SubDeity posted...
Sengoku jidai has always been the best period for Total War,
What is this nonsense.
Whatever Shogun 2's merits (it seems to have finally solved TW's issue of dull endgames), Japan is pretty objectively the most limited when it comes to variety. Medieval covers a bigger range of technology and environments, while Rome had a staggering degree of faction diversity (and EB adds even more; seriously EB might be the best mod ever).
The problem with Medieval and Rome is that while variety is nice from a historical perspective, it's bad from a gameplay perspective. You see this huge army your enemy has and you literally don't know what it does or how to beat it other than to throw more stuff at it. This is just plain bad on a strategic level. You need to have some idea of "this army can beat that army efficiently". You simply don't want to continously throw stuff into the meat grinder because you got a whole bunch of other stuff to worry about.
Strategy gamers get into this trap of thinking more features + more stuff = better. It's just plain wrong, as most game designers will tell you. At best, once you get past a very low threshold, there is no correlation. In fact, most will generally tell you there's a NEGATIVE correlation between how good your game is and how many features it has and its scope. Take something like... Settlers of Catan. Very small scale, very few options. Very good nonetheless because it's well designed.
--
assert(!hotterThan(foo, "Hot Nymphomaniacal Lesbian Mind-Controlling Dominatrix Fairy Doctors with glasses"))