I was agreeing until you said the part i underlined. Instead of taking the aspects that most would agree can be skipped, you took some of the major parts of medieval warfare and labeled it all as "boring" its one thing to say you personally dont like it, but its another to conclude it should be omitted from the game only because YOU dont like it. Siege warfare is a great and important part of any medieval based game, how can you have a battle with no pre battle preparations? You expect us to just walk into an area and be swarmed by enemies without any say in how the battle will go? Training would be a great way to see the development of your force, it would be boring to just have an elite force with no effort at all. How are two armies clashing and doing it over again boring? I respect opinions but it just seems like you're either using some strange sarcasm or that medieval fantasys arent for you
Okay, then, you figure out a way to model days and weeks of blockading, mining, and countermining in a way that would be fun in a game. Oh, and add the serious problem of sustaining a besieging army's supplies. Sieges are slow and stupid. What people want are the assaults on fortifications. There's the enemy's flag on top of those ramparts, and here's our army in the lines of countervallation around the ramparts - and now, our flag is on top of those ramparts. Or the pressure of defending against an assault on your own walls. Or breaking a siege by relief. Those are all set-piece engagements. Subsuming them under the general rubric of 'siege' is inaccurate and misleading. You assault a keep so you can end a state of siege. Siege is, as generally construed, 'bad'; it is the end of mobile operations, it is a drain on resources without clear opportunity for advancing one's cause directly, and it is only undertaken because alternatives - an assault, a surrender, or whatever - are beyond the capability of your army. You besiege when you are weak, because you cannot afford to lose many men due to taking a place by storm, and because siege means that you will probably not suffer many casualties to the enemy. Fun stuff! Truly deserves to be the centerpiece of a combat video game.
'Prebattle preparations' encompasses a great deal more than giving a rousing speech to the troops and maybe figuring out what general leads what forces on what wing of the army. There is the act of moving soldiers to where they need to be. A great deal of organization is required: how many men in each unit, over these roads to these different locations. You require provosts, and marshals, and staffs. Who gets to march where when so that everybody is where they need to be at the appropriate time? Who decides the appropriate time? Where do you encamp? Who goes where in the camp? How do you organize latrines, command and control, food preparation, camp-follower accommodations, march and post security? How about camouflage - how does one prevent enemies from figuring out where your troops are going, and possibly redirect them from doing that? They are all important to the act of making war. They are also almost entirely inappropriate for handling in a game.
When I say armies smashing into each other over and over again, I mean exactly that. A set-piece battle might start with two armies rushing at each other and engaging in a melee. Men, however, get tired.This melee does not, typically, last very long, or if it does it does not employ all of the soldiers. With a few men dead after a short time, both armies will pull back, reduce the intensity of the fighting, and allow men to rest. Then they will go at it again. This cycle will continue on and on for several hours, maybe even days, in the worst case scenario. It was extraordinarily repetitive, and in most cases extraordinarily indecisive.
We are not talking about Medieval: Total War battles where two big masses of men smash into each other, fighting drags on continuously for maybe several minutes, and then one side breaks and runs away and gets slaughtered by the other side's cavalry. Faster-paced battles happened, sure. They were also quite rare. Take a look at the Battle of Agincourt, for example. It wasn't a case of "the French charge at the English longbows, are wiped out, and retreat". It was "the French forces make probing advances, mount several individual charges at various points in the engagement, and eventually the French army slowly disintegrates and retreats". It took over three hours for fighting to die down after the end of 'skirmishing'. They had to stop and take a lot of breaks.
The way characters fight in video games is ridiculous. Hawke or the Warden might do the equivalent of running a marathon and winning an entire martial-arts tournament in a single unremarkable day. This would require superhuman endurance and superhuman strength. No one can actually do that. Real combat is and was structured around the constraints of the human body and constraints of organization and management. Simulating those things in a video game makes for really boring video games. Kind of like how, if you stab somebody in the guts with a sword, that somebody is probably dead, and almost certainly incapacitated, yet Dragon Age combat has both players and enemies sustaining wounds - in many cases, fairly ridiculous amounts of wounds - to drag out combat and add 'tactics' and 'difficulty'. (In that sense, combat in video games is both 'too fast' and 'too slow'. This is not a bad thing.)
When I described these things with derision as being 'boring', I also made sure to point out that I did not believe that they would not be recognized in any way, shape, or form. That was kind of the point of my post. BioWare will almost certainly allow players to make individual decisions that seem to impact the things that I mentioned. In the gameplay demo, for example, they showed the relief of a besieged fortification, and demonstrated that one had a choice as to where to dispatch the troops: to defend the village, the fort, or their own wounded. In DA:O, there were mechanics that allowed the player to upgrade their armies before the Battle of Denerim by donating cash and various items, which is basically training. In other BioWare games, players have had the option to determine unit leadership (e.g. Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission) and other assignments for critical tasks.
Like combat, this is not realistic military leadership. It is a simulation. It is the shadow of the real thing. You don't hash out march routes, camp setup, training schedules, or food supplies in their entirety. You don't spend time in map study (which is itself anachronistic for medieval warfare, but let that go), consider spatial aspects of warfare, or engage in Clausewitzian geometry. But a simulation is exactly what it's supposed to be, and that's a good thing.
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