Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, a podcast that is often about strategy and tactics games, unless we go off on a tangent about something a little bit different. I'm Len. I'm your host for this week, and I am joined by our good friend from TapTap, Ian Boudreau.

Hey, everybody.

And I believe your first time on three moves ahead, we have freelance writer Josh Broadwell.

Hi, thanks again for having me.

Yeah, we met in the crucible of the Baldersgate 3 reviewer discord, as we were all grinding our way through that, like, 150-hour game with a four-day embargo or whatever it was.

Yeah, but today we're here to talk about Total War Pharaoh.

It is the latest.

They're not calling this one a saga game, although it's from Sophia who made a Total War saga, Troy, Creative Assembly's Sophia Studio.

They're calling it this one a full-fledged Total War game, which makes me wonder if they're just done with that branding altogether.

Because I would say it's a little bit smaller in scope, probably, than something like, you know, Rome 2.

Yeah.

Yeah. Ian, how have you been finding it?

I like it.

It is a little bit smaller in scope, but I think that there's, I mean, it still has a lot of the weird total wariness about it.

I mean, I think that we're just never going to lose.

But some of the new ideas I think are really compelling.

I really like the outpost system.

I really like on paper. I like the, uh, the new stant

system and the battles and the dynamic weather and, um, things like that. But in general, no, I, I,

I think it's a, it's a good total war. And, um, the, uh, yeah, just, it feels kind of crisp and

clean and, and back to basics, I guess.

We could probably talk about that a little bit more as we proceed.

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