Nanman DLC announced.

[zoner16]

There are rules in fiction. Try putting in a beardless Guan Yu, see how well that goes over with the target audience. The rules are often different, but fiction relies on a grounding in some sort of consistency in order for it to have emotional engagement. With a setting as widely interpreted as the 3K one though, there's so many levels of grounding to choose from, and it feels like CA just put them all into a blender.

I'm not sure what you mean by "synergy" but I can agree that the character management doesn't scale well as the campaign goes on. The first half of a campaign, you have pretty heavy investment in a few characters you have to keep an eye on, because hiring people is expensive, and good generals are rare. By late game though, there's way too much going on, you have to constantly be clicking on people you can't remember, and hiring people is just another thing on the shopping list.

I don't think the game is itself simple, but there are way too many shortcuts. Ancillaries are too overvalued by default, you'll stack too many bonuses to basically everything without much planning, and basic units are too efficient to make army composition rewarding. There's a lot of options, but the good ones are too obvious. These are all things I've been trying to mod, but aside from playing on legendary campaign difficulty, knowing the ins and outs of Total War makes it hard to challenge myself, though the variation between campaigns keeps me coming back.

[PikeStance]

There are rules in fiction. Try putting in a beardless Guan Yu, see how well that goes over with the target audience. The rules are often different, but fiction relies on a grounding in some sort of consistency in order for it to have emotional engagement. With a setting as widely interpreted as the 3K one though, there's so many levels of grounding to choose from, and it feels like CA just put them all into a blender.

Thus the reason why Fiction is far more easier to pick and choose and still be justified. In historical games, generalization is financially expedient, but is a firestorm in the making.

I'm not sure what you mean by "synergy" but I can agree that the character management doesn't scale well as the campaign goes on. The first half of a campaign, you have pretty heavy investment in a few characters you have to keep an eye on, because hiring people is expensive, and good generals are rare. By late game though, there's way too much going on, you have to constantly be clicking on people you can't remember, and hiring people is just another thing on the shopping list.

I don't think the game is itself simple, but there are way too many shortcuts. Ancillaries are too overvalued by default, you'll stack too many bonuses to basically everything without much planning, and basic units are too efficient to make army composition rewarding. There's a lot of options, but the good ones are too obvious. These are all things I've been trying to mod, but aside from playing on legendary campaign difficulty, knowing the ins and outs of Total War makes it hard to challenge myself, though the variation between campaigns keeps me coming back.

They discussed throughout the build up to release how you have build based on synergy of your characters and "empire." However, I completely ignored it. I had plenty of money. With my armies, I just made pretty colors.