Enemy Unique Generals - Release or Execute?

[Five-Pacer]

Is there ever a chance that an enemy unique general will join your faction if you release them?

Executing them really weakens their faction, so is it ever worth to release them in hopes that they will join you someday?

[Snow]

kill them all

[Crowkeeper]

You can use spies to worsen the relationship between those unique generals and their lord, thereby increasing the likelihood of them joining you in the event of you capturing them.

[Doctor Gitgud]

Yeah you can get them in a lot of ways. Just finished my Lui Bei campaign and I got the following.
-Lu Bu - showed up at my court, never fought him
-Zhao Yun / Gongsun Zan - they were my longtime confederation partner but split off and made a rival claim to the emperorship when I declared. They abdicated very early in the war, which surprised me because I thought I was going to get gangbanged between them and Wu
-Sun Quan/ Sun Ce - got them late in the game when Wu abdicated and I became undisputed emperor

-Zheng Jiang - honorable mention because I tried EVERYTHING to get her in my faction for marriage and failed. Was in a confederation with her but could never vassalize or absorb her. Vassalize greyed out, absorb theoretically possible but she never got higher than -44.5. Wiped her out in the endgame after I won, tracked her to the remnants of the Han empire. Vassalized the Han empire and absorbed it, but I guess she wasn't a field general because she didn't join my faction. She never worked for anyone else again. The point though, is that if someone joins you (either you convince them, or you absorb a vassal), you can get the unique officer if they are deployed or a ruling family member.

[identity]

Everyone left alive when a faction is destroyed gets put into the recruitment pool the next turn. This very likely means the generals will go down fighting and will likely be killed in combat unless you baby the unit in a personal battle and don't damage them too much until they decide to route, the downside to this being you'll likely end up killing their friends and they won't like you very much, but it is what it is and is probably the only way to ensure unique generals survive the destruction of their faction without getting killed in the process.

Like mentioned above, you can damage their relations with spies, which means they might defect to the recruiment pool at some point, but it's a long and involved process. As it stands, I don't really find that option all that useful for grabbing generals I want, and you'll mostly just have to hope that the general will leave their service at some point during the game.

The rare option is capturing them in battle and hopefully they decide they want to join you. I actually had this happen with Zhao Yun, which seems rather counter to his historical portrayal, but I wasn't going to complain.

As for the actual question, I would spare most unique generals, except for people like Lu Bu, Gongsun Zan or Sun Jian, who have great items to steal if you do end up capturing them. I also factor in the age of the general, too, and whether or not they'll be living long enough to be useful should they hit the recruitment pool at the end.

The above has as an additional purpose; the game tends to be more interesting, at least in my opinion, when all the unique players are alive for a long time. Once everyone is dead, the game loses a lot of its charm.

[Crowkeeper]

Originally posted by id:

Like mentioned above, you can damage their relations with spies, which means they might defect to the recruiment pool at some point, but it's a long and involved process. As it stands, I don't really find that option all that useful for grabbing generals I want, and you'll mostly just have to hope that the general will leave their service at some point during the game.

Agreed. I have never actually done it for this reason, I just know that it can be done.

Originally posted by id:

The above has as an additional purpose; the game tends to be more interesting, at least in my opinion, when all the unique players are alive for a long time. Once everyone is dead, the game loses a lot of its charm.

Strongly agree. I wouldn't mind a mod which makes it even harder to permanently kill unique lords.

[Three-Headed-Monkey]

releasing enemy troops/generals will improve your relationship with the unique generals, i was able to recruit guan yu & zhang fei for example (through capture) after releasing them a few times

[Hexagoros]

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

Yeah you can get them in a lot of ways. Just finished my Lui Bei campaign and I got the following.
-Lu Bu - showed up at my court, never fought him
-Zhao Yun / Gongsun Zan - they were my longtime confederation partner but split off and made a rival claim to the emperorship when I declared. They abdicated very early in the war, which surprised me because I thought I was going to get gangbanged between them and Wu
-Sun Quan/ Sun Ce - got them late in the game when Wu abdicated and I became undisputed emperor

-Zheng Jiang - honorable mention because I tried EVERYTHING to get her in my faction for marriage and failed. Was in a confederation with her but could never vassalize or absorb her. Vassalize greyed out, absorb theoretically possible but she never got higher than -44.5. Wiped her out in the endgame after I won, tracked her to the remnants of the Han empire. Vassalized the Han empire and absorbed it, but I guess she wasn't a field general because she didn't join my faction. She never worked for anyone else again. The point though, is that if someone joins you (either you convince them, or you absorb a vassal), you can get the unique officer if they are deployed or a ruling family member.

Hahaha. Yeah, the first thing I wanted to do as well was find a way to get Zheng Jiang as my bride XD

I ended up getting Lu Bu as a husband instead as Sun Ren. >__>

Don't ask.