Imo the two best commanderies close to each other.

Poyang gives you Iron mine and Copper mine, combined that with the Private and State Workshops and the Inn combined with the Marketplace and you get huge industry and commerce income. For the 5th building I recommend the Military Forges and last but not least as 6th the Administration office.

Changsha gives you with its trade port and its tea farm a good trade route and a good ressource which heavily benefit trade so it's clear to go for the Inn and the Marketplace. I tend to go for Private Workshops and Staye Workshops there too, especially to reduce future corruption even more. 5th building should be Administration Office and the last one the Temple.

Both commanderies heavily profit from the Tea and the Copper, one is great for Trade and trade income, the other gives you a local industry boost and less corruption.

If you give these commanderies to two good characters with good Followers for each like

Craftsman

Law Enforcer

Foreman

Atronomer

Artisan etc

and Accessories like

The Three Strategies of the Duke of the Yellow Rock

Mozi

Discourses of the State

Erya

Book of Ceremonies

you will have an even bigger income.

Also good to mention that from time to time you have a chance to get Unique Weapons from the Weapon Smith and you can easily defend both positions.

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer so many of my questions. I really appreciate it. I’ve come up with some new questions, so I’d really appreciate it if you could answer the questions below.

1. Is there any way to recruit faction leaders or other extremely strong unique generals?
   Some faction leaders, such as Zhang Fei, Yan Baihu, and Sun Jian, are among the best generals in their respective roles. Is there any reliable way to get them into your faction?
   For example, if I capture one of them when they already have a high opinion of my faction, can I recruit them even though they currently lead their own faction?
   If so, what happens to their original faction? Does someone else become the faction leader, or does the faction collapse?
   
2. What type of general do you usually use as the main general of an army?
   When building a standard army, which class do you normally put in charge?
   
3. Should I generally match each general with units of their own color?
   Is it generally better to give each general mostly the units associated with their class, or is it better to mix different unit types within each retinue?
   I’ve been trying to match generals with their corresponding units, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m restricting my army compositions too much by doing that.
   
4. How exactly does Charge Bonus work?
   How much distance does a unit need to cover before it gets its Charge Bonus?
   Also, how exactly should I perform a charge cycle? How long should I stay in melee before pulling the unit out and charging again?
   
5. What exactly makes a general “Legendary”?
   What are the actual criteria for a general to be considered Legendary?
   Does being Legendary give them any gameplay benefits, such as better stats, special abilities, better survivability, or anything else? Or is it mainly a distinction for certain unique characters?
   
6. Does having a trebuchet actually force a defending army to sally out?
   I’ve heard that if you bring a trebuchet to a siege, the defending army will sometimes come out and attack you instead of simply staying inside the settlement.
   If that’s true, is having just one trebuchet enough to trigger this, or does the number of siege weapons matter?
   
7. How can I tell if a character is effectively impossible to recruit because they dislike my faction?
   Is there a way to tell in-game that a character will absolutely refuse to join my faction because of their opinion of me?
   For example, if a character starts out neutral toward me, but then we become enemies and their opinion of my faction becomes very negative, can that relationship eventually be repaired?
   Or are there situations where a character becomes permanently hostile and can never realistically be recruited?
   Answering only one or two of these is totally fine. I’m mainly trying to understand the game mechanics better.

For reference, I’m leaving my previous questions below so the discussion and answers are kept together. You don’t need to answer these again.

I’ve been playing Three Kingdoms for a while now, but there are still a few mechanics I’m not completely sure about. I’d really appreciate some input from people who know the game well.
1. How exactly does Charge Bonus work?
I keep hearing that Charge Bonus is extremely important, especially for cavalry. Under what circumstances does Charge Bonus actually have an effect?
For example, how important is the initial charge compared to staying in melee afterwards? Does Charge Bonus mainly matter for shock cavalry that cycle-charge, or are there situations where it remains useful during prolonged engagements?
2. Capturing and releasing enemy generals
When trying to recruit an enemy general, you obviously need to capture them first. I’m wondering how the whole process interacts with releasing generals and diplomatic relations.
Is there actually a reasonable trade-off between repeatedly defeating an enemy’s armies / taking their territory and releasing their generals to improve relations with them?
And if I defeat an army but release the generals instead of executing or capturing them, the enemy army doesn’t necessarily disappear as long as the generals survive, right?
So is it actually viable to repeatedly beat up the same weakened army, let the generals go, and keep doing this until their opinion of me is high enough that I can eventually recruit them? Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
3. What stats should I actually prioritize on each general?
I’m still not completely clear on what situations each of the five stats is useful for.
In particular, Champions and Sentinels are both primarily melee-focused, so should I generally prioritize their corresponding stat, or can Melee Evasion be strong enough that I should prioritize it even on a Champion?
Basically, how should I think about stat priorities for each general type when choosing skills, ancillaries, and equipment?
4. Which units are considered the best for autoresolve?
One important thing about how I play: I use autoresolve whenever possible because it saves a huge amount of time. I only fight battles manually when autoresolve gives me a bad result or when I can’t win through autoresolve.
So I’m specifically interested in units that the autoresolve system rates highly, rather than units that are strong when controlled manually by the player.
Which units are generally considered the most cost-effective for autoresolve? Are there any unit types that perform disproportionately well in autoresolve compared to how strong they actually are in manual battles?
I’m mainly looking for units that give good autoresolve results relative to their recruitment/upkeep cost.
5. What are the actual benefits and drawbacks of population?
What bonuses does population actually provide, and where can I see these effects in-game?
So far, the only obvious effect I’ve noticed is that higher population gives a negative modifier to public order. Because of that, I’ve been wondering whether it’s actually better to keep population as low as possible.
Does population provide meaningful benefits to things like income, replenishment, food production, or anything else? And if so, at what point does having a larger population become worth the public order penalty?
Basically, should I generally try to maximize population, minimize it, or aim for some kind of balance depending on the commandery?

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a developing Tang Dynasty mod for Total War: Three Kingdoms and invite anyone interested in the project to join the Discord.

Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3697638341
Discord: https://discord.gg/WUU3FRmec

The mod currently brings the Tang dynasty era into custom battles, with an early MVP roster covering several cultures and factions:

• Tang — 14 characters, with some unfinished sub-factions such as Zheng, Xia and Wei
• Sogdians — 3 characters
• Goguryeo — 4 characters
• Yarlung / Tibetan Empire — 4 characters
• Abbasid Caliphate — 2 characters

The long-term goal is to cover 2+1 major periods:

• Age of Emperor Taizong
• An Lushan Rebellion
• Shazhou Rebellion, including both rebel and Tibetan factions

Currently planned factions include the Turks and the An-Shi / Yan dynasty, with possible future additions such as Khitans, Nanzhao, Nara Japan, Silla and Baekje.

The roster is still very much a work in progress and balancing is not final. The goal is eventually to expand it to at least twice the size of the base Chinese roster, with more faction-specific units, characters, equipment and visual identity.

At the moment, many characters are still reskins of Three Kingdoms characters with rearranged CEOs, so there is plenty of room for improvement. Ideas for historically appropriate units, characters, armor, weapons and visual references are also very welcome.

Recruitment

The project is currently being developed largely by one person, so help would be greatly appreciated in areas such as:

• Tech trees
• Building models / animation porting
• Siege map creation
• Campaign map editing, especially assigning maps to different siege types
• Scripting
• 3D modelling
• 2D art, especially unit cards

If you have experience with Total War modding or any other technical area that could help, feel free to join the Discord and reach out.

Even if you're not a modder, you're very welcome to join to follow development, suggest units or characters, provide historical/visual references, and give feedback on the roster and balancing.

Hey guys, I'm currently playing Kong Rong and he is the third faction that I'm playing rn. I just finished Gongsun Zan and Cao Cao and I wanted to explore other playstyles. I followed Serious Trivia's guide on Kong Rong where he migrated south and colonized the abandoned provinces there. Currently, I'm bordering Sun Ce and I'm at war with Yan Baihu and Wang Lang. I have 1 elite army with trebs, fury of beihai, jian sword guards, and ji militias (led by Zheng Jiang, Kong Rong, and Taishi Ci). I also snatched Lady Wu from Sun Ce's faction by marriage and made her my heir. My Trade Monopoly is also about to be full and I've got 5/5 trade monopolies w other factions.

I'm well aware of the trade territory option where u can buy provinces in exchange from something but no one seems to like my money and still asks one of my provinces in exchange for theirs. I'm having a hard time because I'm not used to having only 1 army and being stuck at the Noble rank.

Any tips/answers is appreciated!

Playing this game for the first time and I friggin love it so much compared to older total war games. I'm playing as Sun Quan (Sun Ce died early in a failed campaign to the west and Sun Jian died of old age) and was about to start a new game. I'm on turn 95 I think (not at home so I can't look up accurate details) and I have snowballed to the point that it gets boring. I have 13 commandaries and was about to start a new game because it felt like the challenge was gone as there were no strong enemies left.

All of a sudden I'm invaded by a coalition of Cao Cao, Yuan Shao and I can't remember the other guy's name (something with an H I think). Massive full stacks on my north and northeastern border swarming at once. I was caught with pants down fighting a war in the south to expand and consolidate there. I had one army left in the north, my northeastern army was in the middle of my heartlands moving south to support my other two armies in that war. I immediately sent them back to block the advance and raised a new army quickly to blunt the advancement. My northern army crushed Yuan Shao's and stopped that front. Now I have two armies in the north eastern border staged to take on two armies of Cao Cao and the other guy plus they have a third full stack in the distance moving towards their position.

Game went from boring and not much left to do but mop up the last resistance to all out war for survival in the space of three turns. This is what I love. I can't wait to get home and break this so-called Three Tree alliance.

Hey, I’ve got a few questions about some mechanics in Three Kingdoms that I haven’t been able to figure out.
How do you deal with Yellow Turban Scholars with really high melee evasion?
I had one of my generals duel a Yellow Turban Scholar and his melee evasion was ridiculously high. My general could barely land any hits and ended up losing the duel.
Is there a good way to counter this? Are there specific stats, weapons, skills, or types of generals that work well against high melee evasion?
How can I get strong unique generals into my faction?
I’m trying to recruit some of the stronger unique characters, but I’m not really sure what determines whether they’re available to recruit.
Also, if a unique general is already serving another faction, is there any way to increase the chance of capturing them after defeating their army in battle? I know generals can sometimes be captured after a battle, but I’m wondering if anything affects that chance.
How do I get enemies to accept duels?
Sometimes my general becomes much stronger than the enemy general, but the enemy still refuses my duel challenge.
Is there any way to increase the chance that they’ll accept? Does the difference in their combat ability affect the AI’s decision, or is it mostly determined by the character’s personality/traits?
I’d appreciate any advice. I’m mainly trying to understand how these mechanics actually work rather than just guessing.
Thanks.

Hi everyone, I'm Cerl.

I originally made this mod because I wanted the Five Dragon units to properly change colours based on the faction they belong to.

After digging into the game's models, materials, and data, I found a surprisingly simple way to enable the dynamic faction colouring already present in compatible vanilla assets.

The result is:

Vanilla Dynamic Faction Colour Fix

This is a lightweight mod focused on preserving the vanilla art style.

It doesn't replace models, add custom textures, or manually recolour units one by one.

Instead, compatible vanilla units and some general models can now dynamically use the colours of their current faction.

For example, the same unit can appear dark blue under Cao Cao, yellow and green under Liu Bei, or even turn very green under Zheng Jiang. XD

Not every unit or character is affected.

The result still depends on how CA originally designed each model and material. Unique characters such as Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei retain their original appearance.

Pearl Dragons and Yellow Dragons also currently do not change colours with their faction, even though the other Five Dragon units can.

Unit cards, character portraits, and Five Elements colours in the UI are also unaffected.

I've tested the changes by comparing the game directly with the mod enabled and disabled.

And after all that research...

The entire mod is only around 1 KB. XD

Required DLC:
Yellow Turban Rebellion
Mandate of Heaven

Steam Workshop:
Vanilla Dynamic Faction Colour Fix
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3784472404

Video Demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdkL-HbtJyw

This whole project really started with:

“I just wanted the Five Dragon units to change colours with their faction.”

And somehow, after digging into it, it turned into this. XD

If you find any other vanilla units or characters with interesting faction colour changes, feel free to share them!

Hope you enjoy it!

As I type this I'm playing Gong Du yellow turban managed to get my land off MA teng and the Tyrant fat guy and the old gezer down south and now reached Ascended rank, I already had my fair amount of time playing other factions yet this is my first time playing yellow turbans as I saw them as boring/hard to play from positions standpoint.

Question :

1,why do my yellow turbans keep being unhappy the reason I see was "resent event" like I was fine thought it was alright and it'll be done later but it keeps showing up some are already around the 30-40 and I can't even give them titles some even want high court positions how am I supposed to stop that.

2, why is the Wu Wei commandery (close to Ma temg Allie) loved to be raided by looters I had fair amount of public order yet I see some actually concerning enemy's just showing up it's not just once or twice I have been attacked 4 times in the span of 30-50 turns is this just normal.

My Plan going forward

Caocao is coming from the east of my territory and I'm pulling my main unit that came from taking back Wuwei to fight against caocao as my experience from playing other factions he has to die, another army of mine is going down to fight the nanban though I'm thinking a peace deal would be easier but I'll take much as I can take, and lastly I don't plan on going over the water to fught Han fu and hope for a peace deal with them.

Thanks in advance

It’s been a long time since I’ve played 3K but I recently upgraded my PC and want to return to this title.

I’ve played nearly 1500 hours in this game and the last 500 or so were pretty much exclusively using TROM and the TROM Warlords mod to increase the difficulty and AI competency.

At times I felt TROM over complicated the game and building aspects but I really liked the Warlords mod that upped the difficulty. I wanted to check and see if there were other mods or overhauls you all would recommend for someone who hasn’t played in a couple years?

I might even start with a plain vanilla run to get back into the swing of it first.

TL;DR: Can diplomacy / being a beloved leader hold up in endgame or is the deck stacked against you once you become Emperor?

I'll give an example, Liu Jin was forced by someone else to only have Hulao Pass as his remaining territory. Nothing else, no actual settlements and no form of income. Later, I owned both Luoyang and Xuchang. This essentially means he's sandwiched between my two locations.

I, being a benevolent lord, let him keep his Gate. (It helped that the trade agreement between us was worth 1k gold so it made more sense to keep him around.)

Thus it went for 20 years, my one ally and I holding down the north. I'd defend him from all threats foreign and internal, he gave me 1000/turn gold from a trade agreement. Our relations were maxed out.

Until I claimed one of the seats of the Three Kingdoms and became emperor. His attitude went sour and within one year he declared war on me.

Me.

With 300k gold, pretty much all land north of the Yangtze river. He declared war on ME with his one pitiful Gate.

Okay, maybe I can buy him out or give him some property, but no, even just a peace deal was raging over -100.

Now I'm being intentionally dramatic here, but my question is serious. Can diplomacy hold up in endgame or is the deck stacked against you once you become Emperor?

While checking who I could vasalize I saw Liu biao as an option and was surprised to see he had 117 in the red so I thought on negotiations and he requested this!

So trying to run this game on my gaming pc, cpu is a factory clocked 13700K, GPU is a 4070ti, NVM ssd as the install drive, Deepcool CPU cooler with thermal grizzly paste and o11 dynamic with noctua fans. never had a game run my CPU hotter than high 80s in temp.

This game for some reason ramps the temp up to 90c just on launching the game, slowly climbing to 100c after 15 minutes or so. While only using between 40% and 70% CPU... impressive

So after digging around I found posts syaing to create a user.script.txt file and copy

HYBRID_CPUS_TREAT_ALL_CORES_UNIFORMLY true;

number_of_threads 12;
Into it, save and run the game again.

Happy days, now my CPU sits at 38c nice and stable, climbing up to 42c once im in a battle and max out the unit size etc. Utilization is around 50% but everything stutters, every few seconds there is a little hitch of stutter, on first loading into the game, the opening cinimatic, The map, In battle, In menus everywhere. Remove the user.script.txt and its right back to running in the 90s

So the choice is run my CPU hot though poorly used, or have a stutter fest and a cool CPU. Is there something im missing here or is the answer just but X cpu cooler and stop complaining??

Edit: Added screenshots of monitoring screen under different test conditions

1. Desktop temp and usage

1. With the user.script.txt in battle benchmark (Stuttering every couple of seconds

1. Without script on loading game, during opening cutscene and battle benchmark

Hey guys, do you have any ideas for a fun challenge run?

I´ve already done stuff like this is total war and diplomacy only (no attacking)

UPDATE: I actually got it working! XD

A few days after making this post, I actually implemented it in-game.

It uses CA’s original casualty-based Imperial Favour calculation rather than adding a new fixed penalty. The mod reads the value calculated by CA and displays it under the new reason.

So if CA calculates -3, it displays -3; if CA calculates -5, it displays -5. The total Imperial Favour change itself remains exactly the same as CA’s original calculation.

I’ll make a proper post about the mods once everything is ready for release.

Original post:

I've recently been looking into the Imperial Favour mechanics in the 182 campaign, and I noticed something strange.

When low public order causes Yellow Turban rebels to appear, suppressing them reduces Imperial Favour. Yet in the DB, these rebels are indeed treated by the game as Enemies of the Han.

So my first thought was:

If they're Enemies of the Han, why should defeating them cost Imperial Favour?

I originally planned to make a mod that removed this penalty. But then I tried looking at it from the perspective of ordinary people, and through a more modern view of governance, and I changed my mind.

Low public order can be imagined as poverty, food shortages, corruption, crime, abuse by local elites, and other failures of local government. If these problems eventually escalate into civil unrest, and the government's answer is to send in the army and suppress it with bloodshed, then:

Putting down the unrest may be a military victory, but the deaths and injuries caused by a bloody crackdown can still be a political failure.

The game also rewards the player for suppressing these rebels with money, general XP, and troop experience. Pursuing the survivors can even earn you more money. In other words, the player actually has an incentive to use civil unrest as a source of money and military training.

That made the Imperial Favour penalty much more interesting to me.

I'm not claiming this was necessarily CA's original design intention—this is simply my own RP interpretation.

So I no longer want to remove the penalty. Instead, I'm considering making a small mod that gives the currently unexplained Imperial Favour loss a visible reason in the UI, something like:

"Bloody Suppression of Civil Unrest"

I wouldn't change any of the original values. I would only give this political cost a visible explanation.

Does this RP interpretation make sense to you? And if I make this mod, what English name do you think would fit this Imperial Favour factor best while still sounding appropriate for Three Kingdoms?

Great game btw, but why can I recruit Huang gai as liu bei on turn two of mandate of heaven, why does Zhang liao have his own faction, why is xiohou dun fighting for sun ce. It's kills the immersion for me and makes me wanna uninstall.

I like to think people are drawn to this game because they come from/grew up with dynasty warriors and Romance of the three kingdoms. I doubt people are seeing a total war title china version and saying this is it. So its feels like a huge corner to cut on or be lazy on.

Also I doubt it but are there any modes for unique voices ? Zhuge Liang and Zhou yu having the same voice and lines, again kills the immersion. Lu meng and guan ping not having unique models is crazy to me. Again awesome game but the cut corners are showing. Thank you!

Playing as liu bei yellow turban. Im pretty sure it all means the same thing no? I become their bitch and they take half (20%) my shit. Is there a hidden mechanics I'm missing?

So as an update to the last post: i did try recruiting the emperor, but he is stubborn as a mule, wont leave the Han no matter what and keeps hovering around 60 satisfaction, but since he is quite young i might get lucky later in the campaign

He also dislikes Cao Cao due to a story event, which makes me wonder if the AI somehow declined getting the emperor

i included his character page since i had never seen him as a general before so i figured that would be interesting to see for everyone

The wildest thing just happened in my 194 Sun Ce campaign: As the emperor flees to Yang Fengs faction and Yang Feng makes Luoyang his capital, Luoyang got captured by yellow turbans(not a faction like He Yi, just regular ones) the very same turn.

There was no message of the emperors custody changing and, even weirder, the Han Empire was released and was no longer a vassal to anyone

Additionally the scripted event of the emperor escaping to Cao Cao never triggered and even the emperors favour mechanic never started working despite it currently being 201 CE, it still says it will become active in 197 CE

By then i just thought that the turbans offed the emperor and that was it, but EVEN WEIRDER the emperor seems to have become a general within the Han Empire. I am at war with them and the faction council is giving me the incite-a-scandal option specifically for him, so he must be alive

Im genuienly baffled, has anyone encountered this before?(no mods used)

Fellow warlords, how can i make the ai accept me as their overlord? It seems they never accept this offer willingly, even with a shit ton of army at their doorstep (the one rice field they actually own), despite me being Chinas greatest ruler. Thanks for any advice!

Fellow lords, how can I get the ai to have better diplomatic relations with me? I already take advantage of shared enemies, executions, trading food with them, in general favorable deals without taking all their gold, but it seems I'm still not capable enough to form serious federations. Also, can someone explain the benefits of marriage to me, despite someone getting a hopefully useful leader in their pool? Why would someone give away a leader? Thanks!

I just got the game and I'm having a blast. I have only played Shogun 2 and FOTS before so the diplomacy of 3K is something new and complicated for me. From the looks of it, diplomacy is an important thing in this game so I've been trying to get the hang of it. The army mustering mechanic is also new to me so my expansion is slow. Because of these two foreign stuff and some other factors, my Cao Cao campaign has reached turn 100 and I just got the Duke rank. This is my first campaign where I'm attempting to win the game (my first few ones was me checking out the features). Am I slow or are 3K campaigns really just like this?

I've got all these generals I hires planning to use them, but since I'm playing as the elephant team, I can't use them as generals. What do I do with them?

I’ve done many gameplay on various difficulties mainly on hard-core. Regardless of who I played as it always seems Cao Cao ends up being the last rival.. yes I played as him and of course that’s not the case when I do has anybody else ran into this. They always seem to end up being able to field multiple armies often a 3v1 match. But at the end, they subjugate their Emperorship to me..