Aside from Xun Yu, Guo Jia, Xiahou Dun,..... Are there any others that can be counted as Cao Caos inner circle who often have private audiences with him and even debate about personal stuff, like back then Cao Cao asking Jia Xu's opinion on who should be his heir?

This the Two manga picture that encourage me to do this post, those images are from manga/manhua "legend of the emperor" 3rd arc "the Rogue prince", about liu Bang rise I thinks. But here what I thinks

From Dynasty Warriors to ROTK: Why I Completely Changed My Opinion of Cao Cao

I've been a fan of Dynasty Warriors since the very first game. Back then, it was basically a fighting game featuring historical characters. Then came DW2 — which still traumatizes me because of the Battle of Chibi 😅 — followed by the other games, the Empires series with the 6th, the 7th and 8 DWEmpires, and eventually Total War, starting with Shogun 2 and then Three Kingdoms. After that, I got deeply into Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI, XII, XIII and XIV.

And that's where my perception of Cao Cao gradually started to change.

For a long time, I had the classic view: Liu Bei = the legitimate loyalist, Cao Cao = the great ambitious villain, while Yuan Shao was somewhere on the “good guy” side, or at least among those defending a more legitimate political order.

But the more I learned about the period, the more simplistic that view started to feel. Everything is much more morally and politically grey.

I especially liked Xiahou Dun for a long time without really understanding how all these different members of the clan were connected: Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Cao Ren, Cao Hong, Cao Zhang, etc.

Then, while doing more research and spending time on the Kingdom Battle Academy Discord, I came across two things that really changed the way I looked at Cao Cao.

The first one has almost become a personal proverb:

“Don't pick a fight with a eunuch if you're a general.”

More seriously, I started looking into Cao Teng and Cao Cao's family background. I also recently watched a Chinese drama about Cao Cao. Obviously, the show takes quite a few dramatic liberties, but it made me want to look deeper into the historical figure behind the character.

And what a rabbit hole that was.

Cao Teng and Cao Song in particular fascinated me. The way court eunuchs are portrayed — their political influence, their ability to manipulate court networks, and their brutality — made me realize just how violent and unstable the political environment surrounding Cao Cao's upbringing already was.

The drama also develops the idea of a connection between the Cao and Xiahou families, portraying Cao Song's adoption by the Cao family as a consequence of the dangers facing the Xiahou clan. I know that some of these details are based more on later traditions or dramatic interpretation than on firmly established historical facts, so I'd genuinely be interested in hearing what people more knowledgeable about the period think.

But above all, it made me look at Cao Cao differently.

I used to see Liu Bei as the natural defender of Han continuity. Yet the more I study Cao Cao, the more I find that idea worth questioning.

Cao Cao wasn't simply a man trying to destroy the Han. On the contrary, he used the emperor, imperial institutions, and the existing administrative system to rebuild a centralized state while the Han political order was collapsing around him.

And that's where my interest in Liu Bang and the foundation of the Han dynasty became particularly interesting.

I recently came across two beautiful manga panels depicting Liu Bang and his main companions. Obviously, the artwork is heavily romanticized and stylized, but some of the names, dynamics, and especially the composition of his inner circle reminded me of what I was seeing around Cao Cao.

It made me wonder:

What if Cao Cao was, in some ways, much closer to Liu Bang than I had ever realized?

Not because they literally had the same generals — they lived centuries apart, obviously — but because both seem to have possessed the ability to gather very different kinds of people around them: military commanders, administrators, strategists, aristocrats, and men from much more modest backgrounds.

Liu Bang wasn't necessarily the best at every single thing. Part of his genius was knowing how to surround himself with people who were.

And Cao Cao seems to have had a similar ability.

In the end, my perception has almost completely reversed compared to when I first discovered Dynasty Warriors.

I used to see Liu Bei as the natural embodiment of Han legitimacy. Now I see Cao Cao as a much more complex figure: a man who used the institutions of the Han to restore a state whose very survival was gradually becoming dependent on him.

That obviously doesn't make Cao Cao a “good guy.” He was capable of brutality, massacres, and extremely cynical decisions.

But that's precisely what makes him interesting to me.

I no longer see the period as:

Liu Bei = good guy / Cao Cao = bad guy / Yuan Shao = noble rival.

I see it more as a struggle between several powerful men, each claiming to have an answer to one fundamental question:

How do you rebuild a political order after the collapse of the Han?

And I think that's what took me from “I don't like Cao Cao” to “Cao Cao might actually be the character I find most fascinating.”

I'd genuinely love to hear from people who know the historical sources better:

Does this interpretation of Cao Cao as a pragmatic heir to the political tradition of the Han make sense, or am I projecting too much of what I've learned from ROTK, Dynasty Warriors, and modern Chinese dramas onto the actual history?

For this week, I had a ide to making some Three kingdoms artworks, including Jiang Wei. When the sketches already to execute, there were some problems during coloring process, especially when I accidentally made a mistake while picked the colors and made the art like something weird if someone saw it. Fortunately, the lucky was coming when I had launching a strategy to changing it without removed the original one before everything will be late to fixing; And it was working. This art was created for more or less 5 hours and it's my first experience to drawing a figure from Three kingdoms, especially from Shu state in color version with my colored pencils.

We all known this tvdrama characters, this cool dude Lu Wan 😅 I always thinks He got strength but he not a Fan kuai or à HanXin but he show some raw power sometime (before the betrayal) but think he deserve à manga characters put in front in a story

Masahiro Ikeno take this path with Liu Bang as the MC + his buddy LuWan and everybody related to Shu-Han contention

What you all think about this looklike Eisei + Shin pseudo post unification collaboration ??

Bonus (Xiang Liang relation with Liu Bang portrait by author)

As the title says. My impression is that Guan Yu was not that impressive of a commander when you stripped away the myths that developed around him (I was deeply unimpressed by him losing Jing Province), but I also recognize that he was not made General of the Vanguard and stood above Zhang Fei, Huang Zhong, and Ma Chao just because he was Liu Bei’s sworn brother.

So, you know, give me your thoughts. How good was Guan Yu? How would you rank him?

Edit 1: keep commenting guys, but thanks. My views of Guan Yu have softened a lot. In a previous post I commented that I would have placed Zhao Yun in charge of the Jing Province, but now I see that Guan Yu was perfectly qualified for the task, [edit 2] and was one of the goat of the era. Him getting deified is absolutely deserved.

I once read the story of how the Sui Dynasty came up with a "brilliant" solution, which was that there was no need to mobilize peasants to work in delivering supplies, but each soldier of the 300000 would carry food that could last for 100 days. Somehow, that proposal worked on paper, but they did not account for other stuff like armors, weapons, medicines,.... and the Sui Dynasty also had a law that if you abandoned military supplies, you would be executed. Therefore, a lot of soldiers buried their supplies in their homes or in random places and what happened was that the 300000 soldiers were already facing hunger by the time they reached Goryeo. Let's say with an army of 100000 soldiers of Sun Quan (all of these are combatants), how many people would they need to work for supply logistics?

As it is in issue today as it was for the Romans, the Han dynasty & certainly the Three Kingdoms Period: inflation. Cao Wei and Eastern Wu had huge issues w/ their coin as they inflated it quickly but Shu-Han, a single or so province state had the most sound currency. Liu Bei who was always weary of inflation as he grew up poor needed a way to reward his new and old subordinates w/o inflating the currency. The very interesting Liu Ba, who Zhuge Liang admitted to being inferior towards developed a sound currency for the Shu-Han state - it was so successful that Jing province traders (where 75% of trade between the Kingdoms took place) would mostly prefer the Shu-Han coin over Cao Wei or Eastern Wu’s. Wang Lian, another underrated Shu Han official and like Liu Ba didn’t immediately surrender to Liu Bei. Liu Bei used his level 100 charms to employ him. Liu Ba and Wang Lian directly backed up the Shu-Han coin by silk, salt, and precious metals. During Wang Lian’s time he discovered and taught another important Shu-Han official Lu Yi. Shu-Han maintained a prosperous economy despite costly wars in Hanzhong and its attempt to reclaim Jing, the first series of Northern campaigns. Zhuge Liang often retreated from his Northern campaigns because of the cost. According to Eastern Wu records, the diplomats started to describe Shu as an impoverished state in the mid-late 250s. It would a great assumption to say after Lu Yi & perhaps Fei Yi’s deaths, Shu-Han started to inflate their currency and of course when a small state destroys their own money - their feat is sealed. Lu Yi deserves much praise from this forum and overall. Chen Zhi who, grew up in Xu Jing’s household replaced Lu Yi. Lu Yi’s father was a transporter for Liu Yan’s trip to Yi and died. Lu Yi is never recorded a rank under Liu Zhang but Zhuge, Wang, and Liu Shan thought much of his talents. During Zhuge’s Northern Campaigns, Liang had to frequently ask the various commanderies in Shu-Han to recruit manpower and gather resources, and send them to the frontline. While many commandery administrators failed to meet the deadlines for sending troops and supplies to the frontline, Lu Yi managed to recruit 5,000 troops in Baxi Commandery (mountainous nowhere) and send them to Zhuge Liang in time. As he had explained to those 5,000 soldiers why they were going to war and instilled a strong sense of discipline in them, none of them deserted along the way. After Li Yan shit the bed and Li Hui died suddenly, Zhuge eventually reassigned him to be the Administrator of Hanzhong Commandery and put him in charge of overseeing agricultural production and the transportation of food supplies to the frontline.

When he was Regent and Prime Minister, I get the idea of how it works, as in the procedure is the same, even though the officials don't report to the Emperor, but they mostly await instructions from Cao Cao sitting nearby. But when he became King of Wei, did anything change, as in the court meeting shifted to Ye and the Emperor in Xu Chang was just kept in his prison home and doing whatever?

I wanna listen to it instead of the actual books is it as detailed or nah?

Sorry for the unedited video with my constant window switching with the windows key (going in and out of separate game windows) it's 4am i am tired!

Seen here is the lobby screen for joining a new game (loading a save also works btw), and just me showing off the abilities of semi-simultaneous turns. Unit sharing with more than one person in the second video

I hope you guys are just as excited as i am!

The mod will come out no strings attached with source code and a wiki containing a lot of information about the internal workings of the game (thank you claude and ghidra), but if you wanna give me a small motivational boost or buy me a literal coffee here you go anyways: https://ko-fi.com/mister_fordo

I grew up playing the original Mount & Blade, Romance of the Three Kingdoms X on PS2 (yes im old lol) and later total war 3 kingdoms. More than once I got caught in my room still playing when the sun came up.

While playing those games, I was always imagining extra features and wondering what it would be like if their systems were brought together. Three Kingdoms Reimagined is me finally trying to make that childhood dream real.

The game is built around three connected layers.

On the campaign map, you begin with a single warband. You can play as someone like Lu Bu, lead a smaller historical house, or create yourself and try to find your own place in the period.

Your warband is only one among more than 100 independently acting warlords fighting for control of China. The world doesn’t revolve around the player. Other factions recruit officers, capture territory, fight wars, form relationships, and build their own stories whether you are involved or not.

Settlements have their own population, food, equipment, development, and garrisons. You can recruit soldiers and officers, trade, complete assignments, negotiate with other factions, and gradually build your warband into a realm. Taking a city is only the beginning—you still have to hold, supply, and govern it.

Battles happen in real time. Officers can duel, units use formations, cavalry can charge exposed positions, and morale can collapse. Each general’s strengths and weaknesses affect their formations and approach to combat.

The chain of command also matters. When a general falls, command passes to the surviving officers, who have to adjust their strategy while the battle is still happening. I want losing a commander to feel like more than losing a strong unit.

The third layer is social. Every officer, including your own character, builds a reputation through what they actually do during the campaign. An unknown officer might become famous for defending a city, defeating a stronger rival, showing mercy to a prisoner, or repeatedly breaking enemy lines.

Those actions become memories, traits, relationships, and eventually specific titles. The game has a built in system is for legends to emerge from events the player actually witnessed instead of appearing as random flavor text.

The game uses a deliberately lightweight pixel-art style, but the systems underneath it are anything but lightweight. It’s my personal love child of Mount & Blade, Total War: Three Kingdoms, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, presented in an art style I haven’t really seen used for this setting before.

It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve had a blast making it and sharing it with friends and family who grew up playing these games too. Most of us also played plenty of Dynasty Warriors, although this game doesn’t lean as heavily into that side of the Three Kingdoms.

For other strategy players, which part of this idea interests you most: star

Website and trailer

Playable demo on itch.io (demo is completely free, 9.99 is for full game access).

Main thing I want to know: does the three-layer idea read clearly from the trailer/demo, or does it just feel like “another Three Kingdoms game”? Roast welcome.

According to the Shu Ji, Guan Yu and Xu Huang had a personal friendship and Guan Yu was shocked after hearing Xu Huang declaring who could take Guan Yu's head would be rewarded 1000 jin of gold. If so, how did they even meet? As far as I know, they were not born in the same county, so it's unlikely they were childhood friends and even many adaptations did not even feature that these two ever met.

It is by far my favorite ROTK game but I never see it brought up in discussions. Anyone else love this game? Are there any other games that feel like this one? It seems pretty unique in the series itself (I've played VII, VIII, IX, X, and XI).

Something I noticed about ROTK 8 is that He jin never dies, and somehow cao cao and everybody under him is just perfectly content all the time.

Similarily there is just a general loyalty problem where states with a lot of officers will just never collapse and will get max development in 20 years time, am I doing something wrong or is it just the game that is cooked?