Sadly, yeah. The guys at Creative Assembly aren't history professors.
Rome: Total Realism mod is rather nice though, since they DID have history professors as part of the dev team. I love that you can play as one of the Indo-Greek Bactrian kings, using modified hoplite tactics plus Asian elephants and Central Asian horse archers.
I do agree that RTR was pretty awesome and stuck decently close to history. I also used to like turtling on the map edge as the Bactrians. Overall, I think vanilla RTW was the last high quality CA product. I even forgive them for the Ptolemids in chariots.
The vanilla of the rest of the series, on the other hand...
No, but they do tend to hire multiple experts for whichever game they are working on, as well as acquiring source texts for the design phases.For the most part the Total War games reflect the situation of the time they are set, although concessions are made for gameplay reasons (and in some cases ratings reasons).
The Total War series ever since M2TW has been made by brutally stupid developers with no love of history. There were no experts. The series has actively spread disinformation that even a child could pick apart. For example, this loading screen gem:
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself" -- Thomas JeffersonAn American school child would point out that T.J. wrote about the pursuit of happiness in the
Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution as claimed, and moreover he declared it to be a god-given inalienable right. He wouldn't then turn around and claim with amazing hubris for the time period that this prize, which he identified first as coming from on high, was now the gift of the Constitution, which actually doesn't allude to happiness at all. It's a jaw-droppingly bone-headed fake quote that alone could throw the validity of all other quotes into question. But there are so many other bad examples.
The most buffoonish by far is the description of English longbowmen in M2TW. The background info for that unit actually repeated the groan-inducing urban legend that the vulgarity of the middle finger arose as a response to French knights cutting the index fingers off British archers, so the archers stuck out their middle fingers and said, "We can still pluck yew. See? PLUCK YEW!"
Kid you not. Load up M2TW and that claim is actually in the text somewhere. I was devastated that this was being passed to millions of less-discerning gamers as "history" when it's pretty corny and obviously an urban legend. The middle finger arose as an insult probably due to a vague similarity to genitalia, not corny pop-history connected to English longbowmen.
The person making the loading screen quotes and the background info for units has been phoning his job in for quite some time. This is a buyer beware for the Total War series. Play these games because they're fun. Never repeat anything in them on a history exam! There's no real push to maintain accuracy, even when it has nothing to do with the gameplay.