Total war-total bummer
The game is turn based with the ability to play RTS with your armies.
The game looks great and is a joy to zoom in on your soldiers and watch the animations of their hand to hand contact.
The battles are on a big scale but there is 4 unit number scale if you want to scale up or down e.g. on huge you might have 80 arches in a group and on very small only 10.
All cities can be auto managed and it’s much easier to do that than micro manage. So you may only be moving you armies and not micro managing.
Battles repeat themselves. You will find the same thing happening each battle.
So are invasions. Every time you invade the enemy you destroy one or two big armies and then it’s just a matter of capturing towns and cities. The game try’s to offset this by once you have an enemy under thumb someone else declares war on you. This isn’t fun as you don’t get a rest period between wars.
The pope: This guy gives you missions [such as build a church or go on crusade] and tries to stop you from obliterating your catholic enemies in one go. Gay. He will excommunicate you if you disobey.
There are new ‘not military’ units such as priests/Imams merchants and princesses.
The priest spreads your religion and gains you favour with the pope and reduces rebellion risk by making everyone catholic/Muslim.
The merchant gives you gold when placed on a natural resource.
Princesses can be married off to improve relations and can also act as diplomats.
The Diplomat, Spy and assassin are still there. I don’t have to explain what they do.
Crusade/jihad‘s are just an in convince there is no real reason to devote yourself to one expect to get your armies experience.
There is still only one way to win the game WAR!!!
This is total war so……….
It would be nice to have alternative methods and a smarter A.I.
If You like total war games you will like this. If you don’t there’s not enough new content to sway you.
Overall 3.5 out of 5.0
