I will not pull myself by the balls and will go straight with the trump cards. One of the main competitive advantages of Total Var is the realistic battles. The battles of Total War are not about poking two models at each other, as in some Civilization or Age of Empires. But, in order for this to work, the player must be immersed in the atmosphere of the battle as much as possible. He must practically believe that he is above the battlefield, watching the battle from the eyes of a flying eagle. And here there are no trifles. Every aspect that can add realism has to be done.
First and foremost, what is now degrading with each new game is Total Var. Animation. Soldiers should be poking at each other, not past. People should fall from a shock, not a heart attack. There must be inertia, there must be a weight for the units expressed in animation, and not only in the numbers of characteristics. There should be arrows, not white snot. The arrows should stick into the flesh, not disappear in flashing clouds. Warriors must writhe in pain and die on the abandoned battlefield.
After all, what is war? This is a multitude of deaths. Death on the battlefield is one of the most important things for a warrior and this is the last thing in the life of each of them. Now, in the modern games of Total Var, the soldiers have turned into mindless dummies who just fall like plastic toys. The player has no sense of being on the battlefield. The player has no sense of the importance of the lives of his soldiers, no respect for their gallant death.
After all, you are not just on the battlefield as an outside observer, you are not one of the warriors who is primarily responsible for yourself. You are a commander on whom the lives of soldiers depend.
Now they are trying to slip the animation of Chinese generals, who cleverly jump together in a duel, swinging their legs like in a Hong Kong action movie. (actually not, much poorer than animation) But this is not a total var. This can be pleasant, disliked, or left indifferent, but this does not replace a real batch of two armies, where the player's eye every now and then can notice this or that personal tragedy of any of the soldiers.
Those who say that they do not bring the camera closer and that they do not care what the soldiers are doing to each other, either suffer from attention deficit or do not understand what they are talking about. The human brain does not even focus on individual fighters, even without moving the camera to make out nose to nose animation of murders, it still sees the battlefield at the level of peripheral vision. Anyone notices the big picture and gets his share of impressions.
What impressions can you get here? Seriously, what is it? Someone vomited undigested caramel bears? 5 year old Michelangelo laid out his first mosaic of colorful poop?
After all, everything else is in other strategy games, everything else is not a competitive advantage, but the mainstream. These are not positive differences, but already self-evident. Moreover, these moments, common to all 4K strategies, do not require so many resources from the developer. As you have seen, they could have come up with fascinating mechanics of economics and development that are in no way inferior to modern games, already in 1996.
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