This Old Neon Forum

I got made a viceroy once I hit rank 2.

I few thoughts:

• It's nice to have more direct control over my own cities' policies
• It's fun to get to pick and move around my officers (finally) - as governor, I got to keep what I recruited which was handy, but there was no guarantee they would stick with me since my lord could pluck them from me at any moment. Managed to keep Gan Ning, Huang Zhong, and a couple mid-90s INT/GOV advisors.
• It sucks to have to manually defend when attacks happen in "real-time" - you get a single warning that an attack is happening, and it's easy to miss it or assume that the local governor can handle it. Not a mistake I'll make again, though!
• On the same note... when you're commanding a battle in real-time and you want to "back out" and give commands to your governors... can you go back into the battle? The help stuff is not at all clear about how this works.
• There are still way too many "confirm this suggestion by an officer" bits... although I only now noticed after playing several hours that they suggest an activity and not a goal/duration - and that you should fill in one that's not the minimum most of the time!
• Training under another officer to improve your skills is great until you have to dual/debate them for them to rank up your skill. Especially if you have 80 in the relevant stat and they have 97. I've learned not to make friends with Huang Zhong.
• Loyalty is weird in this one! Instead of promoting/rewarding officers for loyalty boosts, all that is done automatically and doesn't factor into LOY. Instead, you as their commander have to gift them items/booze? Or is there a better way to improve it?

Kong Wen - what are your custom char stats? I'll probably start a second game and add you in once I wrap up this one. It'd be fun to see Kong Rong do more than flounder. I usually give Gongsun Zan a good adviser but it's not enough to keep him afloat.

Niahak wrote:On the same note... when you're commanding a battle in real-time and you want to "back out" and give commands to your governors... can you go back into the battle? The help stuff is not at all clear about how this works.

My one experience with trying to "back out" of the battles ended up with my chosen character's unit retreating, then disbanding upon exiting. Troops went back to my city, and I had to return solo. It was a very large battle, and the city I returned to was close by and had just enough troops for me to reform and dive back in, though. Still, time had passed, and it was ultimately a loss.

Side note, should we all just share characters and stats?

Drauks wrote:My one experience with trying to "back out" of the battles ended up with my chosen character's unit retreating, then disbanding upon exiting. Troops went back to my city, and I had to return solo. It was a very large battle, and the city I returned to was close by and had just enough troops for me to reform and dive back in, though. Still, time had passed, and it was ultimately a loss.

Side note, should we all just share characters and stats?

Ugh. I'll hold out on backing out of battles, then. Hope Liu Zhang stays off my front lawn!

I'm playing as Cheng Pu, but I tossed in his son Cheng Zi for a little more flavor (born 183 or so) and was way too nice to him given his bit role. I think I gave him 70/70/75/80 or something. If I choose a more challenging/interesting new character, I'll share them.

The localization only lets you use 6 characters for family name (dunno about given), so you can't create a Gongsun. Sad!

I'm away from my game on vacation at the moment, but I'll definitely share my true to life (and thus OP) Kong when I get home.

I always create Wong Yu of Changsha (born in 165). He's not a very intelligent soul, and starts with 77/84/65/57. As soon as he builds up enough force, he strikes out at as many Liu as he can feasibly take on. If he falls out of power, I usually have him link up with the Sun.

In previous ROTK games, I always just created historical characters that were missing from the series. They included things like Zuo Chengzu, who Kong Rong executed for treason for DARING to suggest he ally with Cao Cao or Yuan Shao, Gongsun Du officers, various grand administrators of Jing and Jiao, Zhang Lu's mother and Sun Jian's sister, to give a few examples.

I also would sometimes make Yuan Shao's sadistic yandere waifu, but they actually included her in this title. Good on them.

I'm really butthurt that unlike NA: SOI, however, this game doesn't allow you to (easily) add in custom portraits. You have to basically hack the game in order to do that, which is too much of a pain in the ass for your's truly. That kind of sapped my desire to bother with custom characters. I earnestly hope that they consider patching the feature in soon. Despite the game's flaws, the simple inclusion of that option might bring me back into the game. I can use it to make a bunch of bullshit factions in the Yellow Turban scenario and see how things play out. If NA: SOI had the portrait customizer, I feel like there is no reason this game shouldn't. Unfortunately, that seems to be a trend with ROTK XIII. KOEI did not spend even a quarter of the effort they did with NA: SOI and the results clearly show. The game is a lazy mess.