With Empire Divided, it may be time to return to Total War: Rome II

Another thing in terms of the battle engine - it immensely disappointing is that it’s been over a decade since RomeTW and we’re still puttering around with the same army sizes (sometimes even smaller depending on game balance for certain factions) on the same size maps.

The Total War series is immensely popular. Its one of the most played games on Steam if you look at top 100 - There are always 4 , sometimes 5 of their games as the most played all the time. Skyrim aside, no other game series has this that I’ve spotted.

Normally, when a genre is this popular, and always sells well, you get tons of rip-offs, both from smaller og larger companies, trying to get a slice of that sweet moneypie (Survival, battle royal, MOBA). In this case, we got absolutely nothing, and haven’t for many years.
That usually means, that the game is too technically difficult to actually emulate easily - which is probably why the games haven’t changed drastically over the last years.

Its the same with games like Mount & Blade - Some games have tried to emulate PARTS of it, but never the full package - its just not that easy to do well it seems.

A few years ago it seemed this was a burgeoning genre and there were a bunch of total war clones. There were the two King Arthur games, and the follow up King’s Crusade based on Richard Lionheart, Imperial Glory (which I quite liked), the Russian ones - XIII Century and I think its sequel - Real Warfare? I played most of these and they were technically pretty good, arguably better than Shogun Total War. But none of them did that well I guess and no-one else has decided to get into it.

I enjoyed the Arthur games to a degree, but I recall the difficulty spike being really stupid.

The alignment wheel was pretty cool.

Knights of Honor was vaguely the same sort of game as TW, except the strategic map was real time iirc (it’s been a long time) and you were limited by having 12 "Knights,"who were everything from Governors to Landlords to spies to generals.

And armies needed Generals.

I’m sorry, but the only thing Knight of Honor had in common with the TW games was real time battles. In fact, I would argue that KoH is the superior game, and I’d like to see a modern version.

Or are we now calling any game with a strategic layer and tactical combat a Total War clone? Because MOO 2 would qualify.

Why sorry? :P

Anyway, I did say

which means only in a limited or tangential way.

Knights of Honor had some great ideas.

I installed King Arthur again and that also had some great ideas, but the difficulty spikes were not in my imagination.

If I remember correctly knights of honor has really great music.

And a nice starting screen., Super cheesy intro movie though :)