Played through the tutorials and the 2 demo missions and wasn't real impressed. Keep in mind, I haven't played any of the Total War series, so I don't have any comparison frame of reference within the franchise. I have played most other popular RTS/RTT titles though and found this game was very slow-paced, it feels more like a sim- somewhere inbetween an animated board game and watching the History Channel.
Graphics are really good. Very GPU intensive game, lots of pixel shading going on with some excellent effects. Surprisingly, wasn't very CPU intensive for an RTS, but this may scale quickly with more units. Ran well on my rig, frame rates typically 30-40FPS with everything on Ultra, 1920x1200, 4xTrMSAA. A few issues with individual units not rendering animations consistently, particularly horses and mounted units. Load times are longer than most games but still manageable, sounds like more RAM seems to benefit here.
Gameplay and pace again, I found to be very slow. Unit abilities and such, attack ranges, AI etc. I found to be heavily lacking as some touched on earlier. You have to basically do the whole right-click and drag direction before your line soldiers auto-attack and there just didn't seem to be many moves/abilities other than "Run", "Fire at Will" and "Melee". Overall I found controls and giving orders to be pretty clunky overall, where timing and coordinating massive army movements was always off. I'm sure this would improve with time and practice.
Unit descriptors and designs seem pretty uninspired and unremarkable. I guess each unit has various "morale" levels that impact their fighting ability, but the UI design and graphical representations are just so bland and boring, like footnotes in a wall of text. Like a sample unit card would be like:
Highland Infantry 28/30
5 damage, (r)un, (s)hoot, (m)elee
happy, golucky, ready to kill, yay
inspired by nearby unit and just happy to be here alive
I can see why some people would like this game, its just too slow and generally uninteresting to me. Not a huge fan of the particular time period and type of warfare either. Personally will not buy, but its certainly not a poorly designed or executed title.
Edit: One major gripe with the graphics/engine was the lack of Alpha Blending and transparencies for textures depending on camera angle. For example, if your units are in the forest and there's trees between you and your units, you won't see them. I know its more "realistic", but its also incredibly drab staring at a bunch of trees instead of your units. Its not just a fault of this game, most games do a really poor job of this, I think the last game I played that did a really excellent job of blending alpha textures so they were nearly transparent was Titans Quest.
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