Three Kingdoms Unit Variety and DLCs

[zoner16]

I disagree.

1) The Tang Dynasty was very large and expansive in scope and they have nothing to do with the 3 Kingdoms period. The Tang Dynasty fought everybody from Japan & Korea in the East to the Abbasaid Caliphate in the West so you're talking about a battlefield bigger than 3K and probably equal in size to Rome 2's battlefield map.

Making the Tang Dynasty (which has a bigger scope than the 3K period) into a mere expansion to a 3K TW main game would make little sense because expansions are supposed to be narrower in scope and more focused than the main game - not the other way arund.

2) They have 3 separate titles focusing on the [Western] Romans. Crisis of the Third Century is literally just 1 century and falls between the timeline of Rome 2's main campaign and Attila TW. Rome 1 and 2 covers roughly 200 BC- 200 AD. Crisis of 3C DLC is 200 AD-300AD. Attila TW is 400+ AD up to 800s AD with Attila's AoC.

Making the Crisis of the 3rd century into a DLC is perfectly fine because it covers 1 century and is basically sandwhiched between 3 Roman-centric games that already covers antiquity in that part of the world.

In fact, it's more surprising that 3K is a full game instead of being a SAGA/expansion game to a main game about the Han Dynasty. That's like Crisis of the 3rd century being the main game and Rome 2 being the expansion.

And it's also surprising that Attila TW was made into a full title at all considering the limited timeframe/scope (I don't consider this a SAGA game considering it was full price with a large scope/lots of content equal to Rome 2). So if they could do it for Attila about the fall of Western Rome which had a narrower scope, I see no reason why they can't do it for a bigger timeperiod/scope such as the Tang Dynasty.

The problem with the Tang is that they don't really have the same "Rise" that Rome did. They just kinda took over from the Sui, who had already had most of Han Chinese lands under their control (an area the size of western Europe). The also didn't have the same cataclysmic "Fall" that western Rome did, with mass migrations, invasions, and wars with rival powers. They just fractured from internal instability.

The Tang fought a bunch of people, but these were all wars on the periphery, not ever something that required the empire to go on a war footing. These were all military expeditions a la The Last Roman.

The one big exception would be the An Lushang rebellion. I could definitely see that as being a great campaign. It involved basically every nation in the region, and was the closest the Tang dynasty came to destruction before the actual end of the dynasty.


As for the Three Kingdoms, its fine as a full game. We already have the Shogun games to show that you don't have to have a long time period or massive map scale to make a tentpole Total War. The problem with trying to make the whole Han Dynasty into a game is that nobody else in the region was even close to it in power. Any game as the Han when they were united would be a massive unbalanced campaign, without the Attila era's excuse to debuff the Romans. The Three Kingdoms works because the scope is still epic but the fracturing of power means that factions can start on a more even footing, and basically everywhere is fighting, not just the periphery of the empire.