Originally posted by Sasaki Kojiro
agree...the more they added to the strategy game the more it became an inferior EUII.

Medieval would have been great if it was the "The hundred years war". Rome if it was "rome vs carthage".

The game just doesn't work on a large scale--you aren't going to have "total war" for 400 years in which scotland takes over all of europe for some unknown reason.
Indeed, there were endless such scenarios in the medieval period (some of which were touched) The hundred year's war; The Reconquista; The Teutonic Wars; the Crusader Kingdom Wars; Byzantino-Turkish wars, SiculoNorman-Byzantine wars; Italian City States wars and much more such in antiquity.

The so-called Grand Campaigns are beyond historical plausibility, because they are indeed far from the scale set where the TotalWar model works best (that was designed around the campaign of Shogun by definition/necessity).

As Karl08 says tedium in the campaign map rose quickly as the series evolved, to the point that for ETW they had to simplify a lot in order to prevent the micromanaging details to be overwhelming since so much of the globe is included - on the other hand this feels wrong, because it ends up portraying France the same way Yamashiro was portrayed in STW.

CA simply scaled up or down the basic set-up of the STW campaign in order to make a game in a particular historical setting irrespective of how well this would feel and function. Its awkward at best and really bad for the gameplay.