Total War: Three Kingdoms
For good and for bad, Total War: Three Kingdoms certainly is a Total War game.
Two of my generals dismount in the middle of a field to duel with their opposing numbers. The rest of the battle continues in the distance, but I’ve zoomed in to watch the flashy moves as the generals kick and stab each other instead. Occasionally a flurry of arrows or a riderless horse will pass in the background, but for the moment I’m 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-handedly. 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 also quite a good poet.
There’s an option to turn some of these things off at the start of a campaign by engaging Records Mode. With it, stamina plays a more important role in unit repositioning, and it also gets rid of the duels and gives generals bodyguards to do most of the 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, where the broad sweep is familiar but the subtleties are ignored whenever they would be inconvenient to the action.
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 to the party and brought some new friends. Espionage has its own menu full of options so that embedded spies can mess with trade or sabotage cities. Characters have a satisfaction score that will drop if they’re not promoted regularly enough. Court positions that are unlocked as you level up have to be handed out carefully to prevent dissatisfied generals from
starting a civil war. (You can also give them a nice water clock that will boost their satisfaction.)
MAKING PACTS
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 I ask a neighbour for something there’s a button to automatically figure out what it would take to make that deal work. It just straight-up tells you how much money will guarantee this trade of territory or food or even marriage, 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 my Confederation to Defeat the Barbarians has new faction leaders lining up to join it on the regular.
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. Your enemies can even submit themselves to vassalage under your allies as a last-ditch attempt to end wars, forcing you to either give up on your conquest or upset the ally in question.
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 Dhong Zhuo, a tyrant who begins the campaign with the current child-Emperor as a hostage.
These very different characters can make for very different starts – Cao Cao, the suggested beginner’s choice, feels more like traditional Total War in that you have a decent settlement, an army, and a neighbour to defeat so you can complete your first province (here called a commandery). Meanwhile, Liu Bei has an army full of legendary generals but no home and has to defeat an army of Yellow Turban rebels before settling anywhere.
Other parts of the turn-based campaign side of Three Kingdoms are less jolly. Population is important – a high rate of growth, from constructing the right buildings, can increase your armies’ replenishment rate but also cause overpopulation, the main culprit of public disorder. Having too many people puts a strain on food supply.
Meanwhile, you want to keep constructing buildings that earn money and increase prestige (which is how you unlock higher ranks, fill out your court, and eventually declare yourself one of China’s three kings).
I can’t say working my way through upgrades of various buildings has ever been my favourite part of Total War and when you control something on the north side 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 – like espionage it’s just a menu. It feels like a way of keeping some of the things agents and heroes did in former games, but abstracted enough that they aren’t an annoyance. It also keeps them off the map so it’s free for actual armies to do their thing.
According to one point of view, all this stuff on the campaign map and its multitude of attached menus
– I haven’t even mentioned reforms, a tech tree mapped onto a picture of an actual tree where each improvement lights up a blossom of petals – is just scene-setting for the battles. And it’s true that it gives them context that can make them feel different to the last one no matter how similar they actually are in play.
Of course there’s none of the madness of the Warhammer games; there aren’t hydras breathing fire or giants swinging tree trunks around...
I enjoy 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 takes an important theme of Romance of the Three Kingdoms like corruption, personified by traitorous eunuchs who nepotistically manipulate their friends into positions they don’t deserve while the country falls apart.
THE POINTY END
The real-time battles are more immediately exciting than the numbers game. Units with crossbows chunter out steady volley after volley of bolts, horseriders form up into wedges at the last minute and charge, infantry lock down their shields and absorb damage. Formations are back and there are plenty of them, though it’s not always easy to get access to them. There are multiple classes of general to choose from and strategists, while weaker, are necessary because they learn formations as they level up.
Some followers have access to them as well, so assigning a herdsman to the general with a cavalry retinue means they’ll know the wedge formation.
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.
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 tree trunks around, but there’s also none of the individual clashes that made Shogun 2 so much fun to watch.
BATTLEFIELD BULLY
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. Plenty of my criticisms – an underwhelming endgame, or clunky battle animations, or AI oddness – have been true of other Total War games. Three Kingdoms is no worse than many of them and better than quite a few. It’s easily in my top five games in the series.
I look forward to seeing how things like the diplomacy system and maybe duels carry on into Warhammer 3 and what comes next, it’s just hard to look past Three Kingdoms’ role as an iteration on a formula rather than a game in itself.
Three Kingdoms is a very good strategy game for when you want to experience 2nd century China, and I’ve spent dozens of enjoyable hours with it. When you zoom in close on the right details, whether two generals duelling or an enemy turning the vassal system against you, it’s grand.