That demo did nothing for me, sadly. They persist in showing a zoomed in perspective so we can “ooh” and “aah” at their graphics, but the historical art style is just boooooooring compared to the awesome of Warhammer, and the zoomed in PoV means you don’t get any real sense of the tactical crunchiness of the battle, and on top of that, the unit sizes remain in the roughly 100 person size range, which means the battles themselves will feature 2K troops per side, up to 4K with reinforcements, and that means the battles are under-scale for the period by at least half an order of magnitude, maybe an order of magnitude or more. And that in turn means the battles are much quicker, with way more maneuvering, flanking and micro-managing than would be realistic for the period. Relatively tiny battle lines relative to the historical scale of the battles means it is way too easy to flank and maneuver so you get little sense of how battles like this flowed. This has been the Achilles’ heel of Total War for a long time but I was able to ignore it for a long time but now that the series has aged and I’ve also seen the much more fun and interesting small-scale variant of the Warhammer games, I’m pretty much done with the historical TW engine, at least until they rescale it. However, to re-scale it they would have to give up their fixation on zooming down to individual troopers with fancy graphics and use a less detailed depiction so they could fit 10X as many troops on the screen.
And it’s not the “realism” of the unit sizes I care about; it’s the fact that if you make the armies 10X too small, then you don’t get the proper scale of the battlefields, the proper pacing to get into flanking positions, etc. With tiny armies, everything deteriorates into a skirmish, which is a lot of fun when you have orcs and ogres and trolls oh my, but is unsatisfying to me for historical units, for most periods.
Then I run a couple of cavalry units up the slope, and swing them round and down into the enemy’s rear in the tactician’s equivalent of a golf clap, scaring the other general off-map in the process. It’s over in seconds(emphasise mine)
It doesn’t take my army long to trundle across the map because everybody runs by default – a perk of Romance mode, the more dramatic and less plausible of Three Kingdoms’ two overarching campaign playstyles, where fatigue is less of an inconvenience and battles are proportionately snappier. (The other, if you’re late to the party on this front, is Classic, which is based on exciting historical artefacts like crop tallies rather than the boring old feats of godlike valour depicted in the ancient Chinese epic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms). And then there are my heroes, Sun Ren and Sun Quan. This being Romance mode, they’re effectively free-roaming superheroes rather than just overpaid people in loud hats who fight alongside your rank-and-file.
Romance mode…:S
My takeaway from the article and the video is that the combat seems…terrible.
And for me the combat was always the best bit. The empire management was never very good.
This really looked more like some WoW battles than anything historical or fantasied. Even the esthetics, be it the soundtrack or the 3d, felt like mobile phone game levels - not in the derogatory “PC is better” way, I mean all those f2p things trying to mimick Koei’s looks.
As usual, the units are too tiny. The only way to appreciate a battle is in replay mode. If they just double the size of units and made the maps fit them it would be a thousand times better.
I wonder what the campaign end goal will be. Maybe it’s a relatively-short goal, like take imperial city. Then it ends, and you can start a campaign with another starting status (say with only 3 kingdoms left).
I could be terribly wrong but… the Warhammer 2 team has so much going for it. Plus the inevitability of Warhammer 3 … I just wonder if this China game (and I would have paid real money for it 4 years ago) will work.
Three Kingdoms will be the first total war game I do NOT buy at launch. I hope it is super great but…
Oddly I feel exactly the opposite. I just feel like since they insist on sticking to a relatively small-scale depiction of battles, with lots of micromanagement and timing of actions, the historical settings just can’t measure up to the awesomeness of the Warhammer setting.
I’ve loved the historical TW games since the original Shogun but now that I have tasted Warhammer, the historical stuff is old and busted to me, sadly.
Problem is Warhammer 3 is the “evolution” game that CA used to talk about - it’s the third game in the series where the big guns have already been deployed - what’s really left? Ogres, Chaos Dwarves and some more Chaos factions? Boring.
Three Kingdoms seems to be the next “revolution” style game that is bringing in some new concepts on how the diplomatic game works. It looks incredible.
