Firstly, I want to highlight that I like both Creative Assembly and I have enjoyed playing Total War Battles: Kingdom. The purpose of this post is not to bash mindlessly but to professionally explain the mistakes from the point of view of both an professional/analyst and a gamer and help further by proposing solutions to improve the game(s).

So how did Creative Assembly go wrong?

Total War Battles: Kingdom has gotten some very negative reviews by players and even majorly angered some who went on to rant negatively about the game which not only damaged the performance of TWBK but I firmly believe also damaged the brand image of Creative Assembly.

Here is a chart showing Steam player reviews where it is very clear/visible to see the amount of the angry/negative reviews by players. Of course there are also many positive reviews but if we compare this product to other games by Creative Assembly it is a clear contrast where other “proper” Total War games have significantly positive reviews.

Let’s get started

I have prepared series of screenshots illustrating Creative Assembly’s mistakes in cooldowns / game design, so let’s jump to them 1 by 1 and I will also add further explanations along the road.

Waiting for Workers

I will start with Houses / Workers, because this is one of the first things the player / gamer gets to see, which made a lot of players very angry.

Below you see a screenshot from the “House” (there are 3 types of houses, this is the “middle” one). The player is immediately confronted with a pretty big cooldown of multiple hours (5+ hours on this screenshot) and, pretty much, right from the beginning of the game.

You see, the player will build something like a Blacksmith to generate income, but in order for the Blacksmith to work it needs workers, so the player builds one of the “House” types to get those workers as expected by the game and “BANG!” s/he is in for the shock of waiting 5+ hours just to get started playing!

In this day and age where people have no patience and many games have few minute cooldowns + free speedups under 5 minutes.

So now you can’t use the Blacksmith you just built and you can do pretty much nothing else with your city until you start getting those workers. And just you wait for what happens when you actually do get them 🙂

Trying to get some Food

Next, you want some barrels of food, so you build a Farm to grow wheat. What happens then:

• The player has to wait for the farm to sow seeds (new waiting time/cooldown per each hex around the farm)
• Then the big shock: the player has to wait up to 11 hours for the wheat to grow.
• The screenshot below showing 10.5 hours on the Wheat Field (Autumn season)

Note (side point on Creative Assembly’s monetization failure): an additional note, there is no way to speedup or eliminate this cooldown, neither in-game nor with real money (Gold). This is one of many shortcomings in monetization which I will not go in-depth on in this article as it would need it’s own dedicated report/analysis explaining the multitudes of monetization and player retention mistakes.

Patience for Wood

Once you chop down the trees you will need to plant new trees (done by the Woodcutter although the game really fails to explain this and furthermore never talks about the planting range),

The player is then confronted with pretty massive cooldowns for the trees to grow. The screenshot below showing 2 examples of 14+ hours and 2 days.

And bear in mind that trees will generate a few dozen units of wood while the player needs thousands for their first building upgrades.

Not-so-welcome to Crafting cooldowns and costs

When crafting is available to the player, s/he may want to bang the head on the wall or tear out hair in frustration. You have multiple insane game design elements in this alone:

• Getting the crafting elements via Sheep or Cattle –> massive cooldowns just to get 1 or few pieces; here screenshots showing 18+ hours grazing / breeding and 9+ hours growing wool
• And you will need a large amount just to get the crafting started… (by the way, none of this is explained in the game!)
• When you do finally manage to start the craft you are shocked by the game telling you that not only you need to wait 12-24 hours to craft your item, but you have to do that in 5+ stages, i.e. repeat 12-24 hours cooldown/waiting 5+ times!

Here you see the crafting window:

• Each Craft attempt takes 12 hours and generates 1 bar or half if failed or rare 1+ if lucky/critical.

Solutions / Recommendations for Creative Assembly

Now that I have outlined the problem with cooldowns clearly let’s talk about how Creative Assembly could have done this better or how they could correct it.

Firstly, there are 2 paths to choose from:

• The difficult fix: which would involve a re-design / re-think of game systems allowing quicker interactions and/or adjusting difficulty.
• The quicker & dirty fix: which maintains the current difficulty level while addressing the problems which is the one I recommend to do either as the complete fix or as Step 1 before the above path can be created/discussed/agreed, which can take a longer time.

Let’s take houses / workers / Blacksmith for example:

I’ll simplify: let’s assume Creative Assembly, in TWBK, wants to give 1 worker per 5 hours (the Blacksmith / Tavern requiring 5 workers before they start working). There are 2 fixes that can easily be implemented here:

1. The problem created by this condition is that you cannot have less than 1 worker as you cannot cut a person in half. So a smarter / better way is to increase the quantities and say that the Blacksmith has space for up to 50 workers (notice here I am changing 2 things: both the amount of workers and the condition which we will use in the 2nd fix below). Now that we changed 5 workers to 50 we can start giving the player 50 / 5 = 10 workers per hour or 1 worker per 6 minutes! Now that’s a lot more acceptable than shocking players with a 5 hour cooldown!
2. Does a bar or restaurant stop working completely if 1 out of 5 of their workers has to leave or gets sick? No, of course not. There is absolutely no reason at all to force the player to fill up all of the workers. Instead, what is smarter / better is to adjust production or income based on the workers assigned by the player. So instead of generating 10 silver by 5 workers we take the production level as a maximum and allow the player to earn less than the maximum depending on the assigned workers. We allow the player to immediately assign the 1 worker s/he received per 6 minutes remembering that the maximum is 50 workers. This means we can give the player a reward already for doing this! This will be 1 / 50 x [maximum reward amount] instead of having to wait many hours for the maximum. Therefore the silver values should also be adjusted by multiplying all values by 10 or 100 for example. So 100 silver or 1000 silver instead of 10. This allows us to divide by 50 and get 2 or 20 silver which we can reward to the player!

This solution would be very easy to implement for Creative Assembly and would change the visible waiting times from many hours to minutes removing any such negative surprises / shocks as players would not have any issue accepting waiting times of 5-6 minutes versus 5-6 hours. Moreover this preserves the current difficulty level.

Similar logic can be applied onto other elements in Total War Battles: Kingdom.

Wheat collection: allow a faster collection of smaller amounts while maintaining the maximum ceiling so if the player is not active s/he can collect the full reward when returned, while the active players can be busy collecting their food barrels.

Herds & Crafting: these need more attention, but the same solution/logic can be applied:

• There is absolutely no reason to force the player to wait 10-20 hours for a full herd size. The maximum herd size can be kept the same, e.g. 12 for sheep, but it is absolutely better to allow the player to collect production per animal, not being forced to wait for all 12. Keeping the same difficulty, this would mean 1/12th of the reward, but would keep active players engaged and keep giving out rewards to players at an acceptable cooldown.
• Similarly the 5 stages of 12 hour crafting must go (far away into the depths where no creature can reach). Crafting can be made so much more interesting in TWBK than it currently is. I could devote an entire report just to fix the crafting in the game, but at the very minimum, the cooldown issue can be fixed via 2 avenues:
  1. Open +1 equipment: There is no reason to have +2, +4, +6 only other than it being pleasant for the people who designed it. Players should be able to craft the most basic items cheaply and later be allows to further improve them or to craft new items trying to get a better bonus.
  2. Stages must go: There should be either a continuous time-based crafting process (only interrupted by lack of workers) or a time-independent system based on a number of hammer strikes or craft attempts. I strongly recommend the latter with no or minimal cooldown periods as it allows players to get basic items within acceptable time as long as they have sufficient resources to craft the item. Higher level items can require a tougher approach but by this time the players would not have left the game in anger.

Conclusions / Final words

• I highlight again that in this analysis blog post I have focused only on the mistakes done by Creative Assembly related to cooldowns. There are A LOT more things which can be fixed/improved in TWBK, both in game design / game systems / balance, as well as player retention and monetization. Each of which have a lot of issues / mistakes in this game.
• There is also a lot of good work done by Creative Assembly in TWBK, but I would limit that to the art/graphics, music/sounds, pleasant atmosphere rather than game design excellence.
• The multi-hour / multi-day cooldowns have got to go away!
• Everything is fixable in TWBK, because I find the game to be very aesthetically pleasant. I can feel a lot of love and sweat has gone into making this a very beautiful game (that part Creative Assembly has done well) and I would hate that being lost due to poor game design / poor game systems. But still a decision must be made since the game was launched with so many errors and already angered players and generated a lot of negative publicity. This decision is: (1) either to try to fix the game, or, (2) release a new game with a new name, copy/pasting all the good things and fixing all the bad things.
  • If I was the business owner, I would do both, choosing multitudes of easy fixes for TWBK while giving a new fantasy or sci-fi world/atmosphere to the new game while keeping the spine to minimize costs. Otherwise, if I was forced by Creative Assembly to choose one (not having access to TWBK player statistics), I would make a new game as one has to consider that it will cost a lot of money to undo the already-generated negative publicity/content on TWBK.

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