Total War: Three Kingdoms will be released in Fall 2018

[Tactics Mayers]

This is basically a best of both worlds. Both the fantasyfans and the history-fans will be satisfied.

[caratacus]

I don't think good games have entirely disappeared. But the games I enjoy now are a bit different. I am looking forward to "Railway Empire" which comes out later this month.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/50...ailway_Empire/

It's a bit like the old Railroad Tycoon games, the old 2002 version which i remember fondly. I have high hopes for it. I also enjoyed some of the more unusual simulation games in modern times. This is my favourite:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/24...ain_Simulator/

There's only so many times you can conquer your enemies, after all. Sometimes it's fun to just sit back, relax and enjoy the scenery!

Thanks @bigdaddy1204 for these recommendations, especially the first, that looks a great game . When I was a kid, I spent time drawing islands in textbooks with mountains, forests, rivers, swamps and then adding railway lines, ports, airstrips to develop towns and cities. Seeing how it would transform an uninhabitable island into a highly urbanized one. Later on I set up a model railway in my bedroom but got diverted away to other things.

One of the things that I am looking forward to seeing in this new Total War game focusing on the Three Kingdoms period, are the buildings. Probably for the first time an attempt will be made to recreate these ancient Chinese cities. Just hope those warriors don't get stuck in them, but if they do, I'll just admire the architecture.

[Roma_Victrix]

One of the things that I am looking forward to seeing in this new Total War game focusing on the Three Kingdoms period, are the buildings. Probably for the first time an attempt will be made to recreate these ancient Chinese cities. Just hope those warriors don't get stuck in them, but if they do, I'll just admire the architecture.

Well, I mean, this Rise of the Three Kingdoms mod for Medieval II Total War has basically already done that. At the very least, though, it will be the first time a Chinese city will be presented in an official TW title game. They did, however, have Japanese cities and castles in the Shogun series, and Japanese architecture is basically an extension of ancient Chinese architectural traditions.

Unfortunately not much remains of Han-dynasty architecture, but some ruins are still standing. This includes brick and rammed-earth walls and beacon towers, granaries, gatehouses, underground tombs with shafts and domes, the stone and rammed earth base platforms for altars, temples, armories, and palatial halls, and stone-carved pillar gates and towers placed outside of temples and tombs. The latter are very interesting in that they depict how wooden architecture and wooden towers would have appeared, even with the distinctive ceramic roof tiles, instead carved out of stone. We actually have tons of Han ceramic roof tiles as well, so we know how the roofs of wooden buildings would have appeared.

In addition to these actual ruins, the Han Chinese thankfully also placed little ceramic models of courtyard houses, granaries, farms, and urban residential towers in the tombs of wealthy people. You can view some of them here. They're pretty cute, actually. They also made stone-carved reliefs depicting roads, bridges, and canals. We've actually found ruins of drainage systems for their major cities as well, including bricked archways and ditches filled with ceramic water pipes. These were built underneath gatehouses and generally lined the major streets of the cities.

Chinese architecture and buildings from the 6th and 7th centuries AD onward (i.e. Southern/Northern Dynasties, Sui and Tang) have survived in much greater quantities, because that's when they started using brick and stone much more regularly, especially for Buddhist pagoda towers. The oldest surviving wooden temple halls date to the 8th century AD (i.e. Nanchan Temple), during the Tang period. Ruins of the Han-dynasty rammed earth Great Wall still exists in small sections, but the brick-and-stone Great Wall that we see today is basically a 15th-16th century reconstruction of the Ming Dynasty, for instance. There are, however, many brick and stone gatehouses that still stand from the Song and Yuan periods, i.e. the 10th-14th centuries.

It's easier to mod things out than mod things in even on the new engine. Once TW3K Assembly Kit is out, I'll mod out the stuff you dont want for you, free of charge. ��

That's good to know!

[Morrowgan]

We better be able to steal arrows with Kongming

[rafmc1989]

About the architecture, yes, Roma_Victrix, it's not very common to have reliable sources for the cities the CA will do... but I think they will do very good, speaking for RII and Attila, I think they presented good environments afterall (apart the thing of "soldiers tanks" capable of destroying everything in front of them while walking xD )

But a question, is the new title going to use a new graphics engine too??? (we are a bit fed up with the same old engine they recycled since the times of EmpireTW)
I would love to see animations which reflect exactly the style of warfare of Han Chinese

[Ngazi]

When was the time a game series used a new engine for a sequel? It seems engines now just get updated for every game and work pretty decently. Of course I've never played a Warscape game and heard it still has many unit mass problems so a new engine would make me hopeful.

I'm still pretty skeptical about the new game, though.