Slitherine

I was reading Quora earlier and ended up reading a couple of threads about realistic war games.
One that frequently came up was Rome: Total War.
R:TW is a pretty fun game, especially if the two-hour RTS battles don't bother you, but LOLOLOL realistic?
One of the examples mentioned that this was the game used for 'Time Commanders', which actually just shows how shoddy the Hitler Channel is (it's all Ancient Aliens crap anyway), not how 'realistic' Total War is.
I guess most people are not even aware that grognard games exist, but still, R:TW is only slightly more historical than Civilization.

Most gamers are not grognard, and they dont have deep knowledge of real battles, they say total war is realistic because the battles (comparing to age of empire) indeed look more real (real in sense of Hollywood movies battles).

Spartan leaves the Total War family in the shade IMO. They both share the mix of turn based strategy and realtime battles but the basic concept of Spartan (and the rest of that family) is far superior. The two hour battles of Total War is not just a problem of playability. Ancient commanders were not able to micromanage battles in the way players can in total war. As far as I know, Ancient unit commanders were not issued with personal radios which is what that level of command and control would require. The Spartan concept of deploy your troops and then let things run is much more realistic. If ever there were a Spartan 2 ( I wish), the battles could be improved but the basic concept is sound where as that of Total war is unredeemable flawed.

Rome: total war (the first one) was good. Very good for its time. Maybe not realistic. But It's not a wargame, not a simulation. I enjoyed It and numerous mods were great.