As the great rise, the Greatest will fall.
"A storm approaches, yet my warnings fall on deaf ears. Egypt is not ready. Must I face this threat alone? While those ignorant old men set others against me? I will not back down. Let them bicker among themselves. The Falcon's eyes are upon the horizon."
— Ramasses
Total War: Pharaoh is a 2023 video game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. The fourteenth mainline entry in the Total War series and is set in Ancient Egypt, specifically the end of the New Kingdom and the wider Bronze Age Collapse.
Egypt's Pharaoh Merneptah is now old and dying, and the people of the Nile clamor for a new leader to rule over them. Talented leaders like Seti, Amenmesse, Tausret, and Ramesses are now vying for the favor of Ra and destiny. However, new threats emerge; from Asia Minor, the Hittites, though fragmented between Šuppiluliuma II and Kurunta are once again challenging Egypt's influence over Canaan. However, the warlike Irsu and the ambitious Bay would not allow their city-states to become pawns on the chess table, seeking to make their own mark on Canaan and beyond.
And if it was not enough, the Sea Peoples from the west are coming to exact turmoil in an already burning land...
The game was released on October 11, 2023 on Windows. After a mediocre sales performance and poor reaction from fans, combined with a similar reaction to the release of the Shadows of Change DLC for Total War: Warhammer III, Creative Assembly took the unprecedented step of completely revamping any further development on Total War: Pharaoh, reducing the price and refunding the difference back to customers, including those who bought the ''Deluxe'' and ''Dynasty'' editions. Instead, the intended first DLC High Tide, in which the Sea Peoples become playable, became a free update, and all other upcoming DLC development has shifted to improving the base game with further updates and patches.
Total War: Pharaoh contains examples of the following:
- Adaptational Villainy: Iolaos, Heracles' charioteer and possible lover, is depicted in the High Tide update as a brutal raider and zealot who believes he is the brother of a god and seeks to burn down the world in his name.
- Age Lift: Historically, Ramesses III would have been only about four years old when Merneptah died, and his Twentieth Dynasty (Ramesses II, Merneptah and his children belonging to the Nineteenth) would be established by his father Setnakhte (who is present but unplayable) following the civil war between Seti and Amenmesse, when Ramesses would have been 28 and would succeed him on the throne of Egypt three years later at the age of 31.
- Artistic License – History: The devs did a fairly good job of researching the history of the Late Bronze Age but some things do escape.
- Amenmesse is referred as heir presumptive to the Egyptian throne and as the elder brother to both Seti and Tausret. while the exact relation is not known (Egyptians weren't big on family trees), we know that Seti was older and his father's chosen heir from the beginning.
- Ramesses III is at least a decade older than he actually was.
- The Khepresh follows its conventional depiction as the Pharaoh's war crown, but recent scholarship suggests it was actually a symbol of the Pharaoh's power as a god on earth.
- The Kingdom of Marion on Cyprus should have been ruled by Acamas, if we follow tradition, which is the only record we have about the earliest rulers of the island.
- Artistic License – Religion: Moloch is depicted as a Canaanite god. Since the 1930s, scholarly opinion has that the Punic word mlk referred to a type of sacrifice, not to an independent deity in his own right.
- Battle Couple: Seti, Merneptah's Crown Prince and his wife, Tausret, begin the game as allies and there is even an achievement for two players cooperating together to win the game while playing as them.
- Brains and Brawn: The wife-husband pair Tausret and Seti are portrayed like this. Tausret is a strategic genius, and her mechanics are particularly focused on using political and economic maneuvering to turn her enemies' schemes against themselves and make her faction into Egypt's dominant economic power. Seti is impatient, ferocious, and aggressive, and has little interest in diplomacy when he can simply crush his foes on the battlefield.
- Brother–Sister Incest: This being Ancient Egypt, Seti and Tausret are half-sibling spouses in the traditions of Pharaonic Egypt.
- Cain and Abel: Seti and his half-brother Amenmesse are bound to clash head to head over the throne of Egypt once their father Merneptah dies, Amenmesse also has this dynamic with Tausret too, possibly even more so, since they might have been full siblings.
- Cool Crown: The Egyptians have five to choose from when they stake their claims as Pharaoh, from the standard Nemes headdress to the warrior king's Khepresh and the grand Pschent double crown alongside its constituent red Deshret and white Hedjet.
- Crown of Horns: Suppiluliuma II wears the crown of the Hittite kings, a tall bronze cone adorned with three pairs of bull's horns. His rival Kurunta instead wears a hat adorned with bronze antlers.
- Demoted to Extra: Setnakhte, Ramesses III's father and the founder of the 20th dynasty of Egypt, is in the game but isn't playable and doesn't have a unique model.
- End of an Era: Like Total War: Attila before it, Pharaoh takes place during the Bronze Age Collapse in the Ancient Near East and challenges the player to endure it, or accelerate it if one is playing Irsu.
- Hordes from the East: From the Northwest actually, the various Sea Peoples, who come and go in waves like the hordes in Atilla will occasionally raid the coasts of Egypt and the Ancient Near East visiting death and destruction on the unprepared states of the region.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: Kurunta and Seti are portrayed as Card Carrying Villains despite the historical record saying little about them other than that they existed. Downplayed with Irsu; the Harris Papyrus describes him as a violent raider who reduced Egypt to Apocalypse Anarchy, but there's no indication he hated peace and civilization in principle the way his in-game incarnation does.
- Large Ham: Merneptah, the GREAT PHARAOH! The opening cinematic pretty much consists of him Chewing the Scenery, starting with praising his own rule, and every word out of his mouth comes with the most dramatic! Possible! Intonation.
- Mundane Made Awesome: Merneptah makes eating a grape — and then choking on it — an epic event.
- Rape, Pillage, and Burn: The Canaanite leader Irsu's play style encourages you to raze, sack, and pillage as many settlements as you can, rather than build up a kingdom of your own. The Sea Peoples can also take this route, and Iolaus specializes in it.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Seti is the Red. A brutish thug with no interest in diplomacy, his default solution to problems is to crush them with his army, and his faction buffs encourage an aggressive, conquering playstyle. His wife Tausret, the Blue, is a strategist and courtier, with excellent ranged units for carefully-cultivated combined arms forces, and a special court ability allowing her to take plots against her and turn them against their originators.
- The Smurfette Principle: Tausret is the only playable female faction leader.
- Succession Crisis: Two flavours for both the Egyptians who have four contenders vying for the double crown of Egypt and the Hittites who are in the midst of a civil war of their own when the game begins.
- Shout-Out: The flavorText for the "Obelisk" building states that "A rather plump man from a faraway land taught [them] how to make these.", referring to Obélix from the comics.
- The Strategist: Tausret is portrayed as a strategic genius, and both her quotes and things others say to her emphasize this. Mechanically, this is represented by economic strength and by a superior ability to manipulate the court and turn intrigues against her back on their originators.
- Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Merneptah's scribe and fan-bearer are briefly shown rolling their eyes when Merneptah lists off Ramesses II's full litany of titles.
- Young Conqueror: Ramesses, the future Ramesses III, is portrayed as one, his model still has his sidelock of youth when the game begins, while also evoking the imagery of his predecessor and possible ancestor Ramesses the Great.
- You Require More Vespene Gas: Pharaoh has the same resources first introduced in the contemporaneous A Total War Saga: TROY (Food, Gold, Wood, Stone and Bronze) which the player is unlikely to be fully self-sufficient in producing without negotiating barter agreements with neighbours and allies.
