Originally Posted by
zoner16
I've been enjoying it quite a lot. The campaign is quite excellent, and many of the new systems work just fine on it. The sandbox does quite well to keep the game fresh, and the fact that the AI actually uses the mechanics sensibly opens up a lot of options on how to play. Crazy things will just happen and throw the narrative for a loop.
Battles are just alright-ish, and while some of it is balancing, I think there's just a lack of interesting tactical options. Many of the units feel similar despite technically having different stats and types. Formations could help, but I believe CA made a mistake by locking them behind strategists. It's already difficult to support units that can even use formations in the first 100 turns. Getting a high enough level strategist leading them just makes it more rare for you to see and use them.
They aren't bad by any stretch. The AI has advanced a little bit. Some of the cheese tactics still work, and it still will do some of its old failures, but if you engage it in a standard fight, it can do quite well man for man. It'll bend its formation to try and block off flanking attacks while keeping its men together, switch its shots around to higher value targets, peel off units to try and deal with things in its backline, and is generally putting up a convincing effort that can punish you if you don't pay attention or get too greedy. It's not going to floor you, but that does feel generally as a movement forward. Melee animations are generic but functional, but some of the other animations are well done, especially cavalry charges.
The game looks and sound gorgeous once you turn off the English VO. The UI is a mixed bag of good, good but not enough for the amount of info they're trying to convey, and places where the art style clearly went too far. I've never noticed it getting in my way, just occasionally forcing me to double check what I just did.
As a 3K history fan, there are a lot of lacking details that irk me, from all the missing characters, to the anachronism fiesta that is the equipment, to the weird in between place that the "story" popups exist in, where they're somewhere in between Romance and history but refuse to acknowledge it. However, at the end of the day, there's enough proper 3K in this game for me to like it anyways. I can get Yuan Shu to sell me his daughter for a clay pig, and that somehow that feels like a natural progression of the situation, just part of the TW3K experience, and its fun.