After completing my Empire campaign in Immortal Empires, I decided to jump into a Three Kingdoms campaign to compare the experience and some interesting stats emerged that I wanted to discuss. I completed my Immortal Empires campaign in 120 turns – at least, I completed my short and long victory conditions. I decided not to play out the end-game scenario.
In Three Kingdoms, I also halted my campaign on 120 turns. I didn’t complete the campaign, but I did reach a point whereby I would soon (within 20 turns) trigger the end-game and the battle of the Three Kingdoms would commence.
Three Kingdoms obviously can’t compete with Warhammer in terms of faction or unit variety. That’s the strength of the Warhammer series and Immortal Empires. And Three Kingdoms also lacks the spectacle of magic and monsters in its battles. In terms of campaign, however, Three Kingdoms offers a far more engaging and complex experience.
From region, faction and character management to diplomacy, Three Kingdoms makes Warhammer seem rather lacklustre in comparison. Of course, Three Kingdoms was released after Warhammer 1 had already established the core campaign systems that the Warhammer series would follow. As I said in my Immortal Empires impressions post, all of the Warhammer content from Warhammer 1 to Warhammer 3 needed to connect together so the campaign, as a whole, hasn’t really evolved much since Warhammer 1.
The fact that Three Kingdoms has a superior campaign in terms of features and mechanics wasn’t a surprise to me upon playing an Immortal Empires campaign and a 3K campaign back to back. What did surprise me, however, was the battle stats at the end of those 120 turns in each campaign. Remember, Warhammer is a game that’s very much focused on those spectacular battles – those clashes of massive unit, faction, magic and monster variety. And the Immortal Empires campaign, as a whole, exists almost purely to facilitate those battles.
But when I looked at and compared my battle stats, I discovered something quite interesting. In Immortal Empires after 120 turns I had fought 121 battles, but I had only personally fought 29 of these. 29 battles out of 121. That’s 92 battles I chose to auto-resolve. And Three Kingdoms? A game that simply can’t compete with Warhammer when it comes to variety? 84 battles after 120 turns, of which 49 were fought personally and 35 were auto-resolved. That’s 23% (Warhammer) versus 58% (Three Kingdoms). So what’s going on? Why did I choose to fight far more battles personally in Three Kingdoms than in Warhammer?
First of all, Warhammer may be all about the battles, but you can have too much of a good thing. 121 battles in 120 turns is just too many, especially when so many of these battles feel entirely inconsequential. In 3K, I only fought 84 battles over the same turn period but these battles, overall, felt far more important in terms of progressing my campaign goals and as a result, I felt far more inclined to oversee them personally.
And this ties into campaign pacing. The Warhammer campaign has a faster pace than 3K. This means you’ll be rocking multiple full stack armies within the first 20-30 turns whereas in 3K, you’d be hard pressed to afford a single full stack within the same period. It’s not impossible, but you’re more reliant upon smaller armies.
In Warhammer, you tend to skip tier 2 units and move as fast as you can to tier 3. Within 50 turns you’ll likely be fielding multiple stacks of the best units you can recruit – and these stacks won’t evolve as the campaign continues, because they’re already as good as they can be. Now, the way armies work in 3K and Warhammer is quite different so the comparison isn’t exact, but the point is – it takes much longer for you to field a tier 3 or equivalent full stack army in 3K than it does in Warhammer.
This means that battles in 3K take more turns to grow in scale and there’s a more extended period of unit progression (from tier 1 to tier 3) and as a result, the battles never really fall into a repetitive pattern because your army size and unit composition is constantly evolving across the entire campaign.
In my 3K campaign, for example, even by turn 120 with 5 full stack armies (compared to my 11 full stacks in Warhammer) I still hadn’t upgraded all of my units to tier 3 equivalents. I spent over 50 turns in Warhammer expanding and fighting with armies that never changed. In 3K, on the other hand, my armies were changing fairly regularly, right up until the end of my campaign.
And less armies means you care more about the ones you have. They become far more important and the battles they fight also become far more important. In Warhammer, losing a full stack of tier 3 units is annoying, but I can easily recruit an entirely new stack within a matter of turns. In 3K, losing a full stack is a serious blow that takes time to recover from, especially if you lose the characters commanding those units.
In Warhammer I can just recruit a new general and drop 20 tier 3 units into their stack in a few turns. In 3K, due to the way replenishment, redeployment and mustering works, that’s simply not possible, at least not until you hit the very final stages of the campaign and you’ve unlocked all of the various possible bonuses to these systems via research, character perks or regional upgrades. But even then, character level also factors into unit recruitment – so a new ‘general’ won’t necessarily be able to recruit the same tier 3 units as the higher level commander they’re replacing.
And finally we have battle types. The majority of battles fought in both campaigns were for minor settlements. In Warhammer, minor settlements, despite the faction, all share a small number of template maps that never change. In 3K, however, every minor – or resource, as they’re known in 3K – settlement has a unique map for each settlement type and this map expands and evolves as the settlement grows.
And this expansion based on settlement level also applies to the provincial capitals which grow from small towns without walls to massive, sprawling cities. In Warhammer, a provincial capital always has walls and doesn’t really expand at all so there’s nothing really new to see from Turn 1 to Turn 120.
So let’s sum up, shall we? I fought more battles in 3K personally because 1) there were less battles to fight 2) these battles more were far more important to progressing my campaign goals 3) battles were far more decisive in terms of unit / character losses for myself or my opponent 4) battles took more turns to grow in size 5) there was a regular introduction of new or upgraded units to fight with as I progressed 6) the settlement maps (which make up the bulk of the battle types) are far better in terms of variety, scale and expansion as the settlement upgrades.
It’s not just one thing, but a combination of things that makes the battles in 3K more compelling to actually play throughout the entire campaign – despite lacking the variety and spectacle of Warhammer.
And that’s why I hope the next historical Total War game is more like Three Kingdoms than Warhammer. Warhammer has been massively successful and is massively popular, but I hope CA doesn’t believe that the Warhammer formula is the one to adopt going forward. Three Kingdoms shows us what the future of Total War can be.
Oh, and no more f**king campaign map agents / heroes in the next game please! If you take anything from 3k going forward, make it that.
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