Total War: Difference between revisions

* [[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.

* [[Word Salad Lyrics]]: The lyrics to the "map view" music in Rome are just a disconnected series of Latin nouns. Which is, admittedly, characteristic of some Roman poetry.

* [[You All Look Familiar]]: Especially in the early games. In ''Medieval II'' the series added more randomization to soldiers' faces and uniforms, but made them all have the same face again in ''Empire''. Fixed in ''Napoleon'', where there's differing (though often similar or reused) appearances for individual soldiers, but named historical generals will have their their distinct looks. For example, Thomas Picton appears in a long red coat and top hat (his luggage having not arrived to Waterloo in time), while Napoleon wears a long gray overcoat and distinctive hat.

** Zerging is a viable strategy against the Mongols and Timurids, too. When they first appear, they're just unsupported armies with no cities backing them up, which means that any Mongol or Timurid warrior you kill ''stays'' dead and cannot be replaced. Since by the time the Mongols show up you'll already have a strong empire that can take some losses, it's possible to simply keep sending waves of suicide armies against the Mongols and the Timurids to batter them down. You can replace your losses; ''they'' can't.

** Semi-averted in ''Empire'' and ''Napoleon'' due to the presence of field artillery, and almost completely averted once the enemy infantry or cavalry are in range for canister shot. This can work against if the numerical advantage is sufficiently lopsided or if advancing against infantry, but usually by the time you can effectively zerg, you've tended to have gained the advantage anyway. On a campaign scale, however, Zerg rushing is still a viable tactic and is usually called "blitzing". At the beginning of the ''Empire'' campaign, each province - especially for the larger empires - only has a minimal amount of units, meaning that if you can build up a stack fast enough, you can sweep up most of their territory before they are able to muster up an army large enough to halt yours. If you use the [[Game Mod]] that enables minor factions, Persia is good for this, as it is able to recruit Bedouin warriors (who are cheap but plentiful) and borders two overstretched empires - the Ottomans and the Mughals. The main obstacle is keeping your newly-acquired provinces under control while your army immediately moves on, although all but the capitals require a token occupation force and tax exemption status to be kept under the boot.