Total War: Pharaoh Review (Ahn Revanche)
Total War: Pharaoh really starts to show the age of some of the traditional TW design, and how poorly it meshes with some of the newer game systems.
They removed the traditional one-resource-fits-all gold system of past entries in favor of the multi-resource system from Troy. Players now need to manage settlements that produce gold, bronze, stone, wood, and food, which makes minor settlements feel more impactful. However, this also introduced two major issues in conjunction with the ridiculously large campaign map.
First, all resources are stored infinitely in the void--there are no stockpiles in large settlements, for example. In the late game, this becomes a problem when every faction has stockpiled so many resources that their settlements become superfluous. It doesn't matter if you've captured all of a faction's major and/or food producing settlements, they'll continue to sustain their multiple 20-stack armies off their near bottomless reserves. Captured all a faction's bronze producing settlements? They'll still continue to throw hordes of bronze-equipped armies at you for the same reason.
The second issue with this resource system is the lack of supply lines. I'm not advocating for the complexity you'd see in a Paradox game, but there's an issue with factions capturing huge swathes of non-contiguous territory, sometimes on the other side of the map from their capitols. This becomes a problem when they can begin raising huge armies from territories that are entirely cut off from the rest of their territories, or prevent you from securing provinces by taking a single random territory that they could realistically never support. At a certain point, the lack of supply lines becomes immersion breaking and frustrating.
I mentioned earlier that the map is huge, and it starts to feel more bloated than anything else. Destroying factions and taking territory starts to become a chore at a certain point. A workforce system was implemented to prevent factions from instantly upgrading their settlements, but the consequence is that the already-management heavy late game becomes even more management heavy. It's not unusual for you to start your turn with over 20 notifications of possible settlement construction and upgrades that must be managed manually. When you own 60+ territories and still must continue to constantly develop all of them to manage invasions from every direction, it just becomes tedious.
Compounding this, the map has a system of roads that prevent desert attrition. Marching your troops off these roads will open you up to severe attrition penalties for your armies unless you have the proper outposts. However, not all adjacent provinces are connected by roads, and transporting your armies around one side of the map to another can take quite a while. However, this is where the AI starts to simply become a nuisance. AI generals and factions have no sense of self-preservation, and they will gladly take massive attrition penalties and doom their armies to destroy your outposts. This barely provides them any positive benefit and significantly reduces their military power, but it's incredibly annoying to deal with as a player. This is not an exaggeration--the AI will literally raise single-unit armies to destroy your outposts, even though it cripples their own economies.
TW:Pharaoh introduces new court and Pharaoh power systems, which are intended to add depth and strategy to the game. However, the court system can descend into just another box to check to end your turn very quickly. Instead of picking a course of action once per court rotation, you have to manually select an action every single turn, and you rapidly reach a point where you stop getting meaningful benefit from them. Court positions can give you bonuses to recruitment and development but also, annoyingly, make you a constant target of AI factions trying to reduce your legitimacy. At some point, one of the dozens of AI schemes with a 19% chance of success will succeed if you allow it to go through, and it's going to be frustrating.
Pharaoh powers give you unique upgrades if you become Pharaoh/High King, but some of them are literally broken. I took a power that would allow me to annex a faction that has below a certain amount of territories, but it simply didn't function. The button was always greyed out, and hovering over it would just pop-up a blank white box.
All-in-all, Total War: Pharaoh does what Total War games have done successfully in the past, but lack of developments in AI decision-making, resource management, late-game settlement automation, etc. really hamper the experience.