Good evening you are listening to Thru Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney, here once again with freelance writer and NoCB's own, T.J. Hafer.

Hello.

And we welcome back once again, official anime interpreter for the state of Georgia, Brian Smalley, aka Chef Lubu.

How we doing?

And finally, we welcome Gamespeats television tutor at the Prince Beyond, Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

So this week, we are going back to the dying days of the Han Dynasty with Total War Three Kingdom's Mandate of Heaven,

which moves the start date for the Total War campaign back to, well, the time before

everything goes completely to shit and just when we're pretty much right there on the cusp.

Brian, I wanted to start with you since you were on one of my favorite episodes of The

He was Ahead from the last couple of years, which was discussing romance of the

Three Kingdoms as a setting. And what was appealing about it, what is sort of resonant about

that history. It was a great show. People should go back and listen to it. I am curious,

what relationship you ended up forming with Creative Assemblies take on the setting?

Yeah, honestly, I love it. I think that they, they knocked it out of the park. And I've loved

playing the game and seeing the different factions and seeing how they work. I, you know,

I'll be the first to admit that some of the factions in their idiosyncrasies is not my favorite. But with the

mandate of heaven, they're given a lot of face time to factions that, you know, Coe Tecmo has

traditionally played as a comedy bit. And they really did a great job of given these early

factions and these early leaders, just really, really cool setups.

And I've really enjoyed being able to play the yellow turbines as my faction, as the protagonists, which I think that holds water when you see just if you're familiar with it, how everything was in such turmoil

come around 194, 198.

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