cre: Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wild Review — Welcome to the jungle
Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wild releases September 3 via Steam. I have to admit I was pretty darn excited when it was initially announced that we would have an expansion that would focus on Nanman and Meng Huo. Then as I continued to review The furious savage, some problems became apparent. Before we get to that, let’s discuss the roles the Nanman played in the frame.
The Nanmans were a loose confederacy of people ethnically different from the Han. At Luo Guanzhong Romance of the Three Kingdoms, they rebelled against the rule of the kingdom of Shu-Han. This led to Zhuge Liang’s southern campaign where the great strategist emerged victorious. The whole fiasco spanned a few chapters of the novel, including recounting the exploits (and traps) of King Meng Huo, the Fire Goddess Zhurong, King Mulu, and many more.
Say hello to Nanman
Meng Huo, Zhurong and Mulu take center stage Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wild. They are also joined by a fourth faction leader, Shamoke, a leader whose glory was to kill Wu’s general, Gan Ning. They are playable in both the 190 CE (vanilla) and 194 CE (A betrayed world) start dates.
Right off the bat you will notice how the countryside is quite different from what you have become used to in Total War: Three Kingdoms. The furious savageNanman’s rulers will experience most of the action in the southwestern part of the map, an area filled with dense jungles and swamps. Indeed, the greatest conflict of the time will hardly bother you, even if several Han Lords come knocking on your door several turns later.
Your main goal here is to unite the tribes. To accomplish this, Nanman Chiefs are able to confederate, vassalize, or completely destroy non-playable tribal factions to gain their advantages or allegiances. Each tribe you defeat grants you certain buffs for the campaign.
Overdrive overdrive
To say that Nanman’s characters are unique would be an understatement. These are not only their starting locations, but also their tech tree, buildings, leveling means, and animal units such as tigers and elephants. For the leveling process, Nanmans do not acquire skills in the same way as Han, Bandit, or Yellow Turban characters. Rather, they are able to allocate skill points to increase their class / stats (i.e. Sentinel / expertise or Commander / authority).
When it comes to skills and perks, new leaders acquire them by performing various counts. Examples include 10 siege battles to gain + 15% campaign movement range or winning 10 defensive battles to activate the “Disciplined” trait for your suite. Some of these counts are easy to complete as you go; others, meanwhile, are boring to get – I mean, would you really have “defensive battles” or “ambush battles” as your primary focus? As such, it becomes a chore when you are only passively gaining perks while actively increasing attributes.
At the very least, Nanman’s characters can be very powerful in terms of stats alone. During my game of Meng Huo in Romance mode and very hard difficulty (VH / VH), I had several officers with over 100 points in two or even three categories.
Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wildtech tree
Another major change is the way Nanman factions unlock tech. The first allows you to recruit elephant units (although these are limited in number). From there, you’ll have a choice of three branches: Domestic (mostly building upgrades), Military (Rally towers, resupply, and additional special units), or Diplomatic (trade, research, and diplomatic relations). Some nodes will also prevent you from choosing their counterparts, so you need to be careful with your choices.
A key concept here is that there are a lot of technologies stuck behind missions, additional tasks that you can accomplish during your Total War: Three Kingdoms to play. These are mostly generic actions like reaching level 5 with any general or constructing a certain building. Again, it’s a bit passive. In some cases, I didn’t even realize that I had already achieved a particular goal in advance.
Nanman buildings, however, are very powerful. For example, the Places of Worship branch increases your prestige, population growth, and public order while reducing corruption. The same could also be said for their officer assignments (which are locked behind particular technologies).
Where everything falls apart
The Nanman’s unique abilities in Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wild are outweighed by their abysmal advantages of board positions. When assigned as administrators (or “cave lords” in this case), they will simply reduce construction costs. Then again, I was surprised when I finally captured and used Han characters. Apparently, they too have lost their admin buffs. Imagine assigning a strategist with + 40% revenue from trade, silk and spices, only to find that he just cut construction costs like other Nanman officers.
This seems to be a problem until the characters are actually assigned to positions. During the selection process, their bonuses will not appear at all and you will have to guess what they are actually offering until they become administrators. If you choose the wrong character, you will have to eliminate them, which will result in an opinion penalty. Alternatively, you can check out all of the skills, traits, and auxiliaries they have and rate accordingly, but that’s a problem.
To go further, the problems also have something to do with the region itself. The dense jungles and swamps of Nanman-held territory can be excruciating to navigate. At Koei Tecmo Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, these were places you wanted to avoid or didn’t waste a lot of time on due to attrition or poisons. Here in The furious savage, you will find yourself skipping several turns just to get from point A to point B. This didn’t help as armies often ran out of supply and movement points. I guess that’s due to the terrain itself combined with a lot of generals that have very low cunning stats, or something else. What could have been an exciting campaign quickly turned into a chore.
Victory for Meng Huo and probably someone else
As mentioned earlier, Nanman executives in Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wild need to unite disparate tribes to become the ruler of the south. You also need to control the 21 Nanman-type colonies and then a few more until you reach 50 colonies in total. After that you have to wait 20 rounds until you get the victory.
Of course, you can continue to develop aggressively, but I found this to be unsuccessful as it’s better to just defend and make sure that a random opponent or rebellion doesn’t take a single colony away from you. You will probably need to survive the onslaught and weather the storm just in case of a few surprises or because the Han Lords are already mad at you.
By the time I finished the campaign as Meng Huo, I was tired. Although I tried another race, this time as Lady Zhurong, it was almost pointless. With a few differences with the Innate Perks, her starting region and campaign goals were no different from her husband’s.
Are Meng Huo and co. Is it worth it?
Unfortunately, strategically, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by Total War: Three Kingdoms – The Furious Wild. The pace just seems shifted – from a race to defeat so many tribes to conquer 50 settlements, you suddenly switch to a game of waiting. Combine that with inexplicably low movement range and supplies, and it does indeed become an oddity. Replayability, in my opinion, suffers as well – Nanman executives will have the same progression and the same incidents to deal with. Chances are, Shi Xie and Sun Ce will be your rivals early in the game, and you’ll fight your way from there. In my case, I ended up seeing strange events where Cao Cao or Yuan Shao started to descend into the jungle just to fight. It’s like they have a super weird obsession with taking out enemies that are too far away.
Still, one could easily appreciate the efforts that Creative Assembly put into creating this. Unique Mechanics are treats that can keep you entertained for a while. You even have ranged units, tiger hunters, and elephants going wild. Additionally, there is the free update which expands the map and adds Gate Battles, Shi Xie (as FLC Lord), and Juggernauts. These are all welcome inclusions.
I can’t tell you how ridiculously awesome it is to start charging with elephants and tigers while juggernaut flamethrowers burn the battlefield. These new additions provide a refreshing dynamic for the tactical side of things even if the strategic aspect has some shortcomings.
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