Advanced Tips+Strategies!

[ekidhardt]

As a vet of the Total War series, I've learned a few things--and I'm here to share! (until it's all nerfed or balanced). I discovered these on my own :)



In no special order!


1. Ultimate Army: Flaming Catapults are god!
Low level armies are the way to go. The ideal army is this:
6 archers,
6 spearmen (or if you can the shield guys that can make turtle),
2 horsemen (flanking),
4 catapults.

You will take any city, win any fight. I've never lost any fight with this group, and it's cheap.

2. How to take over ANY city.

Make sure you have catapults and archers: use all your ammo. Withdraw. Attack again, use all your ammo, withdraw, over and over on the same turn. Yes this is cheap, but you will always win.

3. Defeat all archers easily

Take the shielded melee that can make a turtle, which is 100% arrow resistance. Do turtle formation and walk up to the walls of a castle or settlement. The enemy AI is so dumb that they'll waste all of their ammunition on you. Then walk in and destroy.

4. Never use armies again! Make armies of 6-9 generals + no upkeep.

This one is an amazing tip! <evil gaffaw>. My most badass crew was 9 generals wandering around without armies. They have NO upkeep! As long as they're powerful, they will annihilate any 3 generals+3 full armies of any combination. The best part is that they have no upkeep, because you're paying for them already--and enemies will chase them down thinking they're weak! Then you can omg rofl stomp everyone and practice your evil gaffaw. MWHAHAAHA!


5. Marriage is fantastic! (recruit and adopt every female you see, then steal generals to your faction by marrying them)
This is the best way to steal generals. You can instantly get Lu Bu. Every time you see ANY available female, recruit her, and pimp her out to a general. You can divorce your own wife. In fact, you can do this from turn 1, by 'seeking spouse' getting married, divorcing her, and pimping her out to a solid general. Do this early as possible because generals are already married by the end.

You also get major diplomatic points by stealing their generals. Go figure.

6. No high level units are worth the money. Use only low level units.

Speaks for itself. The price scaling is totally not worth it.

7. Hold down alt and move the target on a catapult and you'll see a circle that changes the size diameter as you move it, showing you the accuracy of each catapult. Pretty cool!

8. Have your archers, NOT your catapults burn down castle towers and main gate keeps.

They will light it on fire instantly! One volley, maybe two--and it'll reach 100% fire damage. As soon as it's above I think 60% fire damage, the tower is doomed. Once it's 100% fire damage, just wait for it to burn down. MMWHAHAAAA!

9. After every turn do a 'quick deal' and to 'create vassal'. (or nearly every turn).

Especially when you see a faction about to burn to the ground by another faction, when their doom is imminent, they will join you as a vassal. I got 7 vassals this way my last playthrough. You just have to keep checking.

10. As soon as any kingdom is defeated, check the recruitment pool.
This is how you can recruit rulers from other factions that weren't killed.

11. Expand with the army in tip #1 as fast as humanly possible. There is no penalty for relentless expansion.

In Warhammer, you get destroyed by expanding too fast. In 3 Kingdoms, you become a god!

12. Ambush all the time: especially with approaching armies.

They make ambushing super easy in this game. There is no radius check, so you can literally ambush right beside an enemy army. Where this is useful is this: instead of having an army defend a city, have them camp one step outside and ambush. The city guard will join the ambush, and the ambush bonuses are far more useful than the castle defenses.

The second bonus to this is that setting amries in Ambush mode will hide them and draw in weaker armies to take over your areas.

13. If you think you're going to lose a city, and you can't do anything about it--change the governor.

So this take a bit of a setup: first have one governer with a BADASS army, the best, most expensive troops. (recruit them, then recall the retinue) remember that recalled retinues have no upkeep. Then change the governer to the city being attacked...and that retinue will defend the city! mwhaha...the attacking army will just run away.



That's it for now! I hope they patch things to make the AI so much smarter. I am very confused why the AI is so dumb in this game, but in Warhammer, it's so devious.

[TDBD-SEBN]

the tip 2 I just discovered today when I just wanted to take some casualities from enemy settlement, then I realized I could attack again. it was totally cancer. pretty sure this is not supposed to be like that.

[ekidhardt]

yeah---to be honest with you, I love leveraging good game mechanics and advanced strategies. I don't want 'easy wins' I want 'smart+efficient' wins. So I test things out and figure out the best way to be efficient.

Unfortunately, many of these tips (almost all of them) should be nerfed. I beat my last two games in around 100 turns because of this. I hope the developers fix it all! Especially about using low level units all the time, better units are useless.

[Crowkeeper]

Way too much cheese in this thread. Noobs will love it though. Nice tips.

[Greldinart]

tip1 : conquer all north horse place, -80% cavalry cost and upkeep = free army

[Nugcrusher]

Originally posted by Finn:

the tip 2 I just discovered today when I just wanted to take some casualities from enemy settlement, then I realized I could attack again. it was totally cancer. pretty sure this is not supposed to be like that.

Nothing wrong with this tactic....I used way back in the Rome (1) days.

[[Myrm]Fable09]

Tip #2 if you used all of your ammo then withdraw how can you have ammo to attack again ,?

[TDBD-SEBN]

Originally posted by Nugcrusher:

Originally posted by Finn:

the tip 2 I just discovered today when I just wanted to take some casualities from enemy settlement, then I realized I could attack again. it was totally cancer. pretty sure this is not supposed to be like that.

Nothing wrong with this tactic....I used way back in the Rome (1) days.

no it's totally wrong because in fact you have unlimited ammo by using that. so yeah it's an exploit and a bug that needs to be fixed. idk why people can actually argue about this.

Originally posted by MyrmFable09:

Tip #2 if you used all of your ammo then withdraw how can you have ammo to attack again ,?

yeah you can withdraw and then it will say a draw match, but then your siege still continues and you can attack all over again. so it's basically unlimited ammo for trebs and archers.

[tzeneth]

I’ll agree with a great many of your tips but some of them are wrong or I just disagree with.

Partially wrong: archers have some anti-cheese overrides at higher difficulties which means they won’t target your turtling infantry or your generals.

Expanding rapidly also increases your corruption which can rapidly DECREASE your income.

The 9 general trick seems cool but impractical in some circumstances depending on how many armies you are permitted to have active. IE: if you can only have 3 armies that means your 9 generals take up your entire force and you may potentially be unable to defend certain areas like exposed flanks of your territory away from where your 9 generals are.

Also, to my knowledge, even the administrator retinues have to muster when first assigned, which means they may be all but useless when they first arrive.

[ekidhardt]

For SURE many of these are exploiting a system that wasn't tested well enough, clearly, obviously. It needs fixing.

What I don't get is that, after 15 years of games--how do they miss this stuff? This takes 1 play through to realize these things. "How to beat any castle with 1 catapult", literally--it can be done.


Exactly the point, ammo should not re-appear. It should only get re-charged next turn, OR impart some sort of major vigor loss, or accuracy, on the army. Easy fix.

Some of these strategies are completely legitimate and won't change (like checking for free generals after their faction has been destroyed).

I've beaten the regular campaign on just over 100 turns 2 times now, I get about 30% of the way through the tech tree.

[Page Down]

I've done #3 on normal difficulty, but can anyone confirm if it's the same on legendary difficulty? Sometimes on normal difficulty I feel as if some enemy AI are smarter than others. Sometimes they will have their spearman guarding their archers while sometimes they won't. I wonder if it has anything to do with their commanding officers and the difficulty.

[ekidhardt]

I'm cranking up the difficulty today, I'll check to see if the AI behaves any differently than blatantly ai-tarded :)

[Noctis-NL]

Very nice tips...
And remember, rice is king :D

[This PC]

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but there's ways to get cavalry for free with very little upkeep as well. Capture all of the northern pastures and you'll get the "Neighsayer" achievement, and then the recruitment window looks something like this:
https://puu.sh/DE2mh/e23cd486f3.png
https://puu.sh/DE2nv/f27e4f0bc2.png
I consistently do this with Gongsun, not sure if it's possible with others.
I assume it would be pretty easy to achieve with other northerners like Zheng Jiang, which probably has one of the strongest campaign mechanics.
I mean, this is potentially even less upkeep than general spamming. It feels more "legit" than general spamming though. General spamming feels like cheesing the game.

[Taejeo of Wei (Sao Sao)]

These are the reasons why the players will need my mods for number 3 and number 4:

https://youtu.be/2GJlCmMIyJI

Lv Bu joins your faction 1st turn mod

https://youtu.be/wd9BGLbakaM

BTW: nice post, I have used all your tips except number 13, not sure if I want to try the unlucky number...

[This PC]

Originally posted by Taejeo of Wei (Sao Sao):

...

Not everyone wants to cheat.