Total War: Pharaoh completely shifts gears after the series’ fantasy phase
It turns out I got pretty attached to eagle-mounted archers.
In 2016, Total War: Warhammer marked a sharp turn for the long-running strategy series. 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. 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. It sparked a trilogy that’s now about spectacle as much as it is about strategy.
Total War: Pharaoh, which Creative Assembly announced last week, feels like a response to that shift. 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. 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. 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. The results played out over a matter of excruciating minutes as I obsessed over the dwindling health and morale bars of every unit. 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.
“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. “We wanted to reduce the amount of micromanagement because of how overwhelming it can
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