I've heard a lot about the Total War games and i've gotten interested

I've heard a lot about the Total War games and i've gotten interested.
However I'm not sure which one i should start with.
Any suggestions?

Shogun 2 is probably the best for a beginner, stay the fuck away from Warhammer.

speaking of Total War can someone redpill me on Total War Arena?
I got a closed beta key for it but i dont think im going to use it

Ok, always been interested in Asian history anyway.
out of curiosity is warhammer too complex or just bad?

Warhammer will either be considered one of the best in the series or worst depending on who you ask

It's kind of a cross between total war combat and small-scale moba-like combat. You team up with some guys and you fight against an enemy team. Each player controls 3 units which can be archers, pikemen, cavalry, artillery etc. You win by capturing the enemy base of killing all enemies. It's not terribly interesting but still fun to play once in a while, but IMO it's ruined by being extremely grindy to unlock new generals/troops/equipment/whatever.

History nerds have nothing but rage and tears for Warhammer, especially considering it's both good and successful which makes them extra salty. That said I still agree with that guy that Shogun 2 is a good place to start. It's one of the best-polished TW titles and doesn't have a ton of different factions and units like Warhammer so it's much easier to learn. It's also cheaper so if you end up not liking it you'll have wasted less dosh.

What is your favourite time period? Pick that one

third age total war is the best total war game

What if the games buggy and unplayable?

Empire isn't that bad after the patches.

none of them are unplayable but as for buggy, I quit buying new TW games when I noticed an identical wall/gate pathfinding bug from medieval 2 in rome 2

Do you only care about history?
Rome 2
Are you a weeb?
Shogun 2
Do you like fun?
Warhammer/Warhammer 2

Shogun 2.

>hear empire is the best TW
>try it
>most disgusting world map of any game I've seen

it is seriously dogshit looking

Rome Total War is the best. Warhammer Total War is good. I didn't enjoy the equals or others games.

Seconding Shogun 2, I love Warhammer personally but I would only recommend it over Shogun 2 if you want fantasy stuff like dragons and magic in your total war.

Shogun 2 has the best balance (but some of the worst unit variety) out of any Total War game, and has a very zen aesthetic. There's also Fall of the Samurai as a standalone which is great if you want a mix of traditional japanese units and western style line infantry & artillery.

Empire is a glorious mess, and unless you really like the time period I would suggest not getting it.

>hear empire is the best TW
You've been bamboozled.

Alright i think it's decided then, most people seem to be recommending shogun 2.
People seem to be in agreement that it's easier for beginners and i'm reasonably interested in the history.

...

Also thanks for the input

- OP

Attila is also one of their best but the hardest for a beginner

...

Total War is Sup Forums now? I'm actually a little curious, which race in Warhammer did the Sup Forumsacks play the most? The High Elves, Dark Elves, and even the fucking Skaven seem like they'd be big hits over there.

Warhammer is the best

warhammer is best

>he doesn't know
total war allows you to make big ass armies and smash them together. Its the perfect game for nationalist manchildren. Med 2 even has a MP community full of butthurt slavs that ban horse archers

Vampire counts

Dunno what that guy is on about, if anything it would be a mix of /his/, Sup Forums, and /tg/

I'm pretty sure all of those would be considered degenerate there.
only acceptable races would be humans

best combat: Rome 1
best campaign: Medieval 2
best mods: Medieval 2

the engine they use just makes for weightless lousy battles since Empire

>which race in Warhammer did the Sup Forumsacks play the most?
Probably Empire.

You really should ignore the "best for beginners" factor. The differences in complexity are negligible throughout the series. No one who can get into game A will find it harder to get into game B. You should pick based on your favorite setting and style of warfare. That said, some of the games are considered inferior or obsolete at this point. You should avoid Shogun, Medieval, Empire and Rome 2 at least until you play other games in the series.

Release order

What has you so ass rattled nigger?

nothing.
I am just saying that vanilla med 2 has a lot of autists still playing it. Thought it might be cool to share.

Nah.
>Elves are sexy white people.
>Elite warriors and sailors.
>Keep Uluthan clean of filthy non-Elves.
>Or end up enslaving all the wretched sub-Elves.
>Defenders of civilization despite the best efforts of those pointy nosed rats.
Yeah. There's probably a great High Elf-Dark Elf divide there.

As for the Skaven:
>Only the strongest survive.
>Backstabbing is the only way to survive.
>Infiltrate mortal society and corrupt them from within.
>All FEMALES are disgusting breeders who brood more Skaven.
>A obsession with fairly badass guns.
I can't say if Sup Forums would like them, see them as stand ins for (((them))), or write them off as MGTOW shit.

Warhammer is Total War kino

>that webm where the gobbo was being launched with nasheeds being played in the background
kek

Praise Gork

You mean Mork.

Mook please go

How is Rome 2 or Attila? Are they bugged to oblivion?

good
no

Attila is basically the "fixed" Rome 2, just like Napoleon was the "fixed" Empire.

rome 2 was buggy at launch but has been patched and runs great now. I really like rome 2 a lot but it is will be harder for a beginner to get into because compared to the others its infrastructure is more complicated, the interface is pretty cluttered, and the map and campaign is massive and long.

The best games for a newcomer to the series would definitely be Shogun 2, medieval 2, and Rome 1. Out of all the games shogun has the most straightforward and intuitive resource management and interface and balanced and simplified unit variety.

SHAMEFUR DISPRAY

Shogun 2 is the best one to start with, its easy to learn doesnt have huge variety of units like the other total war games that has other countries/races.

The ui is super clean, the game runs super well and it has the best dlc out of any total war game which is the fall of the samurai dlc.

Basically you can swap between ninjas and samurais fighting each other and replace it with miniguns,cannons and rifles.

Its 2 games in one.

Any game that has nation v nation will attract those kinds of shitters, regardless of genre.

All I want is Empire 2

fuck autismhammer and it's neo/v/ fanbase

Shogun 2 is also the last hurrah before they really started stripping out features. I like Warhammer and all but it and even Rome 2 are missing a lot of good shit from Shogun 2. Family trees/diplomacy/etc.

>butthurt slavs that ban horse archers
Why? Don't slavs have pretty damn good horse archers in M2?

whichever period of history you like best and takes your interest the most out of them all.

I started with Napoleon, went on to play everything from Rome 1 onwards. Some people love Shogun 2 more than any other, but the setting doesn't appeal to me so it's a lot lower on my list, but I think all the games are worth playing.

Warhammer is great too, don't let onlyhistoryfags tarnish it's reputation.

reminder that we STILL haven't had a proper pike & shot game.

late game Medieval 2 was the closest we've come

here's hoping the first of these TW Saga games finally does it.

>Family trees/diplomacy/etc.

what is Attila

>more boring history shit

or they could keep making badass fucking monsters and magic units in warhammer or another fantasy franchise

You could try a arqbusier and ashigaru spearwall build in Shogun 2 as well. I agree that an English civil war would be super dope though.

I'm going to skip medieval and shogun 1 total war

Rome 1:
>neat setting
>some good mods
>lots of features that were removed in later titles like unlimited building slots and in the latest titles agent cutscenes
>combat has not aged well at all
>at this point its difficult to recommend over rome 2 other than it doesn't have rome 2's piss filter

Medieval 2
>big improvement over rome 1
>combat isn't as clunky as rome 1
>2 different settlement types with different things you can recruit and build at them
>when a unit gets better armor or a better weapon it visually changes the model in battles
>if you use ctrl when charging a unit they will take out a close combat weapon on a charge rather than using a lance and said weapons will have different attack stats
>huge variety of mods, many of which are highly customization
>fuck the pope
>Milan wants a military alliance
>The mini-campaigns are really fun
>Sieges are good and multi-tiered

Empire
>great if you really like the setting
>buggy as fuck
>laggy as fuck on monster computers because of said bugs
>you will die of old age before its your turn again
>variety of different factions with different playstyles
>buggy as fuck holy shit CA pls
>Naval battles became a thing and are great if slow paced
>matched animations were introduced and look kinda shit and make the combat really wonky and annoying but were somewhat patched later, makes chasing routing units a pain in the ass though

Napoleon
>huge improvement of Empire
>the changes to the tech tree though really fucks up cool shit like fire by rank and volley fire
>naval battles are faster paced and more refined, whether they are better or not is purely a matter of taste as both are fairly well put together
>setting is a bit bland and its focused around just playing the french in time limited campaigns
>limited variety of factions you can play as and the campaign map itself is limited
>battles are much better and matched animations work a bit better

cont.

>blocks your path

>tfw establishing the Commonwealth through the bloody power of the New Model Army

>combat has not aged well at all

I think Rome 1 is still the best. It's very easy to understand and intuitive.

it's definitely the best and has the most variety of units/tactics

Play the one which has the most interesting period to you. A lot of people will recommend Shogun 2, but it might not be what you were looking for unless you really like samurai.

Every total war game has pros and cons. Because Warhammer is fantasy, it gets bashed on more than the rest, but if you wanted dragons and dwarves it'll do you better than anything. Same thing goes for Rome 2 or Attila, if the concept interesting you, play it. The series is rather infamous for a one step forward, two steps back design philosophy anyways.

>when a unit gets better armor or a better weapon it visually changes the model in battles
I loved that in Medieval, it's great flavor to see your units be fancier. I haven't noticed it in any of the other games. Does Warhammer do it?

I would always suggest to play Rome 1 and Medieval 2 first

purely because the campaigns in those games are so shockingly primitive nowadays.

yes, they have some really great systems in them like armour and weapon upgrading etc. but on the whole the maps are too small with too few settlements, and generic rebels occupying 90% of settlements at the start of the game is the worst aspect of them. The one thing that you can definitively say is better about modern TW games is the sheer number of individual factions.

Medieval 2 was last one. Veteran ranks and upgrades are really just a way to make your units super overpowered in the latest total wars.

Warhammer for example: a max rank handgunner unit dishes out comparable damage to three handgunner units at base rank.

Rome 1 would be a lot better with actual pathfinding and butter smooth controls. Cavalry randomly charging a nearby enemy unit is just annoying. Same goes for navigating city seiges which suck in both Rome 1 and Med 2.

Also the lack of historical accuracy in Rome 1 started to molest my autism.

Shogun 2
>arguably the best total war title especially with its 2 dlc campaigns
>Avatar Conquest is a lot of fun and its a shame it wasn't incorporated into later games and maybe even into the single player campaigns
>probably the best multiplayer because the game is very well balanced
>the matched animations actually make sense in this game and are well done, you still have the floaty stuff but they look a lot better and are over faster, routing units matched animations were changed much later to make it much easier to chase them down
>great variety of start positions on the campaign ranging from starting on a small island with one enemy or on the edge of the map to starting in the middle and everyone hates you
>while they ar rook arike different factions "themes" can drastically change how you play the campaign, its very impressive
>naval battles are a lot of fun in fall of the samurai, very fast paced compared to even napoleon and the visuals are great
>amazing aesthetics and graphics have aged reasonably well
>hilarious voice acting
>amusing cutscenes
>lacks some quality of life features added in the later titles especially with keyboard shortcuts for orders
>lack of visual variety for units obviously if that matters to you

Rome 2
>somehow CA managed to release a game even more fucking broken than Empire
>holy shit it was a buggy
>downgraded visuals
>piss filter
>variety of factions
>matched animations were slowly improved as the game went on but look wonky
>was patched up
>this is where CA started to become greed over content
>the campaign DLC's are good and some are arguably better than the main campaign
>factions really start to play a lot differently
>naval battles are still an awful buggy mess
>AI is even more retarded
>what is balance, take a unit like a hoplite, put it in a corner with the general in phalanx
>take 1 unit of chariots, hide it behind a hill
>charge when the enemy is blobbed on your spears and get 4k kills on one unit

cont.

>city seiges which suck in both Rome 1 and Med 2

all things considered, Med 2 sieges are still the very best in the whole series

I don't know why they don't go back to have grueling long ass sieges which give you crazy anxiety as you're trying to figure out if you're winning or losing

I hated warhammer, but now I am super addicted... although it gets incredible boring after 3 provinces or so...

>Sieges are good and multi-tiered
the map themselves are good, but the actual battle is complete trash to due non-working pathfinding and retarded ai. Only good reason to play medieval 2 nowadays is for the mods.

the path finding is fine, it only gets fucked up if you try to move multiple units on the walls at once

>all things considered, Med 2 sieges are still the very best in the whole series

Medieval 2 is my favorite in the series, but I dont know what the fuck you're on. The AI is too stupid to be good in a seige whether on defense or offense. The only time I've ever seen them effective was when that one autist scripted his game to spawn infinite cannon elephants which overwhelmed the world.

Attila has the best seiges handdown. Fire spreading, multilayered defense with good maps and some decent infantry gameplay with a great hopeless atmosphere.

>boring after 3 provinces

I enjoyed how in the first game you had a set of regions to conquer as your race, and so I didn't get bored until I conquered all of the Badlands as Dorfs, and then I just sped to victory conditions.

Any Total War post-Rome is completely broken. Campaigns start fun, then degrade into a mind-numbingly repetitive sequence of city/castle assaults

Time period. Simple as that. Total War games are quite similar to each other in a fundamental sense.

thank that stupid change where you cant have captains and only like 5 generals

Med 2 was my favourite sieges because of multi-layered castles, and how it was such a long grueling fight due to town centres providing that huge morale boost.

You had a huge desperate brawl to decide who'd win in full stack sieges. They were always the most memorable for me. Although probably the most fun defence sieges I've had were having a small force of ranged units defend a 3-layered castle against a horde of mongol cavalry and just about managing to drive them back at the final gate

...

Attila
>what rome 2 should have been
>new mechanics were added like escalation
>combat is way better than rome 2 as is the map itself
>really fucking boring time period that very few people like
>toned down the visual filters a lot
>naval was improved but still fairly buggy
>AI is slightly less retarded
>factions are more unique with abilities for the battles and campaign map
>combat feels and looks a lot more brutal and less choreographed than in previous games with matched animations
>sieges are the best in the series but this is where the whole pulling siege equipment out of thin air started
>Attila is a push over rather than a serious threat because the AI is still retarded and hasn't been improved since rome 1, sometimes it seems even more retarded
>still fairly unbalanced, horse archer spam will win the game and some units are incredibly
unbalanced and while some were fixed not all were, also upgrading units in the campaign can sometimes make them worse
>fighting slavic factions that spam their poison archers will make you want to kill yourself if you have to fight the battle and not auto-resolve

cont.

>Do you only care about history?
>total war

I'd say go with the Fall of the Samurai expansion.
Shogun 2 on it's own is good too, but FotS adds modern unit dynamics and if you modernize your population gets harder to control

>Waaah I want to have a bajillion armies for no reason other than having a bajillion armies
Retard. It was to stop people building full stacks and camping every city.

>Empire
Just place a fleet at the Bosphorus strait and the turn times will decrease significantly.

that's literally what every fucking game comes down to

The original Rome is so broken you can just buy your rival's settlements with endless diplomats, don't even have to fight

The combat isn't even close to moba like

have you ever played one?

As every other user has said, shogun 2. After that, pick your favorite period of history. I would say that Attila is the best mechanically, but that's just my opinion

>The original Rome is so broken you can just buy your rival's settlements with endless diplomats, don't even have to fight

Thats what romans did do to many barbarian tribes. Bribed and bought them out with a little extra threat as a cherry on top.

That's because AI was shit and couldn't handle not doing that.

except that with limited armies you end up camping in walled settlements only (another stupid change) instead of having armies spread around the map

it makes splitting forces fucking infuriating and chasing down raiding parties nearly impossible as they do a sack/raze musical chairs routine through your entire empire

a completely worthless change, if you didn't want to camp in cities with a bunch of captain'd armies, don't.

All these fags can cry all they want but in about 5 days we are going to have the largest most content heavy map ever in total war. It is a good time for twwh

I used to hate the general system but I grew to love it. I miss the army tradition system though (why in the fuck is this gone from Warhammer?).

My only problem is that you can no longer have a man of the hour that you adopt into the royal family and turn into a master general.

just remember TW games aren't strategy games. Any diplomacy or trade you do is ultimately pointless. It's a tactics game with larger units.

Ah, memories. Good ol' five year Ottoman turns

Trading regions was great too, realistic too if you want to run that retarded argument, let you consolidate your territory, and again, if you didn't like it as feature, you didn't have to use it

i loved playing a no name roman captain leading an army to victory and then becoming an honorary noble married to a hot daughter of the faction leader

I still dont understand why they didnt incorporate separate spawns for every legendary lord. Its one of the great improvements the sequel brought.

What is there to learn?
>Spearmen beat horses.
>Horses beat archers.
>Archers beat infantry without shields
>Infantry without shields beat infantry with shields
>flank to win

>Invading Europe as America

I pine for a victorian total war so I can raze the british isles with US marines.

>You don't have to use bad, broken mechanics

probably the worst way to defend the game

It's something they are planning on doing eventually, according to them

>>Attila is a push over rather than a serious threat because the AI is still retarded and hasn't been improved since rome 1, sometimes it seems even more retarded
yeah no, the huns usually raze the entirety of central Europe and you need double the amount of doomstacks to beat them in battle.