• Note Your Faction Leaders Stengths and Weaknesses and play to their strengths.
  
• Note your first faction Mission.
  
• Check the Characters available to your faction and their strengths and weaknesses.

Characters are individuals who are willing to join your faction as subordinates to your faction leader.

• An Army consists of up to three Characters and their personal retinues.
  
• Each Character may have up to six retinues.
  
• Therefore, and army can consist of up to 18 x Units plus 3 x Characters

Your court consists of three levels

1. Leaders/Family (Your Faction Leader, Prime Minster and Heir)
   Satisfaction Immunity up to Rank 10
   
2. Council (Your Council of Monisters)
   Satisfaction immunity up to Rank 8
   
3. Adminstrators (The Adminstrators governing your Commandeies)
   Satisfaction Immunity up to Rank 4.

TIPS

1. Do NOT rush to appoint a Chancellor on Turn 1. Chancellors cost +200 per turn in salary but only grant +15% Income from Peasantry. In the early game the apointment will make a loss.
   
2. Do NOT appoint family members to Council positions as they do NOt normally draw a salary and so will cost you +350 every turn rather than +200.
   
3. Check and replace your Faction Heir on Turn 1 if necessary.
   [*} Replace children with adults for Faction Heir. Children do NOT provide any bonus from the position.
   
4. Choose a Commander Type Family Member with high Authority as Faction Heir

Characters are individuals who are willing to join your faction as subordinates to your faction leader.



Believe it or not some of the characters who offer you their services are actually working as spies for your enemies. They will obviously not tell you this before you hire them so a little detective work is necessary when hiring new characters.

• Anyone who is willing to spy for you, is obviously not spying for you enemies. This might seem a bit too obvious, but apparently its true. So, you are safe recruiting characters who offer to spy for your faction.
  
• Alternatively check the characters profile and look for who the character previously worked for and why they left or were dismissed. If they hold a grudge against their former employer then they clearly are not spying fro them. Again it seems like an easy thing to fake but apparently they don;t lie about it. So, if they say they hate their previous masters they really do.

Having acquired any worthwhile and available items from your friends through diplomacy make sure to distribute them wisely to your supporters.

Tao Qian has acquired some nice books unfortunately he was reluctant to part with them.

Here we see that Lady Bian who we recently made our Faction Heir has now been assigned a Refined Scholar, which when assigned as a follower of a Faction Heir increases all Character XP by 1O% Faction-Wide.

BEFORE YOUR FIRST BATTLE
Before ending your first turn it is important to complete any diplomatic deals to trade items or complete any trade deals. You and the AI factions will have already received your initial selection of Ancillary Items so the first thing to do is check with your friends and find out if they got any good items in their care packages that you would like to acquire for yourself. The allocation is completely random so one of them may have got a unique or excellent item.

It is important to do these deal straight away before you fight your first battle because this is when you are at your most powerful and thus have the most diplomatic clout.

Marry your father to Lui Dai's daughter for +6.8 diplomacy bonus and swap for a decent ancillary item.

Finally, after all that preparation its time to fight your first battle. But for the Cao Cao campaign its not quite that simple because apparently the Han General commanding the first enemy army you face is a guy called Yuan Huan, and Yuan Huan is an Agricultural Reformer whose character provides a lot of useful bonuses for the building of farms and Cao Cao's faction relies heavily on farming for its early income.
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843709807
So, the last thing you want to do is kill this guy. Your mission is in fact to capture him and then offer him a job. This is something completely new to me in TW games so I decided to give it go.

How To Capture A General

1. Save the game just before the battle.
   
2. Do NOT accept any duels with the General you wish to capture. Duels end in death and you cannot capture a dead general.
   
3. Keep your army out of the way. Your soldiers are not much help and may accidentally kill the general you want to capture. This task requires care and control to stand a chance of success.
   https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843709337
   
4. Use your Super-Hero Characters to defeat the entire enemy army and either drive it off the field or better yet massacre them all for extra XP.
   https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843710521
   
5. Once the enemy general you want to capture is left all alone on the battlefield carefully attack him with one or two of your heroes. The object is NOT to kill him but to destroy his morale so that he breaks and routs off the battlefield.
   https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843711045
   
6. When the target General routs let him go. Then cross your fingers and hope he gets captured. There is a 61% base chance of capturing an enemy general who has not died. So, its pure chance, if you fail then reload and start again.
   https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843711629

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843712448

I have posted a link to Serious Trivia's Tutorial Video Part 5 above mainly for completeness. However, I didn't fully follow the advice given in the video as I'm not that interested the super-hero concept of the Romance of The Three Kingdoms. So, rather than fight the battle for Peixian with my two heroes as advised and fiddle around trying to outflank spearmen I simply shot them to death with my archers and fought the battle in the normal way.

Having Said that the key advice given in the above video is sound.

1. Don't bother capturing farming settlements in the early game as they make no money.
   
2. Generally the Han and Yellow Turban Rebel Factions are pretty passive enemies and don't need to be attacked.
   
3. Fog of War does not penetrate beyond neighbouring counties. So passive enemy counties can be used as buffer states not only blocking attacks from more powerful enemies, but also hiding your Commanderies from enemy eyes.
   [*} Your most dangerous potential enemy is Lui Dai. The guy whose daughter your father married. But he is blocked by the Yellow Turban Rebels and so will not attack until your father dies. At that point you can use the rebels as a screening force to blunt his attack before counter-attacking.
   
4. In the meantime the most lucrative expansion target is Fuli the Hans Livestock Settlement to the south.

The Annexation of Peixian
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843816982
As stated above Peixian was annex in the traditional way using the full force of my army. Although I did use my two generals to outflank and chase down the Han Archer Unit.

So, my faction now owns two counties of the Chen Commanderie, and Serious Trivia is perfectly correct that like most long standing TW players my instinctive next target would have been the remaining Farming County to the west.

But I'm going to accept his advice and leave it as a screening and blocking state and attack Fuli the livestock settlement to the south instead.

Once again I am linking Serious Trivia video above simply to preserve the link and make it easier to find for myself and anyone else who wants to watch it. But in practice I watch this video and came away with very few notes. So, its another non-event from that perspective.

The discussion on Assignments was interesting but didn't really come to any real conclusion and surprisingly Serious Trivia never actually set any assignment during this video merely talked about them.

• He seems to favour assigning Cao Ren to Supervise Construction which reduces construction cost by 10% and Construction Time by 1 Turn. But then he didn't actually make any assignment at all and there was no explanation why. So???

.https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843879001
One added complication is that in the video Serious Trivia only has 1 x Assignment and has a Supervise Construction Option for Cao Ren. Whereas in my game I have 2 x Assignments and none of them are Supervise Construction. So, even if i wanted to I couldn't take his advice.

Cao Ren Becomes a Tax Collector

Can't be bad - 50% Extra Income from Peasantry.

Trading Food Tip

• Trade Food in the Winter because this is when food tends to be in short supply and so the AI values it more,

Kind of makes sense.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843880686
Serious Trivia recommends starting with the Tax Collection Building.

1. Because its Free
   
2. Because the Return on Investment is immediate e.g. it costs nothing and delivers increased revenue. Whereas spending over 1,000 Gold on a building that increases income by 100 gold will not net a return for ten turns.

Seems logical.

The first and moist important thing to note about Reforms is that the information provided by the Reform Tree cannot be trusted. It would appear that the designer responsible for its design was more concerned with drawing a cherry tree than he was is providing the player with accurate information. So, whatever strategy you choose to follow as regards to Reforms please don't make the same mistake i did and assume that the information provided by the game is accurate.

"The entire point of a Strategy Game is to encourage the player to review and analyse the information it provides and formulate a strategy based upon that information for winning the game. The only role the game design team have in this process is to make sure that the information the player needs is presented clearly and accurately to their players. Somewhere along the line the person designing the cherry tree lost the plot and forgot why he was being paid."
So, don't trust the cherry tree it lies.

Instead look elsewhere to establish how the reforms are linked and what they do.

This is a measured path for supporting steady economic growth.

This is a strategy that rushed military units and developments for those who prefer to throw caution to the wind and smash their way to victory.

A build that focuses mainly on trade and commerce for those who have access to good trade ports and the like.

This strategy seeks to maximise Food and Peasant Incme by focussing on farming. Serious Trivia does not recopmmend this appraoch unless one has the right commanderys in the early game.

Schemes appear to be missing from the Serious Trivia Guidance Videos. Probably because they were a later addition that were added after the videos were made in 2000.

Some of these schemes seem really useful but so far I've not found a video guide on how to use them effectively so the best I have found is this webpage.

Fates Divided - Cao Cao Schemes Guide[www.pcinvasion.com]

And I'm not sure how up to date or accurate it is, so I include it only as a reminder that Schemes are something else to be considered at the start of your campaign.

Thought I'd do a bit of scheming with Cao Cao just to see how it works, although Serious Trivia's videos pre-date the Fates Divided DLC.

Dominion Over The Realm

This seemed like an obvious bonus as it gives you an instant Reform.

I opted for Register of Land and Population which gives me a bonus of 15% Income from Peasantry. Not sure if that was a good choice but I figured extra income is always good.

Rival Tigers And One Prey

This was the second scheme I went for mainly on gut instinct as it seemed to make sense being a sort of call for all rivals to unite against the common foe.

But also note that these two schemes have boosted Cao Cao's Credibility from 40 to 70, which I'm pretty sure must be a good thing. Serious Trivia mentioned something about reaching a Credibility of 75 being significant so this is a sizeable step in that direction.


Bit of additional Diplomacy this time offering Rice for Peace and Gold.
Can't be bad.

Once again I find myself posting a link to a Tutorial Video that I'm dubious about, and this seems to be the trend now as I delve further into Serious Trivia's play list. The main problem being that Serious Trivia is clearly into micro-management of his super-heroes on the battlefield, whilst I've never been much good at micro-managing units (especially cavalry) in TW games and so tend to shy away from schemes that rely upon it.

Disband Your Army Before You End Turn 1
This advice is logically sound.
Disbanding your Army before you click on the the End Turn button will save thousands in army upkeep costs.and as Serious Trivia rightly explains many of the initial units begin the game in the wrong retinues. e.g. Shock Cavalry (Red) in a Commanders (Yellow) Retinue.

And there seems to be no way to transfer units from one retinue to another so the sensible thing to do is disband them and recruit more appropriate ones.

Timing is Everything
A quick note on when to disband your army. If you intend doing so.

• Finish all your diplomatic deals first. Because you want your army to look strong and influence the outcomes.
  
• Once all deals are done disband all the units in the wrong retinues.
  
• Move your remaining troops up to the border towards Fuli (your next settlement target) and only then recruit a third general.

Do I disband the Heavy Tiger Cavalry Unit?
This unit is one of the nest my faction can recruit and its a free gift in the starting army. It will be at least 10 Turns before I can recruit this units as it requires research to do so. But it is also very expensive and not really essential in the early game. It's also in the wrong retinue.

So, whether you disband it or not is up to you.

The recommended military cut-backs
If one follows Serious Trivia's advice you will end up with an army of two retinues containing three units after your cutbacks.

1. Commanders Retinue (Yellow) consisting of 1 x Light Melee Cavalry Unit (Yellow)
   
2. champion Retinue (Green) consisting of 2 x Shielded Spearmen (Green)

And this will be the Army you march towards Fuli for your next battle. Serious Trivia says you can capture Fuli easily with just your Super-heroes and no army at all, but I personally have doubts about my ability to do so, and there is also this doubt about why I am playing this game if it isn't about commanding large armies.

But then I chose to stick with the Romance option, so I just have to remind myself that this it myth not history.

I saw this was the next video in the series and so watched ahead to see if it explained how to replace all those units you have just disbanded from your army. But it doesn't.

Basically, this video explains how to choose the third hero for your army and debates whether a Blue Strategist Hero would be better than a Red Vanguard Hero.

Recruit A Third Hero for the Battle of Fuli

However, at the moment I'm more interested in how I can win the Battle of Fuli without an army, so i may need to watch the next video to find out and then skip back and decide whether I want to try.


The best way I've found of deciding whether their is harmony between a candidate for recruitment and your faction leaders and existing heroes is to try and recruit them. This brings up a harmony bubble for each candidate and as you can see the first five potential candidates all hated us.

Instead of recruiting someone who hates us I opted for Xiahou Yuan, the cousin of Cao Cao's friend Xiahou Dun togther with his two shock cavalry units.

Notice Also that Cao Cao has handed over command of the army to Xiahou Dun. This is because Xiahou Dun has a trait that adds 25% movement to armies he commands on the campaign map. I just have to remember to swap command back before the army goes into battle. Otherwise I don;t get the formation options that Cao Cao provides when in command.

So, I've watched ahead now (three videos ahead of my current game timeline) to see how difficult the Battle of Fuli was without an army.

It looks as though the battle was pretty difficult.

• The AI failed to fall into the Spear Guard trap.
  
• The AI did a pretty decent job of covering its archers with spearmen, bearing in mind that in my game the archers actually fire at the heroes. So, I don't have the luxury of hanging about within archery range.
  
• Serious Trivia actually had two out of his three heroes unhorsed by spearmen during this video, and he is meant to be the expert. Whereas I definitely am not.
  
• He only managed to secure Pyrrhic Victory, which doesn;t bode well for my chances.

So, some food for thought there and I'm not sure what to do at the moment. Ib don;t think I can do better than Serious Trivia, but obviously once I start deviating from the guidance it becomes less and less useful.

Well I managed it.

They say forewarned is forearmed so the fact that I had watched Serious Trivia fight this same battle on the video certainly helped and knowing what to expect I was able to adjust my own tactics slightly to avoid some of the issues he faced.

I used my two spearguard units to focus the attention of the Han Army, positioning them in a wood on a small rise just within bow range of the Han Army. The idea being to bait the enemy into attacking and then circling around behind them with my cavalry and generals to take out their archers and then complete a standard 'Hammer & Anvil' attack on the enemies rear.

How did it actually work out?
The plan was sound but the execution proved a bit more complicated.

At first the enemy simply wouldn't attack and just sat there (perhaps because my spearmen were too well hidden in the wood). Fortunately, I had given two of my heros bows as I didn't have any archers and they managed to cause enough irritation that eventually the enemies front line units charged and ran straight into my spear wall.

So, the cavbalry and heroes then began moving around their flanks with a view to attacking their rear. But, unfortunately the AI was too clever for that and having committed three halberd units to the fight against my spear wall they began using their remaining three spear units to try and screen their archers.

Fortunately, I had three heroes and three cavalry units, so by splitting up and ranging my horsemen in a wide arc around the enemy rear and flanks I simply overstretched the ability of the three enemy spear units to cover everything and eventually the foxes managed to get in amongst the chickens.

Once the enemy archers panicked and started moving the task of protecting them just got even more complicated for the AI and I was able to move in and start the business of running them down.

The problem being that all this was taking way too long, and the enemy seemed remarkably reluctant to actually scatter. So, my poor spear units were forced to stand and take it whilst my cavalry played cat & mouse with the enemy reserves.

However, eventually the enemy archers scattered and I was able to focus on the main fight in the wood. It was then just a case of

• dodging the enemy reserve spear units,
  
• charging into the back of the enemy fighting my speak wall until they routed.
  
• then chasing the survivors down with my cavalry.

Then enemy were quite helpful at this point as whenever one of their spear units routed from the fight on the hill they sent one of their three reserve units in to replace it. So, eventually I didn't even need to dodge their reserve units to make the charges and at that point it was all over.

I completely ignored their general and let him leave the field and he was captured and I hired him to join my faction.

So, in that respect I actually came off slightly better off than Serious Trivia, but probably with higher losses particularly amongst my spear men who had a long hard fight. I can't say it was an enjoyable battle and by the end I was as exhausted as the spearmen, but hopefully there won;t be too many more of this sort of battle in the future.

It was around this time that Cao Cao received an emissary from a minor warlord called Ze Rong.

Ze Rong was supposedly a cruel tyrant but Cao Cao had never met the man and had no idea who he was or where he came from. It took some time to even establish if he existed and where his lands were located.

It was eventually discovered that he held a small area of land to the south-east beyond the Han Empire and close to the Yangtze River. Cao Cao was still curious why Ze Rong should be so concerned with securing a non-aggression pact with someone who did not even know he existed.

But further enquiries established that Ze Rong's land were poor, his food production was low and his people starving. Cao Cao therefore agreed to the deal but only if Ze Rong agreed to buy food from Cao Cao to feed his people.

Word has reached Cao Cao that his beloved father Cao Song has been betrayed and murdered by his father-in-law Tao Qian.

Honour demands satisfaction and Cao Cao has no hesitation in declaring that his fathers death will be avenged with the blood of Tao Qian and his entire family.

War Has Been Declared

When your faction leader Ranks Up (e.g. from Noble to 2nd Marquis) you will be given some Prestige Points to spend. This caught me by surprise the first time it happened so I did some research to find out what it was about and how best to spend them.

Notes
The advice in the above video is a bit wishy-washy and so I think the truth is that there is no obviously superior strategy to dictate how you spend these points. But this is the gist of what was said.

1. There are FIVE things you can invest Prestige Points into: Administrators; Armies; Assignments; Spys and Trade. You can invest up to EIGHT Prestige Points in each giving you a total of 40 x Prestige Point Slots. But you only get 25 x Prestige Points. So, care is needed to invest in the best options.
   
2. It requires a total of Eight Prestige Points to max one category of investment. So, in theory you could max out three things, Unfortunately, because some of the points are already assigned randomly by the AI. So, the best laid plans can be screwed by the RNG Gods allocating some of your precious points to the wrong thing.
   
3. Benefits are only obtained when the investment of prestige points unlocks a Milestone on the investment scale. There are three Milestones on each scale. 1st Milestone (2 Points); 2nd Milestone (6 Points) and 3rd Milestone (8 Points) points spent in between milestones produce no benefit at all. So you get nothing for 1 x Prestige Point.

So, the obvious strategy is to invest points in categories that will at least unlock a Milestone.
e.g. If you have 1 point to spend and Administrators has 1 Point invested already by the AI, whilst Trade has nothing invested in it. Then its better to spend the 1 point on Administrators and unlock its Tier 1 Milestone than invest it in Trade and get no benefit for it.

At least that's my logic.

Which are the Best Options To Invest in?
Like I said there doesn't seem to be clear answer to this question. But these are the notes I made whilst listening to the video.

• Armies: Seems to be the Best Option to Max out. So one should look to invest 8 points in this category by the end of the game.
  
• Administrators: Doesn't really pay off until late game, when you have a lot of Commanderys and even then probably isn't worth maxing out. Limit Investment to Tier 2 (6 points)
  
• Assignments: Only worth serious investment if you plan to micro-manage assignments and even then should be a low priority as it won't pay off much in early or late game.
  
• Spys: Not worth much investment mainly because the need for spys declines as you eliminate your enemies. Limit investment to Tier 1 (2 Points) only.
  
• Trade: This is really useful in early game but gradually becomes pointless towards late game as your number of potential trade partners diminishes. So RUSH EARLY INVESTMENT but limit how much you invest as eventually it will be wasted.

So, ARMIES is a definite, some early investment in TRADE and limited investment in ADMINISTRATORS and TRADE.

Some notes and tips for attacking settlements.

1. Capture Points do NOT give victory on unwalled towns, So don;t bother targetting them.
   
2. Pick which gate you intend to attack. Choose one with only two towers defending it.
   
3. Hide you main attacking army out of sight from the city so the AI cannot see which gate you plan to attack.
   
4. Place one or two poor units in sight but opposite where you plan to attack as decoys to fool the AI into defending the wrong gates.
   
5. Use your three heroes to charge and capture the towers at the gate you decided to attack.
   
6. Once the towers are captured rush the rest of your army forward to defend the gate against recapture.
   
7. Use your three hero characters to move on and capture the inner towers.
   
8. Once you have clearly a path to the town centre occupy it with your army making sure to stay out of range of any uncaptured towers.
   
9. The enemy should try to retake the town centre and be decimated by your defenders. If not use your hero's to pick off the enemy units in detail until the town surrenders.
   [o/list]