Narrative also drives A Total War Saga: Troy, where as a commander of an army in the Aegean, you are tasked with sending your thousands ships to Troy, or defending it. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms inspires Total War: Three Kingdoms. The First Total War: Napoleons Empire and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. With Napoleon, Creative Assembly cemented this approach by encouraging players to identify with an ambitious general as he led campaigns in Italy in 1796, Egypt in 1798 and then across Europe.Ī story-driven approach is now at the engine of all major Total War campaigns. An expansion then asked players to follow the campaigns of Alexander the Great. In Rome: Total War (2004), players sided with one of several competing family dynasties in the Roman Republic. The pleasure is located in both the sense of mastering a continent in its turn-based macro mode, and manipulating a field of soldiers to success in its real-time micro mode. The designers present you with a huge canvas and your job is to fill it.
Generally in Total War, players assume control of a faction vying for control of a country, or a country vying for control of the world.