What little history there is behind Nanman chieftain Meng Huo suggests he had a rough go of it.
He appears in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, in which he's notable for being captured and released by Zhuge Liang seven times during the Nanman's rebellion against the Han before finally admitting defeat. Total War: Three Kingdoms' new The Furious Wild expansion tells this story, and while it expands Three Kingdoms' already impressive map, it begins as a much more constrained experience.
The Furious Wild starts you off in the southwestern jungles of Three Kingdoms' feudal China, taking the role of one of four tribal leaders. The Nanman people are affiliated only by shared culture, and the tribes live in a state of uneasy peace as the events of Three Kingdoms are getting underway. They can either unite and survive, or be crushed by the sweep of the Han empire as it consolidates its power and inevitably pushes at old borders.
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Total War: Three Kingdoms will see its first true expansion in The Furious Wild, which launches September 3. It adds the Nanman tribes, which include four playable factions and characters, and its own mini-campaign. But all Total War: Three Kingdoms players will be seeing a major free update to the game when The Furious Wild arrives, and it includes a major map rework, a new character, a new type of battlefield, and more.
The biggest change coming with the 1.6.0 patch for Total War: Three Kingdoms is the campaign map rework. Creative Assembly has done a pass on the entire map, adding new commanderies, correcting and adding names, and slotting in new commanderies for the new Nanman region in the southwest. The developer has also added strategic chokepoints, which accommodate the new kind of tactical battle, the gate pass battle.
Gate pass battles take place, as you might expect, at gate passes, which are a new type of settlement placed in strategic chokepoints. The maps are essentially fortified towns with two avenues of approach arranged opposite to each other. Attacking armies will deploy on whichever side of the settlement they approach from and fight their way through.
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Total War: Three Kingdoms - The Furious Wild review
Total War: Three Kingdoms - Furious Wild is "totally different"
Total War: Three Kingdoms' next expansion adds "fearsome" Nanman factions, animal units, more
