Well, MTW massively improved on STW. You had castle sieges, 100 or so units, general portraits, the trait system, more religions, the pope, crusades etc, glorious achievements.
That's reasonable and it didn't have suicide FMs quite as much, armies that didn't devolve into a massive ball of units like MIITW and RTW, (ETW has fixed some of this actually), the diplo AI was atleast somewhat reasonable. It generally stuck to treaties and would all-in weaker guys.... etc.
RTW was to a lesser degree similar upon release. It was friggin 3D and added the new campaign map and converted everything to 3D. However, RTW also saw the rise of the suicide general charge head-long into phalanxes, and other bad things like poor diplomacy and multiple personality diplo/warfare AIs. Where as the MTW AI actually effectively flanked sometimes and did some other clever-clever things... RTW's AI never did too much. Interestingly enough the strategic AI got a nice upgrade in Alexander where diplomacy became quite better and the AI learned how to properly invade and reinforce invasions as much as an AI can be expected to.
MIITW was a trainwreck plain and simple. The AI was nuts:
-The diplo/warfare problems were still present.
-The idiotic BI naval invasions came back with a vengence.
-Units balled up instead of come at you with any decent formation most of the time.
-We had passive AI if the player fielded too many missiles.
-There were much more errors with unit cohesion and getting units to actually fight.
-Castle pathfinding was and still is borked.
-The AI kept spamming uber peasants.
Also, just incase anyone cares here's my personal play time on each of the games:
-I played about 12 campaigns in STW and finished 3.
-I played about 15 campaigns in MTW and finished 2 due to memory leaks.
-I played about 4 campaigns in Vanilla RTW and finished 1. Found CIV3 for $5 and played a ton of games. Then I discovered EB, XGM, and other things

of which I played several campaigns though finished none.
-I played about 9 campaigns in MIITW and finished 2(Milan and Jerusalem in Kingdoms).
-I played 3 campaigns in ETW, got bored with the silly AI and went back to CIV4 and then EB and then Third Age: Total War for MIITW, then I found XCOM.
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