Ok,
The first Total war game I played was Shogun, way back in 2001 which at the time I thought was excellent as I'd been playing Age of Empires 2, and it seemed like a big leap up in scale and ambition for the time. Ive played every release since, including lots of mods and ad ons and looking at the whole thing, Id have to say that Rome total war made the biggest impact on me generally.

So, what do I think of this one? Well, having read these forums before buying the game, I was initially worried about what the graphics would look like but they actually seem to be ok ( I get much better fps by dropping the shader down to low for only a minimal graphics impact in its current pre patch state). I was more concerned with how the game played and I was quite pleasantly surprised.

Diplomacy now seems to be a useful tool rather than an afterthought, thrown in to complement the real time battles as I had regarded it in all previous total war releases up to Napoleon. I like the fact that there are dozens of different factions to interact with and use as shields, distractions and tools against your enemies.

Battles( Im playing on normal) seem to be more of a challenge now. Ive lost several, even though I thought that I'd deployed sensibly and didnt do anything particularly rash or risky. This seems to indicate that there is now an increased need to ensure that you bring quality troops to the field as opposed to simply outnumbering your opponent. People have been complaining about the lack of variation in troop types (too many Ahigari, etc) but to me Ive always found the enormous amount of types available in previous releases and mods to be something of a smokescreen, to compensate for the fact that the core of the game, particularly diplomacy and battlefield AI, cant be radically adjusted or "fixed". This one however, at this early stage of investigation, does appear to build on what Empire began, with a reasonably well functioning system.

I also like the way you can now concentrate on building your commanders into individuals with the skill system, meaning of course that you dont want to throw them away after having invested so much time in their development, and the beautifully drawn portraits ( which now correspond with their actual appearance) help with increasing immersion as well.

My initial views then, are that whilst not being a groundbreaking jump forward, like Rome was, this installment is looking like being quite a solid and well rounded addition to the series.