Back when I was actively playing nearly every one of the historical Total War games, an entry set in China’s Three Kingdoms era seemed like an obvious no brainer. So when Creative Assembly finally announced it, I was so happy and looked forward to it so much. The problem is that they left it too late but by then I was thoroughly burned out of the series. Even now after having left it alone for years, I’m finding that while it’s quite satisfying to start and struggle through the beginning of a campaign, actually finishing one feels far too daunting for me. I’ve simply played too many of the Total War games over the years and despite the many innovations in this title, in the end it still feels like more of the same.

The history of the period is well known due to its many, many adaptations but briefly in 190 AD the Han Empire has collapsed. The child emperor is a puppet of warlord Dong Zhuo and outraged leaders all across the country rise up in protest against his oppressive rule. This game lets you pick one of the many, many factions present in a bid to unify China and become Emperor. The canonical three kingdoms under Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Jian are the most powerful of course but you can play as any of the minor factions as well. One departure from previous Total War titles here is that you can play in either the more historically accurate Records mode or the more fantastic Romance mode. The latter boosts the leaders and generals in the game to superhuman levels able to mow through large numbers of ordinary soldiers with the overpowered equipment to match. You’ll also need to manage the relationships between your characters as how much they like each other can influence how satisfied they are in their roles. In this way, it feels like a small step towards the Paradox-style strategy games.

With so much experience already under my belt, I went into this thinking that I would be fine without a tutorial. I was wrong as there are so many new mechanics I eventually had to go watch the entire series of tutorials on YouTube. The characters all have classes for example, which affects how they are used in the strategic and the tactical layer. Each faction is actually racing to earn prestige to rise through the ranks far enough to be declared Emperor. The tech tree, known as Reforms here, and the infrastructure development paths for each province, for some reason confusingly called commanderies, are quite involved compared to previous Total War games. On the tactical map, leaders can activate special abilities and can duel one another. Each army really consists of the personal retinues of up to three leaders. There are novel mechanics for intrigue, the favor of the Emperor, food production and much more. On top of all that, each faction has its own unique mechanic and special resource. There’s a lot to learn.

I used to be a big fan of the tactical battles of the series and raved about its ability to put thousands of soldiers at a time on the map. Nowadays it looks a little lackluster to me. Don’t get me wrong, it feels great to see the great heroes of the Three Kingdoms era duel one another but after you’ve watched a few of them, it’s more important to take your eye off of them and pay attention to the wider battle. I have to confess that during my campaign I manually played tactical battles mainly only during the opening sections when things were more dicey. Once I gained enough of a strategic advantage, it was just simpler and faster to field more armies to outnumber the enemy and auto-resolve every battle. It’s kind of skipping past the heart of the series but after a while the scale of the map is so big that each individual battle feels relatively unimportant.

The same applies to many of the other mechanics as well. When you only have a handful of leaders, it makes sense to agonize over the equipment and followers you assign to them. When assembling armies, you want to match the right leaders together, taking into account their classes, traits and existing relationships. But once you scale up beyond several commanderies, you have too many leaders to really pay attention to them all that much. I find that it’s vastly more important to build up a strong economy and keep satisfaction consistently high than to micromanage every character and every battle. It is still immensely important to put the right characters in court positions that even small bonuses like +2 order are very powerful when they apply throughout your whole faction. Being able to assign characters to boost food production or reduce corruption in particularly rich areas is very important as well because it scales.

Anyway, I wasn’t engrossed enough in this game to play it extensively. My Sun Jian campaign was basically a cakewalk after I survived the opening section and expanded steadily. I feel like the AI doesn’t play very well given how badly their cities are built up after taking them over. They seem to do adequately in tactical battles. It can be quite annoying when your army and overall tactics outmatch the enemy but your generals can’t stand up one on one against theirs and you’re forced to watch them chew up your units without being able to do anything. I will note that I found it surprisingly easy to win the campaign. Instead of a time consuming slog, the Cao Cao faction gave up and offered me confederation. I basically got their capital for free and from there, it was a straight shot to the one remaining enemy capital.

In the end, I suppose I’m still too burned out from the Total War series to be able to muster up much enthusiasm for this title. But I also feel that it’s because Creative Assembly has made the strategic layer sufficiently complex that it’s enough of a complete game by itself. I remember when the strategic layer was just a very thin veneer around the tactical battles. By that point, I feel like I’d be better off playing a Paradox title that properly simulates everything at that large scale. Anyway I’d better stay away from the Total War games from now on and I don’t really find their current focus on Warhammer to be very appealing. Maybe if they finally make a Warhammer 40k game?