If you massacre 3/4ths of a city when capturing it, the city will be happier than if you'd just occupied it. It's not crowded anymore, and that is one of the main sources of unhappiness. The fact that you've almost murdered everyone doesn't have any effect on the survivors' mood.
Essentially, this becomes the de facto occupation strategy in Rome; city grows to a particular population size and becomes unruly. Evacuate the current garrison, and let them revolt. Besiege the city with the garrison, and massacre the population. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Averted post-Empire, where looting a city results in massive happiness penalties that could easily spark a revolt within a couple of turns unless you cut taxes and fill the city with garrison troops. Looting usually works best when you don't intend to hold the city at all - just keep the (huge amounts of) cash and give it back or let the enemy retake it.
Mare Nostrum, the Mobilisation theme for Mediterranean factions in Medieval II.
van Dyck's work in Shogun 2 and its DLCs are no pushovers either.
Broken Base: There's a bit of a fracture between fans of the Total War Warhammer trilogy (Fantasy fans) and pretty much every other Total War game (Historical fans) since the two groups are in direct competition when it comes to getting their games made...and groups within the historical fans as well! Total War Three Kingdoms and Troy attempted to bridge between the two communities, having both historical and fantasy-style modes, but it can be argued that it failed to please any side. The old-school Historical fandom is put off by the emphasis in "hero units" and the fact that the "fantasy" mode is where the devs put the true effort, with the "historical" mode just a stripped down version of the game, and the Fantasy fans are unintrested, due the fact that in the end of the day, the "merged historical" games are still "swords, spears and bows and nothing else".
In the case of Three Kingdoms, if one ignores the heroes, it very much plays like a mainline historical total war game with some of the most developed campaign mechanics of the series, including a grounded records mode. Plus, previous entries in the series had their fair share of fantastical or unrealistic elements, such as Roman ninjas and Bronze Age Egyptians in Rome 1, but some of the history fans felt the series still is not a true "history" game nonetheless due to the ads focusing on the superpowered heroes in the marketing.
Geisha Assassins that have turned rogue in Shogun. The AI for Ronin/Peasants makes them rampage through nearby targets, they'll just start slaughtering the general and the replacements for the nearest enemy army, if it moves, then they continue on to the next target.
Moving back in time, or forward in terms of games, Horse Archers in Rome count too. In Medieval II, they've largely been nerfed to the level of Goddamn Bats as your knights can generally beat them; their true threat is to infantry armies or armies weak in cavalry. Horse archers in Rome can be countered by archers or cavalry, or by really heavy infantry who can soak up the missiles, so they're not that dangerous... unless you're unfortunate enough to deploy mainly phalanxes.
The entire Mongol faction, the Mongols in the first game in particular. Medieval II's Mongol horde was manageable if you had the right units in your army (lots of light and heavy cavalry.) In the first game, the Mongols got dropped in Khwarezm with about 10,000 men, far more soldiers than any one faction is liable to possess by that time. They made the Russian High Era start the hardest faction in the game. Don't get us wrong though; the Mongols of II are not to be messed with... and that applies to the ones who turn up in Shogun I too...
While we're striding on to Medieval II... Inquisitors. If you don't want these jerks killing your entire royal family and all your diplomats and merchants, you'd better have plenty of assassins on hand, because that's the only way to deal with them (other than putting them in a glass then stepping on them). For that matter, the whole damn Catholic Church is a Demonic Spider (no pun). The Papal favor rates are entirely random to start with, and are almost entirely random throughout the game, as you can LOSE favor for not building enough churches, or even while building plenty of churches. It can get to a point where you can be struggling merely to exist, and the Pope will FORCE you to devote your glorious faction leader to a pointless Crusade of Buttfuck, Nowhere or else be excommunicated. Even worse is when another Catholic faction decides it wants your land, attacks you, you attack it back, manage to retake your land, then while you're besieging your old capital, the Pope tells you to STOP FIGHTING WITH SAID FACTION and that if you attack them again within 10 turns, you will be EXCOMMUNICATED! Even just taking back your old capital will get you punished, and in the end THEY will get off with HUGE Papal favor... of course, if you know how to take advantage of the Papcy's crazy mindset, you can actually turn the tables right back on the other Catholic nations. Sure, the Pope will order you to hold off on attacking your enemies, but he won't bat an eye at you maneuvering an army into their territory and parking it right outside their city, and attacking the moment the enforced truce ends. The real trick to beating most Catholic nations is to launch coordinated assaults on multiple cities at once, or if you're man enough, just power through the excommunication. It's only a 20% penalty to public order, anyway....
A portion of the series fans admit to never actually finishing a Total War campaign, feeling snowballing on the strategic map happen long before victory conditions ever really become in reach and make players never have to fight a real-time battle ever again to get to victory. Many features of the series' entries can be inferred to having been developed to alleviate this problem (such as Shogun 2's Realm Divide causing Gang Up on the Human and giving them free veteran armies to ensure you'll not going to just auto-resolve your way to Kyoto, or Attila's titular general appearing to also get free armies out of nowhere that are very willing to raze your defeated cities and villages to make defeats against them stick for the meantime).
Ensemble Dark Horse: Sweden in Empire gets a lot of Let's Play requests and fansite discussion, considering that historically, they are rather obscure.
The game starts in 1700, right before Sweden became obscure... after a century of shaking half of Europe, so it may also count as Back from the Brink whenever Swedes are made into a powerhorse again.
Evil Is Cool: Several factions with the right motifs can seem like this.
Fan Nickname: The best way of using melee/shock cavalry units' superior charge bonus and mobility (as well as dealing with their usual inferiority in numbers) over infantry units is to charge them, fight for a few seconds, and then breaking off from combat to reform the unit to charge again. This is referred to as "Cycle charging" by players.
Though he's not (usually) an enemy to the Catholic nations, the Pope is nothing short of incredibly annoying. You get right in the middle of destroying your hated (and usually campaign-specific) enemy, and he demands you stop the war for five to seven turns. You don't, enjoy your excommunication. Not to mention he'll essentially force you to build a Crusade army and sometimes demand your faction leader take command of it. And he'll also send Inquisitors to your lands.
Though you can take advantage of the Pope's annoying tendencies by hitting a Catholic nation and triggering a "truce." Immediately afterward, during the "lull" in the war, you can move units into enemy territory, right next to their cities, without being molested by the enemy, who will be excommunicated if they attack you. Then, the moment the enforced truce ends, you can hit them with a coordinated assault, taking multiple cities. Next turn, the Pope calls for another truce. Rinse and repeat.
If you take control of Italy and have a decent number of cardinals, it's possible to rig the Papal elections. Assault Rome, kill the Pope, and elect your Preferati into the Papacy. Wham. Instant reconciliation, perfect relations with the Papal States, and you can order up Crusades on demand. And if your elected Pope becomes troublesome (like, say, demanding Rome back) and excommunicates you, an experienced assassin can put him in his place.
Horse archers throughout the series are likely to be this at a minimum (depending on the game, they may be even worse) unless your own forces have plenty of long-ranged infantry/artillery in return to shoot at them back. While the AI tends to be pretty bad at handling their horse archers if that's the case, if not, they'll pepper your units laboriously until they run out of ammunition while your troops probably will have no hope of ever closing in before that happens. The horse archers might not even really stand a chance of actually killing off or routing your units entirely, they'll just be terribly annoying.
Mis-blamed: A common rationalization among fans for gameplay issues in battles that are seen as afflicting games in the series from Empire and onwards instead of the earlier ones (such as unit collision) is to blame the Warscape engine. Strictly speaking, this cannot be the case as the Warscape engine is the series' current graphical engine (benefitting its landscape-like name), with the TW 3 engine being the series actual current game engine.
The Geisha in the first Shogun. Even when they are on your side, it's hard to escape the fact that these are inhuman white-faced super-assassins you're dealing. Their most routine targets, the generals, happen to be their most terrifying kill- they begin by playing music on a lute for the general and his guests, camera cuts away and we here a ruckus coming from the room, the Geisha walks out and we cut back to the room- the general, and his pals, bloody, dead, and hanging from the ceiling by the lute's wires.
The opening of Napoleon can be a mild instance of Nightmare Fuel for some. Napoleon's speaking, delivering his Badass Boast, and then... he's on an unidentified shore, ships burning in the background, and one huge battleship lying on its side on the beach. He gives the order to burn it. It's the HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship. For Nelson/England/Royal Navy fans... the sight is chilling.
The Scrappy: The advisers, who pop up ever time you click most things.
The Pope. England attacked me first, goddamnit! Why don't you tell them to stop sieging my cities?
Surprisingly enough for a series this long, there really aren't that many. There is one that mars what is otherwise a brilliant game, Shogun 2. "Realm Divide" basically has Japan ally up and split into two sides when you reach about 15 provinces or so (Out of about 65). These sides consist of you and whatever allies you have (until they inevitably backstab you), and the other side consists of everyone else in Japan. If you don't think that's unfair enough... each clan arrayed against you is given multiple gigantic stacks of veteran units every turn.
This is also prevalent in Rome and Medieval 2; once your empire is large enough, the other factions will gang up on you, often while still remaining at war with one another (yet not doing anything about it). Empire generally fixed these issues, as long as the player was careful not to upset the other factions.
Rome II fixes this slightly. Rather then every single faction ganging up on you, only the other factions within your subset(Roman, Greek, Ptolemaic etc) gang up on you.
It can be utterly ridiculous to buy territories sometimes. For example, in Empire, the USA has Upper Louisiana as one of its objectives. However, it belongs to France at the start, the US's only ally. Given that going to war can be a bad idea, you could try buying it, like in real life, but sometimes, no matter how much you offer, they won't accept. It can be very frustrating.
Some players are quite tired of agent gameplay, with the survival of men and the movement of armies all being quite capable of falling at the mercy of the Luck-Based Mission. A few players even made mods to remove agents entirely.
Victory screens are this. They run the gamut from Pyrrhic Victory to Heroic Victory, and given it's just a game, long-time players can definitely tell you a time they totally disagreed with it, like a "Pyrrhic Victory" screen taking the winds out of their sails after managing to pull off a win that they didn't expect they could, or a "Close Victory" that they can easily recover from and push out with.
Sequel Difficulty Drop: After Shogun I, where the rebels could wipe you out and there were super assassins that could kill your entire family. Medieval I is a far easier game at least for the majority of factions and Rome got easier still, culminating in Medieval II where a major complaint was that even on Very Hard the game simply wasn't a challenge.
Played straight in the games following Medival II: Empire, Napoleon and Shogun II are all harder than their predecessors, with Shogun II arguably being the hardest game of the entire series.
Rome II has some reputation among players for being able to snowball through it. Then Attila was made to require a lot more significant strategizing on the strategic map and provincial buildings considerations and playing as the Western Roman Empire was clearly designed to be up there for the title of the hardest faction to play out of the entire series.
Spiritual Licensee: Given the scales, time periods and battles involved, the Total War games tend to be reminiscent of various movies. More specifically, you've got Rome, which is reminiscent of Gladiator, and the Shogun 2 DLC Fall of the Samurai, can pretty much pass itself off as a prequel to The Last Samurai. Indeed, at least one reviewer has called it the "Tom Cruise DLC."
The first time that the series hit a low point was with Empire where bugs and bad AI marred what could've been another good installment for the franchise. Napoleon managed to save some face that was lost with its predecessor and Shogun 2 brought the franchise back in the right direction... up until Rome II where its launch day met with disaster among the fans who judged it to be an over-hyped, performance-heavy, and unfinished mess that was full of bugs and seemingly dumbed down compared to previous games.
Fans are still divided on the future of the Total War franchise ever since Warhammer was announced and released. The game got DLCed to hell and back before being released, leaving buyers with a rather incomplete game that has the rest of its content blatantly tucked away behind an expensive paywall, and the medieval fantasy setting has alienated some of the real-life history fanbase. On the other hand, the game's launch day was polished and bug-free with little to no problems which has won over the fans who were worried about quality-control and fans who still want to stick with the old lore now that it's been discontinued.
Total War: Warhammer II proved to be this for every branch of the franchise. On the historical side, Total War: Three Kingdoms and A Total War Saga: TROY were divisive because they were both focused around heroic epics depicting history rather than a pop history interpretation of history, giving them one foot in the world of fantasy and the other foot in the world of history, and on the fantasy side the game's own sequel Total War: Warhammer III suffered from a messy launch that annoyed many fans and had many mechanics that felt like backwards steps from where II left off.
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