Not exactly on topic but what is the best total war game in your view?
Conventional wisdom has it that in a technical sense, Medieval I + Viking Invasion is the best Total War game, but I haven't played Medieval for many years and never Viking Invasion so I'll have to compare the more recent entries (all of which I have played).
To some extent the answer is going to differ depending on whether you're focusing on the strategic or tactical level - while overall I'd say Shogun 2 is the best game, it is rather limited for tactical play for similar reasons to Rome 2 - the battles aren't as fast, but they can be over quickly, and there's not a whole heap of variety in the units (Rome 2 doesn't technically have this problem, but there's only so much variety that's actually relevant in a siege - I wouldn't be surprised to find it's a bit like playing the Maratha in Empire, where you have half a million types of cavalry, exactly none of which are of any use in a siege, while your several artillery variants all do exactly the same thing). Shogun 2 has bad AI, but knows enough to compensate with unit spam and gigantic rushes.
But Shogun 2 has a few things going for it:
1. Interface: The interface is probably the cleanest and most accessible in any TW game, and it actually has an encyclopedia to boot.
2. Sieges. Okay, the AI can't attack successfully in a siege - it's better than Medieval II, but the less said about that game's tactical AI the better. But Shogun 2 is the first TW game to have a siege system with a semi-meaningful 'capture' objective (rather than something you nominally have to capture but which you'll only actually capture when everyone's dead anyway because the enemy units sit on the victory point), and where controlling and opening gates was important (because without ladders scaling a defended fortress is suicide).
Above all, sieges in S2 could be dynamic and fun. This is not to be underestimated - TW games revolve around territory control and pitched open-field battles in campaign games are rather rare. Until the victory conditions change or a Paradox-style 'warscore' system is introduced that allows you to contest control of a province through pitched battles, most battles in a TW campaign will be sieges. This is to my mind fundamentally what killed Empire - muskets and sieges don't play well together, and a game that was all muskets, cavalry and artillery vs. a large fortress involved mostly standing around for ages waiting while the cannon ever so slowly blew holes in the wall, and then chucking things unceremoniously into the resulting gap.
Actually, Empire had a very well-designed open-field combat system, and was the only game in the series in which actual unit formations (rather than army formations) were of much tactical relevance (after years of playing TW games I've yet to determine any noticeable game effect from whether my melee units are wide or deep, other than finding space to put them on the map) - seeing a cavalry charge and forming an infantry square to repel it and the like made for a much more dynamic tactical game than most, but with the lousy AI and (thanks to all the sieges) the fact that you were asleep long before you actually met an enemy in the open field (or researched infantry squares), no one ever got to enjoy it.
3. Agents. Shogun 2 agents were not exactly balanced (then again, TW agents never have been very well-balanced), but the design was the best so far in a TW game. I've yet to experiment much with R2 agents to see whether the more varied stats and mission types are a further improvement. The removal of merchant and diplomat agents (actually an Empire innovation, but carried over) is a marked improvement - there wasn't a lot of strategic flexibility in using these in the older games, and merchants in particular 'levelled up' more or less randomly, so constantly losing agents to hostile takeovers, or being unable to close deals because you rolled a bad diplomat, was an exercise in frustration in Medieval II. Shogun 2 also adopted Empire's trade system wholesale, which aside from the AI's irritating behaviour re raiding trade routes is a big improvement for the series.
4. Streamlining. Shogun 2 did discard some stuff rather unfortunately, and I still think that "gold=everything" is a bit of an oversimplified approach to empire management and that tax slider should be local (as in older TW games, but not S2 or R2). But Total War is not a strategically complex game and never has been, and Empire/Napoleon in particular bloated the strategic layer (distinct building chains for otherwise identical tobacco and cotton, for instance). Complexity is great in a game, but feature bloat that gives the appearance of complexity to a game that basically amounts to "build economy, buy units, go kill things" is just sloppy. Most of Shogun 2's streamlining has been widely welcomed, I think rightly so.
5. Dilemmas were a new type of event that added extra flavour in S2, though you still get the traditional missions (exactly who's offering them being a perennial puzzle, as S2 has no Pope or Senate equivalent).
6. Strategic AI. It's not great, but it's better than in any other TW game. The AI can identify weak targets and prioritise them, it will sometimes ally to fight a common enemy, it will refuse to open borders even to friendly factions if doing so would let you gazzump a province (which gives the illusion that it has its own agenda), and it's capable (though not brilliant) in its unit selection and army coordination. The realm divide mechanic is annoyingly arbitrary, and Fall of the Samurai shows only one way in which it could be handled better than vanilla, but it does at least achieve its stated objective: to make the Total War late game a challenge, while in past games when you had an established economy, developed settlements, and a couple of big stacks, winning the game was just a matter of slogging through sieges.
7. Tech progression is about right in terms of unlocking units and buildings at appropriate game stages, and the AI will mostly keep up (in Medieval II I'd routinely have much more advanced units than the AI, and it looks as though units unlock very rapidly in R2 as well), and more advanced units rarely make earlier ones wholly redundant.
8. Setting variety. This is a bit of a cheat, but I love the idea of having a TW game that covers a fully pre-gunpowder period (a la Rome, minus the exploding ballista bolts of Rome 2), a medieval period where guns are gradually introduced (a la Medieval) and a modern, gunpowder period (sort of a la Empire/Napoleon, but somewhat more recent). Shogun 2 is the only TW game that offers the "whole" TW experience, as it were. It's a cheat because Fall of the Samurai is to all intents and purposes an unrelated product, with no units, techs, or even map common to Shogun 2, and which doesn't require vanilla to play.
The only big downside I'd say Shogun 2 has is naval warfare. The AI is terrible but more than that the system - designed as it is for Empire's Age of Sail naval warfare and with the corresponding map sizes to accommodate that - is not at all suited to clashes between coastal patrol boats. Battles between slow, short-ranged ships on giant maps are long and tedious, and lack tactical variety due to core limitations in unit design - Empire and Napoleon (and Fall of the Samurai) had a set of formation, speed and ammunition types for different ships (even if you did, in practice, just automatically select chainshot, immobilise the enemy and wait for surrender). Beyond rowing hard, battle cries for melee ships and fire arrows, Shogun 2 naval combat is just closing and boarding/shooting. Boarding actions themselves are slow, and ships all but impossible to physically destroy - you can burn them with fire arrows, which will work if they then surrender (i.e. jump ship), but otherwise you end up with gigantic inflated fleets you're continually having to return and repair (unless you just scuttle your captures).
This becomes a problem because the AI forces naval warfare on you - not only do the factions all assiduously raid trade routes (with navies of one ship at a time, which are very easy but tedious and repetitive to deal with), but there's a dedicated non-player pirate faction, and autoresolving battles is very poor (as in every TW game except R2). Much of the tedium you don't get from repetitive sieges is sadly restored by even more repetitive naval battles.
