The amount of units in Total war has basically not been going up, because they value animated units to much. You are still playing with low 1000s of units, and

The amount of units in Total war has basically not been going up, because they value animated units to much. You are still playing with low 1000s of units, and this has been the case for a decade. The AI is also not really much better. Even on strategy map level it has been simplified.