Gore in Total War games... I don't think it's necessary.

Already the games depict battles pretty gruesomely at times. For example, in M1 the "Butcher button" during battles is pretty gruesome.

Light cavalry riding down fleeing enemies (albeit they're "captured"... To be executed later!)... Even bloodless corpses littering the battlefields are still corpses.

I don't think seeing tiny musketeers go splat is that important. The sound scape is at times pretty disgusting, even though after playing hundreds of battles it's hard to notice. Especially in M1, with random screams of pain, anger and fear, I was shocked when I first started playing.

Funny thing, though... The more details there are on the battlefield, the more clinical it appears. Those sprite men have always given me a better feeling of controlling living forces, unlike those highly detailed clone armies of Rome kind of sliding at each other at warp speed.