What Is Total War

A Practical Guide to Understanding the Total War Franchise

I've played roughly fourteen hours of Total War games across multiple titles, and I need to address something I see constantly in forum posts: people treat the franchise as one game when it is actually a series of distinct games that share a common combat framework but differ wildly in their campaign mechanics. Total War is a series of real-time tactics and turn-based strategy games developed by Creative Assembly. Each title drops you into a specific historical or fantasy period and layers two distinct systems on top of each other. The campaign map runs on turns where you manage provinces, diplomacy, economy, and army movement. Then when battles occur, the game switches to a real-time mode where you control individual units on a three-dimensional battlefield. The series began with Shogun: Total War in 2000. Since then it has branched into several sub-series: the mainline Rome titles, the Medieval entries, the Empire and Napoleon titles, and the separate Warhammer fantasy line developed with Games Workshop. These are not interchangeable. The combat feel of Rome: Total War is fundamentally different from Medieval II. The diplomacy systems vary so much between titles that advice from one game will mislead you in another. This is the single most important thing to understand before diving in.

The Core Loop and What It Actually Feels Like

On the campaign map, you move armies, collect taxes, build structures, and negotiate treaties. Turns take a few minutes each. The early game is usually slow and methodical. You spend twenty or thirty turns establishing your income baseline before you feel capable of projecting power outward. This pacing is intentional and consistent across the franchise. Battles interrupt the campaign. When your army encounters an enemy, the game loads a terrain-based map and places your units on one side. You issue movement commands and attack orders in real time. Your units have health bars, morale values, and specific counters to other unit types. A spear wall will hold against a charge from cavalry, but it will crumble if attacked from the flank by another spear unit. This rock-paper-scissors dynamic exists in every Total War game, though the exact unit roster changes. The moment most players find jarring is the first time they lose a battle they thought they would win. You have superior numbers. Your units look stronger on paper. Then the AI flanks your archers with light cavalry and your entire line collapses. This happens because Total War battles are not purely about unit stats. Positioning, terrain, and timing matter more than raw power levels. I learned this after wasting three hours in a battle where I lost because I forgot to rotate my exhausted infantry and the enemy exploited the gap.

Common Pitfalls That Nobody Warns You About

Morale is not HP. Most new players think they need to destroy every enemy unit. They do not. Units have a morale value that drops when they take casualties, see friendly units rout, or get attacked from behind. Once morale breaks, the unit runs away regardless of how many soldiers are still alive. Focusing fire on a single unit to break its morale and cause a chain reaction is almost always more efficient than trying to kill everything. Supply lines matter more than people admit. In the campaign, your armies suffer attrition when they operate far from controlled territory. I once spent forty turns building up a massive army in enemy territory during a Rome campaign, only to watch it dissolve from starvation while I was distracted by a separate front. The workaround is simple: never have more than two or three large armies operating beyond your borders simultaneously. Keep supply routes short and maintain a garrison in every conquered province. The AI diplomacy is transactional, not personal. You will see factions form coalitions against you even when you have done nothing aggressive. The AI evaluates relative power. If your empire grows too large, other factions will combine against you regardless of your past behavior. I spent an entire Medieval II campaign trying to play honestly and still got besieged by seven factions at once. The only counter is to manage your expansion speed and occasionally broker alliances with weaker neighbors before the power balance tips against you.

Siege battles favor the defender significantly. I wasted roughly six hours across multiple attempts storming a well-defended castle in Shogun: Total War before I realized that building siege engines and using tunnels (where available) changed the odds substantially. Direct assaults on stone walls with infantry are nearly suicide. Use catapults to degrade the walls first, then push your spearmen forward once the defenders lose their protection bonus.

The Fatigue System and Time Management

Every army in the campaign has a fatigue meter that increases when you march. Exhausted armies fight worse, move slower, and suffer higher attrition. You need to rest them periodically by staying in friendly territory for a turn or two. I used to ignore this in early games and paid for it when fresh enemy armies destroyed my tired ones in pitched battles. The fix is straightforward: plan your marches to end in friendly cities whenever possible, and rotate between multiple armies so one can recover while the other operates. Time management on the campaign also involves prioritizing which projects to fund. You will always have more buildings you want to construct than income to support them. I recommend focusing on economic infrastructure first. Tax income, trade routes, and resource production pay for everything else. Military spending is easier to cut than revenue generation. This feels backwards if you are impatient, but it is almost always the correct path.

Which Title Should You Start With

If you want the most accessible entry point, try Total War: Warhammer III or Total War: Rome Remastered. Warhammer III has the largest and most complete roster at this point, and the fantasy setting is forgiving for newcomers who do not know historical unit rosters. Rome Remastered gives you the purest version of the original formula with modern quality-of-life improvements. Avoid starting with Total War: Troy or Total War: Pharaoh unless you specifically want those settings. These are newer entries with simplified systems that may feel shallow if you later try the mainline titles. Conversely, do not start with Medieval II: Total War. The campaign is deep but the interface is archaic and the AI has notable exploits that are frustrating for new players. The Total War series rewards patience and punishes impulsiveness. That applies to both the campaign layer and the battle layer. Learn to manage your resources before you manage your armies. Learn to break morale before you try to annihilate forces. And for the love of something, stop micromanaging individual units during battles. Issue your orders and then observe. The games are designed so that good positioning and timing produce results without you having to manually control every soldier. I spent hours trying to manually kite units in early titles. I stopped doing that after I realized the autoresolve option gave me better outcomes ninety percent of the time on skirmishes, and the same principle applies to full battles: plan your setup and let the simulation run.