Best Starting Faction?

[Indianer]

I’ve tried starting a campaign as Cao Cao and Liu Bei but didn’t really enjoy either. What is the best faction to start with and how do you build them up? (strongest economically and militarily)

[Amazing]

if you dont like both Cao Cao and Liu Bei i dont even know which faction can satisfy you lol. Calvary and Archer are most OP units now in this game, and they have both of those

[Jeruzalem]

Zhang yan. Bandit faction. Just conquer the smaller insignificant factions to your south. Make sure to get the trade reforms for max monies. Conquer the territories to the east and just go from there.

[Lightning]

Yuan Shao and Ma Teng start off with fairly powerful military, Yellow turbans you want to completely avoid until you're confident at micromanagement of economy and military

[HobbyCathartic]

He Yi of the Yellow Turban is my favorite. My second is the Bandit Queen.

[This PC]

Sun Jian is fairly entertaining to play, easy to expand massively early on by heading south. If you keep a fair amount of money on hand you can instantly raise an army to defend your land at any city you own. His unique mechanic also pushes you to constantly fight epic battles and minimize your losses. Starts with a fairly strong lineage of young very powerful generals, by the time Liu Bei and Cao Cao are dead (Sun Jian is about their age, but Wu's story is really about Sun Ce and Zhou Yu I think), you will be in your prime.

[Dvdz]

+1 for Sun Jian, with super easy expansion south, west and east (north is where all the hard stuff is).

[ACS36]

Depends what difficulty you're playing on.

I think these are the three best starting spots with upside from faction benefits.

Yuan Shau - Most annoying faction to deal with as a player. If you play as him you don't have to worry about it. Also your in good spot to take out other strong factions early.

Sun Jian - Starts on uncontested side of the map. Heading south isn't the best way to win as him. The best way is to head north and take out stronger factions early. If you go south Cao Cao and Liu Biao are just going to declare war on you and invade. This almost always happens no matter what you do. You can't just take the south and be left alone by the AI. There really isn't much reason to take the south right away. Taking out threats will pay off more in the late game.

Gong Du - In a relatively safe side of the map. You start by destroying ma teng and getting the northern corner of the map. Gight off dong zhou or peace him out after you take the silk settlements from him. There is no reason to invade his capital. Forges are one of the best buildings in the game. Gong Du has good faction bonuses for looting so you can get lots of money early on by taking the extra looting tech as your first pick. After that get 25% extra movement range for armies. The Yellow Turban tech tree and research rate from schools is far superior to the other tech tree. Only downside to the yellow turban is that most of their generals are terrible.

[This PC]

Originally posted by ACS36:

Sun Jian - Starts on uncontested side of the ma. Heading south isn't the best way to win as him. The best way is to head north and take out stronger factions early. If you go south Cao Cao and Liu Biao are just going to declare war on you and invade. This almost always happens no matter what you do. You can't just take the south and be left alone by the AI. ...

Can't you just field a small force to take out the han south and defend north ? :p
No one mentioned you wouldn't be contested in the north. :D

[ACS36]

Originally posted by jdtuggey:

Originally posted by ACS36:

Sun Jian - Starts on uncontested side of the ma. Heading south isn't the best way to win as him. The best way is to head north and take out stronger factions early. If you go south Cao Cao and Liu Biao are just going to declare war on you and invade. This almost always happens no matter what you do. You can't just take the south and be left alone by the AI. ...

Can't you just field a small force to take out the han south and defend north ? :p
No one mentioned you wouldn't be contested in the north. :D

Sure but it's a very slow process and you won't be able to take all of the han settlements with just one army. And you need almost a full army to take out some of the bigger han cities on harder difficulties. So you can't just send one small army down there and take the entire southern region of the map.

When you have 3-4 invasion forces coming from the north you're almost always going to want that army some place else.

IT's not uncommon for cao cao and liu biao to be invading you before turn 10. I've done the Sun Jian start 5-6 times now and most of the time that's what happens on very hard.

Also if you advance too far to the west Shi Xi almost always starts to fight you as well. Along with another faction.

If you're playing to win there isn't really much of a reason to try and take every han settlement to the south and east of you. There is more upside is simply destroying your enemies from the start.

[Indianer]

Thanks for the info. I might have to try Sun Jian. I do love the Cao’s military, but I didn’t like the region. I might have played it wrong, but I didn’t think the economy was that great.

I want to be able to develop a really strong economy early on, and expand/trade, while having good food supply. That way I can be in a better position to dominate the mid to end game.

I didn’t feel my geographic position as Cao Cao gave me a really strong economy in the beginning, and by the time I got to around 100 turns, I wasn’t as strong as I would have thought possible.

Liu Bei was even weaker early on, and I didn’t like much about that faction yet.

I like a good challenge, but since I just started I want to feel the game out with a really strong faction economically, that can expand rapidly in the early game.

[Ultrabot]

Try Kong Rong. Governor tab.

[Ruges]

Originally posted by Amazing:

if you dont like both Cao Cao and Liu Bei i dont even know which faction can satisfy you lol. Calvary and Archer are most OP units now in this game, and they have both of those

I find it funny that you say calvery is so OP. I find them under powered. And I say that having an army of pure calvery, with forward deployment that decimates an enemy army. They probably work a litlte better in MP, instad of SP. since a player is not going to instantly react to a flank, unlike the AI who does. I also find horses to be a bit slow compared to foot units.

However I would probably change my mind if archers where not so OP. If not for the forward deployment archers where tear apart my horse army before they ever even got in range.

I also play Sun Jian. His hero system of take less losses then the enemy fits my play style. And have been maxed out on hero status the entire game. This is also probably why I hate horses since they take heavier losses then my normal army. which consists of 1 green general 6 mele units. (swap them out to the green units that mele but also have bows. I put those units in a line in the front. My second general is blue. 6 archers. these are lined up along with 2 more archers from the 3rd general. My third general has 2 archers and 4 trebuchets.

I manually target the trebs to take out enemy archers. with maybe a shot or two into calvery. With that setup I can defeat a 1,000 man army with the loss of 10 units or so. That army even wins 1v3 battles with minimal losses. the calvery army took heavy losses in a 3v1 situation.

[Indianer]

I do like the starting position of the Sun Jian. Plenty of farmland, trading ports, tea, armor and tool maker territories nearby to expand the economy early on. And the mercenary Archers aren’t bad. Surrounded by mostly empty Han lands makes expansion fairly easy.

[110]

wth subjective question is this? obviously cao cao is since its the easiest faction to start with.. everything else is personal opinion..

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by ACS36:

Gong Du - In a relatively safe side of the map. You start by destroying ma teng and getting the northern corner of the map. Gight off dong zhou or peace him out after you take the silk settlements from him. There is no reason to invade his capital. Forges are one of the best buildings in the game. Gong Du has good faction bonuses for looting so you can get lots of money early on by taking the extra looting tech as your first pick. After that get 25% extra movement range for armies. The Yellow Turban tech tree and research rate from schools is far superior to the other tech tree. Only downside to the yellow turban is that most of their generals are terrible.

Yellow turban generals are not terrible. They have easy to manuever skill trees, healers can heal your generals for like their full hp bar, and scholars get the highest melee evasion of any hero. Very easy to have heros kill everything if you get good weapons.

Also not the only downside to yellow turbans. Their elite units are only recruitable for the corresponding general type. Everyone hates them. And they don't have good ways to mitigate corruption which eats income super hard. They have really good early eco from cheap buildings and forges being good, but late game everyone else catches up or surpasses them. Gong du also imo is not the strongest yellow turban. He Yi has an easy start position, and Huang Shao is one of the strongest generals in the game (and starts with probably the best duelist in the game) (although he's gotta deal with liu bei, caocao, and yuan shao all early).

Yellow Turbans honestly are probably harder to play than just playing say ma teng. If you get the horse pastures up top his campaign is almost autowin cause of -72% or more upkeep reduction cav.