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Total War: Difference between revisions
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* ''Total War: Shogun 2'' (2011)<ref> (where the name format was reversed to "increase Brand Awareness".)</ref>
The games' system is an interesting hybrid, with a continent-scale strategic turn-based game that jumps to real-time battles for resolving conflicts between opposing armies. The main campaign takes place on a [[Risk
Battles in the ''[[Total War]]'' series are known as much for spectacle as strategy, to the extent that the History Channel used the ''Rome: Total War'' engine to provide visuals for a series on noteworthy Classical Era battle, and [[The BBC]] used the same engine for the [[Game Show]] [[Time Commanders]].
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** "Eager" - high morale; soldiers are happy to fight. The default morale level from ''Shogun'' to ''Medieval II''.
** "Confident" - medium-high morale; soldiers are ready to fight. The default morale level in ''Napoleon'' and ''Shogun 2''.
** "Steady" - medium morale; soldiers are fighting but aren't as enthusiastic.
** "Shaken" - medium-low morale; troops are getting skittish.
** "Wavering" - low morale; unit breaking up and about to flee. The games will warn you (via an icon on the unit's card) that the unit is on the verge of running.
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* [[Church Militant]]: In ''Medieval I'', the Roman Catholic Church won't hesitate to commission Crusades, nor will it hesitate to send its armies out to smash the uppity heathens. The original ''Shogun'' had militant Buddhist, and later Christian, samurai, who would rise up if upset at your daimyo's religious policy, be it conversion to Christianity or refusal to give up Shintoism if said daimyo conquers a territory that has been converted to Christianity. In ''Medieval II'', if a faction falls out of the Pope's favor and gets excommunicated (or simply doesn't belong to the Catholic church), be prepared for Crusades to such far off lands as... France.
** The Pope in ''Medieval II'' is fully capable of leading armies into battle like any other king or general. But where a king or general is depicted in armor and a fancy surcoat and carries a sword with which to attack cities on the map, the Pope appears in full Papal regalia. [[Crowning Moment of Funny|When he besieges a city, instead of hitting it with a sword he hits it with his crucifix-topped scepter.]]
* [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe]]: In ''Medieval II'', a priest's Piety rating not only affects how good he is at conversion and killing heretics, it'll also protect him from assassins. That's right, in this game, quite literally [[Jesus Saves]] (or Allah, for the Muslims.)
** Its implied that he's so widely considered a saint that people don't dare attack him for fear of [[wikipedia:Thomas Becket|reprisal]].
** Likewise, the zeal rating of Buddhist Monks or Christian Missionaries protects against ninja attacks in ''Shogun II''.
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* [[Depraved Homosexual]]/[[Depraved Bisexual]]: Your general can get traits that reflect his lack of inhibitions when pursuing same-sex pleasures. And if he has one, he tend to get another trait with worse effects, to the point that a city will break into riot the moment he sits on the governor's seat. One of the worst traits is Catamite, in which your general keep a boy-toy [[Sex Slave]]. [[Squick]].
* [[Despair Event Horizon]]: Pushing the enemy to this point is often the entire objective in battles, as once the entire enemy army is routed you've automatically won the battle. Assaults on cities and castles add an extra layer of complication, as they have "squares" - usually either at the base of the castle or the middle of the city - where any unit that enters the square automatically rallies and can't rout, causing them to fight to the death. Since pitching your melee troops into battle with an enemy who won't break is a recipe for a costly meat-grinder, most city battles center around trying to kill as many of the enemy as possible before they retreat to the square, usually by maneuvering cavalry or fast light infantry around on the flanks to cut off the defenders before they can fall back. Note that this makes it very hard to take higher-level fortresses and citadels without suffering major losses, as these grades of castles have multiple layers of walls and gates, making it much easier to retreat to the heart of the castle and hold out. The AI naturally exploits this, quite mercilessly.
* [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything]]:
** In ''Empire'', if you are fighting ''nearby'' a city with fortifications, Scroll over to the map's edge closest to the city. You can see the fort in the far distance. It's a nice touch.
** In ''Rome'' this was more detailed, fight next to a city and you'll be able to see it almost entirely on the battle map. Fight near the ocean with a fleet nearby, and you can see the ships on the edge of the map, in the background. Fight next to one of the Wonders and you'll see it in the distance. Fight a battle in Sicily, and you'll see Mt. Etna spewing smoke on the horizon.
** In ''Medieval II'', nearly anything your generals do can earn them one form of trait or another. Have a general visit or become governor to a town with a brothel? He might pick up a trait about becoming a womanizer. Leave a general between cities at the end of a turn? Might gain a trait regarding logistics. Have a general regularly fight armies of a particular faction, and they'll earn a trait that has them ''hate'' that particular faction and get a bonus commanding against them. Hire mercenaries and get a mercenary captain in the retinue, visit a town with an artist's studio and the general becomes a patron of the arts, visit a region with high Pagan religion and get a pagan astrologer or magician in your retinue, and so on. This even applies to agents; for example, a diplomat from an area with majority of one particular religion will be religiously intolerant, while ones from mixed-religion regions will be religiously tolerant.
** If you're trying to get your cavalry back behind your front line, don't charge them through your bracing pikemen in shieldwall formation. They'll kill your cavalry just as easily as they kill the enemy.
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* [[The Dreaded]]: A character in either of the ''Medieval''s can keep order with a high dread rating. It even says that the room goes silent when your character enters the room in the first ''Medieval'' with a maxed out dread. ''Medieval II'' has dreaded characters lower the morale of entire enemy armies by their mere presence. This is very annoying when fighting the Mongols, who all have high dread generals. Use chivalrous generals to balance it up... or use a general of your own with ''even higher'' Dread to make the ''Mongols'' break first.
** With a general whose Dread is maxed out, it's possible to break an entire enemy army by simply ''charging them.'' You don't even have to hit them; simply charge the entire army straight at them, and there's a pretty good chance that the lower-morale units break immediately, starting a chain reaction of routing that sends the entire army fleeing. With your faction leader, if you push the Dread high enough and execute enough prisoners/exterminate enough populations, he'll end up with the moniker ''[[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|"The Lord of Terror."]]''
* [[Dropped a Bridget On Him]]: A rare trait for priests in ''Medieval II'' is "Secretly A Woman." The character portrait even includes notably rosier cheeks if they have this, and with careful Papal politicking you can get a woman elected pope.
* [[Early Installment Weirdness]]: The first ''Shogun'' and ''Medieval'' games could count, as many game play elements associated with the series debuted in Rome. Among others, a stricter [[Risk
* [[Easy Communication]]: Probably one of the most blatant examples in gaming. You can command a group of knights half a battlefield away from your general, and surrounded, to break off, struggle through the enemies, and reform, before having them charge right back into the enemy (assuming they haven't routed.) In ''Rome'' and ''Medieval II'' at least, you can select an option that forces the camera to stay at your general's unit to counter this somewhat. The [[Easy Communication]] on the Campaign map, on the other hand, can be explained by the fact that each turn lasts half a year, and it is entirely reasonable to acquire the status of every asset in your empire and communicate orders back in that time. Also this way in ''Empire''... but that was pretty annoying (11 years to research a technology?!), so each turn became half a month in ''Napoleon''. One can ultimately treat the whole affair as a [[Hand Wave]] on account of the player representing the whole of one's own force's commanders at both "overall" and unit levels, though of course the player still has the advantage of being able to see unit statuses exactly (i.e. morale), being able to give orders with the "big picture" in mind (nominally anyway...), and the complete lack of tactical fog of war unless a unit is hidden.
* [[Elite Mooks]]: Every single faction has them, and usually they are an extreme nuisance to kill, if not a threat all unto themselves. [[Despair Event Horizon|Unless you break their morale, that is...]] though one of the reasons the [[Elite Mooks]] are such a nuisance is that they're much less likely to break and run than other units. Hell, some of them, in addition to having innately high morale and traits giving them resistance to morale shocks, will have traits that cause them to inflict morale penalties on your troops by their very presence.
* [[Enemy Civil War]]: Several games in the series allow for this, at least from the perspective of opposing factions.
** In ''Medieval'', a faction whose royal family was destroyed or are in possession of a particularly weak monarch could suffer rebellion as rival claimants attempted to seize the throne for themselves.
*** In both ''Medieval'' and ''Medieval 2'', Catholic factions who have been excommunicated may suffer from widespread hostility from Papal loyalists, which can be seen as an Enemy Civil War from the perspective of any Muslim factions holding the Holy Land at that point. When the French are sending crusaders to Frankfurt, they're not sending them to Jerusalem...
** The ''Barbarian Invasion'' expansion to ''Rome'' also featured possible civil wars in the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, as well as the division of the Gothic faction into Ostrogoths and Visigoths.
** ''Empire'' includes emergent factions which can emerge into dissatisfied regions of an existing faction, e.g. Ireland, Scotland and the United States may rebel against British rule.
** In ''Shogun II'' and its expansions, you can actually cause civil wars with Monks/Missionaries (''Shogun 2''), Sou (''Rise of the Samurai'') and Ishin Shishi/Shinsengumi (''Fall of the Samurai'') agents, which rallies the populace of a province in an attempt to overthrow the clan that currently is in control.
* [[Epic Fail]]: Those assassinations/infiltrations that don't end thanks to [[Reality Ensues|reality ensuing]] are these. For example, an assassin hiding behind a door who stabs himself with his own dagger when someone opens the door, or an assassin who gets bitten by the very snake he's trying to slip into your bed, or a ninja trying to drop-kick a target off a railing only to miss and take a tumble himself.
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* [[Reality Ensues]]: More than half of the failed assassination/infiltration videos involve the would-be assassins/spies getting caught doing something fairly obvious and getting killed instantly. Especially notable in ''Shogun II'' with one of the geisha assassinations where the geisha approaches two guards with polearms armed with two very short daggers. If successful, she kills both of them, while if unsuccessful....
* [[Real Time with Pause]]: In the single-player battle portions. Extremely useful, as it allows effortlessly commanding massive armies, as well as minimizing casualties. The strategy part of the game is strictly Turn-Based. ''Shogun II'''s [[Harder Than Hard|Legendary]] mode throws a blinder at veterans by taking away the "With Pause" bit.
* [[Risk
* [[Rousing Speech]]: Delivered by your generals before every battle. Some are straightforward, some are hilarious, and some are downright bizarre.
** Later games in the series will alter the content of the speech based on context. Things like the general's experience, previous battles against the same faction, the weather, and the relative sizes of the armies will affect which lines the general delivers.
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* [[Smash Cut]]: The trailer for ''Fall of the Samurai'' begins with a philosophical and peaceful, yellowish introduction of the process of forging and wielding a Katana, as well as its strong and ancient cultural ties to Japan. It stops abruptly in the very middle, and then cuts to a bluish view of the same samurai from the intro [[Curb Stomp Battle|being mowed down]] by multiple ''[[More Dakka|Gatling Guns]]'' handled by Imperial Japanese soldiers, with a [[Large Ham|hammy]] [[Eagle Land|American]] voice-over moderating the technological peculiarities of the weapon, and then asking the listener whether they now want to sign the contract.
* [[Springtime for Hitler]] : See [[Uriah Gambit]] below. Sometimes, you just prefer that the heir of the throne is that epic conqueror with eight stars in command and seven in dread, instead of a shitty governor from nowhereland, since it gives bonuses (i.e. counter assassination attempts). So you send the 0 star general and have him attack Milan alone, facing his personal guard of at most 30 men against at least 300 soldiers. He wins. And gets a trait which makes him much harder to kill.
* [[Sprite Polygon Mix]]: ''Shogun'' and ''Medieval''; ''Rome'', apart from its series defining changes, also introduced full 3D.
* [[Stop Helping Me!]]: ''"Your siege equipment is automatically deployed-"'' (''click'')
* [[Storming the Castle]]: Pretty much how you take down most fortifications in the game, unless you're willing to tie up an army for five to ten turns besieging the fortress. In ''Medieval II'', if you're a Catholic faction fighting another Catholic faction, you pretty much ''have'' to do this if your Papal favor isn't very high, lest you face excommunication next turn when you either don't lift the siege or assault the walls. This is, of course, why packing siege equipment with your army is always a good investment, so you can snatch the city/castle before the Pope gets noisy.
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* [[Stuff Blowing Up]]: Once you acquire gunpowder, this is your assassins' favorite method of either killing or sabotaging.
* [[Suicidal Overconfidence]]: The strategic AI tends to gravely overestimate its chances and will gleefully attack an empire five times its size and three times as powerful. They'll also refuse terms if you try to reason with them, somehow still confident that they can destroy you with one city. On the tactical level, however, the AI will form a defensive block or flee outright if you clearly outmatch it.
* [[Suspiciously Small Army]]: Despite being one of the most realistic representations of battlefield tactics in the gaming industry, Total War does this, or at least the earlier games do. A unit's standard size in ''Rome'' is between 40 and 60 men, and even at the huge unit size, where unit sizes can reach a massive 240 men, armies can't exceed 4800 men. The actual Roman army, meanwhile, could number tens of thousands in single battles. Naturally this is due to graphical limitations, a 10,000 man army would break all but the most advanced computers. Every faction bringing that many or more to the field would make the game impossible to run. There is however a mod for empire that increases unit size to about 500 man for each unit making a full stack grow close to 10 000 man.
** ''Shogun 2'' is set to expand this, though, with each side being capable of fielding up to ''sixty-four thousand men'' in a battle.
** Done if you or the enemy hide your army in trees during battle, leaving only a small number of units visible. When the enemy gets close enough they stand up, and if the woods are big enough they can conceal a very sizeable army.
* [[Sweet Polly Oliver]]: Priests with the trait "Secretly Female" in ''Medieval II''. This raises her Piety rating, as she is so devoted to her faith that she would risk discovery and death for it. With careful maneuvering, you can even get her elected Pope!
* [[Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors]]: While the sheer mind-boggling amount of units renders this somewhat moot in combat, 'Shogun 2'' has a clear-cut case in the specialist characters on the strategic map: Ninja/Geisha beat monks/missionaries (they can't detect ninja, ninja/geisha are hard to convert, monks/missionaries are vulnerable to assassination, ninja scouting armies makes them harder to demoralize), monks/missionaries beat metsuke (monks are hard to arrest and metsuke are vulnerable to conversion, adding monks to armies make them harder to bribe), and metsuke beat ninja and geisha (are good detectors, ninja/geisha are vulnerable to arrests, metsuke are harder to assassinate and overseeing armies make them resistant to assassination and sabotage)
* [[Take a Third Option]]: While your chosen clan in ''Fall of the Samurai'' can side either with the Shogun or Emperor, it can eventually opt to basically say "screw it" and go against both of them as a Republic.
* [[Tempting Fate]]: The description of the Turks in ''Medieval 2'': "After all, how likely is it that an even more fierce and formidable race of nomads sweep down from the steppes?"
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** ''Fall of the Samurai'' is pretty much nothing but this. The use of 'traditional' troops is an almost outright historical falsification: The samurai caste had been more or less entirely de-fanged as warriors since the inception of the Edo period and the Boshin war had both sides using modern weapons and professional armies (or armies-in-the-making). 'Traditional' weapons were used during the opening stages, but it was not because of any wish to preserve the 'old ways' but simply because they didn't have anything better to use.
*** Though to be fair, it is solely the player's choice if he wants to make use of traditional units; he doesn't have to use them, as he gets access to firearms from the every beginning (and that counts for every faction). It's not as much a requirement as it is a bonus or a historical joke.
* [[Violence Is the Only Option]]: You can ''try'' diplomacy and being nice to people, but either the AI will force you to fight or you'll get tired of your annoying neighbors. That said, it's possible to bribe armies to disband or settlements to defect to your side... except there is no more bribing armies in ''Empire'' due to the revamped diplomacy system, and in ''Empire'' the AI will eventually declare war on all neighboring nations regardless of public opinion. In ''Medieval II'', the AI never seems to learn. You'll be thrashing it, then either the Pope will make you stop, or they will offer you a substantial amount of gold to let them go. Then a few turns later they seem to forget this and attack you again. This can lead to several long and costly wars throughout the campaign. The AI in general is famously stubborn. At times, it will not even accept a ''gift'' of all the territories the player has seized in a war, and that is a ''gift'', with no ''ceasefire''. This is averted in ''Shogun I'', or the easier settings at least. It is possible to win the game without ever declaring war on any rival clan, and to make alliances with them to this end. Said method, however, is to create dozen of spies to forment rebellions in enemy provinces again and again and then sweep in yourself after the old clan was expelled, and to train a few Geisha and unleash them on your allies until, sooner or later, you inherit half the country. The only time you are at war is against peasant rebellions, and they are the most likely to flee without fighting, though eventually they will run out of places to hide and you will be pitted against an amalgation of armies in one final, climatic super-fight.
** Played straight in ''Shogun 2'' with the "Realm Divide" event. Once you have control of about one-third of the map, the Shogun will send ''EVERYONE'' against you. All of the remaining clans (except those allied with you, but don't expect them to stay that way for long) will also promptly stop fighting each other, ally with one another, and declare war against you. And they'll often each send an army of about twenty units (of varying degrees of quality) at a minimum. At this point, diplomacy is worthless.
* [[Violent Glaswegian]]: In ''Medieval II'' when you click on a dreaded Scottish general, "I'll rep off yer head an' spet down yer neck!"
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