A Total War Saga: TROY - Ajax & Diomedes (DLC)

Ajax and Diomedes is a faction DLC for A Total War Saga: TROY, adding two Greek heroes from The Iliad as fully playable campaign lords. If you already own TROY and want to squeeze more hours out of its bronze-age grand strategy, the question is simple: do these two factions offer enough mechanical differentiation to justify another campaign? The short answer is: partially, and that caveat matters. Ajax, the hulking shield-bearer of Salamis, leans into a defensive, attrition-focused playstyle. His roster emphasizes heavy infantry and shieldwall formations, and his campaign mechanics reward holding territory rather than rapid expansion. Diomedes, by contrast, is an aggressor. His Argive faction pushes a raid-and-pillage economy, and his personal combat stats make him one of the more dangerous hero units on the battlefield. If you like micromanaging hero positioning in real-time battles, Diomedes gives you more reasons to stay zoomed in. The two factions do feel distinct enough in their early-to-mid campaign decision trees, which is the minimum bar any character DLC should clear. Where this package starts to wobble is the late game. TROY's base AI was already showing its cracks before this DLC landed, and neither Ajax nor Diomedes introduces any systemic fixes to the diplomatic or economic layers. By campaign turn 80 or so you will hit the same plateau that long-time Total War players recognize: the map consolidates, your stack of top-tier units steamrolls everything, and the strategic tension evaporates. The DLC adds heroes, not depth. Mod support for TROY is thinner than you'd get from mainline Total War titles, so there is less of a community safety net to extend the experience beyond what Creative Assembly shipped. For newcomers to TROY specifically, this is the wrong entry point. The base game's tutorial handles the mythology-meets-strategy hook reasonably well, walking you through resource types (food, wood, stone, bronze, gold all function as a multi-currency economy), the Favor system tied to Greek gods, and the hero unit mechanics. None of that onboarding carries over to this DLC, which drops you into a faction-specific start and assumes familiarity. Play at least one full base-game campaign first. Pick Achilles or Hector, finish it, then come back here if you want more. The 72% positive score on Steam tells the real story. It is not a broken or buggy release, but it is a content drop that the community felt was priced like a full expansion while delivering closer to a faction pack. If you are the kind of player who tracks hero ability cooldowns, optimizes resource trade routes, and genuinely enjoys min-maxing unit compositions for specific matchups, you will find enough here to occupy a second campaign run. Everyone else should wait for a significant discount before adding Ajax and Diomedes to the collection.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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