Let me just say this: I am an absolute sucker for a big idea. A grand philosophy, or some big unifying theory of everything, that seeps under the skin and wraps around the bones of a game to tie it all together. Everything refers back to something else and informs it, all the dangling threads of design brought tidily back in line. Bliss. I love it. Very neat, very satisfying, very, very difficult to pull off.
Total War: Three Kingdoms is absolutely swimming in big ideas - plural - to its detriment and its strength, which is probably inevitable given the deeply, intrinsically philosophical era in which it's set. Three Kingdoms China starts with the fall of the Han Dynasty, around the late 100s to early 200s CE, and predictably it's a time of fractured alliances and political upheaval - so far so Total War. But it's also a time of mystery, and mythology, and romance, all intertwined with other capital-letter ideas like Confucianism and Wu Xing and Guanxi to make a big, slightly headache-inducing but vastly ambitious soup of design.
The one at the heart of it, though, is that trade-off, between a commitment to accuracy and the romanticised telling of the story that people are more likely to know. Creative Assembly has beaten the drum of Records-versus-Romance half to death by now but, if you weren't already aware, they're essentially two accounts of the period that can be reduced down to two books, Records of the Three Kingdoms and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the developer has - correctly - relied heavily on both.