

While Homer talks a lot about chariots in The Iliad, apparently this wasn’t part of the equation in the actual Bronze Age. If there’s a weakness here, it’s hard to see what the impact of the priestess missions are. I didn’t notice whether these had an effect or not, but I never hesitated to send envoys, spies, or priestesses to the enemy’s cities to demoralize them before attacks. The soldiers also believe in omens in the sky, and so you can get a priestess to perform a trick that will make them all see good omens. The giants, for instance, are small in number but they can terrify the soldiers they are attacking. They take the form of larger-than-life humans who wear masks and have an outsized effect on the morale of the soldiers.

The mythological creatures, like the Minotaur of Crete, can also play a role in the armies. If you don’t do that, you may find every now and then that the wrath of the gods comes your way in the form of earthquakes or storms. I tried to keep those two gods happy with sacrifices of meat and grain. Rather, you can see the effects of praying to the gods like Zeus and Hera, like good weather while you are crossing the sea. With Troy, the team at the Sofia, Bulgaria studio of The Creative Assembly chose not to include the gods in the game in the way that Homer did. It enabled heroes to duel with each other in single combat. Total War: Three Kingdoms, set in China amid the mythology of the Middle Kingdoms, had both a historical mode and a mythical one. The only good thing about this decision is that the naval combat in past games has been pretty weak, as you can only do so much with fire catapults and ramming vessels. But in a game set in the Aegean Sea? They might call it Total War Mini Game instead. I mean, if it were Total War Saga: Cossacks, the lack of a naval game would be OK. If I’m docking the game for any reason, it’s this one. That detracts from the realism of the game, which otherwise really feels like you’re fighting in the beautiful and ancient world of the Greeks and the Trojans. Instead of fighting aboard ships, the game assumes you can unload at one of the many small islands of Aegean to fight a land battle. I could tell because it was missing some things like sea battles. This title is a “Saga” because it’s more focused and less ambitious than some of the other games, like Total War: Three Kingdoms. But don’t expect to use any of those ships for naval combat because the game doesn’t have any. Helen of Troy may have had the face that launched a thousand ships. They will join you eventually, when the time is right and conditions favor you. So I wouldn’t pay a lot to a faction in order to get them to join you. So you may inherit a faction economy with some real problems, and you may have to disband a bunch of their armies in order to bring the economy back into proper balance. The danger of Confederation is that factions that are about to give up will be more likely to do it. I was able to do this numerous times, and it helped me gain ground against the Trojans and squeeze them from multiple directions. That means they join you, bringing their armies and cities with them. This means that a faction that likes you a lot will agree to confederating with your faction.

One of the best ways to gain ground is through Confederation. You can conquer lands through military means or colonize razed settlements to gain footholds across the region. If you take over Crete (known as Knossus in the game), you gain one of the victory conditions for Menelaus and also get a lot of resources. Total War Saga: Troy rewards you for successful play in a lot of ways. But he was such a key character that I didn’t permanently eliminate him from the game.Īnd while I’m living proof that the game can hold a strategy buff’s attention for many hours, the game has its flaws. That involved some necessary fratricide, and I accidentally assassinated Agamemnon once. And in this game, I had to conquer many of my Greek comrades before setting off on an island-hopping campaign across the Aegean. I played one of the earlier Total War games, Total War: Attila, for hundreds of hours, as I tried to save the Roman empire from collapse. The real-time battles are best fought only when you have close battles where you don’t have numerical superiority the campaign level duels are best fought as auto-resolved battles when you have overwhelming odds in your favor. As with all Total War games, you can fight them instantly in a strategic-level battle on the campaign map, or you can choose to zoom in on the battlefield and fight in real time with your companies of soldiers on a 3D landscape. Rebels are threatening one of them so you have to take them out first. You start out with just four cities including Sparta under your control. I played as Menelaus of the Greeks, the king whose wife Helen was wooed away by Paris of Troy.
