Zhang Yan on legendary difficulty impossible?

[Chris]

So I'm about 65 turns into my Zhang Yan campaign on legendary and I have 12 commanderies whereas Yuan Shao has only 6 territories, somehow he can afford 3 full stack armies and I can barely afford 2 full stacked armies with upgraded commanderies with a nice mix of commerce, industry and farms. I know it's legendary difficulty and I appreciate a challenge but there's a difference between a challenge and damn straight up bulls***. His allies all join his war against me and even the other factions at war with Yuan Shao conveniently make peace with him then declare war against me, there's armies surrounding me and this happens campaign after campaign. Any tips on how to counter this?

[Elric]

The higher the difficulty, the higher the penalties for the player (public order, diplomacy, income, etc.). Since the Ai is still terrible, they have to come up with bigger numbers to compensate )and random army spawns), otherwise you could just overrun everybody in just a few turns.

About the counter:
I pretty much had the same issue at the beginning in my campaing (as huang shoa tho). Try to defeat enemy armies one by one, invest into replenishment early, as soon as you defeated a big army you can try to get a peace treaty and so will have less dudes to fight against. Dont forget to use ambushes as much as possible, as the success rate for zhang yan is insanely high

[Chris]

Yeah that makes sense. Yeah when focussing an army on-by-one that helps, I also enable night battles when several armies turn up at my gates to fight the army individually. The ambushes with Zhang Yan are amazing and really do help lots. My issue is even after defeating a full stack army and when I try to chase a peace treaty, it's still like -40 in the diplomacy and they always want 2 territories from me, it's just insanely difficult I find with Zhang Yan, almost impossible.