Same. Of course, not being ready could wind up getting you caught with your pants down. I was playing as England in Medieval 2, and had basically conquered all of Central, Southern, and Western Europe, the exception being the Iberian Peninsula, which was in the hands of my Spanish allies and French vassals. Eastern Europe, meanwhile, has become its own massive bloc in the form of Poland(also an Ally), which had wiped out Russia and was holding the Turks and Mongols at bay. So I send a fleet of carracks, with an army, across the Atlantic to find the New World and gear up a massive army, funded by my powerhouse cities in Arguin and Timbuktu, to retake the Holy Land from the Mongols. And right when I’m about to have the Pope call a crusade, my German holdings get hit by the Poles and I’m forced to abandon my United Crusade plans to deal with that shit.
@@jackdaone6469 I can relate. Im running a Spartan campaign in Rome 2. I had taken over Greece, taken Itally from the Romans, and the Averni attack me from the north. It's fine, no campaign can be expected to go smooth, so I had to hold off the Averni while getting all available armies to clean up the Romans in the islands and the city of Carthage. Then the Averni ask for peace so they can fight off the Lusitans, but who knows how long that will last. So I had almost ended the Romans when some barbarian faction to the northwest of Greece decides to invade and take my territory while most of my armies are away. Now it's a matter of holding off on finishing the Romans, while rushing to retake my lands from opportunists, while expecting an invasion from the Averni. I can say CA is making us work for it.
I had conquered everything except Timurid controlled Jerusalem and surrounding area, and Venice. Venice had been my ally the entire campaign and I couldn’t turn my back on them until they decided they didn’t want to be friends anymore. Broke my heart and I crushed them.
Whether I do that or not depends on the game. I found it a lot of fun to complete map domination in Shogun 2, because the end game was actually fun and somewhat challenging due to Realm Divide. In most Total War campaigns, I just try to complete the victory conditions. It's not fun once you become unstoppable and just snowball everyone. At least Medieval 2 threw death stacks of Mongols and Timurids at you. Most of the games become challengeless once you become the dominant power in your region.
@@Elendrian I guess so, but at the same time americas were kinda empty and boring in ETW. Adding territories just for the sake of it is lame. It seems much more fun to me to play on a smaller part of the map but with more settlements. Because basically it's still the same conquest of lots of territories, even though in real world these territories are not that huge. And in terms of the largest map.. it feels like mortal empires from wh2 is quite larger than the map from empire (maybe if you include trading regions from ETW they would be similar though)
Yes I agree. If it wasnt for lack of settlements and often broken onedimensional AI, Empire would be my most favorite title. Even Vanilla I play countless hours
Nah man, try to play a Western Roman Empire on Attila. For the first 20-30 turns you'll have end turns that take 30 minutes to two hours as you'll have to fight multiple manual resolve battles every end turn.
Thankfully its faster now, and the crashing has largely been fixed, but even then R2 has an extremely long campaign. I would honestly excuse W2 if only because its Vortex campaign is pretty short and sweet, and isn't the only campaign, while in R2 you have three equally long campaigns that require you to essentially control the entire map before you complete any of the campaigns, and then you get a military victory anyways.
Not to mention the fact that you'd do a naval siege and regret everything when you land a ship but it keeps going across the land - all the way to the edge of the map. Your troops wouldn't even disembark so you'd have to quit out and reload only for it to happen again. Rome 2 went from the worst total war ever made to one of the better ones
You never played Empire did you, especially withing 6 months of release, because not only did the AI take its time to manage everything (as in buildings, finances, government, units, unit care, recruitment and construction, diplomacy and trade etc.). I know people joke so much about, and take the piss out of Empire's engine and it's infancy. But it genuinly is good at managing all of the above, despite it having so much s*** to deal with. It of course, just took forever to do it, because it was so much. Of course, unit and army movement and battle management looked questionable, but the rest it truthfully is good at. The AI is just as good, if not slightly better in Napoleon, in addition to its massive efficiency boost, plus the lack of map size, and faction quantities. not just to take up time per turn, I mean the AI no longer had so many places to consider moving to, or countries to consider negotiations with etc. Hence Empire's turn time... After about 6-8 months, it was of course drastically reduced by about 30% though. The times the AI was calculating millions of options, and then stalling, because after one action it now decided to rethink it's second move, its priorities were changed, and certain ways in which it calculated were put more into predictions, and organising a better lost of plans in advance, as well as quickly changing and adapting post action etc. Nerdy stuff, that isn't really "seen" by the player, other than the countries flag, and possible unit movement, all taking up less time.
@@dadjokes8963 great britain is probably best and was super easy too, you start with two colonies in northern america as well as the possibility to confederate what would become the US in reality you also have a spot in the carribean giving you a huge advantage over most other factions your home territory is super safe, for some reason the AI didn't even try to invade at any time but even if they try it's really easy to defend because the AI is really bad if they can only attack by naval invasion (they will split their troops way more than via land route) I was at war with spain and later france for at least 50 turns each without them ever becoming a threat just rush to india early on and grab as many trade points as possible along the way and you're really really far ahead in no time I managed to secure india pretty fast before anyone else bothered to go down there while also conquering large parts of america with austria and prussia you're surrounded by enemies and potential enemies and conquering european cities is way harder than places in india or america in the early game (also most of them are owned by minor factions and even native tribes in other words you can safely steamroll as britain very fast
It's so frustrating when your empire is so large that it's tedious to manage and becomes boring but you yearn for the satisfaction of completing the campaign.
France being one region was the epitome of absurd LMAO. Look at how many colonies there are in America!! They even bothered to include bogotá, Colombia FFS!!
In WH2 I only started having fun in the late game again when I just turned off notifications and ignored character skill points and settlements unless it was absolutely necessary.
Empire and Napoleon's naval battles were so good. Getting up close and making the splinters fly. Getting the wind advantage and shrekking a Ship-of-the-line with a frigate... great memories. Makes me want to download them again.
You forgot playing as Bretonnia and not knowing you had to move your lord to the top right corner of the map so you just sit there in Kislev eating stack after stack of chaos.
Did that with Empire. Placed 5 full armies in ambush stance close to Chaos wastelands... So every time their armies showed up they couldn't enter invade the continent because they would keep getting demolished by ambushes. In the ambushes I pinned their whole army in a "box" and just let the handgunners and artillery do their jobs, a true slaughterhouse.
Isn't this a special ability of like one faction at the start of the game? That really skewes the time it takes since not all factions can do that until later in their respective campaigns.
@@orarinnsnorrason4614 I don't recall any of the factions being able to create vassals from the start. Liu Bei can Unify from the start but nobody will accept.
One of the other things that really slows down the Empire campaign is that, with the way the tech tree works, you have to research techs in a particular order in order to actually progress to either better ships or better units, or even just getting the percussion shells for howitzers which takes like 100 turns or something stupid like that
@@Jack-jb4qd You sweet summer child, the Mongolian death stacks a far more worse than what those orcs and trolls can do. That's not considering the Timurids and their cannon elephants.
Total War Three Kingdoms is possibly the hardest total war I’ve ever played. Every time I’ve restarted I’ve grown huge with very large armies and then I get caught in a mega coalition battle and destroyed due to how many sides they hit me from
Managing settlements in Total War Medieval 2 in late games took the most of my time. At least average 30 minutes are to spend in one turn to recruit, construct, or checking income detail and change gorvornor and so on.
This, I have tried completing it 10 times (as in going for total domination). Every single time it would either bug itself out because an ai got too big to think properly or in later tries it would just crash and save file becomes corrupted. To this day this piece of garbage has a negative review from me. And it's the main reason I am working on stopping my Total War addiction. Rome 2 messy launch really convinced me of that.
I finished a lot of campaigns already and it only crashes out in certain battles, or in my current campaign it crashes when I take Cuba from the Pirates.
LiveFreeOrDie i find rome 2 to be pretty fast, you can build so many armies compared to other total war games were you might have 1 army for a long time before you have enough economy. Also in rome i find myself having really ridiculously lopsided victories compared to other games especially as hellenic factions who have access to elephants
Thanks to quarantine I have won 2 Grand Campaign and 1 Imperator Augustus together with 1 Caesar in Gaul but yes it takes a long time, especially for the requirements which sometimes are almost impossible, conquest of Bactria as Macedonia
@@darkspirit8247 They make sense, tho. As Macedonia, you're trying to rebuild Alexander's empire, not make a Macedonian-flavored Roman empire copy. I like that. Apart from the quantity of provinces the location requirements simplistically point to the proper direction and eventual borders, thus forcing you to orient your expansion, even if the player has no idea of (or doesn't care about) the history or circumstances. The problem often comes from the "gamey" nature of the player's campaigns, themselves. Macedon has no business conquering Britain, Gaul or Iberia, that's on you. Not impossible, but inefficient and pointless.
Either you autoresolve and lose or spend 4 hours between turns doing every single repetitive battle against the same units with the same garrison again and again
My WRE playthrough reminded me or mortal empires because of the really long end turn times. However in ME the long turns are because of all the factions. In WRE the long turns are because you get attacked at least 5 times a turn, and much more in the early game.
Empire total war really does take the cake for a long campaign, as even if you get 20 regions in order to unlock the victory conditions, you still have to wait until the campaign deadline.
@@TheManofthecross I did it in DM, even after full map completion i had to mindlessly click on the end turn button 100 times, only to get a shitty cinematic.
@@CapybaraConnoisseur89 that's because of the campaign scripting since there are plenty of nations, even more than TW3K's nation. I'd rather have a long end turn than having the AI making dumb decision
I would just build some forts, bait them into taking your fort, then attack them inside the fort with a bunch of archers and artillery. Their numbers won't help them, and they can't maneuver around like on the open field. Or like the other poster said, longbowmen with stakes in a chokepoint (or behind some pikemen) will do heavy damage to them.
Cannons for the Timurids. 2 or 3 good cannons can get rid of almost all the elephants from one army in a single battle. Pavise crossbows are your friend for both factions. You can win the ranged battle even if your crossbows are outnumbered thanks to being armor-piercing and having lots of defense from armor and shield. Other than that, take only units with good morale. Dismounted feudals and high-tier heavy cavalry. If it doesn't say "good morale," don't bother unless you have a general that gives a lot of extra morale because otherwise they'll break almost instantly.
Richard Holmes This, I think would be a good one, but the problem is that most strategies for beating them devolve into faction specifics. You will immediately hear the longbowmen stakes, but that is England only and so forth. Outside of one legend has done with the fort spam they are all the doom crossbowmen style suggestions and your like ya but not everyone gets pavise.
Pavise xbows still work with 8/18 playable factions. Better than the 1/18 that the longbow people were talking about. The rest holds true for any faction: high morale and heavy cavalry.
The Empire TW Russian campaign is a straight up torture. Your forces will always be stretched thin and the AI is doing everything in its power to make you feel very uncomfortable. It’s a shame Legend never recorded doing this campaign.
Scotland in Medieval 2 Tokugawa in Shogun 2 Both Fujiwara Clans in Shogun 2 RotS Sicily in Medieval 2 Mughal Empire in Empire Ottoman empire in Empire Austria in Napoleon
@sum body I don't think it's clever but I don't see how it's annoying. I just wanted to state my opinion on how I think Scotland is easy to beat in M2TW
The longest and most grinding campaign I ever saw was Third Age Total War Mod for Medieval Total War II. The mod has special precautions to make fast expansion difficult, and Elves in particular need a long time for military buildings. Add to that the huge distances and it was an absolute chore. I did a campaign with Lothlorian and my war against Rhun seemed to never end.
He... Painted the map in Medieval 2 with the Ottomans in 14 turns. World record at the time, apparently. He's 14 or something in those videos. The dude knows what he's talking about. Also, here he explains, that the new world becomes available at turn 200, completionists would have to contend with that, he did too - in order to show off the area in-game. edit: Just realized this is probably a joke... Better late than never... Woosh, indeed.
I have never done a total map completion. Once your the Hegemon and cannot be matched militarily and have completed the victory conditions it gets borting. Battle only has value when there is a challenge to it.
godking turtle more, allow the ai to get stronger. Be happy with smaller kingdoms. Role play that shit. Especially not expanding rapidly will help with the difficulty.
It’s cool that you branched off to do this type of side video, especially as well done as they are. Years ago I expected a branch off but I always thought it would be something like hey guys vote on my next Piss off Legend Campaign and people would vote on the campaigns that you would rant alot on like Greek Cities in Rome. You always say play to your strengths not your weaknesses so thats why I had a weird ass fever thought like that.
"Welcome to part 1489429 of my europa barbarorum lets play campaign as the seleucid empire, so previously we....." Proceeds to retrain slingers, forgetting troop transports, swearing at fucking pikemen, hating on chariots but still keeping them, this is peak legend.
In case of Attila, I think what Legend says is very true - 300 hours into this game and I barely completed 5 campaigns(hard) - unless you play as Sassanids then you just mow ride through everything and everyone - they are so overpowered in this game ;)
I'd like to point out medieval 1. It's got a lot of the same things that make medieval 2 take forever, but instead of the Americas and the Timurids, instead when you hit 70% map painting, it just respawns literally every single major faction with multiple full stack armies of top tier troops as a 'revolt'. It's wild.
I remember spending DAYS just keeping the old world empire in check ticking through the turns waiting to be able to go to the Americas. Sent ships full of merchants over and assassins and spies and then 10 full armies by the time I could go. Watching the plague happen was terrifying. And I had 15 full stacks guarding from timurids and I still had to send reinforcements
To elaborate: during the plague my income totally ground to a halt and I had to stop building anything until it was over (I was spending like 100000 in buildings a turn normally), and on the charts the debt in the population that otherwise was only ever growing is daunting. My kings were terrible and crazy because they had nothing to do so I sent him around to kill rebels during the plague struck years hoping he’d die, and the crazy guy lived! Fitting that the crazy guy then demanded that massive armies sail into nothing for years, but maybe he wasn’t crazy after all
In Three Kingdoms, you can save time by vassalizing and assimilating factions towards the end. You'll be super treacherous, true, but that doesn't matter when there are like 3 factions left.
I like the historical total war games. The warhammer games were okay at first because it was different and looked unbelievably good but now I’ve just gotten tired of it and I don’t want a Warhammer 3. I’d rather have a Medieval 3 or something completely new. Maybe the could do something a bit more modern, although it would need new code it would be unbelievable
Didn't even mention the Mortal Empires end turn time as a contributing factor. I hate to think how many centuries of my life I've been gathering dust in this chair waiting for that damn timer >.>
I just settle down on being a strong power and taking my time with proxy wars of my allies with small armies, sometimes just 3-4 unit strong. Something that made Empire total war actually quite fun.
Empire is totally true! I have spent like 30 hours in one campaign as England and barely scratched the surface. Also, Empire is my favorite by far. I started with Rome and Medieval II. Def my favoriate.
Japan was pretty introverted at that point, but China aswell as Siberia, Australia, the rest of America and Africa..... Man, a real "World" Map! That d be great!
Let's be honest, the real reason Mortal Empires takes so long is the end turn process. I wanted that giant fantasy map so bad until it actually came out and I spent more time watching their tiny flags scroll slowly across the top than I did actually playing the game.
3 kingdom is really long as well as rome 2 and empire but the thing with turn base game is that you can take as long as you like to finish a campaign if you don’t want to rush and auto resolve everything.
I did a Mortal Empires campaign with the Empire in wich I had to destroy every evil faction. Dark Elves, skaven, orcs, undead, chaos, norsca, etc. Took more than 300 turns. But it was really fun.
I usually play untill i conquer the historical borders of the nation i am playing as at its peak, unify a specific region, untill I finish the campaign goal, or untill I defeat my arch-nemesis. The only TW where i conquered the whole map was playing the Julii in Rome, because when I reached the historical borders of the Roman Empire, there were only like 5 settlements left anyway.
Three Kingdoms campaigns actually dont take that much time, because as soon as you arrive at the three kingdoms state of the campaign you can demand from the other two kingdoms to abolish their claim to emperorship which means they surrender all of their generals and territories to you, which can be half of the map. And its not that hard to archive because you just have to defeat most of their armys and have a significant military advantage over them. Doesnt seem to matter how much territory they still own.
I think it's important to point out, for factions like the Romans, even on the easist difficulties, with -1 to happiness, there can still be enough s*** to deal with, especially like food in barren provinces, with Cattle not being as efficient as say Camels to farm etc. But your still right to word it as "Not caring about constant revolts" etc. If you've invested in at Least level 2 settlements before moving your post conquest policing armies on, if either the province is calmer, or you need them on the next province, or the province is simply not the one boarding any opposition anymore etc. and ideally upgrading to level 3 minimum. Because you'll be able to more or less just crush them on the defensive, especially given the defensive capabilities of Roman armies, and the fact, suitably, the most defensive units, are the garrison units. I'd be pretty passed if we got Palatina as garrison units.... Just managing your defensive army properly, like a good commander, lunch as focusing the archers on the heavier infantry with heavy shots or whatever infantry they have, or their General (if on foot) with heavy shot, and leaving the cavalry to attempt to charge over infantry with boosted attack vs cavalry, boosted defence to charges, and 500% entity mass, ie. almost no movement from impact, and as a result pretty much no deaths from the charge itself... Focusing axeman is another good piece of advice. Ignoring their ranged too, and then just charging that hidden unit of equites at them all (while keeping fire at will off). The unit you hid outside the town perimeter ;), or their artillery crews. Then waiting for the right moment to run up toe that blob of infantry attempting to push the bottleneck you closed up, sitting there, and opening fire at will (remmembering to keep a good few metres away just incase they do send one unit at your equites, they tend to) keeping the horses out of melee, and them maybe charging them if the general is finally dead, and/or there's not many left. Definitely not if there's a lot left, and they're spears..... Running your Praeventores into their rear, or having them nearby ready to ram their rear, so as to manage your troops, and keep them alive. Using their cheer incase your units need a minor buff too. Especially vs the Huns if you stuck with Christianity. Camping the archers once they're dry on the cap if the bottleneck is right beside it, and the quantity of enemy units is so high that the 20 guys they've pushed far enough in start to out cap your defending Legio xD. So yea, long story short, I invest in a happy populace, but when I can't deal with a iminant revolt in one turn, and the local towns are big enough, I'll gladly just accept the garrison's new "experience." xD
My Largest army was a small amount of 230,560 units and 2439 Naval. in empire total war. conquered the whole of North Africa and India, Russia with that army. I had multiple battalions guarding my borders as well.
Number 1 longest campaign should be Rome 2 where you got stuck in a battle because you didn’t set a timer and the AI got stuck while disembarking their boats.
I just finished my Zheng Jiang grand campaign (capture every settlement), it took me 224 turns and there are 70 commanderies, 187 counties. Took me an estimated 35-40 hours to complete.
I wish there was an option to have infinite turns because sometimes I just wanna watch the countries eat each other and then after building up millions of troops invade all those countries
What would the rating be if you consider total time on the campaign map? Total War Attila only took long because you said you'd need to fight a lot of battles, which is true. And even if the autoresolve would always give you a victory if you were capable of winning the fight manually, if you use that button it kind of defeats the point of even buying the game if you use that button.
grand hierophants kahteps campaign is especially long. you start off on a continent with no favorable habitat outside of your starting location. this hampers your growth all the way until late campaign. you're far far away from ordertide meaning you can't stop their formation once chaos gets shit stomped so the end of the campaign is going to be you vs the world, and high elves are your best freind early because your early and mid game should be spent stamping out naggarond the skaven and then norscans so getting rid of them is a no no. also your armies are constantly taking attrition damage when they fight naggarond because SNOW... by the time you finish that up you're only target is to go down south to the lizardmen because ordertide is in full swing lizardmen are inevitably going to be allied to order tide so here's where the world declares war on you.. oh your also one of the slowest factions to grow because your armies power is directly limited by your city development. too bad your going to have to spend most of your limited gold supply building infrastructure buildings to get more gold and public order so you can expand to slowly build more infrastructure buildings in costly unfriendly climates. also unless you can get an agent to the other side of the map to start try and confederate other Tk's factions to get some more LL's you can kiss them good bye, because dawi will eat them.. (edit, LOL NOPE, for some reason TK's don't get confederations) the end game consists of you consolidating your rule of the west coasts and then eating the high elves before slowly trotting across the mainland. by the time you finally start to see hospitable climates the game is already basically beaten... you'll be fighting the dwarves as the very last race possible.. it's like they never really planned on anyone ever actually PLAYING a kahtep campaign lol... he's like supposed to be this tiny little minor power that settra has to race to save as a bonus objective before naggarond decides to stomp all over it. actually playing him is just this unforgiving slog as you drag one of the more underwhelming LL's across the map... kahteps main thing is that he can mount a casket of souls... so late game he's basically just a casket with a mediocre lore of magic taped onto it... no other real abilities besides that, that other basic TK lords don't already have.. arkhan the black has a much better lore, and stronger abilities and bound spells. plus he has the interesting thing where he can recruit vampire count units. they should really give kahtep a better lore or maybe a few spells from other lores to make him more of a powerhouse in spells... just... ugh..... kahteps campaign is brutal
hey, great video. I always check out your Top 5 TW video's. I've always wanted to get into these games but they never really hooked me. What would be your top 5 TW games to get into Total War?
