The AI is truly terrible. The religion system just spams units so you're in religious combat for 3/4 of the game. The map feels crammed together. The entire pace of the game feels constipated. Somehow it completely lacks all fun and "play one more turn" factors.
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I recently had the experience of going back to Total War: Shogun 2, and saw instantly how much the subsequent, pre-Warhammer games had lost that charm.
I'm glad to know it's not just me, though: I hate Civ 6 so much I refused to play it with the friend who BOUGHT IT for me.
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Honestly, I think Total War: Medieval (the first one) was the last good one they made before Warhammer. I'm waiting for Warhammer II to drop in price (I'm a high elf fanboy, and the tomb lords and Slann look great too.)
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Another vote for TWS2. Far better Castle fights than any of the previous, imho. Straight out of _Ran_.
I was never a big fan of Civilization, though I did play Call to Power where you could recruit lawyers to argue injunctions against opponents' economies.
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never really played TWS2. TWS 1 was great. I especially liked that breaking morale happened a lot. Stick your archers on a hill, let the enemy charge up to them, watch them break. TWM 1 had the British Isles expansion which I loved. Just the right scale. TW battles get too large
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one thing I hated about the Medieval games was the treatment of gunpowder weapons.
Historically in that period, they sucked ass. Terrible. Archers were vastly superior, BUT you could train any moron to shoot a useless gun. Gunpowder units should be cheap and shitty not OP.
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It was a bit ass in regular Shogun 2. Portuguese mercenaries destroy any and all other units in the Sengoku Jidai.
But it fits better in Fall of the Samurai, where regular levies are only useful in mass numbers, but professional soldiers are utterly lethal vs. other units.