How do you play your campaigns?

[Quickening]

I read in another topic someone saying that they don't actually fight any of the battles. That they just play the game purely as a turn based strategy. For some reason this had never occured to me before and as a massive fan of the old Warlords series (before it turned traitor and went real-time) I quite like the idea.
Anyway this got me thinking that there are actually many ways you can choose to play the Total War games. That has to be rare. Im wondering how you all play your campaigns. Do you manage all settlements? Roleplay? Automatically resolve your battles? etc.
At the moment I manage every settlement and fight every single battle no matter how trivial but Im thinking of giving other styles a try.

[Eva]

My first post, though I have played MTW and RTW before too. I play almost every battle, except when I have an overwhelming force. I run every settlement myself, because I'm not always too happy about the AI doing it for me, especially since I like to save some money sometimes.
I don't pay much attention to my generals, just standard good ones leading a large army, but I'm too lazy to really look into their traits.

[Vintage318]

Since this is my first Total War game, I'm in a learning process of getting hold of the RTS and Turn elements separately. This might not be a good way to practice realistic battles but I practice RTS with Quick games and I play Campaign the traditional turn way for the moment. Once my first Campaign is over, then I'll start playing my own battles and such.

I am just too shaky atm with siege battles and I don't want that to hinder my learning process with the turn based elements of it.

I'm actually playing this game and Civilization IV: Warlords and my experience from civ is making the turn based elements very manageable.

But I'm not too used to the "clunkiness" of the unit responses in battles because most of my RTS experiences have come from Warcraft III, Starcraft, and Age of Empires. Personally my micro in battles aren't making too big of a difference because the lack/delay of unit response. If it's for the realism, I'll take that for immersion. If it's a bug... :/

[Quickening]

But I'm not too used to the "clunkiness" of the unit responses in battles because most of my RTS experiences have come from Warcraft III, Starcraft, and Age of Empires. Personally my micro in battles aren't making too big of a difference because the lack/delay of unit response. If it's for the realism, I'll take that for immersion. If it's a bug... :/

I had the same thing when I first came to the Total War series. My first gaming experience was the original Warcraft back in 1994 and Ive played that series and most other real time strategies to death since then. I came to the Total War series with Rome (although I have since bought MTW 1) and the difference was as you say. My micromanaging "skillz" from playing Warcraft 3 online availed me not. But now... I would find it hard to go back to most other strategy series.

[Musashi]

as a massive fan of the old Warlords series (before it turned traitor and went real-time)
Not technically true... The Battlecry series is a separate game... They still develop the turn based ones (They released the latest turn-based Warlords after the release of Battlecry 1 after all)

[Quickening]

Not technically true... The Battlecry series is a separate game... They still develop the turn based ones (They released the latest turn-based Warlords after the release of Battlecry 1 after all)

This is true, although I feel they put all their efforts into the real-time ones. I actually own Warlords 4 but it's nothing compared to Warlords 3. It is beyond me why they would attempt to break into a genre totally owned by the likes of Warcraft and C&C.

[Beefeater]

Battlecry 3 is rather good I thought. Warlords 4 is massively less entertaining than Warlords 3 was, alas.

I wonder how Dominions 3 will be?

[Quickening]

I wonder how Dominions 3 will be?

Hmm I had never heard of that before so I gave it a quick google and after reading this, http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/Dom3/1.htm I think I'll definately give it a shot.

[Wallas]

I like to manage all cities and taxes. I also like to fight most of my battles and usually try to get about balanced forces to make the more interesting and challenging. But sometimes I take settlements with very low garrisons with autoresolve because I don't want to chase down the few peasants around the castle.

[Varyar]

I'm playing it more like a strategy game, managing all my settlements and auto-resolving most battles(simply because I usually outnumber/outrank the enemy so much that victory is certain). Fighting all battles would be far too tedious, I like to save my effort for the battles where the outcome is uncertain. No role-playing, I treat my generals like chess pawns, killing them left and right if it nets me(the faction) benefits. Will probably be role-playing when I get tired of the 'let's-maximise-everything' approach.

[Whoz'onE]

This is my first TW also. I micro-manage everything in the strategy part, and fight 80-90% of my own battles.

On the occasions that I allow the battle to be auto-resolved, I do so because I want to take a settlement for minimal losses. For some reason, the auto-resolve appears to be able to make the enemy abandon their settlement - shortening the campaign - whereas I always seem to have to fight to virtually the last man. Thus I take more casualties, whilst also inflicting more casualties on the enemy and leaving fewer forces to come back and fight another day. Perhaps I'm missing a trick when fighting my own battles.

[chunkynut]

I've played all the TW series and I manage all my cities/castles and play any battle with over 500 men on each side (or there abouts) or if I really think I need to play the battle to get a correct result (if I know I can win but the autoresolve may not do so). I only do this as a time saver rather than not wanting to play a specific battle.

And as there are the two elements of real time tactical battles with all the preperation for these battles done in the turn based campaign I find that there will be points when I 'steal a march' on the AI and points where the AI does so to me. I find it more enjoyable that way.