3K was the worst for this. Once the novelty of the synchronized duel system wore off, all anyone talked about was the campaign. The campaign map should be in service of the battles, not the other way around. Supposedly Troy and Pharaoh have a better mix, but I can't be bothered to spend money on either of them. I believe CA are too lazy/incompetent to improve the battles, so they shove as much extra bullshit as they can into the recent games and DLCs to justify their existence. This is also why we'll never get a proper Medieval 3/Empire 2 game. Total War in its current form cannot survive without 3rd party tie-ins like Warhammer because CA is incapable of making games good enough to stand on their own.
The trouble with 3k is the battle system actually has a lot of
really fun mechanics they just straight up never, ever did anything with. Formations are the most advanced they've ever been in terms of what you can do with them, units can finally be made of multiple different soldiers for mixed spear/archer units that can be set in a spearwall with the archers ready to fire thanks to said kickass formations, there's awesome stuff like burning down forests with fire arrows to root out anyone who is hiding in them, sieges are back and really awesome... but all the unit stats are heavily based on the Attila-style rock-paper-scissors mechanic so you get militia swordsmen that have more charge bonus than some cavalry and militia jis that can absolutely murder cataphracts simply by standing still when charged thanks to Charge Reflection, and the skill system completely fucked over so much of
that since there's a general skill that lets said militia swordsmen ignore any and all charges while braced. Oh, and the recruitment system was shit, what with units being locked to both specific types of generals
and locked behind certain levels for said generals, so you had to grind them if you wanted to recruit anything worthwhile.
And on top of that they made the dumbass Romance mode nobody fucking wanted the default for fucking everything, even MP battles, so say hello to hilarious imbalances, like a guy running triple Zhang Feis wrecking your whole line with a simultaneous morale-crushing Warcry from all three of them.
Oh, and perhaps worst of all, due to CA going so fucking hard on those Chinabux the Workshop is completely overrun by Chinkshit, so good luck finding anything of actual quality there, never mind in English.
