Konnichiwa,

Welcome to the forums Eldroy.

The in sync units make it look less realistic. I guess that the large number of men on the field is (also) responsible for the need to sync it.

Moving in sync is one thing, men in one unit also look quite similar. Same problem: you can make two different models, but hardware won't like 10,000 different ones. You can interchange parts. Instead of a red pants and a blue pants unit in the same barbarian army, you mix red and blue pants in the two units. Same for haircolor, extra sidearms, scars, size. This will also consume some resources, but the stuff is already there, so instead of modelling each individual soldier you give them/some a short 'attribute list':

-beard no
-facescar yes
-hair bald
-sidearm sword
-pants red
-mansize large

Compare the first title, Shogun totalwar, to the 'second', Medieval Totalwar. Each men in STW units looked the same. In MTW men in units have different sizes. In STW men were neatly lined up in units, MTW also makes some less ordered ones.

I haven't seen all TC movies, but I thought to see some differences between the early and the later ones. This may also depend on the type of unit. The first was a barbarian unit, quite sync and identical to my taste. The later was a Macedonian pikeunit, those looked great. The length of the pike probably makes it more appearant that individuals are doing different things, I also saw some close fights with a sword in such units. I hope that those were pikemen who dropped/lost their spear.

My guess is that the creators are aware of it and are trying things to remove the 'sync'. The large number of units doesn't make this an easy task, you need nifty tricks and they have to work in the big picture (what use are natural units if it increases the number of crashes?).