Editing Total War (section)

==Gameplay==

Total War has two main features: Turn-Based strategy on the campaign map, and Real-Time strategy on the battle map.

In the campaign map, you must manage your economy, keep the peace amongst your subjects, ally, trade, or war with other nations for vital resources, assassinate your rivals, and crush brigands and pirates as soon as they show their filthy hides. In other words, you're pretty much playing [[A Song of Ice and Fire|Game of Thrones, without the ice demons or dragons]] (unless you're playing Total War: Warhammer or a modification).

In the battle map, you must prove yourself [[Creed|a genius of tactics]] with the battle gameplay giving an approximation of units' morale, fatigue, facing and ammunition rather than a bunch of doodz that you'll frequently just all select and then attack-move toward enemies until either they or yours are dead in other real-time strategy games. The rules pretty much work like this throughout most of the titles save for Empire, Napoleon and Fall of the Samurai (which puts a period-relevant focus on gun-armed line infantry instead):

*Spear Infantry: Great for bracing and taking down charging cavalry, but only do OK against melee infantry, though use of formations such as [[hoplite|phalanx]] and other kinds of shieldwalls can even up the odds. Usually best if placed on the flanks. (Which, of course, is strange, considering the fact that the spear was the mainstay of most ancient and medieval armies, as moderately trained blokes armed with a spear, a shield, a helmet, and inexpensive padded jacks/gambesons usually made up the biggest portion of most armies.) 

*Melee Infantry: The hard heart of your strength. These are used to form the main line most of the time, as well as the reserves, and are absolutely vital in siege assaults due to the inability of spear infantry to use formations on the walls. Usually tanky with decent defensive stats to grind down the enemy and pin them in place for whatever shenanigans you have planned. Good against spear infantry, can hold its own against most cavalry except when charged by shock cavalry. In games without guns they often come with shields, letting them resist occasional ranged salvos if they come from the front.

*Shock Infantry: The big blokes with big weapons. Typically armed with huge axes, poleaxes or two handed swords. But can also have other weapons such as sword n board but being bat shit crazy enough to be considered shock infantry regardless. Work as a foot version of shock cavalry and will usually be charging around flanks or bashing their way through infantry lines. Will usually destroy the things they charge and take less micro than shock cavalry since they'll have the numbers to smash through other infantry with a flanking attack (and they are far better suited for siege battles), but with high attack and less defense they are especially vulnerable to archers and cavalry charges themselves.

*Ranged Infantry: Your slingers, archers, javelin men, and crossbowmen. These guys are extremely useful for softening up an enemy force or clearing out a wall of defenders. Be warned, however, that they are very vulnerable to most forms of cavalry. Place them behind your main line if you value them. Generally, slingers are the best for dealing with enemy ranged units, archers have a quick rate of fire and can set arrows on fire for more damage though at the cost of rate of fire, javelinmen deal the most damage in short time but have limited ammo and range and crossbowmen can penetrate armor but reload slowly and aren't that effective without a clean line of sight. And then there's England and its longbowmen which can turn every battle into Agincourt. One can also get access to matchlock guns late game in Medieval II and Shogun II, which practically ignore armor and shred morale, though naturally take a while to reload. Games from Rome 2 onward also made shields block ranged attacks from the front, enforcing flanking to cause maximum damage against any shielded units.

*Pike Infantry: A virtual wall of death for anyone foolish enough to charge head on. The best thing to use for defending a narrow choke-point or holding a battle-line. Immune to cavalry from the front but very scared of archers and generally are only barely better than ranged infantry when flanked.

*Ranged Cavalry: Your horse archers, primarily. These guys are great for flanking shots, ambushes, and harassing the enemy. They are vulnerable to the faster light cavalry, will get shredded by foot archers however and frankly a lot of people probably won't be able to muster the patience to get mileage from their ammunition reserves since they'll be shooting at a fraction of the numbers of an equal amount of foot archer units.

*Light Cavalry: Primarily the scouts and vanguard of the army. Useful for quick movement around the map harassing and killing soft targets like skirmishers, artillery and horse archers, or chasing down routing foes. Not great for direct charges but can be great at rear ramming.

*Melee Cavalry: The jack of all trades of cavalry. Can charge units decently enough but preferably in the flanks or rear unless they are light. Will beat most shock cavalry in a melee fight.

*Shock Cavalry: Your knights, cataphracts, and mounted men-at-arms. These are the hammers to your melee infantry's anvil, breaking a foe like water upon rock. Used primarily for exploiting gaps in enemy lines, charging into the rear of an unsuspecting foe, or flanking attacks. Depending on the game, they can also go straight at anything without a spear and watch them die beneath lances and hooves on their charge, but probably then have to withdraw for another go or they'll get ground down by any serious infantry unit (even without spears).

*Artillery: Ballistae, Scorpions, Onagers/Mangonels, and Trebuchets, mostly, with the odd cannon here or there. Used mostly for smashing down some poor chap's walls, though it is also useful for flinging hate at an enemy during a field battle, [[Troll|And possibly killing their leader in one shot, completely ruining the battle.]]

*Siege Engines: Ladders, battering rams, and siege towers, used for getting through those pesky things called battlements.

*Special Units: Any number of units not in the aforementioned lists, such as war dogs, incendiary pigs, and most importantly, elephants. Hilariously, [[DISTRACTION CARNIFEX|elephants make for excellent distractions.]]

Players can use any number of tactics from actual battles of yore, such as hammer and anvil, forcing an enemy to turn his flank to you, Mongol-style shenanigans, etc.

With the release of [[Total War: Warhammer]], it introduced even more special units with even more specialty (being a fantasy setting and all). These are:

*Monsters: usually have sixteen models or less in a unit. They are taller and bigger than an average human sized model, having high health pool per models and most of them deal great armor piercing damage meaning, they are fucking dangerous and they tend to be the number one priority and are targeted by the likes of ranged units like crossbows. Having larger models mean they can be targeted by even more enemy models in melee combat. But having the ability to hurt armored units as well as having a lot of health meaning they are good against high tier armored units like the Empire Greatswords unit. They gets countered hard by units with Anti-Large trait like cavalry so it is best to have them fight side by side with high model count units like a low tier infantry unit. It's also noted that some monsters tend to be very dumb and cowardly like trolls which results in them routing most of the time, but they have regeneration ability so it's actually a good way for them to heal back up. Most monster units also have the fear trait and terror trait, which helps them rout enemy units as well as not to be terrified of enemy units with the same traits. If they have ranged attacks those are treated as artillery fire, being impossible to block and causing morale penalties.

*Flying Monsters/Infantry: The newest addition to the Total War franchise available only in [[Total War: Warhammer]]. They have the ability to fly so they are safe from the feel of cold steels shoved into their spleen, but are vulnerable to the likes of range units, especially the fast projectile range units like hand gunners. Due to their ability to ignore terrains and melee units, they are often tasked with raiding enemies artillery line or range units. The fell bats of the Vampire Counts are designed for this purposes. Since they are not obstructed from anything, it is easy for them to charge into enemy line like Calvary, especially for the likes of dragons and wyvern(an orc boss mount) who possessed fear and terror trait. Total War: Warhammer 2 gave dragons breathe attack and it can deal a fuck ton of damage from up in the air to anyone that is blob up.

*Lords/Heroes: Every army has a lord. But in likes of Warhammer, they are single unit entity with the health equivalent to a units with 90 models or so. Your agents from the campaign map can be embedded into your army and served as model killing machines. These special single entity units can cause a shock wave of area of effect damage every time they attack and are much more powerful than a regular unit. Although they are still single unit entities, meaning that they can be easily surrounded and hit by many other enemy models if there's no sufficient back up. Casters are a type of hero who cast the lore of magic from the tabletop games. They are single unit entities too but most of them are unsuited for melee combat due to their low health and low melee attack.