Creative Assembly's expansions

I can't say there has ever been a time when I was not very pleased with Total War game expansions. For Medieval 2 especially, I completed the Americas, the Crusades, and the Baltic Crusades campaigns several times, and those were definitely my favourites in the entire series. I know many will not agree with this particular choice, but you know what I mean.

Still, I feel that they sometimes end up releasing their most important expansion features completely half-assed.

For example, in the Baltic Crusades campaign, there is a special option for the Danes after they conquer Finland, Sweden, and Gotland. You can marry into the Norwegian royal family. Then you can assassinate the Norwegian king and prince so that the crown goes to your hands. Very difficult and very risky thing to do, since it requires several assassins to pull off, with the risk that the Norwegians may find out about your plans. The result will be The Union of Kalmar.

But the reward? Nothing.

The manual says you were supposed to receive special units. You would first gain all the unique Norwegian units. And then you would gain a new set of Norwego-Danish super-soldiers. But you get absolutely nothing. No units to train, no trade boost, no shift in alliances out of fear. Your red cities simply turn yellow. Hack the game files and you are unable to find anything to obtain the units you were supposed to get. It was a skeleton feature that was never implemented.

 

The true reward here is being the master of Scandinavia united under one crown. Seriously though it is pretty lame that you go through all that trouble to find that the feature is broken and you get no special troops. I believe for the most part the Total War series fails to live up to expectations. It's weak AI and its historical inaccuracies have always been a turn off for me.

 

Personally, I always wait for the efforts of the very excellent modding scene to fix it all up and create some new and awesome campaigns (or improve the old ones) by making actual use of all the features that the engine supports.

The modding scene is pretty much the best thing about the Total War games.

 

I liked Barbarian Invasion the most because it completely turned on it's head the basic premise of the TW series where each country/faction would pretty much start on an equal footing with a little bit of territory with the goal of conquering everything else. Here there are such factions but they work in a totally different way to the standard(at least up until a point) and there's a real decision to be made about when to keep going as a horde to take advantage of the bonus and when to settle down and become like everyone else. Other factions already have a lot of territory and their goal is merely to survive: Romans rule the world, but there's riots and unrest everywhere, barbarians closing in from everywhere, fuck all money(particularly for the Western Empire), meaning that your domain can be whittled down to fuck all pretty quickly. I remember all the howling about the difficulty of maintaining the Empire...damn CA for putting in such historical stuff in mah gaem! It's because of such complaints that CA never strayed far from the basic formula since then. Still others are in between: minor powers that have to just hunker down and take the scraps when they can when the big boys are tearing strips off each other.

Mods are better of course, but they have the benefit of not having to make everything from scratch or working to a deadline or having to cater to the masses in order to please the money men. Even so, I haven't seen too many mods that use BI gameplay as a starting point; most go with the 'more or less equal factions holding a bit of ground at the start' standard.

 

Try Invasio Barbarorum: Somnium Apostatae Iuliani. It's set in the time of Emperor Julian who tried to support paganism against the spreading christianity.
Religious turmoil is standard when playing as Rome, since not only do you have christianity and paganism, but also manichaeism, judaism and arian christianity in your Empire. Your financial situation is absolute shit if you don't dismiss a lot of troops in the first turn, which leaves you kinda vulnerable since you have enemies on all fronts and rebellions will be guaranteed, especially in Spain and north Africa. And you'll be attacked by huge barbarian armies each turn to the point that you have to abuse bridge defense battles to survive.

Overall, I like mods that just try to portray the historical situation at their time instead of going for balance. It's fun to play one of the minor nations that start out with one or two provinces and have to contend with much larger neighbors. I guess CA circumvented that in Empire by making minors unplayable, but luckily there are mods to allow playing them, which makes for a much more challenging experience.

Really, TW games are at their best when you pick a nation that's in a disadvantageous position.

 

Thanks for the tip. Yeah I also prefer historical setups. On top of all its other faults I hated how easy it was playing Poland in Empire. The country had less than a century to live FFS and was someone's bitch throughout virtually the entire century on account of its weakness! Yen in Empire, becoming a superpower was only marginally harder than most other countries when it should have been one of those choices for the uber hardcore gamer.

 

Yeah agree Barbarian Invasion was pretty decent, was even somewhat fun with western Romans, unlike original Rome where you just steamrolled the whole map, with no oposition : (
I think what mostly lacks in total war game is
a) A chalenging AI
b) A sense of realism, i am not talking here about stuff like historical units, since i know that is never going to happen, i am talking here that all those finner elements, like economical war,succesions,pillaging etc were never there and it was mostly again all due to the imbecile AI which also got a bunch of magical gold per turn out of thin air etc..
So yeah Ai is the stuff that is the most broken one
And what is the most important thing in a game? - gamplay, and since AI can't play the game, u alyways just get this huge map that you just go about your own way and in 50-100 turns it is over.. Never have i been defeated in an TW game, and probably never will

 

Too bad that they never really released anything amazing for Empire or Napoleon... unless you count Napoleon as a standalone expansion to Empire.