Another year, another war.
First thing’s first: I gave Chai Tea Latte the choice of bachelors in the country, and she’s decided to marry the dashing prince
Ke Bineng. Wikipedia says he was “just, honest, and charismatic.” Sounds like a romance novel in the making: 21st-century Canadian woman charms barbarian khan. Anyhow, this means that any time Chai’s armies are in close proximity with her husband’s, they’ll both get combat boosts.
And while we’re celebrating, I’m going to get married, too.
It would be gauche to send Chai off to conquer another city during her honeymoon, so in accordance with our plan, I’m launching a two-pronged attack on Chaisang. Jim and the Mammograms will lead the expedition from Lujiang, with Sauce and K. Thor sweeping down from Jiangxia in the northwest.
Supplying this expedition is a challenge, especially because Jiangxia was just recently conquered. I’ve resorted to confiscating supplies from the people, which won’t make them happy.
Sun Ce’s attack comes up short, and we’re able to capture Chaisang without much resistance.
This puts us in full control of Yang Province. Game-Frank West seems to think that Huainan should be next: we can finish off Huainan by capturing Shouchun. The conquest also bring us to the Emperor’s attention. He promotes me, and I pass on promotions to you.
The XP bonus for taking all of Yang Province also lets me level up and add another advisor. Cang Ci is going to help reduce our supply consumption.
Most of our cities are prospering and growing, especially the ones south of the river, but natural disasters are hurting growth in Jianan and Jiangxia.
Our other neighbors continue to seek alliances with us, giving us cash and special items. The cash I keep: the special items, I pass on to worthy officers.
Speaking of cash, I’m spending a lot of it trying to get Yuan Shao’s governors to revolt against him. Eventually I’m able to get Han Meng, who’s kind of a nobody, to rise up in revolt. He’s still independent at the end of the year, but he won’t last for long. At least he’s a distraction.
I’ve tried to focus our recruiting efforts on officers of Yuan Shao. Our biggest wins this year are
Yu Jin, who’s considered one of the Five Elite Generals;
Meng Da, who’s a crafty warrior; high-spirited fighter
Hou Cheng, Lu Qian, a decent all-rounder; and former independent warlord
Zhang Xiu.Yuan Shao isn’t much deterred, though. He takes out Kong Rong and, more worryingly, Lu Bu. With China’s most feared warrior on his side, he’s going to be even harder to defeat.
Fortunately, we’re able to convince Lu Bu’s daughter, Lu Lingqi, to join us instead. She doesn’t exist in real life or in the novel on which this game is based, which leads me to believe the guys at Koei Tecmo just wanted another excuse to draw a good-looking lady with a cheongsam-straining set of tits.
It’s October 198, and here’s the situation in China and on our northern and western fronts.
Can anything stop Yuan Shao? Perhaps. After all, he has three sons who don’t really like each other, so if we can hold out until he dies…
Options include:
1. Finish off Liu Biao by going west to Xinye, or crossing the river to take Jiangling in the south and Xiangyang in the north. We’d control the Yangtze gorge and force any attackers to make multiple river crossings to get to us, and if we take two of those three cities, we’ll get a bonus for controlling Northern Jing Province (extra XP for everyone).
2. Take Shouchun from Zhuge Jin. This will complete our control of Huainan Provice and give us a big XP bonus, plus it would cut our espionage costs in half. It would also set up a natural geographic boundary with Yuan Shao, as there’s a small river running between Shouchun and his city of Xiaopei.
3. Zhang Chao’s only got 8,266 men and seven officers in Guangling. He’s easy prey.
4. We’d have to march through the mountains to take out Sun Ce in Changsha. His cities are small, so it might not be worthwhile, but complete conquest of his territory would give us the chance to hire the Sun clan as our officers. Some of them are quite talented.
5. Shi Xie controls small cities. He’s built up a sizable army (32,000 men in Nanhai), but his officer corps is weak.
6. There’s an ancient Chinese proverb: “only suckers fight fair.” (Or at least it’s an ancient Chinese proverb now that we’ve tampered with the timeline.) If we focus on shipping supplies north of the river, we can outfit our boundaries with walls, traps, arrow towers, and other nasty things that could sway battles in our favor when Yuan Shao inevitably decides to come for us.
7. Some other thing.
What’s next for us?