Recent reviews by Gimli

some cons:

I'll be blunt, this is a skeleton of a game with a nice layer of paint over it. Everyone and everywhere you play is the same except for religion and one of 3 three government types: feudal, tribal or clan. And they all work kind of the same as well unlike ck2. There are no region specific events, only lifestyle events that you will get bored of really quickly.
You can practically teleport armies across the map with no cost. broken and completly destroys the need for embarkment funds. Battles have been tweaked, but now, you can't win impossible battles anymore by carefully selecting commander traits and units... It degenerates the entire game into a numbers game.
Seduction is the bane at the moment... everyone does it and just gets tiresome.
You can't change your personality over time (not even at the cost of some extreme stress) which i personally find boring.
Vikings are being vikings and introduce bordergore everywhere with their exclaves. I mean, who doesn't want some icelandic norse people in Egypt?
For some reason, crusader states become sunni/norse/... after a generation
unreformed faiths should have a way to lose fervor and should have more difficulty to convert counties.

some pros:
prestige and piety are a currency, sometimes they are hard to get, but overall a good addition
Mercs make sense and make contracts for some years
Perk tree is nice if sometimes not overpowered at certain points
New decisions are nice, but lack anything to follow up on. Just a button that does stuff without any flavor (for example witch coven).
Eugenics are fun and the visual representation looks great
Traits make sense and can make it interesting

conclusion:

Suffers from cut content that is being made for DLCs really hard at the moment. I predict flavor packs (event packs??) and "new" government types that might bring some life into the game.

Don't be mistaken, early game is usually a blast, but mid and end game have no real challenge anymore (except imploding, but the new system makes that really easy to avoid)

Can't really recommend it at this moment, wait and see how they will hanle DLCs an make up your mind then is my advice.

One word: wait

DLC ideas are interesting but still needs polishing.
1) Bugs need to be ironed out. I get a ctd when i win my settlement battle or just playing the campaign for no reason at all it seems.
2) Some events related to rising factions seem to be on loop as long as a character is alive. e.g. Yuan Shao popping up to install himself in Ye commandry (for me at least)
3) Liu Hong is easy as pie. Expected more of a Attila: Western Roman Empire experience
4) New Yellow Turban leaders are kind of passive. Really annoying when you are one of them and your brothers don't move their armies.
5) Fervor should be more interactable, like bad events for warlords where Yellow Turban fervor is high.
6) Rising factions such as liu bei and cao cao could use a certain "immunity" when the mandate war starts (for example, spawn your current army near the commandery and defeat a large-ish yellow turban army to win the commandery). especially liu bei get's whack-a-moled by the Yellow Turban factions.

Good points:
1) Overhaul of the Yellow Turbans is nice, with different units and the fervor looks good.
2) New events are really nice, especially Lu Bu setting up a faction for himself i personaly find wonderful. But would be nice if he just receives/steals a commandery from the person who hired him, makes him a high risk, high reward character.
3) imperial court system is really interesting, don't know if this will also be implemented when you declare yourself emperor. But would be nice and gives a fun dynamic when you think you just were about to win a game and find out that good old mister sima yi and other lovely characters subvert your court.
4) New employables make battles a lot different and more strategic.

Final score: 6.5/10. Will edit review once the patches come out.

After over a 1000 hours of gameplay, i think it's finally time for a little review.

This game is amazing. I get why people are scared off because the amount of DLC, but most of them are just cosmetic and non essential. You only need like 4 to 5 of them and they add a huge amount of content to an already decent game.

You can be anyone: from a pious, god fearing, heretic and infidel destroyer. To a lunatic who puts his horse forward as his chancellor, has a lovely dinner with his prisoners (where only you will walk out with a few pounds more) and sleeps with his sister.

Even after a 1000 hours of gameplay, i still find enough challenges to keep me entertained and i don't see the end of it yet. AND THAT IS JUST THE BASE GAME!
Modding community is active and interesting that can "enhance" your games. Check the paradox forums if you want to get some really nice total conversion mods.

Buy this game when it is on sale or when they fix it.

So, if you have ever played another total war game, then you will know that every faction plays differently and that there will be a constant challenge early - late game. Not in this one, the first 5-6 hours are fun, but then it just goes downhill. Battles become a drag because they are all the same + the AI turns these battles into a joke.

Campaign map AI is bad and is very player focused, making it so that another AI can just eat them from the back while you have to run around trying to catch their armies assaulting your smaller settelments. It also suffers from the snowball effect, turning late game into a grind where you just send 10-15 armies against the enemies 2-3.

Techtree is bland and there is no real reason to research civic tech because it does almost nothing. In the end, you will see some factions still running around with basic infantry while you have it upgraded twice already. The worst part is that all factions have the same kind of techtree with almost the same kind of upgrades. You would think that Alfred would AT LEAST have a specific kind of civic tech, but your hopes will be shattered.

All this makes the factions kinda the same gameplaywise and thus not that interesting after one playthrough.

Overall, this is just a really thinned out total war game that doesn't provide anything new to the table. Even worse, it lost more then anything else. good for new players to total war. Not reccomended for veterans.