The 10 best Total War games to play today ahead of Medieval 3

Blending real-time strategy and a strategic world map, the best Total War games have, over the last two decades, become a deeply iconic strategy format. Starting as little more than wargames, they now incorporate more political and economic angles—but always in the pursuit of that golden standard described in the series title: Total War.

They’ve varied wildly in quality and size over the years, from the shorter and now defunct Total War Sagas to the sprawling decade of development that has given us the runaway success Total War: Warhammer (aka one of the best strategy games of all time). They’ve also undergone a huge evolution in gameplay. Early games were much more like tabletop and miniatures wargames of the 1980s and 1990s, focused on specifics of maneuver, positioning, and morale before secondary concerns like armor and equipment or detailed and different statistics for every unit. Later entries in the series, especially the Warhammer games and Three Kingdoms, have combat much more driven by numbers and stats rather than an attempt at a historical simulation. Both approaches have their fans in the Total War community, and I’ll not attempt to say one or the other is better.