Total War: Thrones of Britannia celt-all

Strange that I couldn't find a thread for this. Creative Assembly are busy bees, what with Three Kingdoms, Warhammer DLC, Rome II stuff, and also this! Release has been pushed back to May 3rd... I always like it when a dev recognises that their game needs a little more time in the oven. It's based on the Attila engine. I liked Attila, I think it was the most underrated TW game in recent times. Well, perhaps it wasn't so much underrated as it was underplayed, I don't think it was commercially successful at all.

Me, I'm looking forward to changing the course of history and putting my celtic stamp on the isles of Brittania (I'll be playing as Gwined).

Already pre-ordered it. I'm going into it relatively blind, but beween this, Warhammer 1 & 2, and Three KIngdoms whenever that's coming out, I'm just wondering where I'm going to find the time to squeeze this one in.

Looks good and I will get it but not sure when.

This is £23.99 at Fanatical, which is almost mid tier pricing and impossible to pass up. The regular Total War youtubers that I watch have got a hold of it now.

It looks like Attila, with a prettier map and obviously a different theme. There is a lot more strategic consideration than the slightly watered down systems of the Warhammer games (which more than made up for it with oodles of WARHAMMER in my opinion).

Edit: Releases next week!

Well this is..... interesting...

For the first couple of hours I LOVED this game. It's beautiful, oozing with theme, and has some nicely refined mechanics, like the factions and politics from Attila but more streamlined. In fact the whole game is more streamlined which is both a blessing and a curse. For some reason minor settlements no longer have garrisons (or at least I haven't worked out what gives them garrisons), so I've been able to conquer three quarters of Wales and most of southern Scotland with small stacks just moving from one minor settlement to the next with no resistance. It's ludicrously easy. And there's next to no public order penalty from conquering them. Instead of public order adding up each turn until a rebellion at -100, it's a static number, so in a newly taken village the public order might be -5, that means there's a 5% chance of rebellion on the next turn. I guess you could be unlucky but I've not had a rebellion yet in 50 turns.

This is with Gwined whose start is rated 'Hard', but I am playing on Normal difficulty settings so I perhaps need to bump it up a bit. At the moment I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone that wants a meaty strategy game, but if you want some pitched battles from the viking age it's quite stunning.

I'm reasonably happy with ToB, largely because it leans heavily into the things I like about Total War. It's the first new historical game in 3 years; I don't care for Warhammer so I've been hungry for an appealing new game. It's a focused campaign rather than a sprawling one and I strongly prefer those. It's a period which I have an interest in due to how turbulent it is. It's heir to MTW's Viking Invasion, my favourite pre-Shogun II campaign.

It's a marmite game. Definitely not for everyone. It's also got a few significant flaws.

I played as Wessex on very hard. (Sidenote: if Attila's WRE was the first faction classified as "legendary" difficulty, Wessex should be the first "very easy". It is very, very easy. I thought playing on very hard would offset that a bit. Nope.)

(NB: this is written with the historical games in mind. I tinker with the Warhammers as there are things I like in the campaign gameplay, but I'm not as familiar with them because the setting is - for me - hideously boring. I think it's fairer to compare ToB to its historical peers anyway, as they operate under similar limitations.)

ToB leans into the older style of campaign gameplay: less stuff, and the stuff which is there tends to be more important. Except for the parts where the design fails, but we'll talk about that later. What do I mean by less stuff? I'm not required to upgrade each province to balance out happiness/squalor/food/religion/culture/research/income boosters. There's happiness, then global food and income. Also no choosing between multiple, similar versions of the same building e.g. lots of food small income farm, balanced farm, lots of income small food farm. Paradoxically, those complicating factors reduced my decision-making, as I spammed the same military or civilian template rather than peanut count. I think the Charlemagne campaign is still the best design in this regard; fewer but more important buildings which encourage tailoring provinces provides with neighbour bonuses. ToB has that to a degree but the beta patch disappointingly rips most of those wider bonuses out. What else? I don't need to juggle an unwanted political power/influence thingy to avoid being interrupted by stuff I don't care about. No unwanted events relating to said unwanted bars causing more disruption. No civil wars to force me to reconquer places when I'm already beyond sick of auto-calcing sieges. No agents! (I like agents in Warhammer. Otherwise, no.) No doing the rounds every few turns asking for trade agreements for the first time in forever. No imperium-powered general limit; it's once again viable to use multiple, smaller stacks which operate independently and join together for battles, or to stick with fewer but bigger stacks. No imperium, a concept which has bored me in every game except Shogun II, where it created a massive end-game war instead of sticking "meh" penalties on the player. Realm divide is a matter of taste; I enjoy the challenge. No forced march stance making the AI go dopey and requiring me to do extra clicks. The tech tree is great. In Rome II and Attila I look at the tree and think, "Most of that is worthless, what's the quickest path to the few good bits?" I look at ToB's and think, "I want most of that! What do I need first?" Public order is back to being a positive or negative with no charge bar. Instead you get a percentage chance of rebellion which increases as public order declines. I don't mind the other system but it does make everything so safely predictable. The ToB victory conditions are shorter, which I'm delighted about. In ToB it's obvious that you're supposed to play on past the ~turn 20 tier 1 victory, unlike Attila where it takes so long to achieve I'm always running for the door the instant it pops. Rome II I modded to halve the win requirements and am still bored before they pop.

Basically, ToB puts the focus back on making fewer but better decisions in a game which plays out at a decent clip. That's my whole pot of strategy design tea, nevermind the cup. I don't want a shallow campaign. I want one where I'm not juggling a dozen balls when only a few of them are interesting. I don't want a short-short game. I want one which isn't bloated out. That last applies to all genres.

Theoretically, the side-benefit of all this cleaning up is that it will help the campaign AI cope. Should they make it aware of how things work. Which I don't think they have. But, positives first, grumbling later.

The battles? I haven't fought so many in a single campaign since Shogun II's FotS. Again, it's heavily a matter of taste. I don't like the focus on siege warfare in Rome II/Attila. ToB is sending healthy, decent armies at me, it's standing and fighting in the open instead of running away, and as we're fighting in the open there's chance to use different tactics. Even if they defend a small village, we're fighting out in the open; that alone is a huge help. The battlefield AI is ... tolerably decent. I had one battle where it bugged out badly. Other than that, it's been flanking on both sides, clashing the shieldwalls capably, building pressure points in a bid to rupture my line, skirmishing. The field battles are why I first got into the series, all the way back with the original Shogun: Total War demo. I have missed them terribly. There are slightly fewer units overall, but most of them are useful and distinctive in their roles again a la Shogun II. When I send my elite units in to combat it matters because they're fewer in number and stronger in purpose. The rock-paper-scissors unit emphasis toned back to a more Shogun II level. Now situation and individual unit combat ability matter more than whether the unit has a sword. There are fewer unit abilities to button click which I welcome as I'm a general not an RTS micromanager.

What about the new stuff? I love the new recruitment system. The limited unit pools, combined with the need for units to build up to full strength after recruitment, is a solid way to make raising an army a thing which requires planning. Losing an army would hurt. Towards the end, yes, some of my pools replenished fairly quickly. Many did not, despite upgrades to spawn chance. In the other games I'd be throwing out elite doomstacks in 3-4 turns apiece. I don't have enough elites to fill my armies, so who gets levies and in what quantities? Food kind of matters and kind of doesn't. Supplies last if you pay any attention. Food is reasonably easy to produce past the early game, though I did once run myself into an accidental famine when recruiting a new army because I forgot to check the cost before hitting the button. On achieving my long campaign victory I've got 5 full stacks and 580 food, and that's after upgrading everything in every province to max. I could field another couple of armies with a bit of waiting on pool respawns. Those armies have a lot of ground to cover.

I do like the addition of ways to win aside from the usual "conquer X number of things including these particular places". A few of the previous TW campaigns have had similar goals, and I'm always sad when one fails to include them. Variety is the spice of life.

The graphics are great, as is the attention to detail. Gameplay always comes first - hence why I tinker with Warhammer despite disliking the setting - but there's a definite bonus to being able to zoom in and go, "Oh, neat, that's the Coppergate helmet." As trivial and silly as it is, I love that they've made the units cheer and shout like crowds, so for the first time in the series the battlefield sounds like a place packed with hundreds of men. "Be like a spear and have a point" bloke and his friends are gone. The voicework is all new. Which, after years of recycling, is a tears of joy moment.

I said "reasonably happy" at the start of this post and keep promising grumbling, so what's the problem? It's too easy, and the AI isn't good enough. That's the major. The beta patch is tweaking the economy to reduce player resources but IMO that's not going to help much. Sometimes the AI does well and displays basic competency. Too often it does not. The AI lacks aggression, and, as is so frustratingly common with the last two historical games, it can't coordinate itself. By lack of aggression I mean nobody declared war on me in my entire campaign, even when I left entire swathes of my borders unguarded for long stretches. In Shogun II that would invite attack, especially if I were at war on another front. Even Rome II and Attila will sometimes take that chance. ToB mostly did nothing. Occasionally it attacked my vassals, as if it couldn't grasp that I'd join the war too. Whether they DoWed my vassal or I DoWed them, the AI didn't attack me much. Some of this can be blamed on Wessex's strength rating but those factions could have caused me trouble if they'd tried. By lack of coordination I mean stack movements. I've seen small stacks left isolated near enemies while a large stack hangs out about of reinforcement range nearby. Sometimes for multiple turns. The large stack seldom goes to engage, even if the small stack wipes and damages the enemy. I've seen the AI send its full stacks off to capture a distant, isolated village while using tiny stacks to defend its homeland when there's a large enemy stack tearing the place up. At least one of the two AIs there is doing the right thing, I guess. I've seen a stack march halfway across the width of England to capture a village, only to turn around and head home as soon as it arrived. Without capturing the target. I've seen stacks standing next to enemy villages for multiple turns, slowly burning through their supplies ignoring the cost-free capture. I've seen an AI major faction send its main army to stand outside one of my settlements while we were at peace, slowly running out of supplies and starving away while another faction rolled up its kingdom up unopposed. Two other factions did the same thing while completely at peace so I can't blame it on the AI ineptly evading a foe. Failed sneak attack? I don't know. Finally, the AI is not upgrading its units. Is it unlocking the techs? I don't know. I suspect not, as then it would be recruiting better units even if not upgrading them. Freshly fielded armies are still filled with tier 1 units. So then I wonder, is the AI failing to unlock the start of those military tech lines? I suspect so. Does the average AI faction need to recruit 10 of a particular unit type? No. Will it attack 10 other armies? No. Will it win 5 capital sieges? No. If it's one of the wide-expanding factions then it might, except then it's got a whole lot of other problems to juggle plus access to civilian tech which it definitely does unlock and use.

Though at least the AI will now stand and fight when it's appropriate, and will attack my stacks at fair odds. Rome II and Attila can be too shy, and it only results in me advancing unopposed until their armies are homeless, at which point I casually wipe the attritioned stack. This is a good improvement.

Minor grumbles include things like missions being pretty boring. The Saxon witan unique mechanic is a pop-up box with 4 choices which offer X penalty with X bonus, which is a good example of the stuff I class as strategy gaming cruft. I don't want the penalties, obviously. I don't care about the bonuses because I don't need them. All I do is tooltip the boxes to pick the least bothersome penalty. Estates likewise; gain too many, loyalty hit on all characters, hand one out to guy with lowest loyalty, everyone is happy; waste of my time. I don't know the base replenishment for any given unit in my pool so I can't tell how much a bonus will affect it. On a similar note, my good cavalry unit has an 18% chance to replenish each turn and I've been waiting most of the campaign for more of them, so am I unlucky or is there something else at play? That's one of my factions 'personality' units, so not having it is a shame. Capitals still have garrisons, which is good as capturing important settlements should require extra effort, but they're once again too weak to create interesting battles. War fervour is a good concept in need of tweaking. The tooltip is confusing and I'm not sure how to raise it aside from signing peace treaties and getting events. The province system has the same old problem it always has: you need the full set for best result. If the AI doesn't have the full set it's weakened, and I feel like I'm assembling a stamp collection when I expand. Not to mention the sheer fury of having vassals scoot in and steal that settlement which you need. Yes, vassals still suck, and playing as Wessex with 7 of the blighters didn't I know it.

I'll play on to ultimate victory, and I'll play again with another faction. I'm sure the start will be more challenging. The longterm? Once I've established myself the AI likely won't manage to pose a threat unless it gets some brain tweaks. The beta patch is doing things like reducing food and money income, reducing public order, increasing unit upkeep. There's not all that much I can do to increase public order so that feels like a bit of a cheap shot. Having less money and food won't matter if I don't need to spend it. You could take half my income and food from my current game and it wouldn't matter, except for how much it would weaken the AI factions. So then we're back to needing heavily cheating AI again, which only papers over a few of the issues. AI is always very difficult to produce, but some of these problems should be addressable.

In the end, the setting, field battles and clutter reduction help a lot and I have enjoyed my time, occasional faceplams aside. I hoped for more. I thought this might be the Shogun II sequel that I've been dreaming of, with the focused map, focused design, and systems design which should make life easier for the AI. In its current state I prefer ToB to everything Rome II, and to everything Attila except the Charlemagne campaign. I really like the Charlemagne campaign, probably my second favourite overall. Shogun II's Sengoku campaign remains the pinnacle. ToB is about even with Fall of the Samurai, a campaign which I found tremendous in setting, gameplay and atmosphere but shockingly easy because the battlefield AI didn't adequately understand guns.

That got long. Froggy + Total War = wordage.

Nice write up. I’m still along the Warhammer 2 game but looking forward to getting this one as well.