Can someone please tell me what all these abbreviations mean?
I obviously know BNW, but I don't play the other games
EUIV: Europa Universalis IV. A heavily-detailed historical sandbox game in the vein of Crusader Kings 2 (CK2) and, well, Europa Universalis III. Never really got into them; I prefer challenges to emerge (or not) organically from a game with set victory conditions as I play (such as "I don't need to do this to win, but I want to destroy this clan that's become my archenemy") rather than having the game force me to choose 'roleplaying' victory conditions.
TWR2: Total War: Rome 2. Billed as the biggest and best yet - what we've seen of the tactical battles looks hardly different from what we've seen eight times before, but the campaign map (which we haven't yet seen in action) promises a lot more, including tantalising hints of a 'cultural victory' condition, and it's replete with factions (12 playable from the start including the preorder DLC, more certain to be added as DLC down the line). It's the game I'm most looking forward to this year.
CoH2: Company of Heroes 2. The sequel to (as developers Relic like to loudly and repeatedly remind everyone) the highest-rated RTS of all time, and deservedly so. I've barely looked at the beta yet, but it seems very similar to the original although possibly faster-paced and with Russian accents so bad you'll pine for Walter Koenig.
This has been the year of the strategy game. There has already been a HOMM expansion and FE Legendary heroes. Plus they teased a XCOM expansion at PAX. Considering how well that game did it must be on the way, could be out by end of the year.
Also for those not yet bored with its weird "not quite a good RTS but definitely not 4x" hybrid gameplay and predictable AI, Sins of a Solar Empire has just received a new DLC: Forbidden Worlds.
Something with the gameplay depth of Civ 5: BNW, but also the aesthetic and historical bells and whistles that help keep the immersion
Rome 2 is certainly the prettiest, and while the TW developers are not particularly good at historical accuracy (in Rome 2 alone they have apparently already included a faction in Rome 2 with an incorrect capital, and they still have some of the original's anachronistic or just plain silly units) they look as though this time at least they're making a creditable attempt in most regards (the original Rome was by some way the least historically faithful TW game, with countless fictional units, three separate factions representing Rome and, conversely, unified factions representing the entirety of "Britannia", "Gaul" and "Germania"). Strategically it's likely to be not dissimilar to Civ V, and judging by recent releases Total War is following many of the same trends - Shogun 2 took a large leap away from micromanagement, for example.
Total War games do, however, repeatedly play on the same map with largely consistent AI behaviour; in previous releases the strategy layer has been to some degree underdeveloped, and Shogun 2 essentially simplified strategy into "make money, buy army, win", which leads to a fairly consistent tech path to invest first in happiness and repression buildings so you can hike the tax rate, and then to spam units. The actual mechanics of achieving that make the whole more complex than it sounds, but once you've mastered it once you've mastered it a hundred times and you can focus on the main point of the game, which is the tactical warfare. Much of the promise of Rome 2 is that it appears on the face of it to add complexity, with a more developed political system than its namesake and the "cultural victory" hinted by the Greek States DLC description.
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