Total War: Three Kingdoms

Look out Koei!

Yup, I’m interested.

OMGGGGG totally unexpected!

Yes!!!

this is probably the best period to tackle for them. Thank god they did not go WWI or WWII (I don’t think it would be good for the engine).

Also, being more shrouded in myth, the “magic” leader abilities will be less out of place.

Hopefully they fix some/all of the underlying issues, like arcade battles.

I’m going to show my ignorance here but how is this different from Shogun 2? The trailer was nice looking, but I didn’t click with that the big deal is like some of you guys seem to?

Presumably the map will be huge and there’ll be some sort of unity victory that doesn’t require painting everything in your colour.

KOEI games! First was Bandit Kings of Ancient China, then Romance of Three Kingdoms and countless others. They were early 90s. Afterwards the games were mostly on PS2 and whatever because R3K remained somewhat popular setting in Japan (manga adaptations and whatever). Dynasty warriors is from R3K characters.

I need to track down an English version to read. Hmmm. I only know the history from all the video games and various mangas and whatever.

I’m hoping they will embrace the mythical aspect of the Three Kingdoms and do something similar to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games with tactics and heroes. That would be great to differentiate it from Shogun 2 and build something somewhere between Shogun and Warhammer.

Honestly, an updated Shogun 2 seems amazing, imho.

But I’m expecting better unit variety and more diverse factions, while keeping everything recognizable.

And yes, I expect hero units will be, well, more heroic than their other historical games, without getting to WH level of silliness (which is great for WH, but not for a historical title). The trailer seems to focus on that.

Overall, it’s one of the few well documented time periods left for them. I still want to see a Medieval 3, but after that the Three Kingdoms was the setting that made more sense (Bronze age would be cool, but that’s such a poorly known period that I guess it could be difficult to design around, although a Trojan Total War could work, maybe using the Total War Sagas concept to focus on the particular war). I also think a Game of Thrones Total War might happen sometime, but that would be more like a sequel to WH.

Found a Guan Yu statue. 190 feet tall. By comparison , the Statue of Liberty is 300 feet tall.

Guan Yu is the God of War and he’s the green dude in the above video. That is a famous scene where the three brothers decide to be bros and restore the Han dynasty. They are the good guys.

I read an old dusty copy of Romance back in college for fun. It was a lot like Don Quixote to me in that the lesser known parts were the most interesting to me. I remember the description of Sima Yang and his “long earlobes” at the end as this weird mashup of buddhism and kingly authority, for ex. Like Book Two of Don Quixote there’s a lot of stuff for fans.

It’s not really that simple, is it? Sure, Liu Bei and his sworn brothers have this “benevolence” and “underdog” mystique around them, but their actual benevolence is disputed, in the same way some people will see more in Cao Cao than just being the “villain”, so to speak.

Of course, I could be completely wrong since my knowledge of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is second-hand, which makes my knowledge of the actual Three Kingdoms a third-hand thing or something… ;)

There’s an online version of the novel here. http://www.threekingdoms.com/

I’ve never seen a translation of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (the “historical” version.)

Despite buying TW:Warhammer and never playing it, I’m all over this.

Ditto. ;)

Yeah I don’t know much about it either! I just downloaded a kindle version (Robert Moss) to read. It seems to have lots of pictures so that will make it easier :)

Liu Bei is presented as the “good guy” in the novel (and hence Dynasty Warriors and to a lesser extent the Koei strategy games), though I believe he was more of a minor player in actual history (compared to Wei and Wu, anyway.)

I can’t speak to it’s accuracy, but this essay is a good read (the link from www.threekingdoms.com is broken, and the whole site seems a bit sketchy now, but found a new link here.) Here’s what it has to say about Liu Bei:

The closer this is to Shogun 2 the better. Still the best TW game by a mile.

In these games you spend most of your time fighting real-time tactical battles, right?

They would have to make something truly amazing to pull me away from Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI.

The strategic layer is getting way better, but yes, the focus is the tactical battles.

I think this installment might change the strategic layer significantly, maybe even adding politics.