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by Catonmars, Level 37
Last updated at September 9, 2008, 10:25 pm
I've been a fan of the Total War series for the longest time. Sure, they've never been what one would call historically accurate (my Roman Calvary would own your ****, seriously) but the balance of economic game play and large scale RTS battles can provide hours of entertainment provided you have the patience of a small God. As the Total War series grew over time you would gradually find yourself facing a larger and larger landscape to conquer, beginning from a small feudal Japan to the whole of Europe and the Middle East. By the time you finish a full game of Mideval Total War 2 on campaign mode you probably want to gouge your eyes out with a fork, assuming you had that much free time and quit your life for a week.

All in all the games were good, but they just had a few flaws that were so unignorable as to be goddamn funny.

Shogun: Total War, the first of the Total War games, boasted the impassable bridges. Anyone who has ever fought in a province with a bridge in that game now knows how it feels to be sexually violated by a half-bald mideval samurai with a pike because that's essentially how these fights went. If you brought 10 times their number like good old Sun Tzu told you to, you could shove it right up your bloody ass as your force gets cluster ****** on a bridge so hard it makes Iraq look like a ******* shining success. On the offhand chance you won the fight, the ******** always just retreated to the castle anyway and held out for 120 seasons while the peasents spawned 500 warrior monks(Think of a non-pacifist mini jesus with a chain gun) to own the 20 guys left alive in your army who promptly fled like whipped school girls at the sign of their portable temples...?

Rome: Total War spawned what I like to call the Calvary conundrum. Everyone remembers the damn scene in Braveheart when the stereotypical cocky British general who should've been wearing a monocle told William Wallace that he "could not win" without any heavy Calvary. Now imagine after he said that, the movie ended with a shot of William with a hoof so far up his ass it was coming out his teeth. Therein lies the essence of Rome Total War. Despite your legions of unmounted warriors, if you didn't have late game calvary, you were ******. With all the mobility given to the damn Calvary one good charge on your flanks equated to the end of the ******* world. It just blows your damn minds that none of the Barbarian tribes in a thousand or so years figured out Rome's one weakness: horses.

My personal favorite oversight though was in Medieval Total War 2 where you are introduced to my favorite unit of all time the English Longbowman. Imagine every sniper you've ever met in a Halo game that raped your **** and you have the English Longbow. Generally, they were never the best attack troop for obvious reasons, but if you put enough of these ******* on the castle walls you were the Spawn Camping AWPer from Counter Strike. At some points in the early game it gets so bad that if you zoom in on the enemy army you're peppering from about 500,000 yards away you can actually see the enemy units mouthing "****** sniper". Taking the cake for the silliest ******* unit in the game, the Longbowmen made defending just about any spot a breeze.

Overall, the games are worth playing but just be ready for a bit of frustration. If you enjoy the Pope *****ing at your because you don't have time to kill Muslims for fun because you're too damn busy killing France (lol, really hard), discovering that gunpowder hurts, and getting sniped!!111eleven then these games are for you.
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Issor
Issor Oct 9, 2008 at 7:36 pm
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Medieval 2 Total War was my introduction to the series.

I discovered the amazingness of the English Longbowmen very quickly.
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