Total War games don't really wind up in any better a situation. You conquer one settlement to enable you to build more units to conquer another settlement and so on and the only actual goal you end up with is painting the minimap your colour. The combat is repetitive and most battles just play out the same as the previous ones, using the same units. Anything else is just personal goals such as "fuck those greenskins, they need to die" and so on. Most games that aren't story based or linear are exactly like this. Just a superficial gameplay loops full of shit for you to play with within your own chosen goals, otherwise known as a sandbox. The X series might stand out a bit more in this weakness because it's janky as fuck and doesn't have the artistic layer or polished presentation that bigger budget games have.
I agree that the ships end up being superficial when it comes to their roles. The various types should have strategic values other than whether they're better suited for OOS or IS combat. Hopefully they did something about this alongside the new fleet control systems.
If Egosoft was a larger team, I'd agree that they should focus on more polished systems rather than just a pure sandbox, but they're a really small studio and I'd rather them focus on being really good at one thing, than to spread themselves too thin like they did with Rebirth (even without the obvious retarded console port attempts)
Way to be extremely wrong.
At least "paint the map blue" is a fucking long-term goal, the X games can't even be asked to have that. 4x have similar late-game "you've won but need to keep playing" issues. That is true for TW, but also for MoO2, and pretty much all of the Civilization games. If anything the Warhammer Total Wars suffer from this syndrome the least.
You are also wrong about the character of Total War battles, at least on the higher difficulty levels that force you to engage with the systems more. Older TW games were much more limited from being pinned to history and realism but Warhammer has really shown how good the concept is when the tactical design space is opened up via the fantasy theme.
Your army composition changes drastically depending on your tech level, the enemy's tech level, and especially which faction your enemy is. All of these considerations are quite important when putting together an army composition. Your lord and tech path can drastically affect the army composition, making some units, strategies, and compositions more efficient or useful. There are also siege battles, which are probably the weakest part of WH but they do require you to at least make some considerations as to which army and how many stacks you bring. All of these elements evolve over the course of a campaign.
TW also has stakes where X doesn't. You don't kill the Greenskins because you want to, you kill them because you
have to. They either are an obstacle you have to overcome in pursuit of some larger goal or represent a clear and present danger to your campaign's very existence.
Almost all games have game loops, but what makes the good ones compelling and the X ones not is that the good ones
aren't superficial. They contain meaningful decisions that require you to consider options and project out the consequences to your failure or success of some higher purpose.
X fails because it lacks all of that. The core elements of the entire game (ships, combat, economy) are all superficial so it doesn't matter what you pick, but you err when you project the superficiality of those decisions onto other games where they are meaningful. Faction, building, and army composition choice in TW games is
not superficial.
And their studio size is not an excuse at all, bad design knows no team size. If anything, doing actual design work on the game it would improve efficiency. Lord knows they might stop wasting time on retarded shit like coding, debugging, and fixing individual mining drone AI.
Egosoft suffers from what I like to call "One Req Problems". That is, they suffer from problems that could all be fixed by hiring one good systems designer that knew what they were doing and letting them do their job. Bethesda games are notoriously full of one req problems. Egosoft's main issues aren't the lack of manpower, but the lack of design competence.