Recommend a strategy game

[GloatingSwine]

Also when you pass a casualty threshold the entire enemy army usually breaks and routs.

[Kaptin Keen]

Um, what? That sounds totally like a bug, because generally if a unit breaks in a Total War game it will run out of the battle area and be removed. There's no way that a unit which has broken and left the battlefield should prevent a win.

Also when you pass a casualty threshold the entire enemy army usually breaks and routs.

I ... have no way to comment on either of those things.

[Cespenar]

Maybe they started the rout way back to your side of the map, so that they'd take the maximal amount of time to reach their end of the map and finish their rout. So you probably waited for a time that you thought reasonable, and thought it just bugged out.

Or maybe it just bugged out. I never played Empire myself.

[snowblizz]

Sometimes in TW a routing unit has "left" the map, but one or more member sof that unit have still to exit. These stragglers can be waaay off from the main unit.

More generally I would agree with what most say, the game should not bug out like that.

One other scenario I can think of, units can regain morale, and especially light cavalry can be stupid hard to chase down and off the map (if they for some reason have good morale regeneration capabilities). I don't remember which TW game I had that issue with though.

[Resileaf]

No matter which Total War game, no unit can recover from routing more than twice. On the third time they rout, they are automatically shattered, and will never return to the battlefield.

It is however very possible that the battle was indeed already over, and that when you had the choice to decide between continuing to run down the enemy troops or end the battle, you continued the fight, and some units were taking an ungodly long time to escape the battlefield. I will not blame you for not knowing that you can exit the battle at any time at this point. I did not know for the longest time either.

[KineticDiplomat]

If it’s essentially war games you’re looking for, here’s a few goodies. They do tend to be a bit more accurate than the Total War series which have always been more about creating a visually stunning arcade game with a lift strategy layer:

Combat Mission. By battlefront games, pound for pound the single best battalion and below tactical simulation on the market. Comes in WWII and modern eras.

Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa. You can find it on steam, a first rate operational level command game about the initial invasion in ‘41.

For some much more light hearted fare, not quite as cartoonish as total war, but less adamantly tactical, you could try Ultimate General: Civil War.