History VideoGame / TotalWar

* LastStand: Units that are in a city or castle's square will fight to the death, and if they have to fight there, they usually ''are'' fighting to the death. In city or castle fights, if a defending unit routs, it will attempt to run to the city square. Sometimes, if you get to the square and are controlling it, a enemy unit somewhere else might rout and [[HilarityEnsues run right into your soldiers]]. Soldiers completely surrounded in the field will also fight to the death; but this is just to break out.

* ''Total War Battles: Shogun'' (2012): A mobile spin-off for iOS devices, later ported to Android and PC.
* ''VideoGame/TotalWarArena'' (2015): A free-to-play game focused around team-based multiplayer battles. Originally shut down in 2019, it was relaunched in 2020 with a focus on the Chinese market, but shut down permanently two years later.
* ''Total War Battles: Kingdom'' (Open Beta, 2015): A free-to-play cross-platform browser game for PC, Mac and tablets set in a persistent 10th century England.
* ''The Total War Sagas'': A series of smaller-scale releases with similar gameplay to the main series.
** ''VideoGame/ThronesOfBritanniaATotalWarSaga'' (2018)
** ''VideoGame/ATotalWarSagaTroy'' (2020)
*** ''Mythos'' (2021)

* AscendedMeme: ''VideoGame/TotalWarShogun2'' had an infamous voice line from your aide-de-camp telling you a unit was routing [[https://www.voices.com/demo_detail/285630 "Our men are running from the battlefield! Shameful display!"]] Every Total War game since has had the line appear in the game's text or voice acting in some way.

*** ''Mythos (2021)''

* ''Total War: Pharaoh'' (2023)

* ''VideoGame/TotalWarArena'' (2015): A free-to-play game focused around team-based multiplayer battles. Originally shut down in 2019, it was released again in 2020 with a focus on the Chinese market, but shut down permanently two years later.

To date, there have been eleven installments in the series, with associated expansion packs:[[index]]

* ''Total War: Elysium'' (TBA): [[/index]]A free-to-play CardBattleGame based on people from throughout history.[[index]]

* ''VideoGame/TotalWarArena'' (2015): A free-to-play game focused around team-based multiplayer battles. Originally shut down in 2019, it was released again in 2020 with a focus on the Chinese market, although players from other regions are still able to play it.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: If you're lucky, captains of armies not led by officers can be promoted out of the ranks into the royal family or become a general after battle for their good work at commanding and kicking ass. (And [[RagsToRiches become Emperor of Rome!!!)]] Unfortunately, this costs a lot of money from ''Empire'' onwards.

* TheGreatestHistoryNeverTold: The series will occasionally dip its toes into lesser-known periods of history that are rarely covered in other media.
** ''Shogun'' and especially its sequel ''Shogun 2'' are some of the most in-depth works focusing on the Feudal era of Japan from a Western company. The first game's DLC was about the Mongol invasions of Japan (predating Creator/SuckerPunch's ''VideoGame/GhostOfTsushima'' by over a decade) while the second had two expansions about the Genpei War of the 11th century and the subsequent Boshin War in the 1860s.
** Both ''Rome'' and ''Rome II'' give a good look at the Hellenistic world outside of Greece itself. Both games also allow the player to select one of the many confederations and empires in ancient Europe and the Middle East. The ''Barbarian Invasion'' expansion pack for ''Rome'' also covers the Late Antiquity era of the Roman Empire which tends to get very little coverage in other works of HistoricalFiction. ''Rome II'' takes it up a notch by introducing individual [=DLCs=] set in UsefulNotes/ThePeloponnesianWar (''Wrath of Sparta''), the Crisis of the Third Century (''Empire Divided'') and the Roman-Etruscan Wars (''Rise of the Republic'').
** One ''Kingdoms'' expansion pack of ''Medieval II'' is set in the Livonian phase of the Northern Crusades between the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Lithuania.

* AndNowForSomethingCompletelyDifferent: The releases of Total War: ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' and ''Warhammer II'', the franchise's only forays into fantasy.

* TheWarSequence: The games can be as fun to watch as they are to play, just to see thousands of little soldiers hacking or blasting away at each other on panoramic battlefields. One of the niceties about ''Napoleon'' is that it upgrades this a ''lot''... although sometimes you have some [[FunnyAneurysmMoment not so funny moments]], such as [[http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/4865/horsedragged.jpg a hapless cavalryman from a shattered unit whose foot is trapped in a stirrup, hence his being literally dragged away by his galloping horse]]... here's hoping that was a corpse. The battles themselves can get pretty brutal as well when [[WarIsHell viewed up close.]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wISXDn8qyiY You sometimes can't help but cringe as someone gets stabbed by several soldiers at once, run over by heavy cavalry and blown away by artillery.]]