Total War: Three Kingdoms (Moving on to next game?)

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**Grey Templar**

Eumerin wrote:
Not Online!!! wrote:
So it seems that the AI is even more chromosomes shorter then before.....

Some specific players had access to a build of the game. Ultra unit size was 30 cav max, 18 units maximum in a army, down from 20.
And sieges, god the SIEGES....

Isn't 30 cavalry in a unit standard for Total War? Or am I misremembering?

The army size was already known, and I believe is mentioned earlier in this thread. Each general can lead up to six units, and you can have three generals in an army.

I haven't heard or seen anything from CA on the sieges (though it's possible that there's something out there that I just haven't looked at), so no comment on that.

30 cavalry was usually the standard size. But you had the option to increase the number to somewhere between 60 for an elite cavalry unit, and 120ish for a infantry unit. In Total Warhammer some units could be 150 dudes.

I'm not going to be happy if unit size is hard capped between 30 and 50. Tiny units like that are so dumb when you are trying to have grand scale battles.

I understand why the tiny unit sizes are an option, for people with lower quality PCs, but having it be the only option is dumb.

**Grey Templar**

Sure, but 3 generals is a bit strange and frankly boring. Like in Warhammer Total War I wish they had given you separate slots for the characters instead of them taking up the space of a whole unit.

Here they are effectively just giving you 1 character slot for free, and then forcing you to give up 2 of your unit slots anyway.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Not Online!!! wrote:
What does shock me though is how the AI behaved in some sieges, completely passive, like rome II passive as in not reacting at all.

Then there is the one battle of someone against a yellow turban rebellion army, which he literally won with taking nearly 0 casualities.

Granted this was a preview build that was at the time some months old but still....

One would hope that they wouldn't have gone backwards and used the pre-patch Rome 2 AI.

You would think that they could use some of their older AI mechanics from older Total War games instead of rebuilding from scratch each time. The AI in Shogun 2 was pretty decent.

**Grey Templar**

I think most people agree that the "mandatory general" mechanic was a pretty dumb idea. Why can't I just have a few units stay in a key location as a deterrent? Generals are expensive to maintain, and forcing all of your armies to have one was stupid.

I love the idea of campaign characters also being combat units like Total Warhammer introduced, but for crying out loud they shouldn't take up a whole unit slot. Each army should have 20 unit slots, a slot for the general(and his unit) and then 2 slots for support characters.

Especially since the current method really messes with my OCD sometimes when I'm making an army with Warhammer Total War. I hate having an odd number of slots to play with or having a single unit of anything thats not a character.

**Grey Templar**

Yeah. The biggest thing for me is the UI is clunky. Its pretty, but its not an intuitive setup and I can't really put my finger on exactly what the problem is with it.

I think it might be that everything is borderless and highly stylized and its tough to tell exactly what you are looking at without staring for a few seconds.

**Grey Templar**

nels1031 wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
Yeah, the lack of the Nanman is just a big glaring omission. Non-Han Chinese tribes were significant political and military forces Eastern Wu and Shu-Han needed to contend with in the period. It's weird that they aren't there.

I just wikipedia'd the Nanman, and would actually pay money to play the faction named "The Man".

Also, that page states that this Three Kingdoms period was the second bloodiest war in human history, like 10 million households during one census during the Han era, and then the Jin did a census and came up with a tally of a little under 3 million households. Holy feth!

Yup. Modern wars have nothing on the wars of antiquity in terms of body counts.

**Grey Templar**

LordofHats wrote:
The poor kid reportedly didn't even understand sex, but he still had a dozen children.

Well... Its entirely possible that he wasn't the real father.

**Grey Templar**

LordofHats wrote:

I think with a few caveats, Total War generally releases good DLC. They don't charge you $20 for a mission pack that'll last an hour and has nothing particularly interesting in it. Total War DLCs generally do what DLCs should do; expand the base game.

Yeah.... except when the DLC is for stuff that should have been in the base game already. Or is in the game, its just in the form of a faction that is unplayable unless you buy the DLC.

$19 to unlock the Wood Elves or Beastmen is a rather jerk move. I mean, yes it is a DLC with a lot of content. Its just content that should, and indeed is, in the base game.

They've basically locked game mechanics behind a paywall.

IMO, a $19 DLC should add extra stuff to the entire game. The only time it should unlock a faction is if its multiple factions and they're a faction that weren't in there already as an NPC faction. I do miss old school total war where all factions were unlocked as you played the game.

**Grey Templar**

LordofHats wrote:
I think the Wood Elves were worth it. You got a whole new faction with a unique playstyle distinct from everyone else and two variations on it. Totally worth. They also weren't in the base game at all. I think they stuck some empire rebels or something over there originally?

Beastmen however were not worth it. Beastmen were a halfassed faction with an incomplete unit roster, no unique mechanics to justify the cost or enhance replay value, and gakky balance. I've never played a WTW game where the Beastmen were a meaningful threat, because their roster is that gak. They weren't in the original game either, but they hardly added anything to the game once put in so...

Also the "blood and gore" DLCs have always been stupid.

I've never bought the wood elf DLC, but the faction exists as an AI faction when I play.

**Grey Templar**

That is correct, they got added after the DLC was released. But that still makes them part of the base game. Unless you've never updated your game files, you can't play Warhammer Total War without the Wood Elves being in it now.

If they were going to charge $20, I would at least have wanted multiple factions in the bundle.

**Grey Templar**

nels1031 wrote:
Next prince : Sima Lun

WHO IS HE?
Sima Lun, Prince of Zhao and Sima Yi’s youngest son, was an egomaniac who was willing to go to any length to secure power. Historically, it was through his actions that the War of the Eight Princes started in earnest; having convinced Empress Jia to assassinate the crown prince, he then accused her of treachery and had her and her family killed. Although acting as regent to Emperor Hui at first, it was not long before he declared himself emperor, drawing the ire of the other princes and starting a cycle of war and betrayal that would shake the Jin dynasty for years to come.

PLAYSTYLE
Sima Lun is a self-serving schemer, willing to engage in subterfuge and treachery in order to acquire riches and power for himself – even if it means sacrificing the efficiency of his own administration! He builds ‘Subterfuge’ through acts of espionage and by developing his own corrupt judiciary building chain; having plotted sufficiently, he expends this resource in order to control other factions in diplomacy.

GUANXI
Sima Lun may delight in deviousness, but it is said that the true cunning behind his ambition lies in the hands of his trusted advisor, Sun Xiu! An inseparable pair, there are no depths to which Sun Xiu would not have his prince stoop in pursuit of wealth and power.

START POSITION
Sima Lun presides over the fertile lands of Shangdang and Ye, north of the Yellow River; securing the entirety of Shangdang and moving into the Taiyuan mountains will give him a solid power-base and source of income, removing his initial threat and allowing him to focus south towards the capital all the while. Sima Yong – the Prince of Hejian – is nearby, and although they begin on fair terms his opportunism poses a threat to Sima Lun’s ambitions. Prepare for war!

WHAT KIND OF PLAYER IS HE FOR?
Any player looking to double-down on clandestine activity should embrace Sima Lun’s subterfuginous style, driven as it is by performing spy actions and enabling some powerful diplomatic chicanery. Being a sneak has never felt so good!

Though we're only 1/4th into the reveals, he seems like the kind of guy I want to kill first. My douchebag radar is pinging off the charts. Gameplay wise, I'm also leary about the part that says " he expends this resource in order to control other factions in diplomacy". All I felt when I read that was "Here comes another version of the Vassalizing Train that we saw in early 3Kingdoms campaigns!"

Yeah, those sounds interesting if its a human player controlling it, but the AI will probably be totally broken with it. Especially at higher difficulties where the AI just gets free resources.

**Grey Templar**

Not that I'm aware of. Besides, the way you'd beat that would just be to have Kholek Suneater.

**Grey Templar**

nels1031 wrote:
Grey Templar wrote:
Not that I'm aware of. Besides, the way you'd beat that would just be to have Kholek Suneater.

I’d mainly just want to see what the mage characters can do, flinging spells out left and right. Which I suppose I could do in a custom battle in some fashion, but this mode just looks more fun than that.

I need to get my PC fixed :(

You'd have to give them unlimited magic to draw on or a highly accelerated winds of magic regeneration. Mages in WH:TW usually get a few big spells off and then fizzle out. Which is fine since most battles last less than 5 minutes, but in a perpetual tower defense situation it would not be great. They're still characters so they'll beat down grunts in droves, but they'll die eventually as they're still squishy.

**Grey Templar**

Worst case scenario is they make a Chinese version of any games they release so they can tap into the Chinese market.

**Grey Templar**

Eumerin wrote:
Voss wrote:
That's not a particularly unique problem. It exists in American records too, both in church records and newspaper articles.

During one particular stint doing archival work for a college in Boston, I came across a lot of wedding announcements from the 1970s and 80s (!!!), where the bride was simply listed as John Doe's bride or daughter, depending on whether the writer thought the husband or father of the bride was more important. The woman's name was often not listed despite her obvious importance to the wedding.

Same thing with 19th century Congregationalist church records. Household were listed under the husband, and it was a stroke of luck if the wives or children were named. Given the time period that's more expected, but s still frustrating to researchers.

You *kind* of expect it when it involves members of society who aren't considered particularly significant. But it's a bit of a surprise when one of the individuals that you're referring to was the wife of the leader of the Sun family (if only for a short period of time), and the other was the wife of the lead strategist of the same family. Both of the husbands were very important individuals while they were alive. The US equivalent would be not recording the name of the First Lady for posterity.

Well, one thing to consider is that all these guys probably had a fair number of concubines and/or multiple wives. Which would lead to them having quite a few children, in varying states of legitimacy. The child death rates up till even very recently were not great.

Children simply weren't really worthy of note till they survived to adulthood unless something particularly special was going on. And I'm sure the court record keepers had better things to do than keep track of even an important person's children unless there was a good reason.

And even if records were kept, if you are a scribe who is trying to organize a library and you need to make some space, what are you going to keep? The records of the deeds of the great Lu Bu? Or the boring rote records noting the names, births, and deaths of a bunch of Lu Bu's children?

**Grey Templar**

Eumerin wrote:

On the other hand, we have the names of a ridiculous number of low-ranking officers from the era. Koei-Tecmo's Dynasty Warriors series has hundreds of "generic" officers who are unplayable, and represented only by a name. And none of these people are fictional. We have records that confirm the existence of every last one of them.

Well thats probably where we get into another part of historical records. The stuff that survives can also be random. Especially if natural disasters get involved.

Kinda like how 99% of the records which survive from the ancient Bronze age on clay tablets are almost all related to food storage, grain harvests, etc... Maybe that was the only stuff they actually cared to write about and nothing else ever existed. Maybe thats the only stuff that has survived because only the warehouse storing the agricultural tablets actually remained in good condition.