*review coming from a long time veteran of this type of game, with 20 thousands hours+ on both Total War games, Crusadesr Kings 3, and others. (TW and CK hereafter for short)
i get the impression that this game wanted to be something a little in between TW and CK, which is not a bad idea at all, but failed, and ended up instead being something that combines the worst aspects of both franchises into a single game, with none of the good parts...
it's not a dumpster fire or anything, in fact, there isn't anything particularily awful about it, but it just feel so, so dull and lame... this game could have been good in early 2000's but nowadays?
you get none of the cool playable real time battles and army composition strategy that are TW's focus, and also none of the kingdom management, vassal politics, and character roleplaying that are CK's focus.
instead, it seems like their main focus here is...to try to play SimCity in a Total War campaign map (?)
at least, that's what i'm guessing, because seriously, i have never seen a grand strategy game with a building roaster so bloated and inflated as this, and other aspacts of the game seems a secondary focus at most.
there is like 25 buildings for agriculture, 25 others for fortification, 30+ for recruiting, and as many for religion, authority, economy, ressources, etc etc...
and yes... you guessed it... Most of those buildings are either useless or redundant because they all overlap each other in what they do.
having more choices doesn't nessesarily equals more strategies or deeper gameplay, in this case, i feel it just creates bloat: complexity, only for the sake of complexity.
There are some great ideas that i like a lot too (like how the population in each region is represented according to the different castes of medieval society and you can set a % of each group to work different task as neeeded, and change that each turn, that's very cool and nifty actually)...but that's not enough to save my interest the game.
