Total War: Pharaoh is adding horses and camels due to popular demand

Player feedback trumps historical accuracy

Creative Assembly / Sega

In a Q&A session on the Total War Discord server, Creative Assembly Sofia’s Todor Nikolov said that Total War: Pharaoh’s addition of cavalry units to the Bronze Age game in the upcoming map expansion update is entirely due to fans asking for more unit variety.

One user asked whether the team had used any historical evidence to justify the addition of cavalry units or if it came down to creative liberty. “I will be completely frank here,” Nikolov answered. “There is no evidence that we should have horsemen in the game apart from player feedback on unit diversity feeling lacking.”

He concluded: “This is the most important reason behind the inclusion of horse and camel riders.” It sounds like the team itself wasn't thrilled with the decision, but had to comply to popular demand due to Pharaoh's difficult player count situation.

Cavalry is generally held to have arrived on battlefields in this area about 200 to 400 years after the era in which Pharaoh takes place, so this is indeed quite a jump in time – and while it’s easy to call those players who demanded more unit variety ignorant or whatever else, the truth is that older historical Total War entries have never been bastions of historical accuracy either.

The original Rome: Total War alone delivers many examples for this, as do Medieval 2 or Shogun 2, but we needn’t go that far back – let’s take Pharaoh’s chariots, for example. 

Historically, chariots in this era were used for one of two purposes, namely as mobile missile platforms or as transports for elite warriors. While Pharaoh does feature chariots that function this way, it also has melee chariots that are very anachronistic. Back then, they would not have charged infantry lines to break them apart. This only happened later with the introduction of blades protruding from the wheels.

So, yes: There’s plenty of historical inaccuracies in the game, and indeed the entire series, already – so that has little to do with an influx of players who came to the franchise with the Warhammer games and aren’t used to the style of the historical games.

CA Sofia also covered the inclusion of cavalry as cleverly as possible, giving it to the faction that would eventually be the first to use it on a large scale in warfare centuries later, so it’s not that big of a deal.

Just don’t base your school presentations on what you see in the game and you’ll be fine.