What are some common or uncommon things that video games get wrong or don't represent accurately enough to history?

TW games are absolute garbage in the strategic mode and even Parashit looks like the most sophisticated thing ever compared to them, this is why I play only battles.

the problem is that they lack bouncing,and even if they hit square in a column knocking down 20 guys 12 will get back up
in real life you'll be taken down completely and the cannonball bouncing is even deadlier since it picks up dirt and shit
some of it could be ridiculous
i've played basically all total war game up to Attila
Rome had urbans,but berserkers,spartans and royal/silver shield pikes could be absurd too
Medieval 2 had those english swordsmen,christian guard and conquistadores which are unbeatable infantry but cavalry is absurd here,egypt had those qapakulu and french also had their gendarmes that could actually beat off elephants
empire had mason du roi and swiss guards for france,coldstream for brits and life guards for the rest
napoleon had old guards and coldstream
rome 2 had those oath sworn,evocatis and royal spartans
shogun 2 had a good one with samurai heroes,bow heroes etc

i play VH/H on Ottoman when i want a challenge
everyone hates you except Britain and Prussia

Supply. In Total War games, it's completely absent (except in mods); your soldiers all magically conjure up the food, ammunition, armor, etc that they need. It's also missing in CK2 and EU4. The supply limit is just a cap on how many troops you can have before they start dying; a large army just below the supply limit can fight without issue halfway around the world away from any friendly provinces. Maybe this can be explained by foraging, but supply trains were just as important in all of these time periods. In Victoria 2, armies do require certain goods to operate efficiently (ammunition, small arms, artillery, etc) but they're just instantly teleported in even when the army in encircled. Ironic, since it has the greatest potential to model the production and consumption of many different kinds of goods instead of just generic supplies. Hearts of Iron 3 has the most realistic supply system of any Paradox game, with supplies being generated in provinces with IC and traveling down a route which takes time and can be affected by factors such as weather and partisans. Serious shortages can occur and your troops will be unable to move and perform much worse in combat not because of an arbitrary cap, but because a bottleneck in your network was struck by bombers, or mud is reducing the capacity of roads, or partisans are harassing convoys. The biggest drawback is that it's all run by the AI which acts fucking schizophrenic most of the time.

Republican Rome didn't actually have Jupiter-worshipping ninjas

B-but /twg/ told me that before Fantasy came along and ruined everything all Total War games were perfect simulations of history.

Fighting in a formation was the exception, not the rule. Ancient armies often formed up into lines or squares, and of course the Romans and Spartans drilled and could perform maneuver in combat, but for the most part soldiers were part-timers who lacked discipline or training, and the best you could hope from them is that they will charge when you tell them to. The "tactics" in a medieval battle came before the fighting, when you chose the battlefield and set your troops up, not once the fighting starts.

user please go and read some books on medieval military history before you embarrass yourself further

>hurr read a book durr
You're the one who has embarrassed himself, fuckwit.

in relative terms very few people died in direct contested hand to hand combat.
it mostly consisted of lots of maneuvering around each other, trying to be as scary as possible without actually getting close enough to get cut, getting a few kills, and then hunting down and killing the enemy if they turn and run first.

It was the same even after. There's no way to actually command a battle once it's started. Everyone is deaf from the roaring canons and the battlefield is covered in smoke from the black powder rifles.

The absolute state of Veeky Forums

You can look up basically any medieval chronicle or annal and find complex orders of battle.

Well what books on the subject have you read?

so is this a complete meme or was it like that?

youtube.com/watch?v=_v2RgtKLaVU&t=450s

>Supply
This so much. I want desperately to play as barbarians using small bands to harass the supply train of the invading army.

How hard would it be to force every army afield to have a tether (supply train) back to a friendly region/settlement. The further away the greater the logistics cost. The cost could be mitigated by pillaging/forging but would come with a penalty to the army's movement. If you don't have the gold or the area you're pillaging isn't wealthy enough (or already pillaged to exhaustion) or your tether is cut by hostile armies, then you suffer attrition.

Gives you multiple options to indirectly attack your enemies both by pillaging the lands of the invaded and by forcing the toll of attrition upon the invader. Pillaging too much would make lands less valuable for conquest.

It would actually give me a reason to have more than one big army to manage and make the war more sophisticated than march my army towards his army until the fight happens.

cringe

Generally speaking armor is better than video games show. You can't kill a man in plate armor by hitting him with a sword several times.

I want to add that arrows are highly unlikely to even pierce plate armour nevermind kill

i RTW1 you would usually kill most of enemies in a rout

Hell when plate armor was first encountered in the middle east, some of those guys were running around, riddled with arrows like pincushions, still fighting. Now this still hurt like all hell, but technically there weren't actually injured.

You posted Shogun II Fall of the Samurai, so here's one.

The Samurai stopped wearing armor by the 18th Century.

Not only because there was a long-ass peace under the Tokugawa, but just like with their counterparts in Mainland Asia and the rest of Europe, Japanese armies centralized and ballooned to sizes bigger than ever before that to give all these people armor wasnt practical anymore. In addition to the growing threat of firearms such as muskets.

So just like their Eurasian counterparts in China & Europe, Nips started wearing uniforms instead.

During the Boshin war there was only one commander recorded to have worn armor in battle. (Pic related) and he was considered eccentric.

Scandinavians dont have cavalry
I will never understand the Turk who thought up this

I think Froissart mentions arrows piercing the thinner side armor, but don't quote me on that.

Interesting. So they had a bunch of arrows that only went like a cm inside their skin?

Well I mean there's just the sheer impact of the arrow on your arrow, that would hurt after a few dozen times.

on your armor*

One thing I miss about old Total War games is, that you could just have units march across the map without a general, and that killing a general really made a big difference, because you couldn't just pull an infinite number out of your ass.

The new ones starting with Rome have so many so terrible design decisions. Provinces, generals, weird ass color filters, the complete worthlessness of garrisons, ...
At this rate I'l never get to play anything more modern than Shogun II.

On a related note, how is the battle gameplay of Europa Barbarorum 2? My vague memories of Medieval 2 include a lot of weird quirks and bugs related to unit movement and unit cohesion, especially in cities.

That's in EU4, if you have more troops in a province than a province can support they start dying off from attrition.
They also have it nation wide in the form of a cap on the number of troops you can have, if you go over you face penalties to the maintenance modifier.

It's not exactly what you're talking about, I know, but it's the closest I can think of as far as game mechanics go.

>artillery in Fall of the Samurai
>Four units of Krupp guns against a non-western opponent

This, but even before the full rout of the army, forces would back down from fighting. The 10% casualty is when a unit of troops is expected to rout, but not in the sense of dropping shields and fleeing without regard for companions. More like backing off on signal and regrouping 120 feet away from the enemy who is cheering, catching their breath, and killing your wounded.

Once the survivors are ready to try again, another clash, again and again until it really is overwhelmed (enemy charges and destroys the line cohesion, causes real panic) or the army fails in some other part of the field and the unit protecting your flank suddenly takes off.

DeI is a mod you bois will like. It's still a game and not realistic but it at least gives a nod to those aspects of war in its mechanics.

This is why horns, bugles, flag signals, etc. are made and officers aren't trained to fight the enemy personally, they're paying attention and doing their best to keep the situation visible (indirectly via dispatches or other means) and manageable to the commanding general (by making sure the men receive and follow his orders).

I really doubt most people wants to deal with the realities of supply and logistics past a very superficial level

>most soldiers in warfare before 1600 were not enlisted men and returned to the fields after the war was over
the knights were seen as the elite of europe because they were the best of the limited amount of professionals.

> what are mercenaries

the limited amount of professionals

Are you actually retarded?