30 years war and it’s a total war style game

1648 is a weird mod for m2tw, they created star forts to play on but they don’t really work properly. more fundamentally the thirty years war, 17th century warfare worked differently than how total war has been conceived, a colunela¹ was such a tightly-knit combined arms unit it cannot be micromanaged by weapon-type like total war units are conventionally. 1648 for m2tw and Pike and Shot for NTW therefore play like bootleg 18th century line battles which is simply not how the thirty years war should look, one would have to design autonomous unit ais that will manage missile-pike formations for the player, as well as complicated cavalry maneuvers like caracole—it would end up very unlike how total wars feel if it was done right.

not that i don’t think it would be worthy/cool to do a 3d real time strategy pike-and-shot simulation, it just can’t be “total war” as it is currently thought of. also i’d be right pissed if someone went to the trouble and limited it to the thirty years war if you didn’t get to do the league of cognac, french wars of religion, 80 years war, english civil war… what would even be the point

(E) 1: colunela was the basic missile-pike combination used in the early italian wars, lending its name to modern ‘colonel’, the tercio is a specific permutation regarding the apportionment of arms in the formation—and a particularly unhelpful term because many of what got called ‘tercio’ were not actually thirds!