The Romance of the Three Kingdoms series has been on my radar ever since the 8th game was released. I was initially excited due to the claims of it being a hardcore strategy game. Having played Dynasty Warriors, I was interested in playing a strategy game set in the same period.

RotTK, by Koei, puts you right dab in the middle of the Three Kingdoms era of China. At the beginning of each game, you get to pick a certain scenario pertaining to that era (you know, the typical list starting with the Yellow Turban rebellion.) From there, you choose up to ten officers to create forces or just to dispatch across the map among the cities (don’t worry, there are a lot more officers and forces already on the map.)

Character artwork appears whenever a special (character specific, I think) tactic is done. This tactic is Whirlwind, used by pikes.

I was kind of surprised when I first started playing this game. I expected it to be a bit more “hardcore.” In all reality, I thought that this game was mostly a city-building game, haha. It’s actually quite “simple.” The controls aren’t very deep and for the most part self-explanatory. There aren’t that many of them that you’ll use for most of the game.

An example of a special tactic. This one is also Whirlwind.

The most useful commands are develop, inspection, recruit, drill, march, and search/employ. Develop is fairly obvious. It allows you to build government facilities, a pretty useful skill to have! Most of the things you build have obvious consequences. Markets produce more gold, farms produce more food, barracks allow you to recruit more troops. Some buildings, like stables, produce equipment for your army while others like mints enhance the productivity of other buildings.

Recruit, drill, outfit and march are military commands. Recruit obviously gets you more soldiers. Drill trains the troops (increases their will, making them better fighters.) Outfit equips soldiers with certain things like spears and horses and march deploys units with certain commanders. Search/employ allow you to get new officers.

A standard battle. You’ll be seeing a lot of this. RotTK is full of it.

All of that is fairly simple. Combining all of them is not. Although RotTK doesn’t have nearly as much complexity of a city builder (too bad ;__ ; ), you’re are limited in your actions by the amount of Action Points and the number of officers you have. Certain actions take a certain amount of actions points. Each action requires at least one free officer to do it (except for special commands like counsel.)

Besides that, the enemy AI isn’t all that bad. The first many times I played (on beginner, even) I got own, quite badly. I would always create a new force, with only one city, and put it right next to Ma Ten. Sure enough, Dong Zhuo (I know I got this name wrong) would always send 10 - 20 thousand troops my way. In between holding him back, Ma Ten would send a couple more thousand. Eventually, those two, even though they were fighting each other, would wear my gold supply down far enough so that I wouldn’t be able to recruit enough soldiers to defend myself.

My home city. From this, I started building my territory, waging my war against the Yellow Turbans.

Getting wiser because of my continuous losses, I decided not to create my own new one-city force to play. I thought that I would have better luck as someone else, so I chose Sun Jian. I had a lot easier time. Colonizing two cities while taking one from the Yellow Turbans (executing one of their officers who refused to join me!!!)

I really like the art style of this game. It looks as though a lot of the things are hand-drawn (although, there doesn’t seem to be much to draw. This game isn’t very animated.) The opening, which you can watch at the top, is very beautiful. The in-games graphics aren’t anything to gawk at, though. You could say that the developers were very humble in terms of the graphics for this game. No matter, I’m sure they knew that the people playing this game would not care in the slightest what this game looked like as long as the gameplay was good.

It’s strange how addicting this game is even though it doesn’t seem very complex. I suppose it’s kind of like Civilization IV in a way. Outwardly, it isn’t very complex, but if you look deeper and deeper into it, it has quite a bit of depth. Furthermore, it, like Civ, is very easy to get addicted to. In fact, I got one of my friends addicted to it not too long ago (I’m so happy her grades haven’t gotten that much worse since it started.)