Total War: Rome 2
Going to do a screenshot blowout of R2 since not many people appear to have posted it much in this thread.
I'm pleased to say that I never had the opportunity to touch the game until some time after the Imperator Edition was released, at which point I grabbed it in a sale along with all the DLC (except the recent Wrath of Sparta campaign). In it's current state, the game is honestly not that bad at all. Hell, it's more stable than the latest, patched version of Rome or Medieval 2. Anyway, I took these shots from a variety of campaigns using several different mods, such as Radious' overhaul, Divide et Impera, Spartacus Rises and various tweak/visual mods. In the end, I think I'm fairly satisfied with the vanilla game plus a few tweaks of my own (24-48 turns per year, some of the sillier "gamified" features removed etc.) and the Radious Battle mod. I have to say, it is an EXCEPTIONALLY ugly game. Even if you have the machine for it, I'd recommend using the HDR disabling mod, turning off vignette effects etc.
Anyway, here's my short Iceni game. Infuriatingly, there's no "Short Campaign" option, so picking a faction means playing through pretty much 50% or more of the entire world map before you can claim victory
I just said fuck it and set myself personal objectives - focused around unifying the British Isles and sacking Rome. One feature I particularly enjoyed was the "Join Confederation" diplomatic offer, which allows certain "related" factions (e.g. Germanic tribes, British tribes, Iberian tribes etc.) to merge with one another - thus the Iceni can create a "British Confederation" with the Brigantes, Iblana, Dumonii and other "family" factions. This is particularly interesting when used before you've maxed out your armies/navies because it gives you control of the other faction's characters. So in my game I went to war with the Oirish, but weakened them enough to force them into a confederation, making their faction leader my sub-chief
As usual, you will still run into nonsensical AI behaviour, such as the pathetic, landless remnants of an allied faction refusing to join my confederation until they were literally one turn from being destroyed by attrition...and STILL demanding 60,000 gold for it
After sacking Rome and a few nearby settlements, Rome managed to recall a legion of veterans, Praetorian guard and Socii mercs. I stopped the campaign after defeating them and slaying the Legate, partly because it seemed an appropriate time and partly because by that point there were a couple of mega-factions in control of Europe and Greece.
I also did a very brief campaign using Syracuse, which were a difficult faction to play due to their lack of resources and high chance of war with at 2-3 larger factions at once (Libya, Carthage and Novo Carthago, though the latter are usually too busy in Iberia to do much). In the end I got frustrated with Rome's prosecution of the war and quit. There are some interesting features like "Set War Target" in R2, but co-ordinating a war between a human and AI faction is still horribly difficult. I'm sure the old Risk map would've made things much simpler.
Still, I moved on to a game in charge of Sparta, with the aim of observing how XTREME actions like executing prisoners and razing settlements influences the general diplomatic situation (it really doesn't make as much of a difference as you'd expect since everyone likes you for doing horrible things to their enemies). Money was a major issue for Sparta since they're only in control of a single sub-province, so I allied with Macedon and focused on assisting their armies rather than wasting coin on maintaining garrisons for my own lands. This involved a few wars with the unaligned Greek and barbarian factions in the north, and was much easier to control due to the short distances and lack of sea movement compared to the Syracuse campaign. Once that front was under Macedon's control I allied with Syracuse and besieged Carthage, which took far longer than it needed to due to frequent slowdowns (apparently related to unit pathfinding getting confused by the custom settlement). By the time Syracuse had lost control of north africa I was fighting off uprisings in their homeland (which had been taken by Libya), so I decided to call it a day.
The Rome campaign was the only one I actually finished. It started off interesting enough, but once I'd taken Italy and the Alps and started pacifying Gaul, it became tedious to control so many variables and try to remember the details and backstories of the various characters. I probably autoresolved something like 98% of the battles, though there were still a few good fights, particularly with the Suebi. It was frustrating to observe some AI behaviour and not be able to nudge allies into better relations with each other, as once I reached the late game I ran into very close 100+ turn allies randomly attacking my other allies despite being half-way across the world and still involved in wars with my own enemies. The diplomacy screen has come a long way since Rome 1 but there are still a lot of incomprehensible decisions being made. I saw the same thing in an aborted Egypt campaign, but I was using Radious AI for that so I don't know whose fault it is in that case. One thing I particularly liked in this campaign was during my war with the eastern european factions, where a single stack slipped through my line and went crazy in Gaul, liberating a faction, which spawned a new stack, which went on to liberate another nearby faction, and so forth. I finally ended the uprising when their final stack got caught attacking a city with my relief force just within range.
Finally some miscellaneous screens of aborted campaigns and various mods.