Total War: Pharaoh Review (banditks)
This game is plagued with issues and contradictions. Systems directly conflict with others and certain choices are made worthless because of bugs.
Diplomacy and AI:
AI are a huge liability and its better just to kill everything and have no allies. Playing as the Hittites with the legacy that is about having allies, vassals, and a happy population. I was dragged into every single war I have had over the last 8 hours by my vassal declaring war after war, that is Declaring, not being declared on. After declaring war that vassal would just sit in his territory and do nothing. Once i finished off his war about 3 to 4 turns later he would declare war on someone else.
Diplomacy also inst working properly, I was trying to get into the good graces of a nearby nation but even though it said relations were -improving- and going from 8 to 45, it would never actually increase even though doing the simple math I had those 45 positive diplomacy points over the negatives. Hit end turn, and its still 8. If it was 8 the last 3 turns and still 8 now, that is not improving.
The systems don't work and actively work against being a faction with vassals, paired with how broken the math of diplomacy is, its just a waste of time to be diplomatic with anyone for any reason, just kill everything.
Trade and resources:
Its the end times, the Apocalypse is here, bronze age collapse. Its impossible to seperate that from the players minds, not to mention the tracker right at the top of the screen. So what do players want to naturally do? horde resources, even more so because there is no cap to hording.
Should i trade away food? heck no, that keeps all my armies going and droughts/famines are coming, I need to horde every scrap of food i can get.
Should I trade away wood? heck no, that is literally used for every single building and is keeping my economy growing which i have to do because its the end times.
Should i trade away stone? heck no, its apparently limited, meaning onces its gone, thats it. You need it for all the higher end buildings which again keeps the economy going.
should i trade away any bronze? heck no, i need that from turn one to get into mid and late tier units, which i have to have to survive the end times going on.
should i trade away gold? heck no, i need that for the political stuff, high end buildings, high end troops, i need it basically everywhere.
the multiply resource system is in direct contradiction with the setting of the game and the style of total war in general. It encourages you to horde, not trade anything ever, and kill everyone else to get the rarer stuff. Being trade and diplomacy are so linked, it kills both systems with this one bad choice that is a left over from Troy.
Outposts:
Another attempt to "unstack" the central settlement system, which really doesn't do much at all to "unstack" it. Its basically little booster pads for player armies to run up and tag to get a little more movement across the map. They really don't serve any other purpose.
Combat:
Flanking doesn't seem to do anything anymore? More than once I have turned and enemies flank and attacked it from behind and the troops just don't seem to care. They fight on in two directions like nothing bad is happening to them.
Chariots are worthless, being basic archer units can to toe to toe with them and dish out as much damage as they take. Cav and Chariots should delete archers every time. I have just dumped chariots out of my army roster completely in favor for another archer, or melee unit.
Overall this game is a huge disappointment. Failed economic system, failed diplomacy, failed AI, failed combat system.
The only bonus is a big map is coming and we don't have to pay for it. At least the devs are going to ditch this failure and move on to a new game and hopefully much better execution.