Total War Pharaoh is recovering to become one of the series’ best

You can’t accuse Total War: Pharaoh studio Creative Assembly of failing to work hard to improve the game. After a rocky launch last year saw the latest in the series stumble out of the gate, the team responsible for it has continued to give the game plenty of attention, issuing huge updates that expand and drastically overhaul nearly every feature. This effort doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Today, Pharaoh received yet another big update geared toward further building upon the successful launch of its Dynasties DLC, the result of which hopes to move the game ever nearer to the beloved status of past series entries like Total War: Rome 2, Total War: Shogun 2, and Total War: Warhammer 3.

The latest update to Total War: Pharaoh, Patch 2.02, focuses largely on tweaking the difficulty of the strategy game. Most important among the changes it introduces is new balancing for Lethality, which now properly affects generals and alters ranged units, and more balancing work done to the campaign’s AI behavior, with, per the patch notes, “a focus on easy and normal difficulties.”

On the technical side, the new patch fixes a number of potential crashes and minor bugs and has optimized the game so ending a turn is now roughly 10% faster than it was before. Even more importantly, though, is a note that “entities no longer continue to fight after being beheaded,” a change that should cut down on players later experiencing a specific kind of nightmare.

Patch 2.02 is out now. If you want to dig into the fine details of the update, there’s a lot more information available in the patch notes right here.

Otherwise, you can find more options like Total War: Pharaoh in our picks for the top grand strategy games and RTS games.

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