A Total War Saga: TROY

I've colour-coded enough Total War spreadsheets to know when a spin-off is pulling its punches and when it's doing something genuinely interesting with the formula. Troy lands somewhere uncomfortable between those two camps, and the 72% Steam rating reflects that honestly. What Creative Assembly Sofia built here is dense, layered, and occasionally brilliant, dragged down by a handful of systemic rough edges that were never quite sanded flat. The headline mechanical addition is a five-resource economy built around food, wood, stone, bronze, and gold, each tied to specific settlement types on the campaign map. Minor settlements become genuinely contested territory because they produce the raw materials your armies actually eat through. Bartering those surpluses through diplomacy is not optional window dressing; it is the loop that keeps your treasury solvent. That is a meaningful evolution over prior entries. The Divine Will system, where you manage favour across the Greek pantheon to unlock boons and avoid divine penalties, adds another layer of campaign-map decision-making that rewards players who think two or three turns ahead rather than just queuing armies. The eight playable factions split between Trojans and Danaans, and each hero (Achilles, Hector, Paris, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Sarpedon, and Ajax) comes with a unique narrative quest chain, distinct skill tree, and faction-specific units. Replayability is real. Achilles and Agamemnon play nothing like Sarpedon, whose campaign leans hard into trade and diplomacy over raw conquest. Two victory conditions, Homeric and Total War, let you choose between a narrative-driven playthrough or the familiar domination grind. The campaign map itself is gorgeous, and the UI drips with terracotta and bronze aesthetics that feel genuinely period-appropriate rather than slapped-on theming. Where Troy loses the thread is in late-game AI behaviour and the economy's difficulty scaling. Players consistently report the AI ignoring resource constraints that hobble the human player, flooding the Aegean with raiding armies while your own food budget tops out at three or four stacks. The strategic AI on the campaign map has trouble coordinating the same multi-resource logic it expects you to master. Battle AI is more respectable, with flanking attempts and reasonable unit positioning, but it remains patchy at higher difficulties. The legendary monster units (centaurs, harpies, and the like) are reskinned archetypes rather than game-changers in the field, which is either grounded or disappointing depending on how literally you wanted Homer translated. Steam Workshop support is present and mod support has meaningfully improved the experience for players willing to spend an hour in the workshop before their first campaign. For a returning Total War veteran, Troy is worth approaching as a focused, flavourful spin-off rather than a replacement for the mainline series. Newcomers to the franchise will find the Bronze Age setting more accessible thematically than, say, Warhammer's sprawling faction list, and the Saga scope means the campaign map is compact enough that early turns do not feel like homework. That is not a back-handed compliment. A tighter map with eight distinct heroes and two victory modes is a legitimate on-ramp. Patch it up with a couple of workshop mods for the economy and AI, and you have something that comfortably clears 60 hours without repeating itself.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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