TOTAL WAR: THREE KINGDOMS
DONG ZHOU IS A BAD MAN. THE 11 PLAYABLE WARLORDS OF TOTAL WAR: THREE KINGDOMS ARE DIVIDED INTO CATEGORIES WHEN YOU S TART A CAMPAIGN. DONG ZHOU HAS A CATEGORY ALL TO HIMSELF CALLED, SIMPLY, TYRANT.
Some romance, mostly battles. ALL THE DRAMA.
The Three Kingdoms campaign is set in ancient China, 190 AD. The Han dynasty has collapsed, and Dong Zhou has captured the child emperor. Now the warlord lurks in the palace, bullying anyone who stands against him. Every cruel overlord needs a Darth Vader, so Dong Zhou convinces the greatest warrior in the land, Lü Bu, to slay his own foster father and become Dong’s enforcer and heir. The resulting family dynamic is… difficult.
At a glance, the Total War formula appears unchanged. On the turn-based campaign map you guide your faction’s research, upgrade settlements with new buildings, conduct diplomacy, and move armies around like pawns to capture enemy settlements. When armies clash, you can take charge of your forces in huge real-time battles set in gorgeous battlefields. However, after a few turns, I discover that there is a lot more to think about. How do I keep Lü Bu’s arrogance in check? How can I negotiate safe passage for my armies with a nearby warlord, so I can crush an uprising of the yellow turban rebellion? How do I hold off the remnants of the Han dynasty and their allies to the east and the south?
The alliances of the era are so tumultuous that Creative Assembly has had to rebuild Total War’s entire diplomacy and AI system almost from scratch. In addition to typical military alliances, you can form coalitions that don’t tie you into complete military co-operation. There are different flavors of vassalage too, and many new ways to undermine and betray other warlords. The diplomacy screen lets you trade goods, alliances, military access, and treasures in a detailed tit-for-tat exchange. For a few turns of my game, several warlords approached me about acquiring a lovely clay bear I managed to plunder. I gave it away for a series of regular payments and put the money into trebuchets.
“The previous system in previous titles was a little bit too old now,” says associate designer Nicholas Graber. “We applied so many patches, so many improvements, we basically wanted to rewrite it.
“So we have a new diplomacy system which is supported by a mostly data-driven AI. It makes development much easier and faster as well. Apart from, obviously, offering a lot more options, it gives us a lot more flexibility. We can come up with new diplomatic options and implement them much quicker.”
It might seem odd to bring a strong diplomatic focus to a game called ‘Total War’, but Three Kingdoms is interested in different notions of how power really works. For Dong Zhou, it’s bullish authoritarianism, backed up by military might. But if you play as Cao Cao you’re a master of manipulation. You can turn heroes in other factions against one another, and specialise in using spies to create civil wars. Some
Ancient China is almost the perfect setting for Total War.
warlords are good at bringing people together in alliances, which becomes useful later in the campaign as warlords ally to form huge factions.
ZERO TO HERO
Your goal is to ultimately unify China under your warlord’s banner, but in this period China is shattered into fragments of territory. Historically, a period of fierce localised scrapping led to the emergence of the three kingdoms: Wei, Wu and Shu. The leading figures of the period were captured in Luo Guanzhong’s epic 14th-century novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This is the version of the history we see featured most often in games. Total War: Three Kingdoms aims to strike a balance between Romance and history with characters that are powerful, but not outright magical.
“Ancient China is almost the perfect setting for a Total War game, in a lot of ways,” says writer and narrative designer Peter Stewart, “because of the scope of the whole thing. 30 million people died over the course of it, and when you’re making a game about war, that’s seems like a perfect setting.
“And then there are the characters as well, who all step into this vacuum of power that’s created when the Han dynasty collapses, which is exactly what we wanted to focus on: How those characters defined the era.”
Heroes have personality traits, and they can form relationships with other heroes they fight alongside (or against) in battle. In time disagreements can become outright rivalries and heroes can defect to join another faction or create their own. The devs say that you will probably be able to let lesser heroes go, but betrayal from major characters in your faction — heirs, and others who hold titles — may prove devastating to your campaign. The relationship system works in the other direction, too. If two best friends go into battle and one of them dies, the other may fly into a rage for the rest of the fight, and enter a period of mourning after the battle.
You even build armies around your heroes. You can have three in an army, each taking a retinue of up to six units
into battle. Heroes come in five flavors. Strategists can debuff enemies, commanders can encourage allies and reinforce a line, vanguard heroes are good fighters who can disrupt a line, sentinels mostly refuse to die, and champions excel at hunting down enemy heroes and duelling them to death.
Given how powerful they are, it pays to have your leaders in the right place at the right time. In Lü Bu’s case, that’s in the midst of a hundred enemy archers hunting down their general.
A battle to take back a fishing village south of my empire has escalated quickly, and I have just realised that I’m heading for a direct clash with Cao Cao in nearby territory. Lü Bu is working alongside a commander who gives nice boosts to my archers and lets them use flaming arrows, and a strategist who stands around looking regal a safe distance away from the fight. Though your army is organised into three retinues, you’re free to command all of your units however you wish — they don’t have to stay near their hero. I push up my flame arrow archers and instruct my trebuchets to sling buckets of what the description text charitably calls ‘ichor’.
Then I unleash Lü Bu. I have hidden him in a forest on the right flank, with a couple of units of cavalry. They burst from the trees and slam into the enemy’s contingent of archers, sending men flying. I select Lü Bu, click on the ‘duel’ command, and challenge their leader to a one-on-one fight to the death.
He accepts. The archers and my cavalry back away and form a respectful circle to give the two heroes space. Lü Bu charges, but his attack is deflected. He jumps off his horse and engages in some spectacular martial arts action. The fight goes back and forth. One minute Lü Bu has the upper hand, the next he’s sent flying by a counter-kick to the stomach. I suddenly realise I have a battle to run, so I zoom the camera back out and tell my trebuchets to target their demoralising poop buckets at the fight near the duel.
With a thrust of his weapon Lü Bu finishes the fight and charges into the archers. I don’t remember a part of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms where Lü Bu bests a hundred men in a shower of shite, but Total War is all about making your own stories.
The enemy morale breaks, and they flee the field, but not before my
strategist is mobbed and killed. The heroes talk to one another throughout, so I can tell the cocksure Lü Bu didn’t especially like my strategist. It may have seemed to him that the strategist wasn’t working hard, but with help from my commander hero, he held the line in the face of greater numbers while Lü Bu was charging around breaking the enemy. Before battles even start, as the game loads, characters chat about their chances in the fight ahead. I’m sure the lines will eventually become rote, but it demonstrates how much CA want heroes to be more than a series of stats pages.
With the battle done, I’m free to face off against Cao Cao. I’ve played three hours of two campaigns, one with Dong Zhou, and another with the oath-sworn brothers Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei. I found that your warlords affect your approach to the entire campaign, not just battles. Dong Zhou has the emperor, which means he has a legitimate claim to a lot of territory. He also has his own resource: Intimidation. When you raze settlements and execute heroes you earn intimidation points, which you can cash in during contact with other warlords to essentially bully them into saying yes. Writer and narrative designer Pete Stewart refers to this as the moment you slam your sword on the table and ask them to rethink their life choices.
FAMILY MATTERS
The brothers start in a very different position. They have no territory, and must scrape back some holdings from the yellow turban rebellion — a vast peasant uprising that was brutally crushed at the time. Though they lack land, their coalition is the most powerful starting army in the game, thanks to the three heroes that lead it. Still, it’s tough to cling on to a
scrap of territory as warlords vie for power around you. In both campaigns, civil unrest and enemy attacks made it difficult to get a foothold. It’s a symptom of the AI’s proactive stance. Other warlords get in touch to ask for favors, or to try to bully you for goods or territory.
“It was one of our main goals to make the AI a real threat to the player,” says Graber. “I wouldn’t say we made the AI much more aggressive, but it’s more active than before. If you have bad relations with the AI you should be prepared for a war. Once a war declaration happens, you should be prepared for an actual attack and lots of battles. We wanted to make sure the AI follows through. The war declaration should be followed by battles.”
And so I find myself facing Cao Cao to the south of my empire. Though Lü Bu had ensured victory at the fishing village, I’d taken losses. My army is at half strength, and I’m down a strategist. In a fit of frankly terrible strategic decision-making I decide to put Dong Zhou himself into my army, partly to see the big man in battle alongside his violent foster son Lü Bu, and partly because he can take a couple more trebuchets in his retinue. Maybe I’ll select the option to fling rotten horses at the enemy this time instead, to fatigue Cao Cao into submission.
This does not work. As I try to take another settlement to the south Cao Cao’s huge army attacks. The pre-battle screen tells me it’s hopeless. My chances are zero. I retreat my army, put them into marching stance, and instruct them to run as fast as they can up the river.
It’s too late. Cao Cao’s army runs me down and defeats my army easily. Then a series of messages pop up. This is what it looks like when an empire implodes in Three Kingdoms.
One: My brutal ruler Dong Zhou is captured by Cao Cao. Two: Cao Cao executes my brutal ruler Dong Zhou. Three: Lü Bu is the new brutal ruler of my empire. Four: Senior figures in my administration, Guo Si and Li Jue, hate Lü Bu and have decided to defect and form their own faction. Five: a civil war has broken out and is tearing my
Your warlords affect your approach to the entire campaign
territory in two. Oh, and the yellow turban rebellion is there, too, burning things down and causing a fuss.
I have a feeling Cao Cao may be one of the more powerful warlords, as he should be. Creative Assembly has a fun way of testing the balance between warlords. As you’re reading this, there’s a chance that some computers inside Creative Assembly HQ are waging war against themselves. The developers call it ‘autotesting’. The AI battles itself, and CA harvests the data to make balance tweaks and check the shape of the campaign.
REBEL ALLIANCE
“What we see in the first half of the game is power groups emerging from coalitions and alliances,” says Graber, “and these power groups are usually at war with each other. In the later stages of the game you have multiple emperors facing each other; selfproclaimed emperors trying to beat each other. That’s the boss fight, in a sense.”
It turns out I’ve only seen the chaotic opening stages of a Three Kingdoms campaign. The really big fights happen later on, once huge power blocs have formed. Though it’s a true sandbox, Creative Assembly hopes that campaigns will tend to result in three huge factions led by wannabe emperors.
“There’s a lot of data we can look through and see how different factions perform,” Graber explains, “which one’s the strongest, which one dominates too much, so we try to balance it of course.
“The biggest factor we can’t take into account in that specific testing scenario is the player. The player can take out our strongest faction in the autotest straight away in the game and suddenly the game the player will have is completely different to what we’re seeing in testing.”
I ask the team if the yellow turban rebellion ever wins. Everybody laughs. The peasant revolt was brutally suppressed in the years leading up to Three Kingdom’s 190 AD start date. Now it’s a preorder bonus faction in a videogame in 2019. History is hard on the losers.
My time with the campaign runs out. I could have spent ten hours trying to undo the mess I’d made, but I came away realising I’d made too many mistakes. For most players, I think the start of a Three Kingdoms campaign is going to be completely baffling. There are so many warlords and characters to understand, and though the information you need is right there on character screens, it takes effort to process it all and get a sense of where you stand with your neighbors. The game gives you some starting missions to provide focus, but I can see myself having to play a few abortive campaigns before I really start to get a sense of how heroes’ personalities play into the game’s sandbox.
There’s so much more I’ve yet to properly explore. The Wu Xing philosophy of five elements runs through the entire game. Every hero and building upgrade matches the colors of water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Some elements
It’s a chance to take the events of history in a different direction entirely.
are complimentary, others work against each other. The designers use champions and strategists as an example. Red, fiery champions are destructive on the battlefield, but they are doused by the draining abilities of a blue water strategist. The effect is subtle — these heroes of Chinese legend aren’t Pokémon, after all — but CA is using the framework to make the game instinctively readable, and to bring nuance to Three Kingdoms’ presentation.
ELEMENTAL
It’s worth mentioning how beautiful Three Kingdoms is. This is the best looking Total War to date. The tech tree is a tree painted on canvas. When you unlock a node — a taxation bonus, or a military mustering boost — that section of the tree bursts into pink blossom. The UI has been reworked to be more elegant, with splashes of blank ink that evoke the brushstrokes of Chinese calligraphy. The map fades into a watercolor painting as you zoom out.
The warlords’ character portraits even reflect their elemental alignments. Lead character artist Mauro Bonelli talks about how colors and motifs in a character’s clothing express their character. Cao Cao is shown in ambiguous colors that could reflect stone, wood, or metal — fitting for a masterful manipulator — but with flashes of red that imply military prowess.
And what about Dong Zhou? Historically, he was killed by his foster son Lü Bu, but what if he managed to keep his retinue in check? He may well have extended his reach and brought all of China under his tyrannical rule. That’s the promise of Total War; it’s a chance to take the events of history in a different direction entirely. Close the magazine and take a look at the image of Dong Zhou on our front cover. This man who would raze a town or execute an official without a second thought. If he came into your home, demanded fealty and slammed his sword down on the table, would you say no?