Trivia / Total War

• Follow the Leader:
  • While Total War is the most famous franchise to combine turn-based strategy and real-time tactics, it was not the first. Lords of the Realm and its Spiritual Successor Lords of Magic have very similar underlying gameplay features to most Total War games.
  • While there aren't many modern Total War clones out there, they do exist. One is Imperial Glory, copying the series' gameplay mechanics though its premise predated Empire and Napoleon by a few years.
• Franchise Ownership Acquisition: Creative Assembly has developed the series and had the first titles published by EA and Activision. Sega bought out both the franchise and Creative Assembly itself in 2005.
• Meme Acknowledgement: Hardly uncommon from the series' community management team or even some trailers. The infamous "Bu-but I don't want to play as Pontus" image◊ has been said by various Creative Assembly employees to have been printed out and framed up in their offices. Later ascended, as it became an achievement in Rome: Total War Remastered, titled "Bu-But I Do Want To Play As Pontus!", where you win the short campaign as Pontus.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: A more minor example since it's just the series' first composer, Jeff van Dyck, but nonetheless one of common things the series' grognards bemoan about is Dyck not scoring for the series since Fall of the Samurai, with Richard Beddow instead having acted as the series' in-house composer since.
• Sequel Gap: Pretty common to some extent considering the series doesn't have to use the same setting between every release, though it's debatable if the criteria of a different setting alone make the different Total War games not count as sequels to each other. If you do think it does though, than Shogun 2 was released ten years after Shogun, Rome 2 came about nine years after Rome, the Age of Revolution setting of Empire or Napoleon has not seen a sequel in over ten years, and Medieval 2 hasn't seen a sequel in over thirteen years (though Total War: Attila - Age of Charlemagne has some similarity due to taking place in the Carolingian Renaissance of the Medieval period, but is also still set some centuries prior to when the Medieval games are).
• Trolling Creator: Creative Assembly marketing was very insistent about the non-existence of Skaven, matching in-universe public stance of them inside the Empire, despite Total War: Warhammer 2's very first trailer pretty obviously implying that the Skaven would be a faction for the game with the large diseased rat with red eyes appearing at the end of the trailer.