I love the Total War series, but after about... oh 2 summers of almost non-stop play in R:TW's SPQR mod I've been extremely burnt out on the series. If you like horrifyingly large and numerous battles (Try 5-10 in a slow turn once it gets going.) Then that was the mod for you. I ended up killing over a million Macedonians over something like 45 turns in two or three months of playing every day for hours and hours a day. I could only afford, I think it was 6 legions at the time, and I'd make enough headway to get close to a city before having to pull back and reconstitute that legion they were so torn up. I'd crush 5-6, 7 if I was lucky armies in a turn with a single legion, and make two steps of progress before having to retreat.
Finally scraped the money together for a fleet to fend of the pirates and outflank the Macedonian hordes and take Greece, and then the Germans hacked their way through the last of the Gauls and invaded and I was done.
Only played about 100 hours of Empire total war, not as nice as the N:TW mod for the old Medieval:TW. I really like their style, but I like the new logistics introduced into Empire. Just wish it was more in depth and that armies required supply trains. And I wish to God that they would stop calling 120 man formations regiments. That's a company, damnit, not a Regiment. A real regiment, before being carved up in battle, would have the same number of men as half the armies running around in that game.
But that's my only real complaint.