Money has very naturally flipped from ‘richer than god’ to ‘how can I scrounge up the cash for another army fast because Oh dear’; were there a more involved economy driving tech progression I think this would be worse, as it is, I’m always dancing on an edge but am liberated to spend on bribing off factions or expanding my court. Spending money is much more interesting when ‘invest in your economy’ is not such an overbearingly correct choice.
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they probably should’ve included as a tip that you really shouldn’t try to field more unit stacks than you have faction ranks under any circumstances (so 1, then 2, then 3) since you’ll at best only have 3x that many good generals anyway, and your strategy needs to not involve that much undefendable territory.
anyway when I inevitably restart a third or fourth time I am going to try to get it through my head that I need to bring liu biao into the kong rong - liu bei - liu dai coalition while I’m beating up tao qian or else the yuan situation becomes untenable. that dickhead is supposed to be busy with sun jian!
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I love how upset I get when characters don’t fulfill their literary mandate. And the game is really phenomenal at getting everyone to the precipice of those situations so you recognize it, before punching you in the head (or waiting for you to be the change you can believe in).
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I’m gonna be out of commission next week for surgery and I really want to spend more time with pathologic and outer wilds but I can’t stop thinking about the war
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I’m playing as Liu Bei now and hooo boy, I didn’t realize what a huge advantage Cao Cao had with his armies. I never had to care about military provisions as him but now it’s like I need to make pitstops in my own territory every time I try to go to war. I have to actually pause and recharge before I go on the next conquering spree whereas Cao could push on like a mad man. I’m trying to counter that with the tech tree but I don’t know how much use that will be.
So I’m working with limited range for my troops now. I can’t just walk my stacks all across China and then fight a big war. Everyone would be demoralized, starving, tired…
Actually that might be because I went up in difficulty a notch but I thought Cao had some bonus to that… Can’t remember. And I’ll miss the diplomatic manipulation abilities! It’s cool to learn new factions though. Can’t wait to play as the bandit queen sometime
this post should get all blood potions itt just by virtue of being there, and being so true.
Is Huang Di in this? He was in some other JRPG I once played. How badly am messing up historic eras here? All I know is Huang Di and that he kills Ying Longs.
For all the fans out there:
a real dreamboat, I have ta say. I’ll keep a lookout for him in my current game and maybe I’ll have stories to tell
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I don’t know why but I had a chance to recruit Lü Bu into my ranks as Cao Cao in my previous playthrough. I was short on cash though and he was super expensive and then at some point he was just gone. There are certain things about this game I don’t yet get.
Another thing is why there’s no screen that shows you your current commitments and when they run out. I’d like to know when I can declare war on someone without repercussions because I broke a deal, like a non-aggression pact or military access. How many turns do I have to wait? And it seems that the AI can get out of trade agreements whenever but I can’t at all. Which is especially annoying when the trade route gets blocked at some point and I get nothing out of it but it’s occupying a valuable slot. It’s curious.
I had to look it up but that’s about 2800 years before this game 
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ahahahah they made him look like takeshi kaneshiro in the john woo movie
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Almost all the character art is ‘inspired’ by Red Cliff
which is actually really helpful for building my web of tertiary characters that fly by in the book
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Ha! Didn’t pick up on that. Now my crush makes sense
I probably don’t need to tell you this but when you google Chinese historical figures you get this bar that shows you related people and some of them have an old artistic rendering of them as pictures and some of them have Dynasty Warriors images 
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Dynasty Warriors or KOEI’s ROTK games.
I started over on medium and everything is going great
I hired some woman as a trader around turn 30 and the next turn liu bei wanted zhang fei to marry her
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This is like the perfect example of how Liu Bei’s bro-centric mentality can get people killed
Zhang Fei is definitely the type of toxic maniac where you might never be able to actually unfriend him, but the least you can do is not introduce him to women jesus christ
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in real life he apparently stumbled up xiahou yuan’s niece out picking firewood and was like “great, I captured a wife!” so this is still an improvement
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It’s the trolley problem but with the love life of a violent alcoholic
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I also used a mod to ensure all the legendary generals show up by the tail end of the range that the game allows them to because I was so despondent over not being blessed by the Dian Wei randomizer this time and oh my goodness Xu Chu
Yuan Shao is gonna get fuckin hosed this time, I’ve actually managed to run a food shortage with Cao Cao
instead of having one huge lunatic I now have an entire retinue full of them
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also having fond memories of dynasty warriors 3 in which, rather than zhuge dying of disease during the final climactic standoff of wuzhang, he’s waiting in the Shu camp and he can shoot lasers from his fan
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