Hey guys. How is the strategy part of this game? I've played the demo, and the graphics are great, but I am more interested in the 'nuts and bolts' of the game. Have they improved over previous incarnations?
I like it. For one thing, your regions don't just have the one city anymore. There is a Region Capital that's your main city, and depending on how well you treat its population, nearby towns pop up as the population grows. You can customize these towns as well, like building churches to give you more missionaries and increase happiness (and convert to your religion), or schools to be able to research more techs at the same time and have more agents, inns to recruit spies and make people happy, or some crafting building that increases region wealth. These towns can be damaged and occupied by invading armies denying their bonuses until you fix them back up.
Regions by water can also spawn ports this way, and you can customize those between fisheries for food, trade ports for cold hard cash, or shipyards to build your navies. Your navies can raid enemy trade routes to give you extra income, and decrease the enemy's. Theirs can do the same, of course. The trade routes are shown in clear lines between ports, and hovering over shows you which countries use that route and it's colored respectively (green for yours/allied, yellow for mix of allied/enemy, red for enemy, white for neutral).
Besides these towns that are created, regions also have things like mines, wineries, farms that you can upgrade (after researching the necessary techs).
There's a nifty research screen that's easy to navigate and assign which school researches what. There's a "Lists" screen so you can keep tabs on all your regions and the buildings/towns within them, so all the new stuff is neatly organized.
Other than these additions, the campaign map doesn't play much differently than at least TW2 (I didn't play the earlier ones). You recruit your units in your region capitals, based on which buildings it has, march 'em to enemies and start fighting. One other neat thing is you can recruit on the road, they'll be created at the nearest region capital and automatically march to join your army. You can also re-fill your units without having to retreat to a city. So it helps keep the action moving.
