A miniguide to a few gameplay element.

[JustaGamer]

Hello everyone,
Think I'll put this short guide here since I see people ask them often enough, and admittedly I also took me a while to figure some of these out.

Ranking/City management.
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I will only mention the rank that makes a tangible difference.

- Rank 9: most officers (and player created officer unless you play a ruler) will start out at this rank unless it's a historical officer with a higher rank. As a player with this rank, you're allowed to make one suggestion to the ruler about a task, most of the time for yourself so you can earn merit and advance to higher rank.

- Rank 7: this is the minimum rank to hold the post of Minister. There are 2 type of minsters, each with 3 different posts.
+ Minister (R): regional minister, allow the minister to issue orders on all cities in the domain. Whoever hold these posts are stationed at the Capital, adviser to the ruler and all that.
+ Minister (G): governor minister, function exactly as regional minister, but can only issue order to their current city.

The 3 different post are:
+ WAR minister: INT attribute.
+ Domestic minister: GOV attribute.
+ Military minister: LEA attribute.

Each officer will also have an expertise that makes them more suitable to a post than another. I.e Impartial is a WAR expertise, Agricultural is a Domestic expertise, Spear Training is a Military expertise. Each attribute will provide a bonus either faction or city wise to other officers in the force. So naturally, you want a Minister with the right expertise at the post. However, a minister needs to have a score higher than 90 in the associate attribute to receive a bonus free action. A lot of time you'll find that you have an officer with say 90 in INT, which makes a good WAR minister, but his Expertise is , Agricultural so you'll have to make a choice. Personally I find that in the beginning if you're only managing one or two cities, more order is better. But if you are pushing for farming or training spear across many cities, than having the minister correct expertise will help. All of this however, only matter if you're someone who can assign minister (governor, viceroy, or ruler).

Playing as an officer, becoming a minister will give you 2-indirect order and either one (if your associate attribute is < 90) or two (if attribute > 90) free order. Indirect order are order slot that you cannot decide which action to take, but allow other officers to make suggestion, you can either allow or disallow their suggestion (can't change it). Free order allows you to pick which action to take and who to assign. The type of order you can issue is not tied to the post that you hold (you can tell people to go farm as a WAR minister), an AI minister will stick to his/her role as much as they can, but can also issue different order if they run out of thing to do.

- Rank 5: This is the minimum rank for Governor.

As a player, a governor have 2 free order slots, 1-indirect order slot, but the main boots come from the ability to assign your own 3 ministers, if they all have attribute of >= 90, you essentially have six extra-indirect order slot. You can also now buy/sell provision in your city. You can also request transfer of other officers in your force to your city (in my experience, as long as you have good relationship with the officer in request the transfer will come through, unless they are Minister (R), can’t expect the ruler to give you his right hand man right :P )
Btw, this is when you see the complete interface, viceroy and ruler are the same, they just have a bigger scope.

- Rank 2: rank required for Viceroy.
Same as governor, except you can make decision on the cities in your district and freely moving officers among them. If you want to plan a rebellion, this is the best stage to put your plan in motion.

- There is a rank 1 but doesn’t mean much, Ruler doesn’t have a rank.

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If you mostly play a customize force like me where everyone start at the bottom, this is the usual progression on how your force will grow in term of how many actions it can take at the same time. This is assumed you’re playing as a ruler:

- Start with 2 free orders + 1 indirect order.
- Each time you have another officer reaching rank 7, you have 2 more order (assuming their attribute is 90). So by the time you have your first set of minister (Regional type), your force can take 9 actions at one time.
- Having the first governor, who will in turn assign their own 3 ministers (G), assuming you have enough officer to fill the spot and they have 90+ attribute, your force will now have an additional 8 order (2 from the governors, and 2 each from the ministers) to make a total of 17 actions
- Every time you have a new set of governor and ministers, you’ll add 8 into your order count. So as you can see, assigning governor and officers to city is very important if you want to maintain your grown, even crap officer is better than no officer at all, and assigning a governor is the only way to make a city manage itself.
- Personally playing as a new force most of my city would be fully developed by the time I get a Viceroy, so it’s insignificant to me. Viceroy will add one extra set of 8 orders on the region they manage, and they’re mostly there to reduce your macro management. Just conquered a force and your officers went on a hiring spree resulting you have 40+ officer in one city? If you don’t want to move those around on your own, your viceroy will do it for you.

Relationship.
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Most people would have known the basic already so I’ll just post the less obvious one.

- Get raptor to 80, then talk to them when they have an ‘emotion’ state, they’ll give you a quest. Finish that quest and you get a lvl1-Friend bonding.
- Now build their raptor to 90. You can either give them a gift. Once trigger that’ll put you at 100 and lvl2-best friend.
- Continue to shower them with gift, help them out, fight in battle with them …etc… you’ll get lvl3 eventually (might take a while, and can’t be visually tracked).
- Once you’re at lvl3, give them a gift and lvl4 will trigger with your confirmation (don’t have to wait like the previous level).
Some note on gift affect:
- Only give them gift that they like, you know this if in the gift list the item show an “O”
- The progression lvl1->lvl2->lvl3 is affected by the gift value and their greed rating. For example, you can give someone a gift (with raptor at 90) with value rating of 15 and it’ll trigger the lvl1->lvl2, but to trigger the lvl2->lvl3 will require a gift at value 20 or 25. These value changed depending on character, might advise is that if it doesn’t trigger, don’t waste another gift at the same value.
- The cheapest way to lvl up is to assign them a task and wait around until they you for help, or give yourself a task and ask them for help.

How to raise relationship between AI officers: they player shouldn't be the only one interesting in bonding.
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This is one of my favorite time waster RP elements in the game. Do it right and it actually doesn’t take a lot of time, doesn’t cost too much and does come with tangible benefit:

- Assign a governor, ministers and some helpers to an undeveloped city. I find that 11-12 officers per city is the ideal amount.
- Basically, you don’t want too many and thus can’t reliably pair your officers together. Too few and they’re each too busy to help one another.
- Lets it run a few seasons, check the chart, once you see there is a red blinking line between them or their raptor hit 80. Throw a banquet with wine. Might take a few times until all of them have a lvl1 bond. After that, just leave them and before long they’ll advance to lvl3.
- You now have a set (or two) of close knit officers.


On Recruiting opposite faction officers:
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- If their LOY is at 100, forget it. Doesn’t matter if you have 100INT, lvl9 Virtue, is their sworn brothers/wife/husband, they won’t budge. This is the game mechanic to prevent the player from just doing nothing but poaching AI officers to build a super force.
- In order to poach them you have to:
+ Wait until their force is destroyed and hire them as free officer.
+ If you capture them, keep them for a couple years. As you keep them as prisoner their LOY will eventually goes down, depend on various factor you might be able to cajole and hire them. There is a line though, as you keep them as prisoner, as their LOY goes down, so does your raptor with them. Keep them too long and by the time their LOY is low enough they also hate you so much they won’t join you anyway.


Some extra tips on managing your force:
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- In mid and late game, I usually assign the officers who I want to lead my armies as the governor. So they’re the one with high LEA/WAR. You don’t need your governor to have high INT or GOV (stat doesn’t matter as a governor), and any expertise they have will be applied to the city they govern. This way I know each of my army will always have at least one solid general, and easier for me to assign new command rank.
- If you develop the few set of close-knit officers like I describe above, move all of them to any frontier cities you just conquer (which will most likely under-developed) and you’ll be amazed how fast they develop that city even without your direction. Some might prefer to keep them to develop their super cities in the back, but trust me this give you a lot more bang for your buck.
- To prevent other AI from poaching your own officers, this is especially annoying after you just hire some new officer who by default will have low LOY (I once hired Yuan Shao who was good enough I assigned as the governor of the city I just conquered. He got poached by Wu the very next month). The game mechanic prevents a force from recruiting officers that’s not at a border city. So move all of your low LOY officers (that you want to keep) to the inner city, preferable with a governor that has the Impartiality expertise. After a few season once their LOY at 100 than you can move them anywhere.

[Hex]

If this is a guide then why not put it where it belongs? Or at least someone try to get this sticked?

I'll be sure to use this a lot. Thanks.

[erobotan]

i agree, great guide need to be put in the guide section so more people can see it !

[JustaGamer]

Eh I don't use the steam forums that often so didn't know it has a guide section tbh. Plus I was only making this on a whim after seeing the same questions getting posted, so I'm sure there are details missing. Maybe I'll update after a while if people have other questions into the guide proper. Won't claim to be an expert but I think I know most of the mechanic of the game.

[Teralitha]

Rank 1 lets you field more troops.

[BlueZ]

I have a question. Why everytime I assign mission for myself, the progress bar doesn't move, like forever. I click it and it shows that Date: Over/ Result: non active. Why I can't do mission by myself?

[DeGorro82]

I want to add info about Relation-System & Preference.

1. Greed Level : Ungreedy - Normal - Greedy

- Ungreedy : Reject gift item that not in his/her preference. (Shown by O and X mark)
- Normal : Accept gift item that not in his/her preference, NO additional point to relation point.
- Greedy : Accept gift item that not in his/her preference, GOT additional point to relation point, but not as much as his/her favor preference.

2. Relation Side Quest

>>> LV1 Friend : Reach relation point 80. Will trigger personal quest. If he/she not interested to you after reach 80pts, just give his/her favor preference gift and the quest will start.

---> NPC favor Weapon - give quest to find a particular weapon (specialty).
(It wasn't real hunt, just check each town market to buy specialty, near the NPC quest giver town.)
---> NPC favor Tomes - give quest to find a particular Tomes (specialty).
(Same rule as Weapon hunting quest)
---> NPC favor Treasure - give quest to find a particular Treasure (specialty).
(Same rule as Weapon hunting quest)
---> NPC favor Alcohol - give quest to find legendary wine.
(Look to the upper left icon and click it to see and auto-move to the quest city and investigate)
Note: Weapon, Tomes and Treasure hunting location city is always near (1~3 city, 5~30 days travel), while Legendary Wine quest is always on far city (20~60 days travel). Don't do the mission when it's close to Assembly schedule.

---> Random Sidequest #1 - give quest to free his relative village from bandit.
(Find the city (upper left icon), investigate, duel the bandit leader, win, report back)
---> Random Sidequest #2 - qive quest to duel him/her.
(Just duel and win to finish the mission)
---> Random Sidequest #3 - give quest to find his/her old relation whereabout.
(Find the city (upper left icon) and investigate, report back)
---> Random Sidequest #4 - give quest to help fund his/her friend project.
(Have 3000 gold and give it to the NPC)
---> Random Sidequest #5 - give quest to find the NPC stolen sword/weapon, not actual specialty/item weapon.
(Find the city (upper left icon), investigate, duel the thief, win, report back)

Note : NPC can give you random quest or based on their best preference.

3. How to easily pass Friendship (LV.1) and so on.

Some NPC had more than 1 favorite preference. For example Guan Yu love Armor and Alcohol preference. The key is to remember what quest he give to get Friend status. If he give you quest to find Legendary Wine, that mean it his more favor preference and gift him more alcohol specialty to easily get advance relation status.

I find this when I create an officer that had 3 preference. Weapon, Tomes and Treasure. Getting LV1 Friend status is like usual. But when try to pass LV1 to LV2 and so on, I have a hard time. I give the NPC Weapon and Tomes, but it isn't progression to the next level. Then I remember that the NPC give me quest to find Treasure before, and as soon I give the most cheapest Treasure item, I get level up to LV2 Best Friend status. Then another Treasure gift, right to LV3 Boon Companion status. Another Treasure Gift, available to make the NPC your SwornSibling or Marriage, base on your and the NPC gender and availability (see below).

4. LV 4 - Marriage or Sworn Sibling info/rule

---> Marriage (Male Char)
- Can and only max, wed 3 Female NPC.
- Can only wed NPC that is single.
- Can marry sisters. Note : I made 3 custom char sisters, and my Male char can marry them all.
- No age restriction. (you can wed single granny NPC. If ... that your thing. )
- If one or more of your wife die, you can marry another female NPC as long as it max 3 wife rule.

---> Mariage (Female Char)
Alas, never play Female char. So I dunno if the rules apply the same as Male char.

---> Sworn Sibling
- Can and Max 3 sworn sibling NPC. That mean 4 chars in 1 sworn-sibling circle.
- When sworn sibling NPC, while you already had before, it will auto make them sworn sibling too.
Example. You make sworn sibling pact with Zhou Yu. Then you make sworn sibling with Zhao Yun, it will auto make Zhou Yu and Zhao Yun became sworn sibling too. And then you make sworn sibling with Zhang Liao, then it will auto make Zhou Yu and Zhao Yun became sworn sibling with Zhang Liao. Thus the sworn sibling circle is max out. Your Char-Zhou Yu-Zhao Yun-Zhang Liao.

- my 50-50 finding. If 1 or more of your Sworn Sibling die, you cannot make another Sworn Sibling. (correct me if I'm wrong.)

[JustaGamer]

Originally posted by BlueZ:

I have a question. Why everytime I assign mission for myself, the progress bar doesn't move, like forever. I click it and it shows that Date: Over/ Result: non active. Why I can't do mission by myself?

What do you mean by progress bar? When you're assigned a mission, it's kept track by value. Say if you are assigned to develop 100 point in farm, you have to go and develope the farm, depending on facilities/helper/current point and your attribute you can gain anywhere between 5-15 points per work out.

[Kitsune Zeta]

Originally posted by Raven2015:

- Rank 7: this is the minimum rank to hold the post of Minister. There are 2 type of minsters, each with 3 different posts.
+ Minister (R): regional minister, allow the minister to issue orders on all cities in the domain. Whoever hold these posts are stationed at the Capital, adviser to the ruler and all that.
+ Minister (G): governor minister, function exactly as regional minister, but can only issue order to their current city.

You forgot Minister(V), or the ministers that answer directly to a district Viceroy.

Each officer will also have an expertise that makes them more suitable to a post than another. [...]

Two things not mentioned here: First, Governors, Viceroys, and Rulers always have their expertise effects active.
Second, the scope of these abilities is the officer's jurisdiction - for a Ruler (and his Ministers), their entire force gets the effect, for a Viceroy, their entire district, and for a Governor, only their city.

[DeGorro82]

I want to add about - How to obtain new Ability or Level up exist ability and Mentor System.

#1 RULE.
If you don't have that ability, level 0 (grey out), you can't level up that ability, even when your mentor had that ability.
eg. Zhang Zhao had COMMERCE level 9. If your COMMERCE level 0, even ask Mentor by him, it won't level up. You must have at least COMMERCE level 1 to be able progress up.

#2 RULE.
You can obtain new ability by became Friend with NPC with certain FORTE.
eg. Zhang Zhao's FORTE is COMMERCE. When you became his friend, it will automatically add +1 level of your COMMERCE. If your COMMERCE is level 0, it will be level 1. If it level 1, it will became level 2 and so on.

With these 2 rules, you can obtain or level up ability by 2 ways.

1. Mentoring.
- The NPC must first have his emotion turn ON. When interact with NPC, see upper right EMOTION status. 4 lists = Interesting, Charm, Gratitude & Respect. If this turn ON, the Mentor icon selection is available. Triggering Emotion status can be achieve by giving his favor preference specialty (items), charmed by your reputation, or gratitude because being assisted on his/her job (The NPC must have to succeed on his/her job, or else, gratitude emotion won't triggered).

Due note : the success rate to get new skill is depend on your relation pts level. First meet an officer and ask to be Mentor will have small chance he/she will teach you their skill. But the more you know him/her, it will rise to 60% it will teach you per Mentor session.

- If you already close to an NPC, his/her Mentor icon is always ON. But, you can exploit it consecutive. You will have to wait next or couple months till he/she ready to mentoring you.

- Ability are related to Skill. Such as Commerce are related to GOV, so you have to choose GOV as you Mentor selection. You can see the ability you want to level up sparking when you selecting the Skill list in the Mentor menu.

- When the NPC ready to teach new ability, you have to Duel/Debate them first and gain victory, or else, they won't teach you, said you weren't ready.

- The Good side of Mentor is 2.
A - It will add certain point to your Skill, the EXP number base of the gap skill of your and the NPC point. The wide gap, given you better EXP. Shorter Gap Skill, give you lower EXP points. Even or better Skill between you and your mentor will always give you +5 pts, whereas 99 different skill give you 99 exp.
(Oh yea, I tried make Huang Hao teach by Lu Bu. War 1 teach by WAR 100.)

B - When dueling/debate with lower skilled NPC, you will gain easy win.

-The Bad side of Mentor is 3.
A - If his/her skill in debating or dueling is much better than you. My officer with 80 INT try to tutored by Zhuge Liang with 100 INT and debate skill ORATOR level 9. Result, it's so hard to get ability from him. He's not a good Tutor ... he's a Torturer. Avoid teach by him until you have at least INT 90 and Orator level 5.

B - Because high profile teacher is also a high profile officer, he/she will often ordered to the frontline, to war. Thus, you Mentor session will got cancelled and wait for long time till the NPC get back. Of course, if you the Ruler or Viceroy or Governor, you can hold off your Mentor for yourself.

C - They want to teach your their war strategy skill instead ability.

eg. Lu Bu want to get Orator skill from Zhuge Liang.
LB : Hey, teach me Orator Zhugg.
ZL : Okay ... do you want my Brilliant Maneuver instead ?
LB : NO! My Undefeatable is better.
ZL : Ok then ... see you next Mentor session.
LB : I'll be back.
Next Session
LB : Teach me Orator Zhukk
ZL : Okay ... do you want my Brilliant Maneuver instead ?
LB : WTH dog ... ! I tell ya last time I won't have it, doog.
ZL : You don't want it then ?
LB : Yeah fool ... I won't have it.
ZL : Hmpf... as if you can win debate with me anyways.
LB : The F# !?

2. Friendship.
- Find NPC with the FORTE-Ability that you need to get level up.

- The Good Side is fast level up without the horror of Duel or Debate with high skilled officer and time consuming 20 days of training, with 60% success rate they will over to teach you.

- The Bad side, you need a lot of Gold to "Bribe" them with gifts, to become your friend. Or a lot of gold to buy Alcohol to make Banquet. Waiting to assist their job is mixed. If you the ruler or governor, you can give them job and had chance to assist them on their job. But they aren't always need to be assist. So best chance are to pour them with gifts or weekly banquet that using alcohol and you need gold either to obtain it.

[Clamallergy ｡ﾟ(ﾟ^∀^ﾟ)ﾟ｡]

Originally posted by BlueZ:

I have a question. Why everytime I assign mission for myself, the progress bar doesn't move, like forever. I click it and it shows that Date: Over/ Result: non active. Why I can't do mission by myself?

When you assign a mission to yourself, you have to go do that mission within the stipulated time frame. Simply assigning does not mean you have started executing the mission.

If your mission is to do something within the city, there will be a new button on the city map for you to click on. If it's diplomacy or recruitment or anything that is to be done in another location, click on the mission button and then on the move to button and you will start your journey to the location. And when you reach your destination you got to do the appropriate thing you are supposed to do (visit someone, see the ruler etc.)

[Teralitha]

War minister is based on INT not WAR, btw.