, temporary fortifications etc. A KoH2 that pulls that off well should have a distinct advantage over many other RTSs. On top of KoH1`s capabilities i`d recommend destructible bridges, pontoon bridges, palisades, spikes etc.
- no team can be expected to make a perfect game and it`s normal for development resources to be limited, if you make the game very widely moddable(like for example the first Rome Total War) you will save a ton of work and have mods to suit any taste, balancing and complexity requirements. Imagine the game getting large overhaul mods 8 years post-release like RTW did, that`s the definition of heaven for me(+ the chance for me and my gf to merge with the couch playing KoH2 multiplayer campaign ♥).
