ROMANCE of the THREE KINGDOMS XIII

[Kong Wen]

Guys, Koei has finally released a new Romance of the Three Kingdoms game in the west in an official English translation, and they've put it on console to boot.

Summoning Drauks, Niahak, Pluvius, Kiwi?, Jordan, etc.!

I'm still waiting for Amazon to ship my PS4 copy. I'm probably going to go snag a copy from the EB beside work to bridge the gap, but I don't want to sacrifice the pre-order bonuses and $20 discount I got from Amazon... But I don't know how long Kong Rong of Beihai can wait before he begins his glorious unification of the Han!

[Niahak]

Got it on Steam, but haven't had the chance to play it just yet. I was traveling a bunch and then had guests over the weekend, but hoping to get the chance to start it up this week.

[Kong Wen]

I'll have to share my Kong Wen stats so you can recruit me (or execute me) in your game.

[Drauks]

I picked up for the PS4. I'm glad there's an officer focus again, though I figure at this point, there really should be an option to play however, no? A lot has been... simplified, though I've yet to expand large enough to see how Viceroys and districts play out in a larger kingdom.

[Jordan]

I'm going to be honest. I don't like the game. As somebody who loves Three Kingdoms novel and historical related things as well as ROTKs VII, VIII & X in particular, it surprised me how little I enjoyed XIII. As a contrast: I spent 300+ hours on NA: SOI but only about 20 on XIII before I dropped it.

The game has a litany of problems, but I think there are three main issues:

-The game is pretty shallow on both a strategic and tactical level.
-The real time aspects of the game simply do not work, especially when everything is real time and happens concurrently.
-The AI sucks.

I wrote a longer critique here.

[Kong Wen]

I wrote a longer critique here.

Well-articulated critiques! I wonder if they'll eventually give us the PUK as a paid expansion in the west? That might fix some issues. I'm not particularly a fan of the officer-focused RTK games anyway (I mean, they're still the best games of all time, just not better than the kingdom-focused high-strategy ones which are the best best games of all time), so I'm not too turned off to learn of deficiencies in that area. But the strategic and tactical imbalances do seem somewhat concerning. I'll see how they play out.

[Kong Wen]

So far my main critiques are with the interface. The UI on top of the playing field is not very intelligent/reactive, so if you scroll your cursor up to the top of the screen to plant a destination, for example, your cursor can get under some UI elements and you can't see exactly what you're pointing at until you scroll the screen all the way up. There are also different pages of "tooltip" style button help items, so sometimes you'll see a handy guide showing you want you want to do and how to do it (select all units), and sometimes you won't (zoom?).

My only other complaint so far, bearing in mind that I haven't played anything in the main game yet, is that the tutorial isn't quite as snappy as some earlier ones. The first few stages of Hero Mode double as the tutorial, which is fine, but sometimes it just tells you to do stuff without really telling you how. I've ended up dicking around in the city as Lu Bu for a week before realizing I had to go execute the commands I just proposed.

I've completed three Hero Mode stages so far (Liu Bei intro, Cao Cao intro, Lu Bu intro). Gameplay is fine so far. Duels and Debates are disappointingly similar, mechanically. I would have liked them to be quite distinct like they were in earlier games.

From a historical/narrative standpoint, I'm disappointed that the game is going all-in on the Dynasty Warriors characterizations. I mean, I can understand that they need more people playing their strategic games, and Dynasty Warriors actually has a pretty decent install rate, but RTK is supposed to be the historical counterpart. Cao Cao's intro says outright that he is motivated by evil and malice. Give me a break! All I can say is thank fuck they didn't use some of the more ridiculous character models/portraiture (e.g. Xu Zhu, Dian Wei).

[Niahak]

I played a bunch of this over the weekend. A few thoughts:

As a tutorial, the later Hero Mode scenarios (Sun Jian + Cao Cao pt. 2) are actually pretty tough. I'm trying to learn the game at the same time as there is a fairly rigid time limit - which actually ran out immediately before I finished each scenario the first time! It's especially disappointing to get the "sorry, you have exceeded the time limit" when the game gives you no warning how much time you have left! (I eventually did find where it says the time limit, but it was in a very unintuitive place)

I don't like some of the changes they've made:

• Troops are now passively recruited, which makes taking empty cities a no-brainer if you have even a single officer to drop there.
• Historical mode is wonderfully historical until it isn't. In my first "real" game, I was serving under Sun Jian. Immediately following the imperial seal events, he was killed in battle and Sun Ce joined Yuan Shu... and then we all stayed there. I suppose I could look up the event requirements, but it was pretty disappointing! I ended up turning off historical events in my second game.
• Village system is not intuitive and it's not clear exactly how bonuses like +2 LEA work. Do they apply to the governor or all units in the area?
• AI is pretty darn dumb in combat.
• Accumulating money as a regular old officer is way too easy! Where are these monthly 300g bonuses coming from? How is the city not broke?

All that said, I don't really play RTK games for the challenge, especially the officer-based ones. Combat is actually pretty fun, even if the administration stuff is all simultaneously too simple and too complicated - as a governor, I wish I could auto-approve officer suggestions. And I wish I could auto-resolve debates or duels, since it's way too easy to take out Bandit Chieftain #10.

I'm glad that there is no detriment to not being present for all the empire-planning meetings, since when I bent over backwards to make it to all of them I found I was cancelling my one productive activity for the month.

All in all - I'd love to see older entries on Steam, since I do think they're better, but I still am enjoying this one for now.

From a historical/narrative standpoint, I'm disappointed that the game is going all-in on the Dynasty Warriors characterizations. I mean, I can understand that they need more people playing their strategic games, and Dynasty Warriors actually has a pretty decent install rate, but RTK is supposed to be the historical counterpart. Cao Cao's intro says outright that he is motivated by evil and malice. Give me a break! All I can say is thank fuck they didn't use some of the more ridiculous character models/portraiture (e.g. Xu Zhu, Dian Wei).

Same here! I really dislike Cao Cao's "yar har, I'm evil, bwaaagh" persona. Some other characters are too DW-y for my taste (Huang Gai, for example), but others aren't like their DW characters at all. I was so sad when I saw Liu Bei using a single sword in a cutscene. Then his combat portrait uses two! Even when they're trying to be consistent with their other games, they're inconsistent.

Also, the way the portraits "breathe" during dialogue is unnerving.

[Drauks]

Psh, I for one welcome most aspects of Dian Wei, bald Caucasian or otherwise.

Historical mode is wonderfully historical until it isn't. In my first "real" game, I was serving under Sun Jian. Immediately following the imperial seal events, he was killed in battle and Sun Ce joined Yuan Shu... and then we all stayed there. I suppose I could look up the event requirements, but it was pretty disappointing! I ended up turning off historical events in my second game.

I concur with this. Although I've noticed that seeing and playing through events has seemed to open up more portraits, those associated with existing officers as well as non-associated ones, for edit mode. I could be making an incorrect correlation, but I have noticed (and welcomed) the additions.

[Kong Wen]

I concur with this. Although I've noticed that seeing and playing through events has seemed to open up more portraits, those associated with existing officers as well as non-associated ones, for edit mode. I could be making an incorrect correlation, but I have noticed (and welcomed) the additions.

I know you definitely get portraits for unlocking achievements/trophies, and some of those are related to viewing certain historical events, so maybe that's the correlation. Or maybe there are just way more portraits so you unlock them for basically everything.

To Niahak's earlier point about Hero Mode becoming a pretty challenging tutorial, I definitely agree that it can be seen as a tutorial/learn to play mode in the early stages, but there are so many of them, and they ramp the difficulty up enough, that I honestly consider it its own full-game mode after the first few stages. Some of them are basically short scenarios where you have to do everything: city, officer relations, and wars. That's a whole scenario packed into a short time limit.