All I want is for history games to keep building on their good features and not get actively worse. Fantasyfans expose themselves as the most shameless goyslop feeders when this is somehow considered an unrealistic problem.

>faction number
Used to be a tidy amount, now it's 3 + day 1 dlc + further dlc
>map size
Peaked in Empire, though that map was clearly too shallow it at least had ambition. A world total war is the clear evolution of the formula but CA haven't even tried.
>mod support
Peaked in Rome Remastered, which wasn't made by CA and also came in a later patch. Empire, Shogun 2, Napoopan, Rome 2, Atilla, 3K all have terrible mod support. The last good mod support CA offered was in Medieval 2.
>gameplay feel
The single biggest issue in the series and the one that hasn't received so much as a whiff of being addressed. The combat in every warscape title feels like floaty unsatisfying shit. There is no impact in charges, no proper holding of lines, no breaking of ranks with missiles. To make matters worse the games have turned into spazzy gookclick reactionary gameplay instead of steady execution of a tactical gameplan, but even mods to slow the battles down don't fix things. It quickly becomes more fun to just autoresolve everything.
>campaign gameplay
Everything is just tiresome doomstack vs doomstack now thanks to the godawful generals and recruitment system changes. Medieval 2 is still the best because the small scale battles are some of the most fun and tactically challening, and you don't automatically have 20 of your best unit available for every battle.
>AI
Was never good but has gone full retard ever since Rome 2. CA even put in the infamous ass ladders because they couldn't just fix their own AI. And don't even get me started on the invisible buff problem for higher difficulties instead of smarter opponents.

They have all the tools, they ought to make a game that sets new highs in all these ways.