Total War series

[Thanas]

I've played Rome and Medieval II, and both are great, but where Total War shines is in the modding community. Without mods they're pretty fun, but mods just take them to a whole new level. After playing Roma Surrectum II for Rome or Stainless Steel for Medieval II I'd never want to go back. I don't own it, but I played a little Shogun II and it just bored me. Every faction had the exact same units, and as such there was no variety to the gameplay. It didn't matter who you fought, every battle was the same.

ITA...

Or Imperium Julianum for BI....

Though I'll still disagree with you on homogenized armies. They look that way, sure, because everyone uses Line Infantry, which happen to be uniformed, musket-armed troops. Except that every nation's Line Infantry has significantly different stats, nevermind the various other units some nations can and cannot get. So, yeah, they're the same in the same sense that in Medieval all the nations' knights wear mail, ride horses, and use lances. (which, incidentally, were even more homogeneous than any Empire unit, because most nations actually shared the exact same Feudal/Chivalric/whatever Knights. So this "Empire armies are the same!!!" whining is particularly bunk)

What? Line infantry in EW was the same, with nearly the same stats.

[Skgoa]

The one major thing that annoys me more than anything else is that the ai seems to have lemming ancestors. Most of my games tend to follow the path of "1. destroy your enemy 2. be attecked by the next one 3. repeat", with me having only little influence in the grand scheme of things. I can get behind "everyone hates the big guy" and different factions allying to bring down an enemy they would stand no chance against alone... but what sense does it make to go alone and attack your only ally who is the biggest and strongest faction and just kicked the last upstart's teeth in? And then they don't even accept a peace offer, forcing me to destroy them.
And at the same time, the ai's warmaking ability is just laughable. In any TW game, I can snatch up territories right and left, often crush a whole empire's ability to build new troops in a few turns... most of the time the ai can't even be trusted to besiege and conquer one city, unless it has a huge advantage. I don't like it when games cheat, but the only time I felt genuinely challenged - and not just swamped by virtually every ai factions jumping on me at the same time - was when I played Carthage in vanilla Rome. You were at a disadvantage from the start, but it never felt contrieved. You had to manage several theatres of war and you had to make the most of your meagre budget, but it depended only on your own ability to do these things.

Oh and a quick question about Shogun 2: is it just me or is there much less to do on the stategy map with every new TW game?

[xthetenth]

To some degree there is less. Shogun didn't have much. Medieval had fuckloads but it was a pain to manage. Rome streamlined it, and it was good. Medieval 2 added a lot, some of which was good, some of which wasn't. Empire added a bunch again, and it was a mess like med 1. Napoleon had to do the streamlining, and it's really nice, rather than the unfocused and unpolished Empire (yeah less stuff, but a lot more coherent.) Shogun 2 built off that basis and I can't for the life of me think of anything in Napoleon's turn based mode that isn't in Shogun 2's. You also get customizable generals and a few other neat things like actual entertaining sieges. Still, other than Empire, every engine change has seen a relatively simpler game.

[PeZook]

Simpler isn't always bad, though. I'd rather think about the next broad strategic move and implement it with streamlined tools than fuck around on the map for two hours.

[Thanas]

See, this is the difference. When I play Imperium Julianum, I prefer to spend hours managing the whole Roman Empire because it is such an epic scale. The new TW just seems utterly simplistic to me.

[xthetenth]

See, this is the difference. When I play Imperium Julianum, I prefer to spend hours managing the whole Roman Empire because it is such an epic scale. The new TW just seems utterly simplistic to me.

That's the difference between simplistic and streamlined. CA doesn't seem to grasp that difference, so when they add new features it's massively more complex (seriously, who thought two diplomat types was a good idea in Med 2?) and when they streamline they take out so much control (yeah theater wide taxes are nice, but why can't we set an overall policy and then tweak from there?) or detail (yay, there's only one really different unit of line infantry in empire, the 150 man Austrian ones, and the rest are all functionally equivalent).

The worst bit is what the imbeciles did to Medieval 2 though. Three lines of uncommented code break the whole diplomacy system (basically the short version is that they accidentally taped the effects of razing a city from Rome to occupying one in Medieval 2, making it impossible to keep your reputation up) as documented here and I believe elsewhere, and they can't freaking fix it. Great job guys. Occupying a city is basically the only good way to keep your reputation up if you fight wars and they make it worse than looting. The best part is that they just don't care enough to fix it.

[Kingmaker]

One of the things that bothered me about all the total war games I've played is that there's really only one thing you can do: conquer territory. While I understand that it's a military strategy game, there are other military strategies besides "conquer EVERYTHING!". Not helped the utterly worthless diplomacy (is it too much to ask that an enemy be willing to make peace after I've kicked their ass multiple times and sacked several major settlements?).

[CaptHawkeye]

I brought that up a few years back but you also have to realize that by design, Total War is not a political game, it's a war game. You play a Supreme Commander or General, not really a King or a President. If you really want to play a "run a country" game GalCiv has conditions for victory that are not just conquest.

[Stark]

That's only true because CA are more incompetent with diplomacy than combat. There's no reason why the games couldn't have better diplomacy; they have territory, resources, dissimilar factions, etc. Concepts of intrigue are even pretty central to some of their settings.