For me it's Diablo II. Granted I've played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn't grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don't hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Age of empires 2 is amazing 3 is dogshit.
All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
Supreme commander 2 is a disappointment.
TW:Warhammer 2 was good, provided you pirate it and get all the factions. I feel like Total War really shines with a bunch of weird variety and radically different core mechanics for factions instead of the more historically focused titles' "these guys with spears are 5% better at doing spearman stuff than these other guys with spears because of their brainpans being more optimized for poking people with sticks or something" gamification stuff. It's just their model of hacking up the game into little pieces to then sell each piece individually on top of the full price of the game sucks.
The dinos are cool. But then you charge at the goblin square and a few of em are sent flying and they are dealt no damage at all, because the algorithm says the dino can only deal damage to like 5 models, and ends up killing like 3 because of how damage is calculated.
There is also very little difference between goby gobos and gunpowder, because all attacks deal at least 1 damage regardless of armour. One you notice that you can't go back.
The the campaign is very limited, just the Rome 2 mechanics.
Cold Ones are so disappointing, though they're apparently getting that from the tabletop too. The Skaven and undead pirates were fun, though.
I don't play Total War, but I do play tabletop. Cold Ones have "stupidity," which means the player can lose control of them and they'll perform a random movement. It's really, really, really bad when your Cold One Knights decide they're going to go look for food off in the corner instead of charging that group of Chaos Warriors.
They also have one of the worst movement speeds of any heavy cavalry in the game at only 7 inches, especially with their cost. They do more damage than horses and have more attacks than boars, which is nice. But between Orc WAAAGH! powers giving boars more movement and horses just being faster, that may not matter if they charge you first.
Still, they're the heavy cavalry unit for both Lizardmen and Dark Elves, so people take them regardless. Especially in 6th. Edition where cavalry was a little too good. You still wanted heavy cavalry units to break through your opponent's infantry blocks.
I never played the warhammer fantasy tabletop (I did play 40k, though it's been a long time since that and all the actual games were online through vassal), but I did read the rules and army books back in whatever edition was contemporaneous to 40k's 5th edition, as well spend a bit of time reading forum threads talking about the meta.
And that's about what I remember about Cold Ones: they're a really cool concept and design that just gets overcosted and has too many drawbacks.
In TW:WH2 they've got the same issues: too expensive, too slow, too many drawbacks, in a meta that heavily leaned into ranged spam, especially for Dark Elves who had one of the best and most spammable ranged infantry units in the game. Some armies relied on pitting enemies with chaff to slam with a hammer or rain tons of fire down on them, and for a few the chaff they pinned enemies with was also going to grind them down on its own, but others were just "kite and rain fire down on enemies, avoiding getting pitted" and Dark Elves were one of those.
Ratatatata
Medieval 2 was the best Total War. I have so many fond memories of trying to break the game in different ways. Making heresy the majority religion, doing opposite colonialism by only sending diplomats to the New World to gift all of Europe to the Aztecs, getting the pope to declare a crusade against himself. It was great.
A new build of eb ii for medieval 2 dropped like a month ago. Haven't played it but it says it solves many of the stability issues thar were due to lack of ram utilization.
Age of Empires 2 is still so good.
If anything it's better than ever. My only complaint is the lack of lan in the new version, wich means I can't play multiplayer.
Shogun 2 was peak, but it had shades of what would eventually kill the franchise, like clicking special abilities that aren't "form infantry square"
3K isn't fantastic but damned if I don't absolutely love it. A good mix of historical themes and over the top gameplay in Romance mode, and the unique diplomacy system only for 3K absolutely rules
But the battles don't work quite well because it's the Rome 2 system. So while it's not as bad as Warhammer or Rome 2, it's not good. The fish scale formation does not work last time I played
Ooooh, I am gonna fight you over Total War Attila, but I recognize I'm like one of dozens who think that game is good.
That's the one with the worst optimization. 3 kingdoms, warhammer2 troy all have higher fps in my PC, granted I'm running a potato, but still. Attila is the total war game with worse optimization. Other than that it's just a reskin of Rome 2 wich is garbage.
Rome 2 was garbage, but it is no mere reskin! have at thee!
All games after Rome 2 are a reskin of Rome 2. If Rome 2 was a reskin of shogun 2, that would be very cool.