Thanks I am looking it over and taking your tips to heart.
I am thinking I need the best heavy infantry I can get. Does that change your opinions on where to start?
I grabbed the warlords dlc as well, seems like if I am going to declare war on everyone I should start a defensive struggle early --turtle … and wait and see.
I can’t speak to the Eight Princes campaign. But the I don’t know you need any of the DLC to get started. I would suggest against starting this with the Mandate of Heaven start. You start with diplomatic relations with almost all of China, where as in the original campaign start you only know a couple of factions. And you have loads of Han Empire cities to blob up.
Yeah that makes sense. The less factions to start with the better. … I have to start wars with everyone initially and make sure I am at war with every faction all the time.
One of the toughest things about this achievement is making sure you are always at war with every faction at all times. I spend 50 hours on a bactria campaign in Rome 2 before I realized I missed a faction at the end,
Good advice RH. I am feeling it out as we speak,
There are lot of new free features coming in the next patch. Bandits are totally reworked and get unique research system. Diplomatically you can “buy” temporary alliance with bandits. You get titles to assign to characters for every faction.
I don’t know that I necessarily have a faction suggestion, they are not nearly as different from each other as Warhammer factions are, for example. The suggestion to go for a corner faction is basically always a good one in TW games where there isn’t a crisis that comes off the map edge (Shogun, Rome, 3K). There are some corners that are less desirable in Warhammer and Atilla, but in 3K all the threats are already on the board. At least in vanilla, I haven’t played the expansions.
My best tip is to use a blue general (strategist I believe) in every army, and give him 2 catapults and 4 ranged archer/crossbow types. And get the flaming ammo skill for the catapults. Great for infantry blobs and towers. Then just make sure your other two generals can actually fight so you have a way to beat enemy generals.
All assuming romance mode, I never tried historic.
How do you make money in this game? Basically as you get larger corruption becomes much more of a drain. As Sun Jian I have a big chuck of land upgraded to level 2-3 buildings, yet i’m making less money than I was at the start of the campaign. Of course I have trade maxed, ect. I only have two armies. I feel like there is some hidden feature i’m not grokking going on here.
Biggest sources of corruption reduction are
a) administrator assigned to province
b) corruption reduction assignment (blue & yellow generals [also purple I think] have a skill that you need to level up into)
Buildings also give corruption reduction, but they don’t have much impact until late game when they get into the high tiers; when the get reduced corruption to surrounding commanderies allowing them to stack their effect to an actual useful number.
Basically until late game when stacking buildings with corruption reduction, you need to pick your money generation provinces and have a administrator assigned, and then throw another character with the reduce corruption assignment.
I think in this game specialization is not optional so a province you don’t fully own or with no synergic buildings is a drain. You also have to send people to do all those money generating orders. And cut on your spendings, get rid of all the low-level characters who have nothing to do.
As everyone probably expected, Nanman is next
Fun “Pacifist Run” in Three Kingdoms. Part three isn’t out yet.
Part Three:
And as expected, Nanman DLC. Looks like there’s a map expansion along with this one
Finally, it sounds like southern China is going to be filled in a little bit. This is the first DLC in interested in for this game, all the others have been bleh.
The weirdest part is that the Wood Elf and Beastmen DLCs had the Warhammer devs really re-evaluate what people wanted out of a DLC, and new campaigns was not what they wanted. People generally seem to pretty strongly prefer new factions, lords, units, and mechanics in the main campaign to a new campaign.
And to their credit the Warhammer devs actually listened. But the initial 3K DLC was almost entirely disconnected from the main campaign. It’s all a bit strange. This one certainly looks more promising.
Notes
I actually liked the direction they were going… and then they sort of retrenched.
The problem for 3K (to me) is that it’s not really fantasy and it’s not really historic, and (to me, again) i don’t really like the way Strategist generals are implemented. Zhuge Liang was supposed to be this impossible genius, and Sima Yi was as well if just a shade under him… but there’s really no possible means of implementing “genius” in the Total War system. Instead they get … catapults and crossbows. And occasionally a “formation” that may or may not be useful.
So the 8 Princes took 3K into a more interesting direction, toward history and away from fantasy, because (imo) the fantasy doesn’t work as well here as it does in Warhammer. The end goal was pretty interesting, the final collapse of Han China, the movement of the Han population south of the Yangtze, and the near dark age of China, with a dramatic battle of Fei River that more or less saved the rest of Han China from being conquered by the barbarians like Rome was.
But people complained that they were leaving the 3K setting too soon, so they pulled back and pumped out a ton of 3K content instead. Which is fine… but i’d have preferred they fix the fundamental issues of interest (to me) with the characters. I mean even Knights of Honor makes non-combat characters feel more interesting.
It really doesn’t help that combat in 3K honestly kind of sucks, with melee troops basically pointless aside from holding ability. I never really enjoy any of the battles in 3K.
See my issue was more that Commanders (the yellow ones, whatever they’re called) were the worst. They didn’t bring good troops, but they also couldn’t fight for shit. Also nearly every faction leader was one.
Strategists being the only way to have ranged units was beyond silly imo. There are 4 classes, you have to take this one type with every army.
Then the usual problem of every faction is basically the same. Hell, some didn’t even have unique mechanics. There were basically: Rebels and Not-Rebels. And that was about it. You get like 1 or 2 “unique” units that often aren’t that unique and maybe you get a neat campaign mechanic.
It was well done, it just had so little to draw me into more than a couple playthroughs. Once you played Cao Cao, you basically played all the rest of the groups. Then you’d try one of the rebels. Then there was… Dong I guess?
I don’t know, strategically they all feel very different. And it affects combat too. Strategists “seem” important till you play, say, Liu Bei. He’s supposed to use the initial trio of heroes as the main army for most of the game. None of them are strategists but you still can use ranged units just fine. As for uniqueness - again, Liu Bei doesn’t have many unique units compared to Cao Cao, but the initial setup with 3 friends gives you one big strong hero-focused army. His discount on peasant units gives you a lot of support armies made with very cheap units you wouldn’t use as other factions much. Those are small things that make campaigns very obviously different.
New patch (notes here) dropped today. With news that makes it sound like CA are moving onto developing a sequel to Three Kingdoms?
