I'm 5 hours in to my campaign so far, and I'm already kind of bored.
The characters and character management stuff seems to be the heart of the game; which I guess is part of the historic fantasy of the Three Kingdoms period or whatever. My problem is that it starts to feel like I'm not so much a grand general sweeping across ancient China, caught up in the romance and grandeur of this legendary story.
Instead, I'm playing TOTAL WAR: CHINESE FANTASY PROJECT MANAGER. I can't put Lu Kong in an army with Wong Fu, because they don't like each other. Why? Who knows. Maybe Wong Fu took too many of Lu Kong's story points during the last sprint release or some shit. I'm already getting tired of watching to see who is dissatisfied with random events and having to coddle them with gifts and promotions, because I don't want more hassles down the line that screw up my grand plans. It really does feel like I'm back at work, only this game has (slightly) more Chinese to complain to me about things.
Speaking about complaining, the battles are dull and easy. Your color-coded generals can only recruit 6 "retinue" units from a tiny pool of possible units, and you only get 3 generals plus their retinue in each army; your blue generals are for ranged units, green is for spearmen, etc. So far, most of the units I've recruited are totally forgettable and there don't really seem to be interesting upgrades or particularly fun/innovative strategies. I've been cruising to victory by just building out a simple front line of cheap infantry, some decent crossbow men and a catapult behind them, and a few flanking cavalry with my generals. Mostly the AI just walks forward and gets torn apart by my ranged units, while my cavalry sweeps around to hit any of their ranged units. This is on Hard/Hard, by the way.
Coming from the superb TOTAL WAR: Warhammer games, this is a major disappointment. While the sieges in TW:W could be a little clunky, the battles (and pretty much everything else) were amazing. The TW:W games have so many different approaches, such diversity in army and character builds, and a cleaner, more refined building/province system. TOTAL WAR: Three Kingdoms doesn't. Now that I think about it, feels like it was heavily designed for the Chinese/Asian market - the tactical battles and grand strategy are downplayed, while the Pokemon-esque character management nonsense is given center stage.