Total War: Three Kingdoms
Management are worried about an impending Chinese takeover, but really it’s just Jody Macgregor using the new diplomacy system.
Management are worried about an impending Chinese takeover, but really it’s just Jody Macgregor using the new diplomacy system.
Two of our generals dismount in the middle of a field to duel with their opposite numbers. The rest of the battle continues in the distance, but we’ve zoomed in to watch the flashy moves as the generals kick and stab each other. Occasionally a flurry of arrows or a riderless horse passes in the background, but we’re intently focused on something that looks more like a game of Tekken.
Total War: Three Kingdoms embraces the story it’s inspired by, Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, rather than strict historical accuracy. Soldiers can run around the battlefield seemingly forever without getting tired. Their leaders are larger-than-life figures with complicated backstories and rivalries, who carry legendary spears and are able to defeat entire units single-handed. Characters like Cao Cao are cast as devious opera villain masterminds able to manipulate wars into existence at the drop of a hat, when the history books suggest he was a decent ruler and quite the poet.
There’s an option to turn some of these things off by engaging Records Mode, if you want stamina to play a more important role in unit repositioning or to get rid of the duels and get generals’ bodyguards to do most of their fighting instead. The alternative, Romance Mode, feels like an honest embrace of what Total War has really been all along, though. It’s a version of history that’s closer to an epic movie.
That said, it’s still the kind of epic where you’ll also have to increase three different types of income by small percentages. The systems that were simplified for the
Warhammer games or the trimmed-down Thrones of Britannia have returned and brought some new friends. Espionage has its own menu full of options, so that embedded spies can mess with trade or sabotage cities.
Diplomacy is one of the most substantial and welcome areas to be changed. Where before there was so much guesswork involved that dealing with rival nations felt like passing notes in class and then waiting for an answer (“Do you want to form a defensive alliance with me, y/n”), in Three Kingdoms it’s completely transparent. Whenever you ask a neighbour for something there’s a button to automatically figure out what it would take to make that deal work, rather than making you stab in the dark then try again when it fails.
There’s a finer grain to the diplomatic options as well. Between non-aggression pacts and alliances, there are coalitions – unions that act as a step along the path to confederation without being guarantees of friendship forever. They allow for more than two members as well, so a Confederation to Defeat the Barbarians has new faction leaders lining up to join it on the regular. There’s also a ‘quick deal’ button that lets you immediately see who is open to trade or vassalhood or whatever, rather than having to scroll down a list.
Vassals are an important part of Three Kingdoms, with factions much more eager to suggest handing some of their income over to you in perpetuity, though they may demand a degree of autonomy at the same time.
World of warlords
Rather than choosing a faction at the start of a campaign, you choose an individual leader. Some of them are warlords with varying degrees of legitimacy to their attempt to take charge of China; some of them are straight-up bandits; and one of them is Dong Zhuo, a tyrant who begins the campaign with the current childemperor as a hostage.
These very different characters can make for very different starts. Other parts of the turn-based campaign
side of Three Kingdoms are less jolly. Population is important: a high rate of growth can increase your armies’ replenishment rate but also cause overpopulation – the main culprit of public disorder – and this strains the food supply.
Meanwhile, you want to keep constructing buildings that earn money and increase prestige. When you control something upwards of 20 settlements, managing all this construction can be a real bore. On the upside, each member of your court can be given an assignment, attaching them to a settlement and giving it some kind of bonus. You don’t need to march them around the map to do this – as with espionage, it’s just a menu.
We enjoyed the campaign for its own sake though, even if it can occasionally be too mathematical for its own good. For an example of that look, no further than the way it treats an important theme like corruption, personified by traitorous eunuchs who nepotistically manipulate their friends into positions they don’t deserve while the country falls apart. In Total War: Three
Kingdoms, corruption is a percentage modifier that impacts your income. It’s so prosaic it’s almost funny.
The pointy end
An army can have three generals, each with a retinue of up to six units. This lends itself to balanced armies with one general for cavalry, one for infantry, and one for archers and catapults. Which is not to say you can’t make unbalanced or hyper-specialised armies, it just feels wrong. Generals have personalities that suit their roles, expressed as they banter with each other during battles. They even gain traits and develop rivalries and friendships with each other the longer they spend together. You want to build them and arm them like party members in an RPG.
Units don’t have as much personality as we’d like. Now that the Warhammer games exist it’s always going to be hard to compete on that front, because no matter how different two kinds of rider are, they’re never going to be as immediately distinct as orcs or vampires.
While generals have attack animations right out of kung-fu movies, when ordinary soldiers collide there’s a lot of milling around and swiping at the air going on. Of course there’s none of the over-the-top madness of the
Warhammer games, because there aren’t hydras breathing fire or giants swinging treetrunks around, but there’s also none of the individual clashes that made
Shogun 2 so much fun to watch. It’s fine from a distance, but unrewarding if you like to hit the slow-motion button, press K to make the HUD fall away, and watch up close.
Night battles do look gorgeous, though. Troops carry red lanterns on poles, and cities under siege fill the sky with floating paper lanterns like low-hanging stars. Battles during winter take place on maps covered in high-contrast snow, while at other times of year farmers might be working in paddy fields as you ride past. Port cities have cranes on the docks and boats in the harbour. That said, there are no naval battles. Given how important rivers such as the Yangtze are to China strategically, it’s a missed opportunity.
Anticlimax is a problem with Three Kingdoms more generally. At a certain point in the campaign, the three leading warlords are declared kings and have to fight it out to determine who will be sole emperor. When we marched a decent army into the first opponent’s territory, they abdicated and surrendered. So we switched our attention to the final remaining enemy, the Kingdom of Wu. After a few seasons we finally drew his full force out and we faced off for the climactic finale. On his turn a diplomacy pop-up informed us he wanted to surrender and abdicate. A relatively bloodless victory is nice and all, and it’s a credit to the AI that it knows when it’s about to be beaten, but it was a hell of a way to end a campaign. Plenty of these criticisms have been true of other Total
War games. Three Kingdoms is no worse than many of them, and better than quite a few. That’s the problem with there being so many Total War games at the moment: a new one comes out while the last two are still fresh in our memories. That said, Three Kingdoms is a very good strategy game in which to experience second-century China, and we spent dozens of enjoyable hours with it.