/VERDICT
A stunning
reinvention of
the long-running
strategy series,
Three Kingdoms’
bevy of smart
ideas makes it the
best Total War
gameinages.OVERALL SCORE
90 %
If it’s friendly, they might eventually become blood brothers,
gaining a mutual defensive bonus when fighting. If one
of them is killed, however, the remaining general might
fall into an uncontrollable rage, charging at the enemy
heedless of your orders. On the other hand, a frictional
relationship might sound like a problem, but it can encourage
your generals to fight harder, if only to spite their rival.
Guanxi pervades almost every system in the game,
but it’s particularly important in two areas. The first is your
government. As you progress up the ranks of aristocracy,
more government positions become available in your
dynasty. Ideally, you want to staff those positions with capable
individuals, but you also want to keep your faction members
happy. If a character’s satisfaction level drops too low, they
might eventually leave your faction, potentially joining one of
your enemies. Sometimes a little nepotism goes a long way.
The second area is diplomacy. With Three Kingdoms, this
has never been more significant (and enjoyable). Securing your
borders with strong alliances is important to prevent you from
being overwhelmed in the early game. However, maintaining
these alliances means keeping them happy, and because
everybody interrelates with everybody else, you need to
think very carefully about the characters with which you
can go to war, sue for peace and trade. It’s absolutely superb
- an ever-shifting chess game that encourages genuine
strategy rather than simply deploying overwhelming force.
One final area of Three Kingdoms that’s been completely
overhauled is espionage. You no longer recruit spies and move
them around the board. Instead, you pick a character with the
espionage trait, and assign them to infiltrate a specific faction.
At this point, that character will enter their recruitment pool,
and if successfully recruited, they can begin performing covert
operations. The longer they’re in that faction, the higher the
rank they’ll attain, to the point where they can potentially end
up leading that faction to hand the entire dynasty over to you.
The changes to armies and battles are subtler, but
equally significant. As in Total War: Thrones of Britannia,
you don’t recruit entire units at cities. Instead, units appear
instantly in the retinue of one of your generals, but take
several turns to reach full strength. Meanwhile, each
warlord has a limited number of armies they can field
relative to their aristocratic rank. A noble can only control
one army, for example, while a marquis gets two or three.
The result is that battles are less frequent, but more
important. Most armies won’t engage in a fight unless they’re
near full strength, and consequently almost every battle is a
major spectacle that could go either way. Meanwhile, your
tactical opportunities are expanded with new ‘hybrid’ units,
such as cavalry that can hold a front line, or infantry that can
fire short-range missiles. Additionally, if you play on the new
Romance mode, your generals become ancient Chinese
superheroes, able to take on entire units by themselves
and deploy special abilities that can reshape the battle.
The resulting Total War is both more flexible
and less predictable than its predecessors, where
diplomacy and espionage are now equally important
to your martial capabilities, and where personal
stories and relationships are threaded through your
victories, in battle and on the campaign map.
Of course, it isn’t perfect. The Ancillaries, special weapons
and armour with which you can equip your characters, is one
system too many. As your faction expands, constantly fiddling
withcharacterequipmentbecomestoomuchbusywork.
Also,the UI, while incredibly stylish, isn’t the easiest to read,
with some important buttons (such as the button for seeking
out a spouse) tucked away in places you might not think to look.
Overall, however, Three Kingdoms is by far the best
Total War game in years. Its reworked systems enabled
far more subtle and nuanced strategic possibilities,
while the character relationships conjure stories that
will surprise and shock you in equal measure.
RICK LANE