At a glance, this is still very much a Total War game
My kingly ego would rather overlook the fact that I failed to build any farms and presided over chronic food shortages. My decision to mint my own currency and put an imprint of my head on all the coins didn’t go down well with my Christian English subjects, who would rather see the Lord’s cross there. When one of the nobles started getting uppity, I should perhaps have taken the option to torture him rather than pay him off. In the following years the nobles came to me for bribes several times after that, and each time I caved my reputation collapsed further. As a result the reign of king Guthfrid of the Northymbre Vikings is short and violent, which is fitting considering the tensions surrounding that period. Maybe his son and heir will go on to do better, though with the name Cnut, I have my doubts.
Thrones of Britannia is set in 878 AD, just after Alfred wins the battle of Edington and halts the Viking takeover of England. The proud factions of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland enter a febrile peace, the sort that just wants to implode the second a leader farts in the wrong direction. It’s an ideal setting for one of the most experimental Total War games to date, especially for a game that’s well suited to telling stories. At a glance this is still very much a Total War game—you build up your settlements and direct armies on a campaign map that encompasses England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and then direct your forces in real time strategy battles when armies clash. However this game is particularly interested in using streamlined politicking and narrative dilemmas to drive your campaign in unexpected directions. The ‘Saga’ moniker fits perfectly.
“I like building stories,” game director Jack Lusted tells me. “Political events are certainly a nice way to add to that. If you strip an estate from someone or you secure loyalty in a certain way, they might agree, but they become vengeful, then they might have other events pop up based on them working against you now.”
origin story
During our chat, I learn that the publication you hold in your hands right now is partly responsible for Lusted’s love of Total War, his subsequent modding efforts, and a career at Creative Assembly that spans Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, and Rome II. “I got into Total War back in 2002. I got PC Gamer every month, and read a few articles about the first Medieval and thought, ‘Ooh that sounds quite interesting,’ and then the copy with the review came out. I remember it was by Kieron Gillen, and it had the words, ‘I am the king of Spain!’ at the start, and I thought, ‘I’m going to buy that!’”
I tell Jack I almost tortured one of my nobles, and he laughs. Torturing him would have given him the ‘Enforced Loyalty’ trait. “That will over time adapt. For a number of turns he will be loyal, then afterwards he will not be loyal, and he will remember that you tortured him.”
I enjoy the way Thrones of Britannia models these violent soap operas because they provide a deeper structure to the campaign than the traditional Total War sequence of ‘meet faction, build a few armies, crush faction, repeat’. You can appease disloyal governors and generals by gifting them one your limited number of estates—though choose carefully, if you later forcibly remove the estate, expect a tantrum. Alternatively, you can add priests to their retinue to keep them in check. If you’re sure a noble is about to rebel, or you’re just sick of them, you can always pay a lump sum to have them assassinated.
Many of Thrones’ systems seem intended to force you every so often to tend to your people. Over the course of a campaign your citizens slide up and down a ‘War Fervor’ axis. If you fight for years, morale will slip away. Sit still too long and your people itch for a fight. At higher difficulty levels your people will move more quickly along this axis, which forces you to read the room and indulge in efficient wars that sate your citizens’ bloodlust without wearing them out. If you wage a war in a high War Fervor state, your units enjoy bonuses to their stats.
“It’s all about trying to add more breaks and different flows to the game, more chance to think,” says Lusted. War Fervor first appeared in Total War: Attila’s Age of Charlemagne expansion but has been refined for Thrones of Britannia. “It adds a much more cyclical nature to the game if you’ve got periods of war and periods of peace. The recruitment system works with that, you’ve got that planning ahead.”
Assembling armies
Recruitment works very differently in Thrones of Britannia. You no longer purchase units fully formed from military buildings in your settlements. Instead, armies pick units from a regenerating factionwide pool of units. The unit appears in your army at a fraction of its normal size and grows to full strength over a few turns.