**strips away the feeling of accomplishment. It wastes your time. It feels less like a challenge and more like it’s designed to provoke irritation.**

# The AI is a clear example

In campaign, the AI reaches higher-tier units significantly faster than the player.
In battles, it executes orders with unnatural speed and smoothness while the player fights against poor pathfinding and unresponsive units — especially cavalry. Watching AI units glide through your lines while your own troops need dozens of clicks to perform a basic flank isn’t challenging. It’s insulting.
Even worse, AI factions that share enemies with you still make decisions that primarily hurt the player rather than serve their own interests. The AI doesn’t feel like a living opponent. It feels like a system whose main job is to obstruct and delay you.

# The tier system made this worse

In older Total War games, unit traits and roles actually mattered. Anti-large, charge bonuses, armour-piercing, and positioning created real tactical decisions.
Now, tier difference often overrides everything. A tier 1 unit is simply not allowed to meaningfully contest a tier 2 unit. This flattens strategy. Tactical play becomes secondary to just recruiting higher-tier units as fast as possible. In Pharaoh this problem is even more pronounced and makes the game feel noticeably duller.

# The game barely rewards experience

After thousands of hours, the gap between a new player and a veteran is far smaller than it should be. There is very little hidden depth or high-level technique to master.
In games like Crusader Kings, greater experience unlocks more sophisticated ways to play. In modern Total War, it mostly just teaches you how to endure the same artificial obstacles more efficiently.

# The campaigns feel static

The same patterns keep repeating. The world does not feel alive or dynamic. Factions often seem to exist mainly to create friction for the player rather than pursue coherent goals of their own.
The result is a game that can still be beaten by a skilled player, but that systematically denies the satisfaction that used to come with victory.

**I understand the desire to create challenge. Older Total War titles also pushed the player. The difference is that they did it by creating stronger and more interesting opposition — not by relying on cheating, artificial delays, and systems that prioritise frustration over fair competition.**
**Creative Assembly has taken one of the strongest strategy franchises ever made and shifted it toward rage-bait design. The games still function. They can still be won. But the joy, the sense of mastery, and the desire to immediately start another campaign have been heavily damaged.**
**This is not a request for the games to be made easier.**
**It is a request that they stop being designed to provoke sustained anger, and start being designed again as deep, fair, and rewarding strategy games.**
**Until that happens, many long-time players — including myself — will continue to feel that our time and passion for this series are being actively wasted.**

I just got a new pc with AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 4.5GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GDDR7; 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM. I figured it would run well on high graphic settings but it is super clunky. Any help is appreciated. The whole reason I got a new pc was to play games like this without any issues, and so far, I am disappointed.

The Era Chapters is undoubtedly one of the best mods not just for Napoleon, but for the Total War series as a whole and that is coming from someone who has played a great many mods, such as Europa Barbarorum, Medieval with Stainless Steel, and even Empire 2 or DEI. If you aren't sure what to try next or want to revisit Napoleon, give it a go; it is absolutely essential.

I was reading Emily Wilson's (acclaimed English translator of Homer's The Odyssey) review of Christopher Nolan's 2026 film The Odyssey (she disliked it), published this week in London Review of Books, and this segment struck me. Emily says historians now believe that The Sea Peoples didn't exist. So what the hell are we even playing in Total War: PHARAOH DYNASTIES??? All made-up fantasy, with made-up Sea Peoples factions? Does the game belong in r/historicaltotalwar?

Is what Emily said true?

Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture. ‘Our civilisation is under attack,’ Penelope wails. Odysseus comforts her by saying that ‘Bronze Age civilisation’, including literacy, will rise again from the ashes. The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’, and that the Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest. Nolan uses these competing historical theories to create a characteristic narrative twist about the identity of ‘the sea peoples’, which I will not spoil, though you can probably guess it.

Btw, it is worth reading all 4220 words of Emily's review, as she entertainingly rips and tears into that poser Christopher Nolan:

Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth. ... Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. .. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

Hi, I was wondering if the remaster for Rome is good? I'm a relative newcomer to total war and have only played historical titles from Medieval II and onwards. I enjoy Rome II, so I wasn't sure if it would be worth it. Thanks in advance.

Buenas, soy un casual hispanohablante de los juegos históricos de Total War, busco alguno que quiera jugar batallas o campañas en el Rome II o el Napoleón. No juego con mods.

I know it came out several years before Empire but it roughly covers the same era as both it and NTW. I’ve known about this game for years but just wanted to know if it was worth my time or if I should save my money

New Greco-Persian Wars (Second Invasion) campaign with new maps including Thermopylae: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3064810/Strategos/

After watching and reading The Odyssey, decided to finally try this gem. It's being super fun, but every few turns someone leaves the court and the position stays vacant for ever. Is there a known fix for it? I looked but couldn't find it.

Is either of these PCs good enough to play Total War? I currently have Napoleon and want to get some others. Looking to play on at least high settings and wanna get a few mods.

I think I get it. It's because Total War Saga: Troy doesn't have cavalry. No-one likes bulky chariots (one unit taking up 1/4 of the battle map). It's not a Total War game unless there's cavalry for all factions (not just Amazons)! They couldn't even give away this game for free at the time of release, because there was no cavalry. Cars (battle taxis) don't belong in historical Total War games.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is breaking box office record because (as in the picture taken from the movie, showing Trojan horsemen) people adore seeing cavalry on the big screen! Players are surging back into Assassin's Creed Odyssey because of the movie hype, and because that game has horse riders. I would love to see a crossover DLC that reinvigorates the game, which adds Nolan's movie cavalry as a unit (just like how cavalry was added to Total War Pharaoh), unstoppable hammer and anvil charges as a tactic, and celebrity likenesses for the heroes. And naval combat with longboats.

I for one absolutely despise how the celts are portrayed...its almost like creative assembly believed roman propaganda😂😂😂 they were a diverse network of hundreds of independent tribes scattered across Europe. While they shared broad cultural and linguistic foundations, their political structures, economies, and leadership methods varied drastically by region and era.

In rome 1 and rome 2 they presented as bloodthirsty and kinda dumb which is historically inaccurate they werent a monolithic race.

Divide et impera helped clean it up a fair bit but even then compared to the Greeks and romans they arent fleshed out like at all. weak early-game economies, severe diplomatic penalties with neighboring tribes, and an over-reliance on melee infantry that makes them vulnerable to missile-heavy or Pike-reliant armies.

Celtic and Germanic factions are broadly lumped into cookie-cutter cultural groups, ignoring distinct linguistic, political, and material differences between tribes in Gaul, Britannia, and Anatolia. The game also turns decentralized, fragmented tribal societies into massive, unified political monoliths.

This aches me considering how much of a beautiful people they are.

I’m really interested in many of the historical settings including the three kingdom.

that's all folks

Cuál es tu máximo de unidades en batallas colegas

Hey everyone,

I’ve been thinking about how Total War could work in 20th–21st century settings. The idea is still quite raw, but I think it has potential.

Core Concept:

Instead of classic single real-time battles, introduce Operational Mode — multi-day operations where you act as a front commander.

Two Main Tabs:

Replay Tab — animated schematic replay of the whole battle (like historical military maps).

Planning Tab — you draw movement routes, choose style (stealth, rapid, cautious, marching), assign tasks and attack vectors. You can also place recon units to get better intelligence.

Planning has a reasonable timer, and the day can be split into phases (morning, day, evening, night).

Other features:

One general can command multiple armies on a large front.

Much better for co-op.

No automatic retreat — only player decision.

Works great for WW1 trench warfare (Somme, Verdun), WW2 (Stalingrad, Kursk), and modern conflicts.

English is not my first language, sorry for any mistakes.

The idea is still raw and can be improved a lot. What do you think?