It will be interesting to see if Creative Assembly release a standalone to Shogun 2 like they did with Napoleon and Empire. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is begging for the Total War treatment.

I have not played Imperial, Napoleon or Shogun 2, so I can't realy recommend anything. Even though I have them, I haven't had a decent PC for a few years now.

However if you don't mind spending a bit more over those three, I would recommend grabbing at least Rome of Medieval II - they are both awesome games, amazing replay value, and both have awesome mods available to squeeze even more life out of them.

I am not sure what you mean here. I played dozens of long campaigns in Rome, and I never had this experience. Are you talking about unrest problems with bigger cities later in the game? To keep many of my far-flung cities happy, I did usually end up fielding huge peasant armies, then getting them killed somehow (usually I would just throw them at enemies to soften them up for my real force).

I think the major reason I never liked Medieval 2 as much as Rome is because, as far as I remember, Medieval 2 didn't have any really awesome horse archer units. I really liked playing Parthia in Rome and having an army entirely formed with their bow cavalry special unit; even if I ran out of arrows, the enemy was usually weak enough that a few light cavalry charges would end them.

Medieval 2 might have gotten rid of a few bugs and game-play problems, but I got tired of the combat if I didn't have to constantly run my horse archers around. Every battle was essentially: 1a) throw infantry at them to bog them down and hold them up, 1b) pepper them with a few arrows from archers, 2) charge their flank with heavy cavalry, 3) massacre them one by one as they flee. Most of the time, I never even bothered with archers and just went entirely with assorted infantry and heavy cavalry.

I liked the Medieval 2 one the most. If it wasn't for the micro-management. Ugh.

Shogun 2 comes close second. It's strange, actually. I wanted to play this game so much before it came out, but somehow the first shogun pulled me more into it than this one. I guess it must be the crossbreeding between Total wars that finally got to me. Or I just got spoiled on medievals when it comes to varied architecture and units. Anyway, you really can't go wrong with total wars is all I'm saying.

That was pretty much the medieval western way of fighting - the only horse-archers you could find were a couple Mongol and Russian units if I remember right?

People just go apeshit because they're a certain distance from your capital. As in destroy them a couple of times over and the survivors still can't let it go kind of apeshit. That's pretty bloody fanatical about something so trivial, wouldn't you say? So yeah, I would consider that a major flaw in the game, personally.

Yeah, it was. I wasn't questioning the historic validity of the tactics, merely that after I while I got bored of using it every time. Sure, each battle is different, and, on the harder difficulties, timing and using the lay of the land to your advantage is necessary, however, at least for me, they started to feel a little 'samey' after a while. That is why I started looking for unusual ways to fight battles in my later games, and Rome just seemed to be more varied in this department to me.

I will note that it took a good while for me to get bored; I must have sunk at least 1,000 hours into Rome and Medieval 2 combined. So, my argument is, in no way, saying that I disliked either game. Unless a person decided to run the game into the ground replaying it, like I did, I am sure it wouldn't matter that much.

Huh. I have never had that problem, personally. Maybe It is because I generally only play 'Hard' on the campaign map? I would say 75% of my games are Very Hard for battles and Hard for the campaign map. I have done VH/VH games, but the overland micromanagement becomes such a hassle with Very Hard that it just isn't fun for me anymore.

Regardless, I have had empires that spanned from Tara (Ireland) all the way to Dumatha (Arabia), and as long as I kept a relatively full stack of peasants in them, set taxes low, and built a few stadia, none of the towns ever got that unhappy. Sure, I might lose a chunk of money each turn keeping them happy, but by then I owned at least half the map anyway; not like I was going to lose the game over it.

That actually leads to one of my least favorite features of Shogun 2: I can't change individual province's tax rates. I really liked that feature in earlier RTW games. The challenge of keeping all my cities just happy enough so they wouldn't revolt, while still maximizing income, was actually a fair bit of fun for me (except when playing Very Hard on the campaign map, then it just became frustrating :P).

Awww! Fricken A! Empire and Napoleon are one of the daily deals today. I foolishly assumed that it wasn't going to happen. I choose to blame you guys. It makes me feel better if I pretend its not my own fault.

Just like when you buy computer hardware, never, ever look back. It's always cheaper tomorrow. The only thing you should concern yourself with is was it worth it to you at the price that you actually paid? :)

I might actually pick up a Total War game in the Steam sale today based on the recommendations in this thread.

It's very very hard to argue with the Empire/Napoleon double pack for that price TBH. 100+ hours between the two easily.

DarthMod Ultimate Commander

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=341088

Oh hell yeah. That would be like maybe dipping your toe in. When you take into account all the factions on offer... yeah, that's a minimum.

To be fair, If you are doing a game based on the Napoleonic wars, except for the Egyptian campaign there is no real reason to include the rest of the world.
Very few games cannot be bought legally for half the intial price..or less....a year after they have come out.

It wasn't a complaint. I just felt it was worth pointing out. To someone looking to get into Total War it represents a more gentle introduction. Especially given how straightforward the Italian and Egyptian campaigns are.