The army cap from the most recent Total Wars is replaced with a food upkeep cost for armies, and food is eventually so plentiful that having 20 to 30 stacks isn’t implausible. But the lack of meaningful checks on snowballing, even on hard difficulty, made it far too easy to become ludicrously powerful. These systems definitely keep you on your toes early on, which is when Thrones of Britannia is the most fun. It's far too easy to become ludicrously powerful. As the Irish King Flann Sinna, I had to maintain my legitimacy in the eyes of the other Gaelic lords which… yep, by the late game, was absolutely unquestioned. As the leader of one of the Danelaw factions, I had to balance the desires of my new English subjects with those of my viking warriors – both of whom gave me their unwavering, utter adoration by the late game. There’s the War Fervor stat returning from Age of Charlemagne, which measures your people’s desire to fight, and I had parked at nearly maximum for most of the late game, making it feel irrelevant. The problem with most of the other new campaign stuff is that it becomes far too easy to manage, with rewards for success and penalties for failure each feeling underwhelming. I really liked how this encouraged me to not have every stack be fully comprised of Elite Praetorian Murderlords by the late game, while forcing interesting tactical decisions about where to deploy my badass battalion and which part of the line could be trusted to the farmers with sharpened sticks. Since the pool refills semi-randomly over time, you’re forced to either raise a smaller army of your best units, or round out a larger one with weaker units. Perhaps most notable is that armies are recruited from a single, global pool and technologies, rather than buildings, are the main way of unlocking better units. I was forced to make a tactical decision of where to deploy my badass battalion.Įlsewhere, Thrones of Britannia is packed with new campaign mechanics that range from meaningful to negligible. Some level of abstraction is expected, but this really stretches my suspension of disbelief. It makes me wonder why the designers didn’t opt to have one turn represent a month or even a week instead. It can take multiple years to march from Portsmouth to Inverness, for example – a feat that a hiker could accomplish in less than three months, even at a quite leisurely pace. The countryside feels fleshed-out and alive thanks to the presence of tiny villages and priories outside the protection of major walled cities.Įach turn still represents a quarter of a year, though, and armies haven’t had their movement range changed significantly, which creates some oddly immersion-breaking conceits when zoomed in this far. Fighting and maneuvering armies along the jagged coasts of Western Scotland is a much different strategic and tactical experience from wading through the marshy bogs of Essex. The map is among the most detailed and eye-catching in the series so far, modeling Ireland and Great Britain at about the same dimensions that had to contain all of Europe in Total War: Attila. It has a lot of cool, new ideas but slips up on the fundamentals in ways that keep those ideas from effectively coming together into a great whole. When I really dug into it though, what I found was a bit of a showboat. Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is successful for some of the same reasons those were. Some of Total War’s best campaigns over the years, such as Caesar in Gaul from Rome 2 or the Kingdoms expansion for Medieval 2, have been narrowly focused on a specific place and time.
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