at least Zhuge Liang and Kong Rong have differing numbers of syllables. Nagamori and Nagamasa on the other hand…
Yes, good point, as others have pointed out the Pinyin system does add an additional pronunciation wrinkle.
More seriously, Japanese being a relatively sound poor language does have an awful lot of homophone-y words.
I might try to stream this tomorrow… if I can figure out a mic.
Just noticed something I haven’t seen mentioned on the tips threads yet: when you construct a building, a “rush construction” button appears under the building icon.
Reading the book (1-volume Penguin edition) and watching the 2010 TV series has helped a lot with the names. But I’ll be thrilled to see a mod that expands the variety of character portraits. I’m glad they’ve gone to static portraits with interactive gear. They should be easier to mod and look less cartoony than the bobbing avatars of previous games.
I played a couple of exploratory games then took a week-long work break. Now I’m trying to beat a hard campaign as Cao Cao. Seems like my problem so far has been advancing too fast and spreading construction across too many commanderies. This time I’m going to focus on a tight, green-focused core and play the diplomacy game a little more carefully.
I think I’ve had that same problem, I go too wide then end up fielding 10 armies trying to defend half of China while conquering at the same time.
Tech is my problem. Both city buildings and troops are locked behind tech, which is very slow. Say 5 techs to get a significant thing, which is already 25 turns. 100 turns means you only get 4 choices.
I think peasant economies (food) want green + yellow tech (for order + money)
Commerce/industry will want blue… Maybe for Ma Teng (spice/silk) or Kong Rong blue is good.
I’m gonna try my next game specialized too!
In my mind +replenishment and +campaign movement range are the best two stats in the game, so I go to the red line for those first. Then I grab the super archers (moon dragons? Im calling them moon dragons) in the blue tree, with all their pre-reqs.
In between I’ll probably pick up 1-3 farming techs and 1-3 public order techs as needed to cover food and… public order. At this point you are in the late game and I just take all the -% corruption techs since your income is so devastated by it.
I have no idea how optimal that is, but it makes sense in my brain.
The units you unlock, minus the special Dragon units, are only available to their respective colored generals, which makes most of them extremely situational. Plus the fact that becoming one of the Emperors unlocks a unit that is competitive for best infantry in the game, and is able to be recruited from all generals, and a lot of the units don’t seem to have a lot of point late game. You can happily win with the aforementioned halberd guys, moon dragons (super archers), trebuchets, and a couple cav to sweep the enemy ranged units. The only thing requiring unlocking are the moon dragons and hypothetically a top tier cav unit if you aren’t playing a faction with access to one.
I realize the early game is way more important than the endgame, though, and there’s probably some good strategy that picks up more of the mid-tier unit researches that I haven’t tried. I’ve never even used a repeating crossbowman in 3 campaigns, even just to see how they are. Never wanted to eat the 10 turns unlocking them.
Fun fact, there is a treasury icon at the top of the screen where you can change your tax rate. Which you can and should do, as a couple public order techs will just let you keep it at High at all times.
Repeating crossbowmen are bugged, don’t use them. They apparently don’t reload.
one shot…is all they need.
I just pulled off a military revolt at a very opportune time. I wish I had seen that option back before I killed another spy in battle.
Another option I missed was when my heir took over I spent turn after turn going through each faction looking for brides, since that’s not available on the quick deal. I finally found under the family tree menu the search for spouse option.
Does that actually search for diplo marriages or does it just generate a spouse?
The former can let you grab unique dudes and also a diplo boost.
It generated a spouse.
In line with expectations then. Would like to be able to pull up all available existing marriage options without one by one through diplo.
Oh, an annoyance that popped up - I wanted to switch my administrators (one had +5 order that I wanted in a city so I could get rid of a +PO building) but there’s no way to do that without a demote/promote cycle it looks like. And then the dude left on the next turn because he got pissed up. Booooooo
I started watching the CTV 2010 tv series of Three Kingdoms. My wife, being of Chinese descent is interested as well, but was pretty daunted at watching 80+ episodes of witty banter, clever lines, violence and funny costumes. Some of the lines are epic tho, Cao Cao sure can talk it up! He’s a far more interesting character than good-guy Liu Bei.
We’re up to ep 6 now… looong way to go.
I’ve only watched a single episode and it has a Greek or shakesperian tragedy feel to it. As in characters are simultaniously larger than life and simpletons. Like Dong Zhuo needing a lot of time to realize that people don’t usually present daggers to sleeping people.
Lol yes. yes it does. But then this is to China what Homerus and King Arthur are to western culture, right?
Right. It’s just that at least recently Western tradition is used to very cynical and realistic representation of history. Like Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven, or Rome TV show. Or look at the relatively recent Troy or King Arthur movies. In those movies ancient people have some alien traditions but they’re decidedly as modern as we are. It’s rarely heroic, and even when it is it’s modern type of heroics.
In the 3K TV show everything is of its time. Like that scene when old minister talks about how Han Empire is screwed and everyone is politely crying while Cao Cao demonstrably laughs - this scene is supposed to be weird to us and it’s one of the first scenes with Cao Cao, the one that introduces us to a character. But the modern idea of historical fiction is making ancient people as familiar as possible. Or go full camp mode like 300 portraying people as they’d probably describe themselves in modern terms. This 3K TV show feels strange because of it, it’s as if anyone would try to make Shakespear movie and it’s just a Shakespear movie, not a subversion and not set in cyberpunk future.
You say that as if it’s a bad thing:
The best shakespeare ever put to screen, bar none.
I don’t.
I appreciated the non-deconstructionist and non-postmodern approach to interpreting literature as intended by its author. Refreshing in the contemporary western culture.
That’s right. I mean it seems obvious that this is the way material like this should be presented but I suppose some find it off putting but it doesn’t seem strange to me. It tries to understand people’s perspectives - and most important context. It seems on the nose because we’re supposed to be looking backward with foreknowledge. The one thing I do question - something that the 3K books don’t really touch on imo - is the nature of loyalty in a patriarchal, paternalistic society. It seems like every soldier is a fearless hero willing to die for their warlord without hesitation, and maybe there’s something a more modern approach could add. But the 3K story is fundamentally unconcerned with ordinary people other than that making the peasants “happy” means helping their population to grow and keeping them well fed and well ordered, and following the “Mandate of Heaven” is to some extent independent of the ruler’s own political ruthlessness.
That’s why I like the take that the 3K game has on the Yellow Turban rebellion and the way the Total War franchise makes these indirect commentaries on history. Good or bad, wicked or selfish, not one warlord doubted that a peasant uprising was a kind of unholy thing that needed to be swiftly eradicated like an unnatural plague. In TW:3K otoh, the game goes deeper into an interesting view of them, and projects a certain limited view of their “revolutionary” ideas - that is, even rebelling against the system their political ideologies are still constrained and limited by their time period and context.