They don’t just develop new traits – a scarred visage that sparks terror in combat, a charitable outlook that makes them popular with peasants – but they also develop friendships and grudges with other characters. These personalities age and evolve over the course of each playthrough. Characters have their own notions of job satisfaction and a certain autonomy overlook one for promotion or fail to supply an entourage befitting their status, and they may eventually switch sides. You can also promote characters to positions at court, from town administrator all the way to prime minister, to shape the operation of your empire. Before recruiting armies, for example, you must appoint a commander, whose attributes go some way to determining which troops you’ll hire and how they perform. Whether you play in Romance mode – which gives your generals sorcerous battlefield abilities – or Records, which skews to the realistic, the characters remain at the foundation, where older Total War games treated them as secondary. On the other, there are the battles, where hundreds of individually animated warriors clash on delightfully miniaturised plains and hillsides. On the one hand, there’s the relatively leisurely business of running your kingdom, where you take turns with opponents (AI or human) to move stacks of soldiers around, adjust tax rates with one eye on your population’s contentment levels, and build facilities such as schools and garrisons.
As one of 12 would-be emperors, you move armies across a lavish, cloud-wreathed map, seizing settlements, nurturing your economy and destroying or assimilating your rivals. The game is set in second-century China, a realm divided following the collapse of the Han dynasty.
Taking its inspiration from Luo Guanzhong’s historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it transforms statecraft into a soap opera – or rather, reveals statecraft for the soap opera it often is. T his latest continent-sized strategy game from UK studio The Creative Assembly blends the hard graft of empire management with some pleasantly raucous personality politics.
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