And as soon as the player doesn't care, building the whole system is a waste of time. There's lots of things the players DO care about that need developer attention.
That wasn't my point. I was saying that all of this super detailed complexity would not be modeled in large scale battles because they have little to no effect on the battle as a whole. If you are playing MMORPG style which a single character who is YOU, breaking your ankle in a fight is a terrifying prospect. But when you are throwing blocks of 500 soldiers against others, what does it matter if one soldier out of 500 stubs his toe? Now if those 500 soldiers run over a patch of ground festooned with pit traps, THEN you get a warning that pops up about decreased movement speed.
It might be interesting to have a History of Medieval Weapons supplement for the game, but even though I 'like micro,' I'd be pretty annoyed at having to think about 300 different instances in just a single class of weapon. Maybe two years after I've been playing the base game in a few different modes, but out of the box? My eyes glaze over at the thought.
Well... like I said before those 300 swords would condense into very few actual "types". You have to change a longswords quite a bit before it no longer works like a "regular" longsword. So what we should be aiming at instead is having maybe 10 types of swords, and 300 skins and models for each. The mechanics of how they work in combat do not change.
I'll be more than entertained if we just get a modest step up from the weapon-defense complexity in GC2, say the ability to carry more weapons in inventory than we can have 'ready' at a given time, enabling units to essentially reconfigure without going through an upgrade cycle like they have to in GC2.
Hell yes. More weapons on a single soldiers comes with tradeoffs like weight, extra training and logistics. But the benefits can be worth it, especially if you configure your army into a combined arms force.
Another idea that comes to mind is allowing for something called a pilum like the romans had. It is essentially a spear that was tossed into the enemy rank before charging.
They were also used to repel enemy charges. A shield with a pilum in it is too ackward to be useful. Everyone wounded or tripped by a pilum or one stuck in the ground is another obstacle. And so on. It was also pretty genius that they couldn't be thrown back.