I’m very amused that we have a stupid launcher so I can open every Total War Franchise Product, costing me 5 seconds and another click, but they added a ‘continue campaign’ button directly on the launcher saving me 5 seconds and a click from the main menu.
Progress?
my favourite fight so far was when one of my cities was being invaded on two fronts, and I was like “I’ll be amazed if even one of these gates holds,” and one did (guess who, Dian Wei)! and I got to race to reinforce the other side to pincer the enemies that were already pouring in
Are you playing Kong Rong
Liu Bei really is a stand up guy lol I managed to make him go into a proxy war against Yuan Shao for me because that’s who the story wanted me to kill. (As Cao Cao.) He was already in a war though. So I made him battle on two fronts and he went from rich and strong to down to two small, non-adjacent territories. I keep giving him gifts like food and funding his war efforts as a distraction to my enemy but I think poor Liu Bei is going down and I’m kind of amused by that?? He thinks we’re “best friends” too and I just see him as a pawn. That’s really wicked and I didn’t know I had so much deviousness in me.
Lü Bei is a real motherfucker. He just scares your troops into running away. When he’s got a full stack he must be unbeatable, I mean I can’t even! I caught him with his military pants down though after some save scumming and that was the only way to beat him. But that was in my previous campaign that stalled, now he would be on my side because I made peace with the Dong’s and the Han in this run
I won a fight for one of my cities by leading all enemies to one entrance, blocking them with basic foot soldiers and then leading my swift cavalry through the adjecent, unblocked gate and attacking them from the rear. The soldiers held out just long enough for the cavalry to do the job. This was something like 1500 enemies (they had reinforcements) against 500 of mine. It was tense, let me tell you. Such a simple pincer trick probably won’t work as well on higher difficulty but it was fun to see real life tactics work in the game, as a beginner.
I feel like I had a lot of beginners luck in my first campaign. I went broke several times, didn’t know to upgrade my cities, had too many armies early on and it all still worked out for a long time. The more I know the more paralysed I become and nothing’s as easy anymore. The more you think you know the worse you do…
honestly the reason I recommended the battles be played on hard is that stuff like that still works, it just works slightly less well so you feel like you really earn it
Okay so Liu Bei is some kind of wunderkind. He was down to two territories that didn’t even share a border, so he went south and took over some more land and survived. I was like haha that’s my “buddy”! Go get 'em tiger. Sure that he wouldn’t be any trouble at all and he’d probably fall by the wayside soon enough. I didn’t attack him though because of the diplomatic repercussions and because he was the only “best friend” I had in all of China. So yeah, I got sentimental. Then I reached the endgame where I became one of the three strongest factions. Those three lay claim to the title of emperor of China and have to duke it out to win the game. Strongest faction after me?
Liu fucking Bei.
He somehow built a huge vassal empire without me really noticing? Not knowing history I hope that this is canon
What probably isn’t canon is that I stopped going after Yuan Shao and instead made peace with him. I made peace with everyone. Midgame I just spent doing diplomacy, making my faction a stable a safe place and getting filthy rich through trade and improvements to my cities. I could buy everyone’s peace agreements, basically. I was like some sort of godfather that everyone came to when they wanted a clay dog or whatever little trinket.
It was all fine and dandy and I made a lot of friends and vassals along the way without even engaging in any fights. This was fine but it wasn’t giving me the prestige points I needed to declare myself emperor. I could gain some through certain buildings but progress was way too slow. I needed more land. But I couldn’t conquer any without making a million enemies and fighting on all fronts.
So I decided to go from trusted leader to being considered utterly treacherous, by annexing my biggest vassal. A life of diplomatic leadership and manipulation, capped off with big betrayal to further my own goals. I hope this is canon as well, for Cao Cao
There are actually a lot more stories to tell. Like how the relationship between me and my closest generals changed. How things dynamically change from small territory with the simple fear of being overrun by neighbors in a time when rule broke down and chaos reigned, to being a major player and overpopulated, to having a giant empire that’s now militarily safe but full of corruption from within… It’s really gorgeous and I’m quite addicted
I was thinking the other day that this game is the first in a long time for me that achieves the original Xcom balance of being basically equally engaging in both the management layer and the battles
the diplomacy and trading and whatnot seem very close to Civ 4 in terms of complexity and speed too which I am 100% here for
I’ve been sick for the last days so I managed to play 47 hours of Three Kingdoms already.
What I thought was the endgame actually wasn’t. Or maybe I’m in the post-game now.
I united all three thrones and now hold the mandate of heaven. I thought that would be it so I kinda, uh, really rushed towards that goal without a care for my country men and women. This might also be canon lol
Now everyone is starving, yellow turbans rebelling everywhere, chaos in the streets, so yeah, the world is burning
I’ll try and fix this. I sooo want to win the game already. I should be burnt out but I’m not.
I’d also rate this a Civ 4 out of XCom 2, it’s great, get it if you’re on the fence
I gotta take a break from total war, I’d like to see the late game for how much it changes but I’ve sunk so much time into it already and restarted twice and I can’t spend all my free time fighting literal wars of attrition
I also don’t feel I’ve quite understood the pace at which the game wants you to fight big battles because like… it’s really fun to win one battle against impossible odds, but it seems very hard to actually bounce back from there to having a proper army again without cutting off your income. I keep bottoming out at like 120 prestige 
Okay so now I’m really post-game. I made it! I saw the closing cinematic and everything. I was getting worried because Cao Cao was over 60 already and most characters died of old age around the good old 69. I thought he might not see the full fruits of his labor but he did. Emperor of all of China.
Well, I mean not fully, that’s what the post-game is for.
I don’t think I’ll do that though because the last few hours were already like swatting flies. Everyone was two notches below me in power but my empire was so vast and you can only have so many armies, so people kept guerilla style sniping my towns and there was nothing to do really but keep on conquering and reconquering. It was two steps forward one step back.
But I enjoyed that I could lean back, but auto-resolve on the battles and just focus on the managing of my towns, fighting corruption and so on. You kinda need to make the transition from relying on trade for your income to building a solid industry, because that brings in the most money. As opposed to commerce and taxing peasants.
All in all this was a gorgeous experience and I can’t wait to try out the next character and maybe crank up the difficulty. Like, I literally hit new game as soon as I was done even though I stayed up all night and it’s 7 am. This is something that truly only 4X games can do to me. “Just one more turn” for sure
Shouldn’t have cranked that difficulty that high I guess!
I don’t have any answers for you but let me tell you, this is the most fun 4X game because of how dynamic it is. There are so many stages to the game, I only outlined a few. But it’s truly insane how much time just one run through takes. It’s literally for war nerds who don’t have jobs or friends. I’m at 55 hours. Can’t blame ya for not wanting to put that in
it also speaks to what a good job they’ve done with the personalities that trying to fight a long campaign without your best guys just isn’t the same
The difference between “I need Dian Wei to defend Luoyang from Yuan Shao” (yeah!!!) and “I need to send Cao Ren to distract Liu Biao to help Kong Rong hold some farmland” (yeah…) is pretty stark. I’ve had a lot of really cool battles already! But I keep having to do lots of boring ones to survive too.
It is honestly all I hoped for and more though, it’s been over a decade since I got so easily hooked into a new 4X like this.
The heights are really high considering the sheer volume of it, part of my hesitation in starting over again is that I feel like I’ve already had so many good Cao Cao stories that it’ll be hard to get as invested the same way, but I would need a third or fourth attempt at spending the first five hours coming out on top against Yuan Shao if I wanted to see Cao Cao’s mid-to-late game. Maybe I’m going after the wrong territory? Trying to hold Luoyang and finish off Tao Qiao while keeping enough other factions at bay is really tough!
I will give Creative Assembly full credit for leading me to be actually somewhat anguished over whether I could really get invested in playing dumb old Sun Jian
ten hours of fucking around in the south waiting for my sons to hit puberty hoping that maybe a pirate will show up
And I am actually a little scared at how quickly I could throw away like, a few days off just staring at this
I get that, totally. I’m happy I had my good buddy Xiahou Dun at my side the entire time.
He’s the hotheaded fighter and I’m the cool strategist. We shared a lot of values but had some troubles. He didn’t agree when I played dirty and betrayed people and when I made him chancellor or something high like that he found out that I’m difficult to work with and that soured our relationship. It’s a relationship best confined to the battlefield, that’s where we worked best.
By the end I had to employ so many people and I hardly could tell their names apart, let alone who they were. But it’s not the game’s fault. I could have dove deep into the relationship trees and uncovered all sorts of drama. The option is there, I just didn’t spend the time on it.
And yeah I feel like the “missions” the game gives you are more like challenges than the easy path to victory. I couldn’t have defeated Yuan Shao when the game wanted me to. Going south to gobble up the cheap factions is way easier. Going west is easier too. Everything but Tao and Yuan, really. I did the first but the second stayed strong the entire game and I was lucky to have him as an ally, made everything so much easier. In the post-game he’d probably be the one I’d tackle last. But maybe that’s the thinking. Get him early or he’ll get even worse. Who knows
look how goddamn cool they made Zhongda look
how can I not play Wei
anyway yeah I’m thinking medium / hard is the way to go over hard / hard
also Zhou Tai has the worst special I’ve ever seen, he gets powered up after you’ve conclusively won the battle? What an asshole. I can’t believe I hired that idiot again!!
I’m scared to jump back into my game because after spending the first 40 turns consolidating the east but failing to get a single farm while Cao Cao took over the heartland my main Boys Squad was lured west by the last few Han territories along the Yangtze.
At that point Yuan Shao decided his endless war against Kong Rong wasn’t going to be endless much longer and brought three stacks down; my deafness to Kong’s cries bit me as Yuan’s northern coalition is absolutely terrifying and all marching into my lands while Cao Cao thinks a single stack is appropriate to defend his pal. If I had to guess I’d say Cao Cao maybe doesn’t care about protecting his boon companion Liu Bei and the weak Kong Rong…
Meanwhile my lone western territory gets mobbed by Yellow Turbans; I chase them back to their hometown and greedily decide to snatch it up to caught by another Turban army lying in ambush. Outnumber 3-to-1 I barely murder enough peasants to save my righteous butt to find that Liu Biao has snatched the city from under me! That was my sin and paid for it in my own blood, buddy~~~
It’s like Liu Bei’s ability to instantly take over Han territory through Right only exists as a trap to overextend land you have to protect from warlords.
I’m most impressed with how well they’ve managed to keep the game dynamic and keep each faction feeling like it’s dancing on the edge of a plate without feeling like the overwhelming status pressure of Europa or the void of expansion in space 4x. They kept the conquest part with liberal weak independent states and the game only reveals the true players deep into it, which holds up well against the story it’s emulating.
Nobody has mentioned Zhuge Liang yet. 
your campaign being a mirror image of mine is leading me to believe that maybe Cao Cao and Liu Bei against everyone is not a good teamup
one thing that has bit me is not realizing how expensive a given action will be until I make plans around attempting it (notably, being the first one to try to rebuild Luoyang, deploying Meng Da as Wei, and redeploying Cao Cao all cost 8000).
