Total War games confuse me a good bit. I have played a couple mostly blind. The combat seems interesting but the game loops seem really, really bad for campaigns. Like, the game inevitably snowballs as you grow in power and after a very brief period you have little incentive not to to just auto battle everything because whatever mechanical advantage you might get from being better than auto battle; you’re going to lose less time irl just tanking the loss and spending a bit more game time to regroup (which rarely had a consequence). And it becomes a huge grind because you need to be constantly clicking on cities to boost income that you don’t really care about.

I’m curious what fans have to say. It seems to be that the experience would be vastly improved if the campaigns focused on small scenario sections with little to no kingdom management and just a series of planned battles that you must get through with predefined set of resources.