I’ve had a pretty good pc for awhile now but Attila has always run like crap for me. U gave 3 kingdoms a really high score for a game that you heavily critiqued. From your initial review of it, the underlying issue still remains, that there’s not enough replay ability for it.
Got a friend into total war years ago when he was having some problems by showing him medieval. When he got his hands on medieval 2 he basically became a hermit for a year, at the end of which he showed me his max difficulty campaign where he had taken over the known world as Scotland (his name's Scott) I don't know whether I helped or harmed his life, but I was very proud of him anyway.
Thx, I couldn't quite make out what Legend said his friend said, now I know.... oh fuckin' LOOOOL I can remember it well, the anticipation, waiting for that last barracks to be built, so yeah... "Urban Cohort...urban cohort"... indeed.
I must be the only one who actually really likes Empire and Napoleon. The land battles are neat cause the time period is cool (even if the strategy is mostly who has more elite infantry and artillery) but the naval battles are what I love. Naval in those two games is honestly better than in any other total war game I've played, though mostly because I'm a big fan of the age of sail. It does have nice mechanics too though. Empire definitely should be above a D ranking though imo.
Napoleon is my #3 tw title, just below med2 and shogun fots Played it recently and it felt like breath of fresh air after spending way too much time on this "warhammer dodging missles simulator"
Well you are right there was some good Elements naval battles, economy, research and yeah great time periode... BUT diplomacy is nearly useless and biggest problem the ai is since rome total war 1 the worst in battles, deployment bugs and scraficing all cavalry at the beging of the battle for free... when you played warhammer 2 or even attila or rome 2, its really paintfull & boring when come back to a empire total battle. Not enjoyable better battle ai & diplomacy would be a great game. so its fair to get ranked at the bottom
Playing as Bactria in Rome 2 was one of the most enjoyable campaigns I've ever played in the entire franchise. You're essentially playing an unholy combination of Macedonia and Scythia with their horse archers. The start isn't difficult, but it's hard to maintain momentum due to how far the other settlements are from you.
Attila is still my favorite, most people disagree with that but i do enjoy dark and miserable tone of the game. Also, the only game in the franchise where the battle are actually epic in the truest meaning of the word. The music, visual effects and the theme are just ridiculously on point.
Attila is super underrated. Feels like a horror game when you’re playing as Rome and barbarians are everywhere. Also the fire and destruction mechanics are soooo much better than any other tw.
Clearly the one I played the most, with Shogun 2 and Medieval 2 completing the top 3. I actually really like the settlement management in Attila. One of the the main reasons I always default back to Attila. Enemies razing everything is annoying tbf.
@@user-gq8ht4nw7i The problem I have with it is that its very missile focused. My armoured romans get destroyed even in Tetsudo. The upgrades are broken and awful.. roman units are just shit especially early. The time period is awesome.. but its not portrayed well in the game.. its not elite roman units fighting hopeless battles against barbarian hordes. Your legio get raped by germanic band or whatever lol. Also I dont care what people think but its not that hard.. any TW game can be cheesed. Attila is easy to cheese with the general death mechanic for example.. I won battles I should never have won just because of that dumb "feature". The AI cheats like crazy and it shows too..
Just finished Attila as WRE on legendary without abandoning everything except Italy. Absolute torture, basically had to fight and cheese the same settlement defence battle like 300 times.
@@Tonyx.yt. I figured that the limit of enemy's numerical superiority is 5 times your numbers. Except if your troops are specifically effective against his, for example Romans with their testudo vs horse archers.
i manage to complete it on legendary without abandoning anything at all, but i basically played along with Legend's this is total war as WRE campaign from 2016 and used some cheeky strats to knock out some of my barbarian neighbours early on. you're right, it is torture. Thank god i am a masochist. Also, i would argue that ERE campaign is even more difficult on legendary, due to sassanid's vassal swarm
Empire was my first ever Total War game and still my favorite to this day. Its mostly the era it is set in that carries it so hard for me, gameplay might not be the best but the era is so awesome. Couldn't really get into Napoleon because it lacked so much content plus only like 5 playable nations
Yeah it was my first too and was also the one I played the most. For me the only weaknesses are that there were so many new playing mechanics implemented, but very few to none were used to its full potential. That’s one of the reasons why I think Empire 2 needs to happen, because everytime I play it I have fun however I always have to think about what could be.
@@erecvonaue7636 No, his reasons are completely justifiable. Empire was not a well-rounded TW game at all. Here are some of the many flaws with the game: - No unit collision with no workarounds, essentially making melee combat one of the worst in the franchise - Diplomacy is fucking broken - Retarded AI: Lining up the infantry 5 feets in front of your men to commit suicide, charging their general head-on, very finicky unit behaviors - Perhaps the worst siege battles in the franchise's history - Forgettable and repetitive music - Little unit variations (though this might be due to the setting) - Guns in this game sound worse than those in Medieval 2 lol - Square formation is utterly useless
@@erecvonaue7636 Empire isnt bad at all but when you compare it to the other TWs, it just falls behind. Keep in mind it was also glitchy af at launch. I'm not sure if they ever fixed it.
Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai was incredible. The Naval battles were amazing you could get Naval shore batteries involved in the Naval battle if it was at a port and your Navy could bombard land targets like a Black Ark from WH2 and on some maps you could see the Navy in the distance out to sea.
Balance issues aside, the Atilla campaign is engaging because it's SO hard, but you can make such a difference on the battlefield. It really adds a lot of excitement to the battles as each one can really turn the tide. The Mongol stack spam does make Eastern factions almost unbearably difficult, though.
@@peregrinemiles7936 Seems like all the mods are older. Are there newer mods for it. I just grabbed SS 6.4 last night and it seemed all the mods were 2012 or earlier.
@@nealm6764 Divide and Conquer is a Lord of the Rings mod and it's still in active development with a fairly big community. Likewise the Call of Warhammer Beginning of the End Times mod. I believe those 2 also has a lot of sibling mods floating around so yeah, fantasy mods is more active than historical mods nowadays
assuming your savefile doesn't get corrupted. or if you dare use mods the soundfiles get screwed up (archer units make cannon sounds), but yeah, it's pretty good
I like the sync kills, even though I wished for better sync kills in basically any Total War game...even though I think they bring more gameplay problems that might make the added immersion not worth it.
My first encounter with the Total War Series was Rome Total War, I loved the opening cinematic. Even tried recreating it in custom games once with the same factions and units while trying to make it as accurate as possible, to predictably poor results. Music still holds up, though.
I used to play it on my Dad's old dell desktop, windows xp and 256 mbs of ram. Rome ran like shit but I played it everyday I could hahaha. Miss those days
Rome total war still has some of the best most interesting mechanics of any total war game. The way your generals would organically grow depending on where you placed them, who their parents were and how they performed. It makes warhammers perk system look childish. They even made it so that in battle the speeches were generated based on your generals personality, the size of your army and the size of the enemy, the state of the war with the enemy, your battle history, where you are, and a ton of other stuff that just made it feel so organic. Add the fact that the battle map was generated based on where you attacked or were attacked, if you were near the coast you could see the sea and if there was a fleet in the sea you could see that fleet, fighting near a settlement you could see it in the distance, even roads were included. The population system that added a high level of management to your army sizes and settlement growth and drastically effected how the game was played on higher difficulties. The fact that replenishment was incredibly difficult needing to go back to a settlement with the appropriate building so you could replenish units made every battle count and every casualty matter. You had to really manage your army over a campaign, attrition really took its toll. The sheer ambition of Rome is totally unprecedented and unmatched by any other game in the series. The level of immersion and replay value was staggering with all these organic stories and characters emerging over the course of a campaign. It really made those heroic victories feel heroic, and I don’t really think that any other game in the series has quite come close to that.
Medieval II was so great because it was the last TW game before the "GREAT AGE OF DLC" Yes it had an expansion pack, but the sheer diversity of units in each faction alone was amazing. Not to mention the great events, black plague, Mongols invasion, discovering the Americas, just to name a few. If they can make Medieval THREE as good as two it goes straight to S tier
They will make md3 barebones on release and fill it up with different factions as an avalanche of DLC, same as with warhammer, because it makes them much more money. Better not raise your expectations for release.
M3 should be made on an all new engine, "Total War III," which would basically reverse engineer the TWII engine but with the addition of all the best received mechanics of other TW titles. The allure of M2 itself was that no two factions played the same and that every culture had its unique 'flavour,' much like the TW Warhammer series.
@@Arcomist Yeah Video game's business model nowadays are pretty sucks for consumer. Better wait until Sale to buy it (or just not on day one release date), because besides obtain it cheaper, I think you'll get a much stable game...
@@godlymoose9118 I think it's not a specific date, (it's been years since I've played) It's more a navel port tech you unlock, at which point you can build the biggest ships, then basically you sail west through the Fog of war until you find something.
Any game company that thinks it's OK to release a 3rd title of the series with the first two titles being required DLC and refuses to drop those first two titles below release market value is not OK in my book.
See as a big fan of 'The Last Kingdom' TV series, I loved playing Thrones of Britannia. It's certainly stripped back compared to the non Saga TWs, but it has great siege maps, excellent UI design and runs super well. They also did fix a fair few of the issues it had at launch in patches. It's by no means perfect and you do likely have to be interested in the time period, but for a quick campaign every now and then I actually think it's very underrated.
Thrones of Britannia was my first TW game (super odd I know) but it'll always have a soft spot in my heart, especially since I didn't know any other YW game at the time.
I also especially love the food system that require you to have enough food to sustain each unit. Combined with minor settlements not having walls, it actually allows you to wage economic warfare on your enemies by capturing their sources of food production, and have the same done to you. It makes it so that even the strongest kingdoms have a "soft underbelly" that needs to be protected and battles become much more decisive and important to the outcome of a campaign. Like what King Alfred said in Season 1 of the Last Kingdom, "we cannot let our enemies march through our lands unopposed." When I'm being invaded and my main army is elsewhere, it becomes a desperate race to raise a force capable of repelling the enemy before they cripple my economy and food supply. It feels like the fate of the kingdom is my hands, and hands of the hastily assemble militia that will fight and die to protect their families.
@@strikemasterice2004 Yeah man, I love the fact that i can not recruit full 20 stacks because I can't feed them all and the settlement scheme which is similar to shogun is also good
I am one of these Shogun 2 and FOTS returning players. Absolutely love the polish of the game, the sprites' combat animations, the sound design, the art. It really scratches an itch I have about once a year the get into that place and period. I hope CA can recapture what makes this game special in their future historical titles - Medieval 3 perhaps... wink wink
My main thing with shogun 2, is that I feel like I'm always playing the same faction. To me, unlocking and progressing to new units a very important part of the game... So when every faction has nearly identical rosters, rosters that aren't even that big... that really kills any reason for me to play the game more than once. I will say that shogun 2 was the first and only total war game where I spent any real time in multiplayer, I can't believe they havent given us the ability to rename and recolor custom elite units since shogun 2.
Late campaign FOTS gets so fucking boring though, and all the siege are braindead unless you're doing a traditional units only run. It works well in the early game where there's an almost even balance between traditional and modern units that the AI knows how to use but by the late game every battle consists of marching your artillery/infantry into firing range and then that's it. And the naval battles...If only they played as good as they looked!
@@MaMastoast The samey factions are definitely the Achilles heel of Shogun 2, however it is a much better game as a whole than warhammer AND Three Kindoms.
Otoh, I dont get at all why people like Shogun 2. Theres little depth and strategy in the battles, outside of some dumb skill spam, and despite the visual quality, the unit animations and physics are so weird and unbelievable that it felt like a massive downgrade from Medieval 2. Everything your units did looked so stupid, units just phased through each other all the time. It wasnt even "hollywood" quality that some people try to frame it as, because during fighting most soldiers just standa around doing nothing. The warscape engine was so much worse here, because they actually made a game about melee. That doesnt count stuff like all factions being the same, the campaign map being one of the most boring CA has ever made, overpowered super-agents, the naval battles suck... IMO the series are Medieval 2 was a mess, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes less so. Only Total Warhammer 2 really brought it to a good level of quality.
“Lost a whole GPA cause of Rome Total War” Same, but with Total War Warhammer II. I literally uninstalled Steam and refuse to redownlod until the college semester is over.
Shogun Fall of the Samurai came out just before some really important exams for me back in High School, I promised myself I'd just ignore it until summer. Was not easy, and I still wasted a lot of time playing standard Shogun 2 but managed to power though. Stay strong brother.
Saying empire is bad because the battles are slow is such a bullshit comment. Its a completely different form of battle due to the time period which yes some people wont enjoy as much as the more melee focused time periods but for meny people geting that perfect volley off with line infintry that leads to mass retreat because you took the time to organise your infantry formation properly is just if not more rewarding then charging in swords swinging.
One of the things I really miss from Medieval 1 is the ability to give individual generals titles that affect their competency, and that each individual unit had its own captain with traits etc. Died with rome 1 never to return probably
I wish you can attach Heroes/Officers to units so even your random spearmen can have some character to them. The Army veterancy and ranks thing from Rome 2 and Attila was great as well.
@@spamquisition4046 I always loved zooming in and watching the one samurai in ashigaru units ripping through everyone. Would definitely love to get that feeling again but with more detail and customisation
@@destroyah377 Yeah, or the knights and standard bearers leading my unit of peasant spearmen. It'll work so well with Warhammer too since they have all those magic banners.
While not the same feudal set up, 3 kingdoms allows you to give titles (like Coiled Dragon) and those give buffs while increasing salary. I think it's good
Rome 2 was the first Total War title I played and to this day it still has a special place in my heart. I had never played any game like it at the time, so for me it was mindblowing. I still come back to it from time to time
Man i fucking loved the OG rome total war. My dad managed to get the collector's edition which had these amazing metal figurines of various units in the game. After he got me my own pc i asked for the discs so i could play it, i didn't understand a thing because i was very young but something about controlling those massive armies was just magical to me.
I remember playing the greeks as a kid. Put all the phallanx units blobbed together, in a circle formation. The AI would go crazy trying to run towards the flanks of the spears, but since all units are in circle, the enemy would just bug out trying to find somewhere to charge. 10/10 would put 5 units of phallanx occupying the space of a single unit again.
I also started playing it as a kid! An older cousin showed it to me and I loved it. I was horrible at the campaing, mostly filled my cities with town watch and did not understand why I could not win battle, hahahaha. Loved the quick battle feature though, used it so much!
Never heard of this collector's edition, and can't really find any info on it on the web. Do you have a source or something about it? Really want to see those metal figurines!
You are absolutely right but also kind of disagree. I mean, yeah if you drop everything to your steam basket and buy at once its somewhere between 2-300$... But do you need to do that? Will you really play with every DLC at once? If you wait for discounts you can get almost every DLC for 5-10$, sometimes even less. If you use instant gaming you get a similar price, but basically any time. Is 5$ a lot? Not really, its basically a cup of coffee, or half a pack of cigarette in most country. People spend several times more on a casual night out with the guys drinking. So I bought 1, played it, enjoyed it sometimes for weeks. When I was done, bought the next one. They actually give you really good value as every 5 dollar gives you at least several hours of fun, depending on how good you are at the game. I played the wood elf DLC for at lest 30 hours or even more and it only cost me 8$. So yes, if you just check the prices and add all of them up it seems expensive, but the value and playtime you can get out of it is insane and well worth it. Also if we can indeed transfer all DLC to the TW3 that will be insane. Meaning the 5 bucks you spent in TW1 actually serves you in 3 games.
That being said the (extra) content is much more interesting than in previous titles. Factions in Warhammer have very different armies and campaign mechanics. The new campaign mechanics of some DLCs are also unique and very fun. You can play without these DLCs but they help refresh the whole experience over time. Overall, that's why TW2 stays with the highest number of concurrent players by far.
@@Debilinside I don't disagree with that at all, and I like knowing that there is extra content on tap basically when I need more. I guess it partly comes down to whether you're happy with the amount of content you get from the base game at launch. If so, then actually new content released over time gives great value for players and keeps us playing. (Contrast that to day one dlc which is frustrating imho)
Got my friend into total war through Shogun 2. We've been playing co-op campaigns and having a blast in a game I haven't played in years. My friend fell in love with total war and is now upgrading his PC to run Warhammer 2 so we can co op that too!
good for you, guys I also had really great co-op campaigns in Shogun 2:FotS and in WH2 especially with giving command to the other player, I was the artillery captain to my friends dwarven armies, that gave him capabilities to micro his slayers and blasting charges etc. and he was my High Elven Cavalry commander, spurring around the battlefield, delivering devastating charges :D great fun
Same here. Got my friend into the series by getting him to play Shogun 2 and now he blames me for converting him, haha. He’s since played Rome 2 and Attila, and he owns Medieval 2, just hasn’t played it yet.
Rome total war brought the series into my life, medieval 2 total war made it a staple in my games library. Even today I find myself running a campaign on it here and there, the way your generals adapted traits along with the chivalry and dread levels, improved upon Romes traits. Something modern total wars don’t invest as much time into, or have as much weight with especially the fantasy based ones.
My list would be: 1. Empire Total War - the one that got me into the series. It's not just about era, but also the entire campaign. It has by far the best map, province system and if dynasty system was properly used, it would have one of the best politics. Battles were all about positioning and it was great. People say AI is the worst in the series and while it is not the best, I saw in the same series worse. 2. Attila Total War: It is like Rome 2, but better. I am not big fan of pronvince system, but the campaign is designed such that it actually made sense and it is actually good. Battles were challenging in a good way and naval battles are done right. Attila also proved that you can have both sandbox of the Empire and story focus like Napoleon. The only reason Empire is better is boring historical battles, lack of diversity and midiocre tech tree. I just wish we had last Byzantine-Persian war and that Empire divided was pary of that game instead of Rome 2. Medieval 2: When people talk about stupid Total War AI, I immediately show this game. I can defeat 2 armies in open field with no sweat, I can defeat siege by simply poking the besiegers one by one and diplomacy may as well not exists. However, the development of provinces, time period, world events like mongol invasion, gunpowder and americas is perfect that only Attila tried to replicate to some degree. It is still an excelent game, but it has one of the dumbest design mistakes I can think off. Napoleon Total War: Campaigns are alright, except Peninsular War which is excelent. Nothing much to say, it uses Empire mechanics which I love, but it is too limiting with how campaign maps are designed. That said, I had one of the most memorable battles there and the story it follows of Napoleon is amaizing. Where Napoleon truly shines are historical battles which are the best in the series. Actually the first Total War footage I saw was someone in internet caffee playing Battle of Austerlitz and it took me years to remember what game it was. That's how good Napoleon battles are. Rome 2: Battles and Campaign are fun, because of how diverse they are and that's a key part. I got that game because I love Hellenistic Age. I never played any Celtic faction in the west, Rome or Carthage. That also means that I am kinda in this game along for a ride, because how much gams focuses on Rome (obviously). I say this because I measure the campaign based on Hellenistic Kingdom rules and they surprisingly fit better there then for Rome. Satraps and clients, WW1 grand alliances, cultural subjegation/integration fit far better for Seleucid, Galetian and Parthian mentality, then Roman and Carthaginian. However that also means that many events and mechanics are also ignored because they were made for Rome, like Civil War (good idea tough), province system (atrocious), or army system and stances. In other words, I love Rome 2, by pure accident. Shogun 2: This is actually my first Total War. Tutorial was good and I replayed that tutorial siege multiple times. However, now when I have experience with the series, every Total War is better then Shogun 2. Diplomacy is by far the most pointless, even more then Medieval 2, unit diversity is even worse then Attila, campaign is worse then Rome 2 and Japan is designed like Napoleon Total War making naval warfare pointless. It was good enough to get me into the series, but I have no intention of playing it again, let alone bying it (I pirate every game before purchase as a demo). And why is campaign always over before it starts to get interesting? The fact I find Japan in general rather uninteresting probably doesn't help. Sassanid Empire and Byzantine Empire are enough to pick my attention and French-British rivalry of 1695-1815 is stuff of a legend. In Shogun 2, I couldn't care less about those clans I've never even heard of before launching the game, nor did I understood much of Japanese culture which puts Shogun 2 automatically in disadvantage (anyone from Japan, please don't take it personally, it's just I find some cultures more interesting the others). I will try Fall of the Samurai as the setting looks far more interesting, despite knowing very little about it, but Shogun 2 as far as I'm concerned served its purpose.
God i remember medieval total war first total war game i ever played, and i played it when i was like 8. spent far too much time in custom matches with all artillery armies just dumping on castles
The very first Rome game I just played so friggin much. Grew hooked to your channel because so many things I remember learning to cheese you were right on it. Was like watching my past.
When it came out, Rome 2 turned me off from the series it was an absolute betrayal for those who preordered. But, it has improved a ton and brought me back to the series, in conjunction with warhammer 2
I think they were over ambitious at launch, which caused them to lose sight of what makes a Total War game great, but they stuck with it for years after release instead of abandoning it and it is actually an amazing game still today. I feel like the game deserves an A for today just because of how much effort CA put into righting the ship that is Rome II, and how they have campaigns that span from the earliest days of Rome, all the way to the beginning of the end with the Empire Divided campaign.
personally I absolutely love Attila, it's definitely my favourite total war because of battle mechanics like you said but also the challenge. It has it's flaws like performance and stupid tech traps + corruption mechanics, but other than that I think the campaign is really fun, challenging and immersive. It's the only total war where I feel genuinely threatened by the AI and the first 5 years of WRE and ERE are pretty scary. It gives battles a truly epic feel cos you truly are fighting for the Roman Empire's life and one wrong step could cost you a whole province. It also has arguably the best DLC and mods of any total war game - Last Roman, Age of Charlemagne, 1212 (medieval 2 with better graphics), Ancient Empires (rome 2 but less of a slogfest), Rise of Mordor (Third Age with better graphics). Endless replayability and it has every pre-gunpowder historical total war experience packed in.
My first foray into the Total War series was Medieval 2 and it was absolutely epic. My only previous experiences in RTS were classic like AoE II and Warcraft 2 and 3 and this was mind boggling. Huge empires and battles and sieging enormous metropolises (were the built building showed!) and 3 walled citadels were amazing for the time! Even the complexity of game mechanics with diplomats, spies and assassins (and the small videos!) were the reason I spent countless hours on this game! Truly an amazing way into an epic franchise!
As far as Empire: Total War goes I liked the setting, and I actually liked the multiplayer. Honestly the campaign really was that awful, but the multiplayer was quite enjoyable back in the day. It's the only Total War game I have put any effort into as far as the multiplayer goes.
Interesting, in my experience the issues with Troy were largely fixed; the chariots were nerfed to a reasonable degree, they can't bowl over elite infantry anymore; they've now settled into their role as chaff destroyers. Collision... okay, yes, still a problem sometimes, but it can be managed. And the fundamental combat, where flanking is so heavily optimized, feels super good. And the factoins feel very different; Hector's standard anvil-and-hammer tactics are very different from Odysseus's mad skirmisher kiting, is in turn very different from Hippolyta's high energy hammer-and-hammer gameplay.
There were still some gamebreaking bugs and some really frustrating things when I last played(September) and I don’t think there was a patch since then. Health doesn’t increase with general level like it should. Achilles’ challenger mechanic would break if a challenger’s faction gets destroyed. AI basically is like “fuck fronts” yoloing into the middle of your territory to sack a couple settlements before dying. Instead of Total War Troy it’s more like Total War Greece because it’s almost always Troy invading Greece instead of the other way around. You can also cheese every siege battle with Hydra units and poison but that’s more user focused so it doesn’t matter too much. If you check the forums there’s probably a lot more bugs/frustrations but these are the one’s I’ve experienced. There are some positives but if it had like 2 more patches to fix the bugs it would be great. AI probably can’t be fixed.
Shogun total war had the best videos ever from Ninjas to diplomats to Geisha videos. The outcome of a agent was shown during the videos and it was revealed halfway through whether it was a succes or failure, creating great suspense.
@@Vyleea Except some of us still think theyre great even with their flaws. Yes, nostalgia is a big part of it, but this tier list is looking at them with the vein of "Look at what we can do now, and look at the improvements, in hindsight these games werent that great." At the time though? they actually were the best of their kind and among the top of the whole strategy genre. So to say that they DONT deserve a high ranking, is as much a cop out and ignorant idea as thinking theyre the greatest.
@@cyanide7270 well, depend what your goal is. Rating for players who had it at that time? Yes, you are right. For new ones, who think about buying one of them? No, it does not matter how good it was, it only matters how well it aged.
@@Kublaioi so is ToB a good game? I've had it for a long time, but I still haven't played it properly. Just 18 turns of campaign and that's it. 2 days ago I downloaded it again and I'm going to give it a chance
@@arsduk Yeah it is, go on very hard difficulty with Sudreyar (if you like vikings) or Mierce (if you like English factions), you can try West Seaxe too but it generally gets easy after you conquer a bit
I've returned to Rome recently, purchasing the non-remastered version. It still is amazing and beautiful (in a way), but it definitely did not age well. How camera works is the exact opposite of intuitive, coming back to it from newer Total War games is jarring just because of that. Pathing issues, crashes, glacial pace with which the units walk, all this is rough to get used to after the years of improvements the series had made. Still love it, but I find playing it difficult. Does the remaster make the camera on the battle screen work more like it does nowadays, I wonder?...
Yes. Remaster is an 100% improvement. Controls and visuals are such an improvement. It brings a lot of QoL settings and features. After you play it you wont come back to the non-remasterd version lol
You know, you're a proper Legend buff, when you watch a 40min video of him, ranking all Total War Games, while you've already got and played every single one of them.
Shogun 2 was my introduction to Total War. I never looked back. I still play it alot... and I might even be able to challenge you on how many hours you have on Warhammer 2. Warhammer 2 though has definitely supplanted Shogun 2 for me. But even though Shogun 2 is unquestionably my favorite (next to TWW2)... I still agree with 95% of what you said. Totally fair assessments. I mean someone could get really nitpicky and go into the smallest details but broad strokes... this is a really good list.
For three kingdoms supposedly they had the Northern Campaigns DLC nearly finished before the plug was cut, it would have been one of the more important dates to settle first part of the entire era. What is bitter though is that in a way the game doesn't even deserve its title. If you put all the DLC together you would barely just cover most of the "first" part of the Three Kingdoms Era and you would still be missing a lot of great characters too. Which in the game's case is very important versus other total wars. CA could have pulled a Warhammer on it but making a brand new game that has nothing to do with the first doesn't remotely look like a recipe for success.
@@joshua41175 It was a bit of an odd card, for sure. The heroes worked really well imo, but risked turning away both hardcore historical fans for being bs and fantasy fans for not being full-on Dynasty Warriors. And it had very little prospect for proper DLC's left, and the first DLC was an absolute disaster with only 10 unique characters and a passive campaign (I might have been one of the only people out there who actually enjoyed a campaign with them). To add to that, there was very little unit variety and there really were only 1 or 2 strong army setups. However, it probably still has the best diplomacy system in Total War history, the AI is pretty good 9 times out of 10 (and changes behaviour depending on difficulty settings, which is so undervalued!) and the battles play out very smooth ict contemporary titles. One of the few issues I have left with WH2 is that soldiers take so long to actually start dying. A volley of arrows should kill about 10% of a non-shielded unit, but in WH2 it just shaves off that amount of health with 0 casualties. 3K does this better imo, you actually feel like your combat actions have immediate consequences.
@@the_tactician9858 well I think it's mostly fine because we get to look at it from a table top perspective as well. Yes body's don't fall but individual models have their own hp bars. It is easier to balance imo and just feels better. It just takes a bit of a different perspective to accomplish that. Should the ever chosen weilding the sword of khaine dab on the haters while moonwalking through kislev? Absolutely.
@@joshua41175 I know that, and it's not like it doesn't work and isn't balanced, it just feels weird, especially when coming from older Total War games, to see an artillery round or magic attack do f*ck all to the number of soldiers of a unit, even though 40 of them just got launched to orbit. In that same sense, it feels weird to see an army that you just beated to 20% hit points still have half their troops. It fits the game, that I'll agree on, and it works well for Warhammer as a balance to the ridiculous amount of magic or ranged attacks available, but I personally prefer a more realistic system overall.
@@the_tactician9858 I mean, I'll never get over praetorian guard taking a onager to and knock over 13 models and only 2 stay down, so that's why I'm having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. Even in shogun you'd have yari peasants that take multiple flinches from archers before going down.
I cant even remember how many time i bought Rome total war , either from letting my friends or cousin borrow the game and not getting it back, from the cd getting scratched , or losing it
Warhammer 2 today is definitely the only S tier game, it's not even a question. And that's for one simple reason - replayability. There is no other Total War game with this amount of replayability. Every campaign in Warhammer 2 plays so differently than any other and it's just a joy. The campaigns in historical Total War games are basically all the same. The units are almost exactly the same in every faction and the campaign mechanics are also a lot similar.
Exactly. If the factions weren't so different from each other, I would just play a couple of campaigns and leave it, like I did with other Total War games. But with all that replayability potential, I currently have over 1200 hours in Warhammer 2 and still going up.
@@SereglothIV yep, and that's exactly the reason why people buy all the DLCs. Every DLC adds yet another new cool and different mechanics. And this is the reason why people weren't really interested in 3K DLCs, because they didn't really introduce any new different mechanincs. There is a reason why people have on average the most played hours in Warhammer 2 than in any other TW game.
Been watching you since maybe 2013-2015, crazy to see you review these games all these years later seeing you have played them and now in Warhammer 👍🏼 love you legend, will always stay updated!
3k really was blueballing, never got to the actual three kingdoms era in the dlc timeline and then when everyone was expecting a reveal of the Chibi (probably the most important that lead to the three kingdoms a few years later) they just drop the support for the game. Also left so many bugs introduced in the dlc (just look at the unoffical patch on the workshop) EDIT add missing part of sentence
4:15 Medieval added proper sieges. In shogun the gate was always open. In medieval you had to break open the gate or use siege equipment to tear down the walls.
If i was to do this vid myself, other than not being as well done, it would be near on identical, rankings and reasoning. The only reason I differ is personal reason with shogun 2, it came out at a time where playing online with my best mate was especially important because of life issues and Shogun 2 was the first game to really make that work.
yo i'm like 30 seconds in and I just gotta say I'm glad you made the point of doing the dual ratings. That was my immediate concern upon reading the title, since those are two very different situations to judge a game by
Warhammer 2 is something that I dreamt about since Medieval 2. "Man, imagine if they made such game but in world of the Lord of the Rings. I would play it all my life". Well, it's not LOTR, but still close enough for me to play it for years.
I agree wholeheartedly with the Troy pick, campaign map looked really good, some decent features, ran really well, introduced some really solid features which would go on to be implemented in Warhammer 2. I even got the game for free, but I got so bored after finishing it once as Sparta. The battles are so boring, the mythological stuff is good, but they didn't go into it enough and only really half tried.
The thing i missed the most in MTW2 versus MTW1 is the titles. Provinces had titles and some buildings had titles. They could add to your general, and honoring the general could boost his loyalty. Back then an entire "doom stack" as we call them now could defect and you loose all that time creating them. Making a General the "master of horses" for example could boost the general's loyalty. Also i seem to remember that who you married mattered when it came to diplomacy. Anyways, they were fleshed out games for their ages.
What's your opinion of the building systems in the older games versus the newer games? Medieval 2 allowed you to build basically all buildings in a town or castle that were available, no build slots or anything like that, and while I know that that is theoretically worse game design, since choices are generally a good thing to force upon your players, the modern system just feels worse. Maybe that is because they streamlined it or executed it poorly, but the Medieval 2 settlement management feels a lot more satisfying than Warhammer's. And then there's the recruitment system, I really adore the fact that units need to return to settlements that can recruit them to replenish, it makes me feel like I'm assembling and reinforcing an army more than just waiting for 2-5 turns for it to replenish. I love Warhammer 2, but its campaign side feels a lot weaker than Medieval 2's.
The old building system had meaningful choices you had to make. Do you build a trading port in a north-sea city or 3 grain markets in your interior towns? You almost never have enough money to develop every settlement at the same time, so you had to make priorities which upgrade gave you the highest return of investment. The new system on the other hand gives you fewer choices in my opinion. Build 1 recruitment province and then spam the same template of growth --> fortification --> economy in every other province until the end of the game.
There's a big difference between choice because of too many opportunities, like Medieval 2, and too few like Warhammer 2. I've played a lot more of warhammer 2, but the city development is trash. Maybe unlimited buildings is too much, but then a hybrid with growth per city kinda like hordes or something could do well, with capitals intrinsically growing faster and able to reach further. The building slot system is really boring.
I really like the landmarks and resource system of Warhammer but yes, the old Medieval 2 system is better for me because all cities are important and you can really get into the nitty gritty of empire management. My fav part of the old recruitment is how you can recruit one elite unit and some chaff in your capital then march them off to the frontline as reinforcements. Also, every battle matters because auto replenishment is not a thing. Of course, the AI breaks with this system because they just spam hundreds of armies without generals that can consist from anywhere between 2 to 20 random units in it. Makes things annoying in the end game.
I played Empire just the other day and it is more of a C tier game now. The game still has the bug where it tanks your frame rates if part of a unit gets trapped on the walls but other than that its not that buggy any more.
@@CallioNyx Yeah they were, I guess with the amount of variety in Total Warhammer in terms of races and agents that wouldn't be possible anymore but they were great.
@@kye4216 That's definitely taken into account, but Medieval 2 is beyond just factions, the campaign events are unparalleled, bubonic plague, the advancement of cannons the inventions in small arms, the mongol invasions, and indian invasions, not to mention the discovery of the new world and the crusades.
I play medieval total war today, i think its an underrated total war game. I love the atmosphere and the music of that game and the fact that you give titles to your generals
There's no way that medieval 2 shouldn't get s tier with how it's aged. There are countless things it had which games after it dropped(for better or for worst) and is definitely one of the most replayable total war games with all the mods in it.
Man, I love Empire so much. It certainly has issues but it's ambitious and quite expansive. The AI suffers a bit but it introduced some cool empire management that feels more streamlined.
Idk Empire seemed to have a lot of hardcore fans, including myself. Admittingly now you can play it modded...so the vanilla version might have just been trash. It was different from the series, and they put some effort into the naval battles. It's probably one of my fav Total Wars. 1. Medieval 2 2. Empire 3. Attila
now if warhammer 2 has naval combat of empire, layered sieges of medieval 2, infantry melee/ranged battle mechanics/animation of shogun 2 and amphibious landings of rome 2, it will be the greatest total war game in all categories.
If i recall correctly they can't implement naval battles due to it being a separate IP by Games Workshop, Man o War. But since they abandoned it i do hope that someday we will see naval battles in TWW, the iron dreadnaughts of dwarves shredding everything and being a carrier for gyrocopters sounds fun af
Bought Shogun back in 2000 and loved it to bits. Best part was the throne room. I love that you could click the wise old retainer for haikus and poems. I'll always remember this one: "The water is a mirror I cannot see the bottom, yet I feel ashamed for the bottom can see me clearly." Deep. And the emissaries... "Buddha's compassion gooo with you." Ah, the memories. :)
What are you talking about? I didn't play Empire at release, but it's still one of the best games in the series, it's 2024 and I still prefer it to Warhammer.
We all got different taste. But Warhammer is their last piggy bank tbh. Medieval 3 is their last chance to really end this mad cycle of bad business moves. I personally like the latest patch. Gives me very little hope in CA for once.
The Rome 2 rating surprised me, ngl. To this day it is by far my favorite total war game. The 1100 AD mod is amazing. I always felt like the combat was satisfying and everything had its place without anything feeling OP/ broken or useless and everything had a counter. Elephants? Pikes or javelins. Pikemen? Ranged units. Cavalry charges where satisfying and powerful when done right but you couldn't smashing through a braced infantry unit from the front. The economy was simple but effective. Idk man, its still the most fun I've had with a total war game and I play it all the time.
yeah i've also played rome 2 rigth from launch. pretty suprised he said the building & politics system were garbage. they were the features i enjoyed the most! building was way diversified compared to rome 1 & med 2. politics added much needed depth to your faction. i also feel like balance-wise it was in a right spot. not like attila. whenever i play attila i feel like cav is utterly useless and falls over at the slightest touch of missiles. nothing like it was in rome 2 where cav could actually take out a missile unit without losing it's battle potential. in my opinion it deserves a higher status especially on the 2021 list.
Eh I love empire total war but it's only really playable with mods that fix some of its issues. Game is just host to all sorts of bugs that make the game unplayable at a certain point. Other games have just as much depth to it as empire combat wise all empire has is time period and scale is excellent
I appreciate and respect the fact that you made 2 separate lists for when they came out and how they hold up today....Cuz even still today ppl worship the OG Rome Total War like its a holy script and even if I love it to death ill admit there it can't hold up to some of the newer games in the series
My first total war was Rome 2 and I was addicted to it, I was enjoying every single thing, even I was losing the battle I was still immersed and love the close ups with the camera. I was surprised rome 2 was bad for everyone, I guess previous total wars set the bar too high on Rome 2
Honestly me too, Malakith Skadi got me into the game, I saw all the bugs in his playthroughs and knew what I was getting into. But I still got it because I love the Roman Empire and history, as well as strategy games. So nowadays I treat Total War releases like Bethesda games, it'll be buggy as hell on release but eventually smooth out so long as the company has reason to do so.
Shogun Total War was Amazing when it released, I played it so much I ruined the CDs and had to buy a second game. The CDs would spin while you played the game, funny to think today. What an great game to start off the Total War library!
wow realy? i tried Shogun the first time in 2016 and it was so bad and ugly (in comparison to Rome2, Medieval 2 which i loved) that i only played it for 6 minutes and than never touched it till today. i hated this game so much that i didnt even wanted to try Shogun2 for many years but a few months ago a friend told me to get Shogun 2 and now i think Shogun 2 is a very good Total War game
@@Managarm1999 2016 was very late for Shogun. It does not hold up apart from the love poured into making it. The soundtrack of course also still holds up.
@@Managarm1999 Shogun 2 almost perfect tw game. There are 2 major issues. Most frustrating thing is diplomacy. Any faction without any reason can declair war on you and when you at war with couple factions the whole fckng map declair war on you (even your allies) and brings 2-3 full stacks to you. Very annoying shit. Second issue as Legend says is almost no difference between factions.
I agree about FOTS, I get the feeling it's a little unappreciated but I always really liked it and added much needed diversity and excitement to Shogun 2. The best way to make an alternate campaign expansion. Compare to say Rome Alexander which I think was a lot weaker and nowhere near as replayable as the original or Barbarian Invasion.
www.instant-gaming.com/en/promo/black-friday/?igr=legendoftotalwar
check out the black friday sale on Instant Gaming
Goes to max screen on my phone.
Accidentally hits the end of the vid
F spoilers.
Welp now to watch it and check out instant gaming.
.
.....
Thank you very much mate! I was hunting for a discounted AoE 4 now I have it thanks to you
RoR tier list plez
I’ve had a pretty good pc for awhile now but Attila has always run like crap for me. U gave 3 kingdoms a really high score for a game that you heavily critiqued. From your initial review of it, the underlying issue still remains, that there’s not enough replay ability for it.
"Rome total war was so good it ruined my life" Legend 2021
BASED
SIGMA GRINDSET
Aye, reminds me of "TvTropes will ruin your life".
Its funny cause its true
I remember the first time my Hasttati were terrorized by Carthaginian war elephants ... totally awesome!!
Got a friend into total war years ago when he was having some problems by showing him medieval. When he got his hands on medieval 2 he basically became a hermit for a year, at the end of which he showed me his max difficulty campaign where he had taken over the known world as Scotland (his name's Scott) I don't know whether I helped or harmed his life, but I was very proud of him anyway.
I’m gonna guess “harmed him” (just knowing how much I can sink into these games)!
(Jk, hopefully that was obvious)
I'm glad it's not just me. I sank 6 hours of yesterday into trying to conquer all of Britain as Ireland in the Brittania dlc.
Wife: "I haven't seen you all week. You've got a mistress, don't you!?"
Husband: "Urban cohort...urban cohort..."
Thx, I couldn't quite make out what Legend said his friend said, now I know.... oh fuckin' LOOOOL
I can remember it well, the anticipation, waiting for that last barracks to be built, so yeah...
"Urban Cohort...urban cohort"... indeed.
That made me laugh way more than it should have
@@Mookee1914 thanks, needed the reminder, cackling way more than I should for a second time, pmsl 🤪
Great, the husband is cheating with an Urban Cohort!
you wonder how many great people weren't born because of gaming !!!
I must be the only one who actually really likes Empire and Napoleon. The land battles are neat cause the time period is cool (even if the strategy is mostly who has more elite infantry and artillery) but the naval battles are what I love. Naval in those two games is honestly better than in any other total war game I've played, though mostly because I'm a big fan of the age of sail. It does have nice mechanics too though. Empire definitely should be above a D ranking though imo.
I think the same. Empire for me personally is the second place after Warhammer
Napoleon is my #3 tw title, just below med2 and shogun fots
Played it recently and it felt like breath of fresh air after spending way too much time on this "warhammer dodging missles simulator"
I love Napoleon.
Well you are right there was some good Elements naval battles, economy, research and yeah great time periode... BUT diplomacy is nearly useless and biggest problem the ai is since rome total war 1 the worst in battles, deployment bugs and scraficing all cavalry at the beging of the battle for free... when you played warhammer 2 or even attila or rome 2, its really paintfull & boring when come back to a empire total battle. Not enjoyable better battle ai & diplomacy would be a great game. so its fair to get ranked at the bottom
I just really dislike that all land battles feel extremely repetitve due to most infantry being more or less the same with varying stats.
Now we need a tier list of all Legend's tier lists.
lmfao
We need a tier list of all his profanities, I know one that will be sure S tier 🤣
@@pascaldifolco4611 is it 'IT'S FUCKING GARBAGE' ?
@@pascaldifolco4611 Ha. It'd be a whole load of "REDACTED" in 2021. And "cunt" which you can still get away with
@@rickkybobby8118 For now.
But his workarounds are pretty hilarious too.
Such as '' unpaid interns '' for slaves. Which is pretty damn accurate.
Playing as Bactria in Rome 2 was one of the most enjoyable campaigns I've ever played in the entire franchise. You're essentially playing an unholy combination of Macedonia and Scythia with their horse archers. The start isn't difficult, but it's hard to maintain momentum due to how far the other settlements are from you.
Baktria was my first Rome 2 playthrough ever! 😁
I remember playing then once too, one of my more memorable campaigns along with masilla for some reason
I always loved sniping an enemy general in Attila when they attack by boat since land units had such an INSANE sea sickness debuff
flying rocks go bruhhh, love it
Goddamnit Patterrz why are you everywhere D:
I love Attila and I hate it.. It's so hard as Roman's and yes it's meant to but damn..
@@Kvs-vf9nt 1212 makes it so much better tho.
Still no as close to Rome two which is above all other total war games by a long shot.
@@Kvs-vf9nt gotta play 1212
Attila is still my favorite, most people disagree with that but i do enjoy dark and miserable tone of the game. Also, the only game in the franchise where the battle are actually epic in the truest meaning of the word. The music, visual effects and the theme are just ridiculously on point.
Attila is super underrated. Feels like a horror game when you’re playing as Rome and barbarians are everywhere. Also the fire and destruction mechanics are soooo much better than any other tw.
Attila seems like the most difficult one aswell with the Roman empire at its collapse and on legendary difficultyl
Clearly the one I played the most, with Shogun 2 and Medieval 2 completing the top 3. I actually really like the settlement management in Attila. One of the the main reasons I always default back to Attila. Enemies razing everything is annoying tbf.
Tottaly agree with you, my 2 favorites are warhammer 2 and attila, mainly the DLC age of charlemagne.
@@user-gq8ht4nw7i The problem I have with it is that its very missile focused. My armoured romans get destroyed even in Tetsudo.
The upgrades are broken and awful.. roman units are just shit especially early.
The time period is awesome.. but its not portrayed well in the game.. its not elite roman units fighting hopeless battles against barbarian hordes. Your legio get raped by germanic band or whatever lol.
Also I dont care what people think but its not that hard.. any TW game can be cheesed. Attila is easy to cheese with the general death mechanic for example.. I won battles I should never have won just because of that dumb "feature". The AI cheats like crazy and it shows too..
Just finished Attila as WRE on legendary without abandoning everything except Italy. Absolute torture, basically had to fight and cheese the same settlement defence battle like 300 times.
yeah i feel the pain, endless pyrric defensive battles in every single town against a 3-4 times more numerous enemy
@@Tonyx.yt. I figured that the limit of enemy's numerical superiority is 5 times your numbers. Except if your troops are specifically effective against his, for example Romans with their testudo vs horse archers.
i manage to complete it on legendary without abandoning anything at all, but i basically played along with Legend's this is total war as WRE campaign from 2016 and used some cheeky strats to knock out some of my barbarian neighbours early on.
you're right, it is torture. Thank god i am a masochist.
Also, i would argue that ERE campaign is even more difficult on legendary, due to sassanid's vassal swarm
@@vladimirvovk8284 that might be true, but you can cheese their economy and WRE is swarmed by everyone anyway.
@@HB013b yes, around 5 still manageable with some cheese, 3 times dont requires much effort
Empire was my first ever Total War game and still my favorite to this day. Its mostly the era it is set in that carries it so hard for me, gameplay might not be the best but the era is so awesome. Couldn't really get into Napoleon because it lacked so much content plus only like 5 playable nations
......darthmod............darthmod.....m
Abolutely with you. Empire was a well rounded tw. I dont understand his reasons.
Yeah it was my first too and was also the one I played the most. For me the only weaknesses are that there were so many new playing mechanics implemented, but very few to none were used to its full potential. That’s one of the reasons why I think Empire 2 needs to happen, because everytime I play it I have fun however I always have to think about what could be.
@@erecvonaue7636 No, his reasons are completely justifiable. Empire was not a well-rounded TW game at all. Here are some of the many flaws with the game:
- No unit collision with no workarounds, essentially making melee combat one of the worst in the franchise
- Diplomacy is fucking broken
- Retarded AI: Lining up the infantry 5 feets in front of your men to commit suicide, charging their general head-on, very finicky unit behaviors
- Perhaps the worst siege battles in the franchise's history
- Forgettable and repetitive music
- Little unit variations (though this might be due to the setting)
- Guns in this game sound worse than those in Medieval 2 lol
- Square formation is utterly useless
@@erecvonaue7636 Empire isnt bad at all but when you compare it to the other TWs, it just falls behind. Keep in mind it was also glitchy af at launch. I'm not sure if they ever fixed it.
A part of me wants Legend to write an autobiography just to see how much Total War is intertwined with his life.
Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai was incredible. The Naval battles were amazing you could get Naval shore batteries involved in the Naval battle if it was at a port and your Navy could bombard land targets like a Black Ark from WH2 and on some maps you could see the Navy in the distance out to sea.
I really love that there is separate list of "on release"! That takes away any questions and thinking "what if"
Balance issues aside, the Atilla campaign is engaging because it's SO hard, but you can make such a difference on the battlefield. It really adds a lot of excitement to the battles as each one can really turn the tide. The Mongol stack spam does make Eastern factions almost unbearably difficult, though.
Medieval 2 is such a great game even after all these years it still is a very enjoyable game to play from time to time.
It was my favourite Total War game until I played Warhammer II
Plus the modding community for it is insane
@@peregrinemiles7936 Seems like all the mods are older. Are there newer mods for it. I just grabbed SS 6.4 last night and it seemed all the mods were 2012 or earlier.
SS is a solid mod, but I usually play around in the LOtR mods these days, they tend to be fairly up to date.
@@nealm6764 Divide and Conquer is a Lord of the Rings mod and it's still in active development with a fairly big community. Likewise the Call of Warhammer Beginning of the End Times mod. I believe those 2 also has a lot of sibling mods floating around so yeah, fantasy mods is more active than historical mods nowadays
Shogun 2 remains the pinnacle. Just my take. A truly balanced and weighty game that requires real strategy. It's aged beautifully, too.
assuming your savefile doesn't get corrupted. or if you dare use mods the soundfiles get screwed up (archer units make cannon sounds), but yeah, it's pretty good
I like the sync kills, even though I wished for better sync kills in basically any Total War game...even though I think they bring more gameplay problems that might make the added immersion not worth it.
My first encounter with the Total War Series was Rome Total War, I loved the opening cinematic.
Even tried recreating it in custom games once with the same factions and units while trying to make it as accurate as possible, to predictably poor results.
Music still holds up, though.
I used to play it on my Dad's old dell desktop, windows xp and 256 mbs of ram. Rome ran like shit but I played it everyday I could hahaha. Miss those days
The Divinitus soundtrack really sells it when you're on the campaign map adding to the mysticism of the classical/roman era.
Rome total war still has some of the best most interesting mechanics of any total war game. The way your generals would organically grow depending on where you placed them, who their parents were and how they performed. It makes warhammers perk system look childish. They even made it so that in battle the speeches were generated based on your generals personality, the size of your army and the size of the enemy, the state of the war with the enemy, your battle history, where you are, and a ton of other stuff that just made it feel so organic. Add the fact that the battle map was generated based on where you attacked or were attacked, if you were near the coast you could see the sea and if there was a fleet in the sea you could see that fleet, fighting near a settlement you could see it in the distance, even roads were included. The population system that added a high level of management to your army sizes and settlement growth and drastically effected how the game was played on higher difficulties. The fact that replenishment was incredibly difficult needing to go back to a settlement with the appropriate building so you could replenish units made every battle count and every casualty matter. You had to really manage your army over a campaign, attrition really took its toll. The sheer ambition of Rome is totally unprecedented and unmatched by any other game in the series. The level of immersion and replay value was staggering with all these organic stories and characters emerging over the course of a campaign. It really made those heroic victories feel heroic, and I don’t really think that any other game in the series has quite come close to that.
Medieval 2 has all of that and more though. Thats why its rated to so highly, it took the great things about Rome and polished/expanded them.
Medieval II was so great because it was the last TW game before the "GREAT AGE OF DLC"
Yes it had an expansion pack, but the sheer diversity of units in each faction alone was amazing.
Not to mention the great events, black plague, Mongols invasion, discovering the Americas, just to name a few.
If they can make Medieval THREE as good as two it goes straight to S tier
They will make md3 barebones on release and fill it up with different factions as an avalanche of DLC, same as with warhammer, because it makes them much more money. Better not raise your expectations for release.
M3 should be made on an all new engine, "Total War III," which would basically reverse engineer the TWII engine but with the addition of all the best received mechanics of other TW titles.
The allure of M2 itself was that no two factions played the same and that every culture had its unique 'flavour,' much like the TW Warhammer series.
@@Arcomist Yeah Video game's business model nowadays are pretty sucks for consumer. Better wait until Sale to buy it (or just not on day one release date), because besides obtain it cheaper, I think you'll get a much stable game...
When does the Americas get discovered? My game always crashes before I get to that point
@@godlymoose9118 I think it's not a specific date, (it's been years since I've played) It's more a navel port tech you unlock, at which point you can build the biggest ships, then basically you sail west through the Fog of war until you find something.
Any game company that thinks it's OK to release a 3rd title of the series with the first two titles being required DLC and refuses to drop those first two titles below release market value is not OK in my book.
It's so sad that Empire wasn't a good game... So much potential for Empire II with new technologies.
Yes. I hope one day CA will make an Empire II game.
@@Raider0075 Empire 2 would be like Easter and Christmas at the same day...
I can't decide which I want more, Medieval 3 or Empire 2, but I know I want either more than I want Warhammer 3
Empire was amazing back in the day
Hmm I loved Empire, but legend is right with the diplomacy there, its awful
See as a big fan of 'The Last Kingdom' TV series, I loved playing Thrones of Britannia. It's certainly stripped back compared to the non Saga TWs, but it has great siege maps, excellent UI design and runs super well. They also did fix a fair few of the issues it had at launch in patches. It's by no means perfect and you do likely have to be interested in the time period, but for a quick campaign every now and then I actually think it's very underrated.
For me Thrones of britannia is underrated and one of my favorites
Thrones of Britannia was my first TW game (super odd I know) but it'll always have a soft spot in my heart, especially since I didn't know any other YW game at the time.
@@Droidman1231 try shogun 2 u will love it
I also especially love the food system that require you to have enough food to sustain each unit. Combined with minor settlements not having walls, it actually allows you to wage economic warfare on your enemies by capturing their sources of food production, and have the same done to you. It makes it so that even the strongest kingdoms have a "soft underbelly" that needs to be protected and battles become much more decisive and important to the outcome of a campaign.
Like what King Alfred said in Season 1 of the Last Kingdom, "we cannot let our enemies march through our lands unopposed." When I'm being invaded and my main army is elsewhere, it becomes a desperate race to raise a force capable of repelling the enemy before they cripple my economy and food supply. It feels like the fate of the kingdom is my hands, and hands of the hastily assemble militia that will fight and die to protect their families.
@@strikemasterice2004 Yeah man, I love the fact that i can not recruit full 20 stacks because I can't feed them all and the settlement scheme which is similar to shogun is also good
I am one of these Shogun 2 and FOTS returning players. Absolutely love the polish of the game, the sprites' combat animations, the sound design, the art. It really scratches an itch I have about once a year the get into that place and period.
I hope CA can recapture what makes this game special in their future historical titles - Medieval 3 perhaps... wink wink
My main thing with shogun 2, is that I feel like I'm always playing the same faction. To me, unlocking and progressing to new units a very important part of the game... So when every faction has nearly identical rosters, rosters that aren't even that big... that really kills any reason for me to play the game more than once.
I will say that shogun 2 was the first and only total war game where I spent any real time in multiplayer, I can't believe they havent given us the ability to rename and recolor custom elite units since shogun 2.
my medieval 3 is ATilla medival 1212AD mod... ahahahaha
Late campaign FOTS gets so fucking boring though, and all the siege are braindead unless you're doing a traditional units only run. It works well in the early game where there's an almost even balance between traditional and modern units that the AI knows how to use but by the late game every battle consists of marching your artillery/infantry into firing range and then that's it. And the naval battles...If only they played as good as they looked!
@@MaMastoast The samey factions are definitely the Achilles heel of Shogun 2, however it is a much better game as a whole than warhammer AND Three Kindoms.
Otoh, I dont get at all why people like Shogun 2. Theres little depth and strategy in the battles, outside of some dumb skill spam, and despite the visual quality, the unit animations and physics are so weird and unbelievable that it felt like a massive downgrade from Medieval 2. Everything your units did looked so stupid, units just phased through each other all the time. It wasnt even "hollywood" quality that some people try to frame it as, because during fighting most soldiers just standa around doing nothing.
The warscape engine was so much worse here, because they actually made a game about melee.
That doesnt count stuff like all factions being the same, the campaign map being one of the most boring CA has ever made, overpowered super-agents, the naval battles suck...
IMO the series are Medieval 2 was a mess, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes less so. Only Total Warhammer 2 really brought it to a good level of quality.
Fun Fact: Rome Total War was used in a british TV show
“Lost a whole GPA cause of Rome Total War”
Same, but with Total War Warhammer II. I literally uninstalled Steam and refuse to redownlod until the college semester is over.
Shogun Fall of the Samurai came out just before some really important exams for me back in High School, I promised myself I'd just ignore it until summer. Was not easy, and I still wasted a lot of time playing standard Shogun 2 but managed to power though. Stay strong brother.
@@winndypops thanks. Once these finals are over, I’mma have a full week where I just game out. Like a mini stay-at-home vacation.
Lol - and here I am, having begun replaying it over the last week with my semester finals coming up in December :D
Saying empire is bad because the battles are slow is such a bullshit comment. Its a completely different form of battle due to the time period which yes some people wont enjoy as much as the more melee focused time periods but for meny people geting that perfect volley off with line infintry that leads to mass retreat because you took the time to organise your infantry formation properly is just if not more rewarding then charging in swords swinging.
One of the things I really miss from Medieval 1 is the ability to give individual generals titles that affect their competency, and that each individual unit had its own captain with traits etc. Died with rome 1 never to return probably
I wish you can attach Heroes/Officers to units so even your random spearmen can have some character to them. The Army veterancy and ranks thing from Rome 2 and Attila was great as well.
@@spamquisition4046 I always loved zooming in and watching the one samurai in ashigaru units ripping through everyone. Would definitely love to get that feeling again but with more detail and customisation
@@destroyah377 Yeah, or the knights and standard bearers leading my unit of peasant spearmen. It'll work so well with Warhammer too since they have all those magic banners.
While not the same feudal set up, 3 kingdoms allows you to give titles (like Coiled Dragon) and those give buffs while increasing salary. I think it's good
Are names of power for Dark Elves in Warhammer 2 not similar?
Great TA man I needed that honest appraisal, you have saved me a great deal of pain & suffering
'I skipped classes to play Rome 1, it could ruin my life.'
Well, look where it brought you now :D
Rome 2 was the first Total War title I played and to this day it still has a special place in my heart. I had never played any game like it at the time, so for me it was mindblowing.
I still come back to it from time to time
Man i fucking loved the OG rome total war.
My dad managed to get the collector's edition which had these amazing metal figurines of various units in the game.
After he got me my own pc i asked for the discs so i could play it, i didn't understand a thing because i was very young but something about controlling those massive armies was just magical to me.
I remember playing the greeks as a kid. Put all the phallanx units blobbed together, in a circle formation. The AI would go crazy trying to run towards the flanks of the spears, but since all units are in circle, the enemy would just bug out trying to find somewhere to charge. 10/10 would put 5 units of phallanx occupying the space of a single unit again.
Pathfinding was so bad turned me off tbh
I also started playing it as a kid! An older cousin showed it to me and I loved it. I was horrible at the campaing, mostly filled my cities with town watch and did not understand why I could not win battle, hahahaha. Loved the quick battle feature though, used it so much!
Never heard of this collector's edition, and can't really find any info on it on the web. Do you have a source or something about it? Really want to see those metal figurines!
As much as I love TW2 - you have to pay a LOT to get everything if you compare to previous titles. There's still quite a bit of content I don't own
You are absolutely right but also kind of disagree. I mean, yeah if you drop everything to your steam basket and buy at once its somewhere between 2-300$... But do you need to do that? Will you really play with every DLC at once?
If you wait for discounts you can get almost every DLC for 5-10$, sometimes even less. If you use instant gaming you get a similar price, but basically any time. Is 5$ a lot? Not really, its basically a cup of coffee, or half a pack of cigarette in most country. People spend several times more on a casual night out with the guys drinking.
So I bought 1, played it, enjoyed it sometimes for weeks. When I was done, bought the next one. They actually give you really good value as every 5 dollar gives you at least several hours of fun, depending on how good you are at the game. I played the wood elf DLC for at lest 30 hours or even more and it only cost me 8$.
So yes, if you just check the prices and add all of them up it seems expensive, but the value and playtime you can get out of it is insane and well worth it.
Also if we can indeed transfer all DLC to the TW3 that will be insane. Meaning the 5 bucks you spent in TW1 actually serves you in 3 games.
That being said the (extra) content is much more interesting than in previous titles. Factions in Warhammer have very different armies and campaign mechanics. The new campaign mechanics of some DLCs are also unique and very fun. You can play without these DLCs but they help refresh the whole experience over time. Overall, that's why TW2 stays with the highest number of concurrent players by far.
@@Debilinside I don't disagree with that at all, and I like knowing that there is extra content on tap basically when I need more. I guess it partly comes down to whether you're happy with the amount of content you get from the base game at launch. If so, then actually new content released over time gives great value for players and keeps us playing. (Contrast that to day one dlc which is frustrating imho)
Got my friend into total war through Shogun 2. We've been playing co-op campaigns and having a blast in a game I haven't played in years. My friend fell in love with total war and is now upgrading his PC to run Warhammer 2 so we can co op that too!
good for you, guys
I also had really great co-op campaigns in Shogun 2:FotS and in WH2
especially with giving command to the other player, I was the artillery captain to my friends dwarven armies, that gave him capabilities to micro his slayers and blasting charges etc.
and he was my High Elven Cavalry commander, spurring around the battlefield, delivering devastating charges :D
great fun
@@darth0tator cant wait to carry his ass with magic :D
Same here. Got my friend into the series by getting him to play Shogun 2 and now he blames me for converting him, haha. He’s since played Rome 2 and Attila, and he owns Medieval 2, just hasn’t played it yet.
Rome total war brought the series into my life, medieval 2 total war made it a staple in my games library. Even today I find myself running a campaign on it here and there, the way your generals adapted traits along with the chivalry and dread levels, improved upon Romes traits. Something modern total wars don’t invest as much time into, or have as much weight with especially the fantasy based ones.
I miss the maps on Rome total war mapping to the actual world. That’s still such a missed feature
Its not. Im presuming you are a Warhammer fan? Even Rome 2 has that.
@@danb4900 yeah I am. It’s good it’s in the historical titles. I skipped everything between Rome and WH1
3K does it
Kind of. I mean the battles where half the map was unclimable hills was always a bit awful.
Thrones has it
My list would be:
1. Empire Total War - the one that got me into the series. It's not just about era, but also the entire campaign. It has by far the best map, province system and if dynasty system was properly used, it would have one of the best politics. Battles were all about positioning and it was great. People say AI is the worst in the series and while it is not the best, I saw in the same series worse.
2. Attila Total War: It is like Rome 2, but better. I am not big fan of pronvince system, but the campaign is designed such that it actually made sense and it is actually good. Battles were challenging in a good way and naval battles are done right. Attila also proved that you can have both sandbox of the Empire and story focus like Napoleon. The only reason Empire is better is boring historical battles, lack of diversity and midiocre tech tree. I just wish we had last Byzantine-Persian war and that Empire divided was pary of that game instead of Rome 2.
Medieval 2: When people talk about stupid Total War AI, I immediately show this game. I can defeat 2 armies in open field with no sweat, I can defeat siege by simply poking the besiegers one by one and diplomacy may as well not exists. However, the development of provinces, time period, world events like mongol invasion, gunpowder and americas is perfect that only Attila tried to replicate to some degree. It is still an excelent game, but it has one of the dumbest design mistakes I can think off.
Napoleon Total War: Campaigns are alright, except Peninsular War which is excelent. Nothing much to say, it uses Empire mechanics which I love, but it is too limiting with how campaign maps are designed. That said, I had one of the most memorable battles there and the story it follows of Napoleon is amaizing. Where Napoleon truly shines are historical battles which are the best in the series. Actually the first Total War footage I saw was someone in internet caffee playing Battle of Austerlitz and it took me years to remember what game it was. That's how good Napoleon battles are.
Rome 2: Battles and Campaign are fun, because of how diverse they are and that's a key part. I got that game because I love Hellenistic Age. I never played any Celtic faction in the west, Rome or Carthage. That also means that I am kinda in this game along for a ride, because how much gams focuses on Rome (obviously). I say this because I measure the campaign based on Hellenistic Kingdom rules and they surprisingly fit better there then for Rome. Satraps and clients, WW1 grand alliances, cultural subjegation/integration fit far better for Seleucid, Galetian and Parthian mentality, then Roman and Carthaginian. However that also means that many events and mechanics are also ignored because they were made for Rome, like Civil War (good idea tough), province system (atrocious), or army system and stances. In other words, I love Rome 2, by pure accident.
Shogun 2: This is actually my first Total War. Tutorial was good and I replayed that tutorial siege multiple times. However, now when I have experience with the series, every Total War is better then Shogun 2. Diplomacy is by far the most pointless, even more then Medieval 2, unit diversity is even worse then Attila, campaign is worse then Rome 2 and Japan is designed like Napoleon Total War making naval warfare pointless. It was good enough to get me into the series, but I have no intention of playing it again, let alone bying it (I pirate every game before purchase as a demo). And why is campaign always over before it starts to get interesting? The fact I find Japan in general rather uninteresting probably doesn't help. Sassanid Empire and Byzantine Empire are enough to pick my attention and French-British rivalry of 1695-1815 is stuff of a legend. In Shogun 2, I couldn't care less about those clans I've never even heard of before launching the game, nor did I understood much of Japanese culture which puts Shogun 2 automatically in disadvantage (anyone from Japan, please don't take it personally, it's just I find some cultures more interesting the others). I will try Fall of the Samurai as the setting looks far more interesting, despite knowing very little about it, but Shogun 2 as far as I'm concerned served its purpose.
God i remember medieval total war
first total war game i ever played, and i played it when i was like 8. spent far too much time in custom matches with all artillery armies just dumping on castles
The very first Rome game I just played so friggin much. Grew hooked to your channel because so many things I remember learning to cheese you were right on it. Was like watching my past.
When it came out, Rome 2 turned me off from the series it was an absolute betrayal for those who preordered. But, it has improved a ton and brought me back to the series, in conjunction with warhammer 2
rome 2 is much better these days
Rome 2 is great nowadays. I waste hours and hours on it.
Ya Rome 2 when it first launched was like a mother killing her kid to me
I think they were over ambitious at launch, which caused them to lose sight of what makes a Total War game great, but they stuck with it for years after release instead of abandoning it and it is actually an amazing game still today. I feel like the game deserves an A for today just because of how much effort CA put into righting the ship that is Rome II, and how they have campaigns that span from the earliest days of Rome, all the way to the beginning of the end with the Empire Divided campaign.
personally I absolutely love Attila, it's definitely my favourite total war because of battle mechanics like you said but also the challenge. It has it's flaws like performance and stupid tech traps + corruption mechanics, but other than that I think the campaign is really fun, challenging and immersive. It's the only total war where I feel genuinely threatened by the AI and the first 5 years of WRE and ERE are pretty scary. It gives battles a truly epic feel cos you truly are fighting for the Roman Empire's life and one wrong step could cost you a whole province. It also has arguably the best DLC and mods of any total war game - Last Roman, Age of Charlemagne, 1212 (medieval 2 with better graphics), Ancient Empires (rome 2 but less of a slogfest), Rise of Mordor (Third Age with better graphics). Endless replayability and it has every pre-gunpowder historical total war experience packed in.
My first foray into the Total War series was Medieval 2 and it was absolutely epic. My only previous experiences in RTS were classic like AoE II and Warcraft 2 and 3 and this was mind boggling.
Huge empires and battles and sieging enormous metropolises (were the built building showed!) and 3 walled citadels were amazing for the time!
Even the complexity of game mechanics with diplomats, spies and assassins (and the small videos!) were the reason I spent countless hours on this game! Truly an amazing way into an epic franchise!
I always loved that touch of detail from CA. The fact you can see your buildings on the battle map made you motivated to defend your city.
It should be in S
As far as Empire: Total War goes I liked the setting, and I actually liked the multiplayer. Honestly the campaign really was that awful, but the multiplayer was quite enjoyable back in the day. It's the only Total War game I have put any effort into as far as the multiplayer goes.
Naval battles were so much fun
For me, the map, especially in Europe was a big disappointment. I mean France has two provinces for heavens sake.
I put 800 hours in Empire Total War multiplayer. Loved that game. Sadly, it's completely dead now.
Empire has a better campaign than Napoleon . You only have 4 factions in napoleon
Interesting, in my experience the issues with Troy were largely fixed; the chariots were nerfed to a reasonable degree, they can't bowl over elite infantry anymore; they've now settled into their role as chaff destroyers. Collision... okay, yes, still a problem sometimes, but it can be managed.
And the fundamental combat, where flanking is so heavily optimized, feels super good. And the factoins feel very different; Hector's standard anvil-and-hammer tactics are very different from Odysseus's mad skirmisher kiting, is in turn very different from Hippolyta's high energy hammer-and-hammer gameplay.
There were still some gamebreaking bugs and some really frustrating things when I last played(September) and I don’t think there was a patch since then.
Health doesn’t increase with general level like it should. Achilles’ challenger mechanic would break if a challenger’s faction gets destroyed. AI basically is like “fuck fronts” yoloing into the middle of your territory to sack a couple settlements before dying. Instead of Total War Troy it’s more like Total War Greece because it’s almost always Troy invading Greece instead of the other way around. You can also cheese every siege battle with Hydra units and poison but that’s more user focused so it doesn’t matter too much. If you check the forums there’s probably a lot more bugs/frustrations but these are the one’s I’ve experienced.
There are some positives but if it had like 2 more patches to fix the bugs it would be great. AI probably can’t be fixed.
@@1219nan ah, I haven't played since February because of hand issues, good to know.
Shogun total war had the best videos ever from Ninjas to diplomats to Geisha videos. The outcome of a agent was shown during the videos and it was revealed halfway through whether it was a succes or failure, creating great suspense.
Some of those videos were brutal, especially trying to assassinate a Geisha, they were like terminators in Shogun 1 lmao.
Like in Medieval 2
It's so refreshing to see Medieval 2 and Rome 1 not being put on a SSS+ pedestal in 2021
Why
@@Pikilloification Because there are some very loud people with very thick nostalgia glasses.
@@Vyleea Except some of us still think theyre great even with their flaws. Yes, nostalgia is a big part of it, but this tier list is looking at them with the vein of "Look at what we can do now, and look at the improvements, in hindsight these games werent that great." At the time though? they actually were the best of their kind and among the top of the whole strategy genre. So to say that they DONT deserve a high ranking, is as much a cop out and ignorant idea as thinking theyre the greatest.
@@cyanide7270 Who said they don't deserve high ranking? The SSS+ isn't the only high rank
@@cyanide7270 well, depend what your goal is.
Rating for players who had it at that time? Yes, you are right.
For new ones, who think about buying one of them?
No, it does not matter how good it was, it only matters how well it aged.
Attila had the most dynamic sieges in the series by far, optimization held it back, and units needed a bit more diversity but nothing has come close
I think Attila is the only TW where the defender will sally out to attack your artillery if player left it undefended
Dynamic? Thrones has the best sieges out of all total wars
@@Kublaioi so is ToB a good game? I've had it for a long time, but I still haven't played it properly. Just 18 turns of campaign and that's it. 2 days ago I downloaded it again and I'm going to give it a chance
@@arsduk Yeah it is, go on very hard difficulty with Sudreyar (if you like vikings) or Mierce (if you like English factions), you can try West Seaxe too but it generally gets easy after you conquer a bit
@@Kublaioi Already started with Circenn, trying to make Scotland great again :D
Feels good to hear other osts than TWW2 battle music everytime lol
great tierlist as usual
My father was playing Rome Total War in the hospital the day I was born. I turn 18 in October and I still play it every once in a while.
I've returned to Rome recently, purchasing the non-remastered version. It still is amazing and beautiful (in a way), but it definitely did not age well. How camera works is the exact opposite of intuitive, coming back to it from newer Total War games is jarring just because of that. Pathing issues, crashes, glacial pace with which the units walk, all this is rough to get used to after the years of improvements the series had made. Still love it, but I find playing it difficult. Does the remaster make the camera on the battle screen work more like it does nowadays, I wonder?...
Yes. Remaster is an 100% improvement.
Controls and visuals are such an improvement.
It brings a lot of QoL settings and features.
After you play it you wont come back to the non-remasterd version lol
@@Jose-sl9gh but maaann those pc requirements T_T ...
You know, you're a proper Legend buff, when you watch a 40min video of him, ranking all Total War Games, while you've already got and played every single one of them.
Shogun 2 was my introduction to Total War. I never looked back. I still play it alot... and I might even be able to challenge you on how many hours you have on Warhammer 2. Warhammer 2 though has definitely supplanted Shogun 2 for me. But even though Shogun 2 is unquestionably my favorite (next to TWW2)... I still agree with 95% of what you said. Totally fair assessments. I mean someone could get really nitpicky and go into the smallest details but broad strokes... this is a really good list.
You put Warhammer over Shogun 2, then proceeded to put Three Kindoms on the same tier? You got a chronic shit take, man.
For three kingdoms supposedly they had the Northern Campaigns DLC nearly finished before the plug was cut, it would have been one of the more important dates to settle first part of the entire era.
What is bitter though is that in a way the game doesn't even deserve its title. If you put all the DLC together you would barely just cover most of the "first" part of the Three Kingdoms Era and you would still be missing a lot of great characters too. Which in the game's case is very important versus other total wars. CA could have pulled a Warhammer on it but making a brand new game that has nothing to do with the first doesn't remotely look like a recipe for success.
This is strange to me, because three kingdoms looked very bad from the sidelines and I only ever heard negative things about it.
@@joshua41175 It was a bit of an odd card, for sure. The heroes worked really well imo, but risked turning away both hardcore historical fans for being bs and fantasy fans for not being full-on Dynasty Warriors. And it had very little prospect for proper DLC's left, and the first DLC was an absolute disaster with only 10 unique characters and a passive campaign (I might have been one of the only people out there who actually enjoyed a campaign with them). To add to that, there was very little unit variety and there really were only 1 or 2 strong army setups.
However, it probably still has the best diplomacy system in Total War history, the AI is pretty good 9 times out of 10 (and changes behaviour depending on difficulty settings, which is so undervalued!) and the battles play out very smooth ict contemporary titles. One of the few issues I have left with WH2 is that soldiers take so long to actually start dying. A volley of arrows should kill about 10% of a non-shielded unit, but in WH2 it just shaves off that amount of health with 0 casualties. 3K does this better imo, you actually feel like your combat actions have immediate consequences.
@@the_tactician9858 well I think it's mostly fine because we get to look at it from a table top perspective as well. Yes body's don't fall but individual models have their own hp bars. It is easier to balance imo and just feels better. It just takes a bit of a different perspective to accomplish that.
Should the ever chosen weilding the sword of khaine dab on the haters while moonwalking through kislev? Absolutely.
@@joshua41175 I know that, and it's not like it doesn't work and isn't balanced, it just feels weird, especially when coming from older Total War games, to see an artillery round or magic attack do f*ck all to the number of soldiers of a unit, even though 40 of them just got launched to orbit.
In that same sense, it feels weird to see an army that you just beated to 20% hit points still have half their troops. It fits the game, that I'll agree on, and it works well for Warhammer as a balance to the ridiculous amount of magic or ranged attacks available, but I personally prefer a more realistic system overall.
@@the_tactician9858 I mean, I'll never get over praetorian guard taking a onager to and knock over 13 models and only 2 stay down, so that's why I'm having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. Even in shogun you'd have yari peasants that take multiple flinches from archers before going down.
I cant even remember how many time i bought Rome total war , either from letting my friends or cousin borrow the game and not getting it back, from the cd getting scratched , or losing it
Warhammer 2 today is definitely the only S tier game, it's not even a question. And that's for one simple reason - replayability. There is no other Total War game with this amount of replayability. Every campaign in Warhammer 2 plays so differently than any other and it's just a joy. The campaigns in historical Total War games are basically all the same. The units are almost exactly the same in every faction and the campaign mechanics are also a lot similar.
Exactly. If the factions weren't so different from each other, I would just play a couple of campaigns and leave it, like I did with other Total War games. But with all that replayability potential, I currently have over 1200 hours in Warhammer 2 and still going up.
@@SereglothIV yep, and that's exactly the reason why people buy all the DLCs. Every DLC adds yet another new cool and different mechanics. And this is the reason why people weren't really interested in 3K DLCs, because they didn't really introduce any new different mechanincs. There is a reason why people have on average the most played hours in Warhammer 2 than in any other TW game.
Been watching you since maybe 2013-2015, crazy to see you review these games all these years later seeing you have played them and now in Warhammer 👍🏼 love you legend, will always stay updated!
3k really was blueballing, never got to the actual three kingdoms era in the dlc timeline and then when everyone was expecting a reveal of the Chibi (probably the most important that lead to the three kingdoms a few years later) they just drop the support for the game. Also left so many bugs introduced in the dlc (just look at the unoffical patch on the workshop)
EDIT add missing part of sentence
4:15 Medieval added proper sieges. In shogun the gate was always open. In medieval you had to break open the gate or use siege equipment to tear down the walls.
If i was to do this vid myself, other than not being as well done, it would be near on identical, rankings and reasoning.
The only reason I differ is personal reason with shogun 2, it came out at a time where playing online with my best mate was especially important because of life issues and Shogun 2 was the first game to really make that work.
yo i'm like 30 seconds in and I just gotta say I'm glad you made the point of doing the dual ratings. That was my immediate concern upon reading the title, since those are two very different situations to judge a game by
If you played Rome 1 and Medieval 2 on the day they are released, you would put them in S tier.
Warhammer 2 is something that I dreamt about since Medieval 2. "Man, imagine if they made such game but in world of the Lord of the Rings. I would play it all my life". Well, it's not LOTR, but still close enough for me to play it for years.
Try playing Battle for Middle earth Reforged, once it comes out. It is free and looks amazing
@@icoivo5529 I know man, I am waiting for it for years too. And for Kingdoms of Arda for Mount and Blade Bannerlord. All my life I am waiting.:(
have you not played the LOTR conversion mod for total war medieval 2? Its really good man.
Exactly the list we needed. RIght when you said Empire could go "straight into the f***in' bin" I lost it lmao
I agree wholeheartedly with the Troy pick, campaign map looked really good, some decent features, ran really well, introduced some really solid features which would go on to be implemented in Warhammer 2.
I even got the game for free, but I got so bored after finishing it once as Sparta. The battles are so boring, the mythological stuff is good, but they didn't go into it enough and only really half tried.
The thing i missed the most in MTW2 versus MTW1 is the titles. Provinces had titles and some buildings had titles. They could add to your general, and honoring the general could boost his loyalty. Back then an entire "doom stack" as we call them now could defect and you loose all that time creating them. Making a General the "master of horses" for example could boost the general's loyalty. Also i seem to remember that who you married mattered when it came to diplomacy. Anyways, they were fleshed out games for their ages.
What's your opinion of the building systems in the older games versus the newer games? Medieval 2 allowed you to build basically all buildings in a town or castle that were available, no build slots or anything like that, and while I know that that is theoretically worse game design, since choices are generally a good thing to force upon your players, the modern system just feels worse. Maybe that is because they streamlined it or executed it poorly, but the Medieval 2 settlement management feels a lot more satisfying than Warhammer's.
And then there's the recruitment system, I really adore the fact that units need to return to settlements that can recruit them to replenish, it makes me feel like I'm assembling and reinforcing an army more than just waiting for 2-5 turns for it to replenish. I love Warhammer 2, but its campaign side feels a lot weaker than Medieval 2's.
The old building system had meaningful choices you had to make. Do you build a trading port in a north-sea city or 3 grain markets in your interior towns? You almost never have enough money to develop every settlement at the same time, so you had to make priorities which upgrade gave you the highest return of investment.
The new system on the other hand gives you fewer choices in my opinion. Build 1 recruitment province and then spam the same template of growth --> fortification --> economy in every other province until the end of the game.
There's a big difference between choice because of too many opportunities, like Medieval 2, and too few like Warhammer 2. I've played a lot more of warhammer 2, but the city development is trash. Maybe unlimited buildings is too much, but then a hybrid with growth per city kinda like hordes or something could do well, with capitals intrinsically growing faster and able to reach further. The building slot system is really boring.
I really like the landmarks and resource system of Warhammer but yes, the old Medieval 2 system is better for me because all cities are important and you can really get into the nitty gritty of empire management.
My fav part of the old recruitment is how you can recruit one elite unit and some chaff in your capital then march them off to the frontline as reinforcements. Also, every battle matters because auto replenishment is not a thing. Of course, the AI breaks with this system because they just spam hundreds of armies without generals that can consist from anywhere between 2 to 20 random units in it. Makes things annoying in the end game.
Back in the day when I first got Rome total war my friend asked what I'll be doing that afternoon (after I school) and I replied "conquer Gaul".
If Medieval 2 doesn't end up in S tier for both lists, I'll eat my socks
Waiting for a video of you eating your socks
This may have been an ill-advised comment
@@hairybullocks507 I want proof, show me proof
Completely agree with you regarding the battles in Attila. The battles in Attila is what makes it a A tier game on my list :)
Your Rome Total War experience mirrors my Warhammer 2 experience.
ahahha
I played Empire just the other day and it is more of a C tier game now. The game still has the bug where it tanks your frame rates if part of a unit gets trapped on the walls but other than that its not that buggy any more.
Prediction:
Warhammer II is S-Tier.
No
@@ДядяКостян-п9щ yes
20:45 man this bit had me cracking up, love your dry humor
I remember buying Shogun it was amazing, I was still finding new features when I gave up to move to newer total war games.
The little video clips with agent actions were terribly funny. :)
@@CallioNyx Yeah they were, I guess with the amount of variety in Total Warhammer in terms of races and agents that wouldn't be possible anymore but they were great.
This is a disgrace, warhammer 2 over Medieval 2? Are you outta your mind man?
you have to take the insane faction diversity into account
@@kye4216 That's definitely taken into account, but Medieval 2 is beyond just factions, the campaign events are unparalleled, bubonic plague, the advancement of cannons the inventions in small arms, the mongol invasions, and indian invasions, not to mention the discovery of the new world and the crusades.
I play medieval total war today, i think its an underrated total war game. I love the atmosphere and the music of that game and the fact that you give titles to your generals
Game crashes for me
There's no way that medieval 2 shouldn't get s tier with how it's aged. There are countless things it had which games after it dropped(for better or for worst) and is definitely one of the most replayable total war games with all the mods in it.
The europa barbarorum mod for rome total war made it double S tier
Rome 1 shouldn't even be on the list, its the apex of these kind of games nothing will ever come close in terms of how good when it was released.
Man, I love Empire so much. It certainly has issues but it's ambitious and quite expansive. The AI suffers a bit but it introduced some cool empire management that feels more streamlined.
Wrong about Empire, it's the most ambitious campaign ever put into a total war game and the best naval battles.
Attila with mods is a joy and a challenge to play, and it has the work-in-progress Medieval 1212 mod that has great promise as a sort of Medieval 2.5.
Idk Empire seemed to have a lot of hardcore fans, including myself. Admittingly now you can play it modded...so the vanilla version might have just been trash.
It was different from the series, and they put some effort into the naval battles.
It's probably one of my fav Total Wars.
1. Medieval 2
2. Empire
3. Attila
now if warhammer 2 has naval combat of empire, layered sieges of medieval 2, infantry melee/ranged battle mechanics/animation of shogun 2 and amphibious landings of rome 2, it will be the greatest total war game in all categories.
If i recall correctly they can't implement naval battles due to it being a separate IP by Games Workshop, Man o War.
But since they abandoned it i do hope that someday we will see naval battles in TWW, the iron dreadnaughts of dwarves shredding everything and being a carrier for gyrocopters sounds fun af
the master of the tier lists!
The lotr mod for medieval 2 will always be the greatest mod of all time
Rome 1 is the pinnacle in a a lot of ways. They've never caught up to the impact or hype they had then for a historic title.
Bought Shogun back in 2000 and loved it to bits. Best part was the throne room.
I love that you could click the wise old retainer for haikus and poems.
I'll always remember this one:
"The water is a mirror
I cannot see the bottom,
yet I feel ashamed
for the bottom can see me clearly."
Deep.
And the emissaries...
"Buddha's compassion gooo with you."
Ah, the memories. :)
I didn't know you could do that😮
What are you talking about? I didn't play Empire at release, but it's still one of the best games in the series, it's 2024 and I still prefer it to Warhammer.
We all got different taste. But Warhammer is their last piggy bank tbh. Medieval 3 is their last chance to really end this mad cycle of bad business moves. I personally like the latest patch. Gives me very little hope in CA for once.
The Rome 2 rating surprised me, ngl. To this day it is by far my favorite total war game. The 1100 AD mod is amazing. I always felt like the combat was satisfying and everything had its place without anything feeling OP/ broken or useless and everything had a counter. Elephants? Pikes or javelins. Pikemen? Ranged units. Cavalry charges where satisfying and powerful when done right but you couldn't smashing through a braced infantry unit from the front. The economy was simple but effective. Idk man, its still the most fun I've had with a total war game and I play it all the time.
yeah i've also played rome 2 rigth from launch. pretty suprised he said the building & politics system were garbage. they were the features i enjoyed the most! building was way diversified compared to rome 1 & med 2. politics added much needed depth to your faction. i also feel like balance-wise it was in a right spot. not like attila. whenever i play attila i feel like cav is utterly useless and falls over at the slightest touch of missiles. nothing like it was in rome 2 where cav could actually take out a missile unit without losing it's battle potential. in my opinion it deserves a higher status especially on the 2021 list.
same
No joke, if someone told me to my face that Rome I and Rome II belong to the SAME tier i would get into a fist fight them.
Empire total war D tier? Garbage take. Easy A or B tier. Amazing unit variety, scale, and nuanced tactics.
Eh I love empire total war but it's only really playable with mods that fix some of its issues. Game is just host to all sorts of bugs that make the game unplayable at a certain point. Other games have just as much depth to it as empire combat wise all empire has is time period and scale is excellent
I appreciate and respect the fact that you made 2 separate lists for when they came out and how they hold up today....Cuz even still today ppl worship the OG Rome Total War like its a holy script and even if I love it to death ill admit there it can't hold up to some of the newer games in the series
My first total war was Rome 2 and I was addicted to it, I was enjoying every single thing, even I was losing the battle I was still immersed and love the close ups with the camera. I was surprised rome 2 was bad for everyone, I guess previous total wars set the bar too high on Rome 2
Honestly me too, Malakith Skadi got me into the game, I saw all the bugs in his playthroughs and knew what I was getting into. But I still got it because I love the Roman Empire and history, as well as strategy games. So nowadays I treat Total War releases like Bethesda games, it'll be buggy as hell on release but eventually smooth out so long as the company has reason to do so.
it is illegal to put troy above empire
Shogun Total War was Amazing when it released, I played it so much I ruined the CDs and had to buy a second game. The CDs would spin while you played the game, funny to think today. What an great game to start off the Total War library!
wow realy? i tried Shogun the first time in 2016 and it was so bad and ugly (in comparison to Rome2, Medieval 2 which i loved) that i only played it for 6 minutes and than never touched it till today. i hated this game so much that i didnt even wanted to try Shogun2 for many years but a few months ago a friend told me to get Shogun 2 and now i think Shogun 2 is a very good Total War game
I remember trying to find the CD for shogun in game, about a year after it came out. Makes me feels so old, but it was such a good game at the time.
same
@@Managarm1999 2016 was very late for Shogun. It does not hold up apart from the love poured into making it. The soundtrack of course also still holds up.
@@Managarm1999 Shogun 2 almost perfect tw game. There are 2 major issues. Most frustrating thing is diplomacy. Any faction without any reason can declair war on you and when you at war with couple factions the whole fckng map declair war on you (even your allies) and brings 2-3 full stacks to you. Very annoying shit.
Second issue as Legend says is almost no difference between factions.
Where would warhammer 3 fall into the list?
Launch D tier. Current A tier
The best quality of Empire Total War: The box-art with the guy screaming with a British flag in the background.
I agree about FOTS, I get the feeling it's a little unappreciated but I always really liked it and added much needed diversity and excitement to Shogun 2. The best way to make an alternate campaign expansion. Compare to say Rome Alexander which I think was a lot weaker and nowhere near as replayable as the original or Barbarian Invasion.
"Hold the line levy, the clan will remember your names." *Naval bombardment.*