The second battle took place on a thin patch of sand next to a fetid swamp.
The first battle was a simple affair (a skirmish against the Egyptian forces of Seti, on a wide expanse of desert with groves of palm trees flanking the map) until a sandstorm struck, rendering my archers useless just as my forces were about to break the enemy. These three encounters give me glimpses of Pharaoh’s biggest change to the Total War series’ battle system: weather effects. In every scenario I played, I took control of Egyptian forces as Rameses III, the famed monarch who defeated the mysterious Sea Peoples in the years during Egypt’s steep decline in power. Pharaoh will include three factions at launch, with eight playable leaders spread between them: four for Egypt, and two for the Hittites and Canaanites each. This further extends the lifespan of each battle, since flanking takes more time with foot soldiers, and chariots, at least in the battles I played, weren’t abundant. It’s also important to note that, in keeping with the time period, there are no cavalry units in Pharaoh - only chariots. You need to plan a bit more, taking into account army composition, terrain types, elevation, and weather.” “We wanted to reduce the amount of micromanagement because of how overwhelming it can be for the player. “We wanted to make a game where your choices are fewer, but more impactful,” Creative Assembly Sofia game director Todor Nikolov told Polygon on a video call. In several instances, I didn’t realize that my strategy had allowed the enemy to slowly gain ground on the opposite flank until it was too late. The results played out over a matter of excruciating minutes as I obsessed over the dwindling health and morale bars of every unit. Once I made a tactical decision in Pharaoh - to advance my left flank in the hopes of pushing the enemy into a marsh, for one - I had to live with it. I don’t have any mages to melt large swaths of enemy troops, and I can’t deploy rat ogres or giant glacial bears as one-size-fits-all solutions. Based on the three scenarios I played in the game’s Bronze Age Egypt setting, battles are not only slower paced, but more deliberate than those of the Warhammer trilogy. Total War: Pharaoh, which Creative Assembly announced last week, feels like a response to that shift. It sparked a trilogy that’s now about spectacle as much as it is about strategy. Total War: Warhammer, in keeping with the fantasy setting of Games Workshop’s tabletop universe, introduced magic, dragons, vampires, orcs, and the explosive kinds of battles all of those things imply. For 16 years, developer Creative Assembly had leapfrogged between historical settings, offering a general’s perspective on Sengoku-period Japan, the rise (and fall) of the Roman Empire, and aggressive 18th-century imperialism. In 2016, Total War: Warhammer marked a sharp turn for the long-running strategy series. It turns out I got pretty attached to eagle-mounted archers.
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