>>2087759
I've played Medieval, Rome, Medieval 2, Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, Rome 2, Attila, ToB, Troy and Pharaoh.
I like history. When I sat down to play Rome for the first time I was a child, and I knew nothing about the titular city except togas and olive oil. The game pulled me into its world, presented a vision of its setting so unique and interesting that it continues to influence media depictions of Rome to this day, and taught me just enough surface-level history to contextualize what I was seeing. It inspired me to seek out real historical research and learn more about the period, because the vision and interpretation they presented was interesting.
There's a similar experience to be had in Medieval 2 (which is why so many people are fucking obsessed with it), in Empire, in Shogun 2 and especially in Attila. These games are fiction, and their depiction of "history" only loosely follows any real historical facts. The facts that are there only serve as a baseline for the artistic embellishment. Somebody at CA created the world that so many people found compelling in Rome, and Medieval 2. They didn't just find that world in a textbook, they made it.
This is what's been lacking in more recent titles. Everybody hates Troy not necessarily because it's a bad game (it is) but because its "DAT TROOF BEHIND DA MYFF" vision is so ass. It sucks all the magic out of a magical setting and replaces it with cosplayers. Shrinks larger than life characters, and reduces mythic kingdoms into mundane settlements.
Pharaoh just throws a barrage of nonsense names and places at you, with an inconsistent and incoherent aesthetic and no real clear vision for its setting--because it's like 4 miniature settings just kind of vaguely placed next to each other. There's a flash of old greatness in how they present and characterize the Paleset but they're an outlier in an overwhelmingly bland game bereft of vision and starved of context.
