Join Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. I feel like the endgame would be a lot more interesting if all of the invaders targeted the faction that has claimed dominion over Britannia specifically, which would have had me fighting a tense, three-front war to preserve my kingdom. While I was fighting the Danes, for instance, the Norwegians went off and conquered a completely different area of the map where they settled down to be, more or less, just another standard faction for me to eventually crush.
The invaders are powerful, but act somewhat aimlessly in a way that lessened the threat I felt from them. I reached a long victory as two different factions in well under 100 turns, and achieved the Ultimate Victory by holding off waves of Norse, Danish, and Norman invaders who arrive from off-map not long after that. The campaign is unexpectedly short.The campaign is also really, unexpectedly short. At least, not any that I could find having conquered all of Britain and fulfilled every victory condition.
The Scots of Circenn have a definite endpoint to their Stone of Destiny quest, but their Norse adversaries in Northymbre, tasked with avenging the death of Ragnarr Lodbrok, never get any kind of payoff or reward for successfully accomplishing said vengeance. Not all of the faction-specific storylines have much of a wrap-up either. Having to choose between building a church to keep the English happy or a runestone to keep the Norsemen happy isn’t much of a dilemma when both groups are utterly pacified. There’s also more of a lean toward story than previous Total War games, but again, it’s something I mostly found relevant in the early game. The army cap from the most recent Total Wars is replaced with a food upkeep cost for armies, and food is eventually so plentiful that having 20 to 30 stacks isn’t implausible. But the lack of meaningful checks on snowballing, even on hard difficulty, made it far too easy to become ludicrously powerful. It's far too easy to become ludicrously powerful.These systems definitely keep you on your toes early on, which is when Thrones of Britannia is the most fun. As the Irish King Flann Sinna, I had to maintain my legitimacy in the eyes of the other Gaelic lords which… yep, by the late game, was absolutely unquestioned. As the leader of one of the Danelaw factions, I had to balance the desires of my new English subjects with those of my viking warriors – both of whom gave me their unwavering, utter adoration by the late game. There’s the War Fervor stat returning from Age of Charlemagne, which measures your people’s desire to fight, and I had parked at nearly maximum for most of the late game, making it feel irrelevant. The problem with most of the other new campaign stuff is that it becomes far too easy to manage, with rewards for success and penalties for failure each feeling underwhelming. I really liked how this encouraged me to not have every stack be fully comprised of Elite Praetorian Murderlords by the late game, while forcing interesting tactical decisions about where to deploy my badass battalion and which part of the line could be trusted to the farmers with sharpened sticks. Since the pool refills semi-randomly over time, you’re forced to either raise a smaller army of your best units, or round out a larger one with weaker units. Perhaps most notable is that armies are recruited from a single, global pool and technologies, rather than buildings, are the main way of unlocking better units. I was forced to make a tactical decision of where to deploy my badass battalion.Elsewhere, Thrones of Britannia is packed with new campaign mechanics that range from meaningful to negligible. Some level of abstraction is expected, but this really stretches my suspension of disbelief. It makes me wonder why the designers didn’t opt to have one turn represent a month or even a week instead. It can take multiple years to march from Portsmouth to Inverness, for example – a feat that a hiker could accomplish in less than three months, even at a quite leisurely pace. Each turn still represents a quarter of a year, though, and armies haven’t had their movement range changed significantly, which creates some oddly immersion-breaking conceits when zoomed in this far.
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