“It adds a much more cyclical nature to the game if you’ve got periods of war and periods of peace. War Fervour first appeared in Total War: Attila’s Age of Charlemagne expansion but has been refined for Thrones of Britannia. “It’s all about trying to add more breaks and different flows to the game, more chance to think,” says Lusted. If you wage a war in a high War Fervour state your units enjoy bonuses to their stats. At higher difficulty levels your people will move more quickly along this axis, which forces you to read the room and indulge in efficient wars that sate your citizens’ bloodlust without wearing them out.
Sit still too long and your people start itching for a fight. If you fight relentlessly for years, morale will slip away. Over the course of a campaign your citizens slide up and down a ‘War Fervour’ axis. Many of Thrones’ systems seem intended to force you to sit still every now and then to tend to your people.
If you’re sure a noble is about to rebel, or you’re just sick of them, you can always pay a lump sum to have them assassinated. Alternatively, you can add priests to their retinue to keep them in check. You can appease disloyal governors and generals by gifting them one your limited number of estates – though choose carefully, if you later forcibly remove the estate, expect a tantrum. I enjoy the way Thrones of Britannia models these violent soap operas because they provide a deeper structure to the campaign than the traditional Total War sequence of ‘meet faction, build a few armies, crush faction, repeat’. For a number of turns he will be loyal, and then afterwards he will not be loyal, and he will remember that you tortured him.” Choosing to torture the noble would have given him the ‘Enforced Loyalty’ trait. I tell Jack that I almost tortured one of my nobles and he laughs. I remember it was by Kieron Gillen and it had the words, ‘I am the king of Spain!’ at the start, and I thought, ‘I’m going to buy that!’”
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I got PC Gamer every month and read a few articles about the first Medieval and thought, ‘Ooh that sounds quite interesting,’ and then the copy with the review came out. Maybe his son and heir will go on to do better, though with the name Cnut, I have my doubts.ĭuring our chat I learn that the publication you hold in your hands right now is partly responsible for Lusted’s love of Total War, his subsequent modding efforts, and a career at Creative Assembly that spans Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2 and Rome II. As a result the reign of king Guthfrid of the Northymbre Vikings is short and violent, which is fitting considering the tensions surrounding that period. In the following years the nobles came to me for bribes several times after that, and each time I caved my reputation collapsed further. When one of the nobles started getting uppity, I should perhaps have taken the option to torture him rather than pay him off. My decision to mint my own currency and put an imprint of my head on all the coins didn’t go down well with my Christian English subjects, who would rather see the Lord’s cross there. My kingly ego would rather overlook the fact that I failed to build any farms and presided over chronic food shortages. I crushed rebels and repelled aggression from the north for them, and now they betray me? All I wanted was to turn the northeast of England into a Viking paradise. My lying bastard nobles have spent years tearing me down with a prolonged campaign of extortion, and now they rebel in unison, turning my provinces to their cause and sending armies to claim my head.