Liu Bei Mandate of Heaven

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Why is this even a campaign? Your ai allies are the most incompetent ♥♥♥♥♥ on the face of the planet and no matter how many times you kick the Yellow Turban's teeth in, the come back with full stacks from three different factions all at once and target you specifically. I have Bo Hai and Pingyuan, have played whackamole with the turbans for the past 10 turns, wiping stack after stack and I look south and there's Lu Zhi with no land. I look Northwest and Tao Qian force marched himself PAST ZHONGSHAN to hit a random holding in the mountains meanwhile the Turbans are literally bordering Luo Yang. I can't move south to re secure that territory because when I do, here comes Zhang Jue with a full stack at Bo Hai. I can't move North because when I do, here comes Zhang Liang at PingYuan. Can't just play Whackamole because when I do, HERE COMES ALL OF THE BROTHERS AND EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ YELLOW TURBAN REBEL STACK IN THE ENTIRE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ COUNTRY. Can't have an economy because I can't hold anything if I want to expand, can't expand or I lose all of my gains and my allies can't hold ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anything. Evert time I hit a stack and win they retreat then bam, next turn they just say ♥♥♥♥ it and take a county from an ally then come right back at me with a full stack 2 turns later. Rinse and repeat. I've restarted this campaign 12 times. I've done every amount of cheese in the books. I've gotten to Noble rank but by that point I see no point in continuing due to the AI Han ineptitude and the feeling of impending doom anyways. Send help.

[Fried Noodles]

Don't worry about holding land.
You can field three full armies (if you want) as soon as Zhang Fei and Guan Yu join you.
While you're regionless, you receive a discount on your unit upkeep, which stacks with Liu Bei's militia upkeep discount.

When Zhang Fei and Guan Yu join you, don't merge them with Liu Bei. This lets you keep your armies at 3 out of your current capacity of one.

Hire on whatever powerful/unique generals you see that pop up in court and go around attacking the Yellow Turbans and razing anything they control.


Can't build Fervor if they're burnt to the ground.
Can't steal your land if you don't have any land.

Edit: I misremembered. Only Dong Zhuo can raze.
You can sack and withdraw and allow the AI Han factions to move in.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136295179

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Originally posted by Fried Noodles:

Don't worry about holding land.
You can field three full armies (if you want) as soon as Zhang Fei and Guan Yu join you.
While you're regionless, you receive a discount on your unit upkeep, which stacks with Liu Bei's militia upkeep discount.

When Zhang Fei and Guan Yu join you, don't merge them with Liu Bei. This lets you keep your armies at 3 out of your current capacity of one.

Hire on whatever powerful/unique generals you see that pop up in court and go around attacking the Yellow Turbans and razing anything they control.


Can't build Fervor if they're burnt to the ground.
Can't steal your land if you don't have any land.

Edit: I misremembered. Only Dong Zhuo can raze.
You can sack and withdraw and allow the AI Han factions to move in.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136295179

We have objectives revolving around holding land to advance the story. Are you telling me this DLC and Liu Bei is so poorly designed that I have to forego his intended play because the DLC is broken because that is what I'm picking up rn

[Fried Noodles]

It's not the only way to play. It's just one possible way to play.
Welcome to the sandbox experience.

For a newer player, it's understandable that a slight bump in the road might feel like a frustrating and impossible roadblock.
Once you come to understand the game a bit better, you'll find that Liu Bei's campaign in Mandate of Heaven is really no more difficult than any other.

The game is certainly not without its flaws however.
In my own experience, I find that MoH events are more prone to breaking than any of the other start dates.

Keep at it.
Or don't.

[panderusw]

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

We have objectives revolving around holding land to advance the story. Are you telling me this DLC and Liu Bei is so poorly designed that I have to forego his intended play because the DLC is broken because that is what I'm picking up rn

You do not have to follow the story line. I only ever follow the story line once, which ended in a mess and a lot of hair pulling stress because follow the story line lead you deep into 3 Zhang Brothers territory and then you found yourself surrounded by YT and the 3 brothers.

Try this if you up for it,
Turn 1 - fight the Han rebel, do not commit your troop, hide them, and let the other reinforcement army fight for you, but do let Liu Bei fight a bit to level him up.

Turn 2/3- move toward Lu Zhi, and fight the 2nd Han rebel. Same thing, try to limit your casualty, let Liu Bei do most the fighting.

Turn 4 onward - Move closer to Lu Zhi city and take shelter next to the city, swap all Liu Bei expensive retinue to cheaper militia unit. In the meantime, hire any good generals, best if a good strategist. Now, start building your army with Liu Bei + 2 more generals. DO NOT MOVE. Once you have about 80% full stack, open up diplomacy panel and start "selling" your "None aggressive pact" and "Military access" to anyone that willing to pay. Remember, the stronger your force is, the more money you can get. If all goes well, you can get about 10-12k out of it. This will last you quite a bit.

Once Guan Yu/Zhang Fei show up, DO NOT merge them, you want to keep 3 armies, ideally you have already hire a few extra generals, so, your armies composition would be something like
-- Main full army - Guan Yu(6x frontline spear), Liu Bei(2x cavalry,2xsword,2xarcher), strategist(4xarcher, 2x treb)
-- 2 extra army with 3 generals each, NO retinues.

By now, it should be around turn 12 or so, attack the farmland to your north, get a trade deal going with that Grey faction(Bian Zhang) at your east. This will make sure you back is secure, with that trade, 99% of the time Bian Zhang will not turn on you. Now, pick one of the brother, and hit him hard until you eliminate him.Do not care if the other 2 take your land, you want to wipe the 3 brothers off the map 1 at a time. Rinse and repeat.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2452217560
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2455708559

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Originally posted by panderusw:

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

We have objectives revolving around holding land to advance the story. Are you telling me this DLC and Liu Bei is so poorly designed that I have to forego his intended play because the DLC is broken because that is what I'm picking up rn

You do not have to follow the story line. I only ever follow the story line once, which ended in a mess and a lot of hair pulling stress because follow the story line lead you deep into 3 Zhang Brothers territory and then you found yourself surrounded by YT and the 3 brothers.

Try this if you up for it,
Turn 1 - fight the Han rebel, do not commit your troop, hide them, and let the other reinforcement army fight for you, but do let Liu Bei fight a bit to level him up.

Turn 2/3- move toward Lu Zhi, and fight the 2nd Han rebel. Same thing, try to limit your casualty, let Liu Bei do most the fighting.

Turn 4 onward - Move closer to Lu Zhi city and take shelter next to the city, swap all Liu Bei expensive retinue to cheaper militia unit. In the meantime, hire any good generals, best if a good strategist. Now, start building your army with Liu Bei + 2 more generals. DO NOT MOVE. Once you have about 80% full stack, open up diplomacy panel and start "selling" your "None aggressive pact" and "Military access" to anyone that willing to pay. Remember, the stronger your force is, the more money you can get. If all goes well, you can get about 10-12k out of it. This will last you quite a bit.

Once Guan Yu/Zhang Fei show up, DO NOT merge them, you want to keep 3 armies, ideally you have already hire a few extra generals, so, your armies composition would be something like
-- Main full army - Guan Yu(6x frontline spear), Liu Bei(2x cavalry,2xsword,2xarcher), strategist(4xarcher, 2x treb)
-- 2 extra army with 3 generals each, NO retinues.

By now, it should be around turn 12 or so, attack the farmland to your north, get a trade deal going with that Grey faction(Bian Zhang) at your east. This will make sure you back is secure, with that trade, 99% of the time Bian Zhang will not turn on you. Now, pick one of the brother, and hit him hard until you eliminate him.Do not care if the other 2 take your land, you want to wipe the 3 brothers off the map 1 at a time. Rinse and repeat.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2452217560
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2455708559

I finally got something going. Said ♥♥♥♥ it and declared a feud against the guy holds the one city and trade port just east of Pingyuan across the river. Took his shot and turned my attention towards the pingyuan salt mine. That capture became my third victory against the Turbans so Zhang Bao got booted from pingyuan. Took it back a turn later, but that left him in a city under siege and after pushing him out and taking the henei farmland, one down two to go. Started stressing a hit then daddy Dong did his thing and now that I am no longer bound to the Han and Yuan Shao spawned, it's gotten interesting. In a coalition with Yuan Shao, Tao Qian, Liu Chongand our newest member, none other than the tyrant himself. We've made steady progress against the rebels and Yuan Shao actually managed to stack wipe Zhang Jue just outside of anping. The north is wide open for me to swoop in and I am now a Second Marquis having taken Bo Hai. Just needed to go off the beaten path temporarily and hop right back on it.

[Fenris]

This DLC is trash nd hasn't been touched since shortly after it's release. The AI is completely incompetent and incapable of doing anything. You lose by default unless YOU specifically stop the YT, and this makes a lot of factions, like sun jian, all but unplayable. To play it on any fun difficulty like very hard or legendary is extremely challenging and requires you completely abandon any idea you had of defeating the YT and having a normal playthrough with the typical rise of cao cao yuan shao and sun quan. The YT we're defeated over the course of a year IRL and this DlC will drag that out until like 210. It's just a broken dlc.

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Originally posted by Fenris:

This DLC is trash nd hasn't been touched since shortly after it's release. The AI is completely incompetent and incapable of doing anything. You lose by default unless YOU specifically stop the YT, and this makes a lot of factions, like sun jian, all but unplayable. To play it on any fun difficulty like very hard or legendary is extremely challenging and requires you completely abandon any idea you had of defeating the YT and having a normal playthrough with the typical rise of cao cao yuan shao and sun quan. The YT we're defeated over the course of a year IRL and this DlC will drag that out until like 210. It's just a broken dlc.

Yeah I had to stop my playthrough. A. Because you are right, if the player doesn't do anything about it, there is no way for the Han to win. B. YT campaign is the easiest campaign I have ever played. Over in roughly 30 turns. Ridiculous. C. ♥♥♥♥ the fervor mechanics. You're telling me that unless I devote a character to each of my commanderies AND build every single fervor reducing building, I'm not gonna be able to get rid of it and even then, if I have just one neighbor that has any fervor in their provinces it still doesn't matter. 100 fervor for the rest of the game. D. They said they aren't even releasing anymore patches for the game and unfortunately no one even mods MoH so that whole start is dead.

[Fried Noodles]

There's no more Fervor once you win the Mandate War.
Could just eat it during the war and focus on eliminating the Zhang brothers. Then you won't have to worry about it later.

[panderusw]

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

Yeah I had to stop my playthrough. A. Because you are right, if the player doesn't do anything about it, there is no way for the Han to win. B. YT campaign is the easiest campaign I have ever played. Over in roughly 30 turns. Ridiculous. C. ♥♥♥♥ the fervor mechanics. You're telling me that unless I devote a character to each of my commanderies AND build every single fervor reducing building, I'm not gonna be able to get rid of it and even then, if I have just one neighbor that has any fervor in their provinces it still doesn't matter. 100 fervor for the rest of the game. D. They said they aren't even releasing anymore patches for the game and unfortunately no one even mods MoH so that whole start is dead.

I am not going to sugar coat it, MOH has some bugs but beating the campaign with Lui Bei is actually very easy. The fervor will end once you wipe all 3 brothers.

A few more tips,
-- you must keep 3 armies, A Main full stack that will push/wipe the 3 brothers, 2 armies with just generals running around to take care of any rebel spawn. 3 generals can take care of any newly spawn rebel without any problem. Just send the 2 more injured out of the 3 general back to court and re-spawn them next turn, they come back full health.

-- upgrade your city to lvl 4, keep build/upgrade any other building in the back burner. Reason being with fervor, your depleting population just does not make investing income building worthwhile. And lvl 4 has wall, rebel doesn't have siege weapons, so they have to siege more than 1 turn, that buy you time to move armies back to rescue.

-- if you have the money, buy troops for administrators, the admin + his troops will become the city garrison. That will help defending the city, admin troops stay in the city does not count as your expenses, it is free.

-- be a di@k, if you think you are going to lost the land, sell it to other that can buy it. Then take it back from YT later.

You can see in the second screenshot of my previous post, I wiped the 3 brothers in 35 turns, and working to clean up the remaining YT. Granted, I do have Zhou Tai that bond with Zhang Fei+ Ji Ling as my main rebel clean up crew.

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Originally posted by Fried Noodles:

There's no more Fervor once you win the Mandate War.
Could just eat it during the war and focus on eliminating the Zhang brothers. Then you won't have to worry about it later.

Well that is nice to know. May revisit it after my sun ce AWB campaign.

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Originally posted by panderusw:

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

Yeah I had to stop my playthrough. A. Because you are right, if the player doesn't do anything about it, there is no way for the Han to win. B. YT campaign is the easiest campaign I have ever played. Over in roughly 30 turns. Ridiculous. C. ♥♥♥♥ the fervor mechanics. You're telling me that unless I devote a character to each of my commanderies AND build every single fervor reducing building, I'm not gonna be able to get rid of it and even then, if I have just one neighbor that has any fervor in their provinces it still doesn't matter. 100 fervor for the rest of the game. D. They said they aren't even releasing anymore patches for the game and unfortunately no one even mods MoH so that whole start is dead.

I am not going to sugar coat it, MOH has some bugs but beating the campaign with Lui Bei is actually very easy. The fervor will end once you wipe all 3 brothers.

A few more tips,
-- you must keep 3 armies, A Main full stack that will push/wipe the 3 brothers, 2 armies with just generals running around to take care of any rebel spawn. 3 generals can take care of any newly spawn rebel without any problem. Just send the 2 more injured out of the 3 general back to court and re-spawn them next turn, they come back full health.

-- upgrade your city to lvl 4, keep build/upgrade any other building in the back burner. Reason being with fervor, your depleting population just does not make investing income building worthwhile. And lvl 4 has wall, rebel doesn't have siege weapons, so they have to siege more than 1 turn, that buy you time to move armies back to rescue.

-- if you have the money, buy troops for administrators, the admin + his troops will become the city garrison. That will help defending the city, admin troops stay in the city does not count as your expenses, it is free.

-- be a di@k, if you think you are going to lost the land, sell it to other that can buy it. Then take it back from YT later.

You can see in the second screenshot of my previous post, I wiped the 3 brothers in 35 turns, and working to clean up the remaining YT. Granted, I do have Zhou Tai that bond with Zhang Fei+ Ji Ling as my main rebel clean up crew.

Thanks for the tips

[FLA]

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

Why is this even a campaign? Your ai allies are the most incompetent ♥♥♥♥♥ on the face of the planet and no matter how many times you kick the Yellow Turban's teeth in, the come back with full stacks from three different factions all at once and target you specifically. I have Bo Hai and Pingyuan, have played whackamole with the turbans for the past 10 turns, wiping stack after stack and I look south and there's Lu Zhi with no land. I look Northwest and Tao Qian force marched himself PAST ZHONGSHAN to hit a random holding in the mountains meanwhile the Turbans are literally bordering Luo Yang. I can't move south to re secure that territory because when I do, here comes Zhang Jue with a full stack at Bo Hai. I can't move North because when I do, here comes Zhang Liang at PingYuan. Can't just play Whackamole because when I do, HERE COMES ALL OF THE BROTHERS AND EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ YELLOW TURBAN REBEL STACK IN THE ENTIRE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ COUNTRY. Can't have an economy because I can't hold anything if I want to expand, can't expand or I lose all of my gains and my allies can't hold ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anything. Evert time I hit a stack and win they retreat then bam, next turn they just say ♥♥♥♥ it and take a county from an ally then come right back at me with a full stack 2 turns later. Rinse and repeat. I've restarted this campaign 12 times. I've done every amount of cheese in the books. I've gotten to Noble rank but by that point I see no point in continuing due to the AI Han ineptitude and the feeling of impending doom anyways. Send help.

the truth is,the liu bei in romance three kindgom story always lost all his land and flee all the time with both his brothers during starting and mid period until he gets zhuge liang with him,then finally have own stable faction at where liu zhang/liu yan territory was xD

[Fang]

Originally posted by FLA:

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

Why is this even a campaign? Your ai allies are the most incompetent ♥♥♥♥♥ on the face of the planet and no matter how many times you kick the Yellow Turban's teeth in, the come back with full stacks from three different factions all at once and target you specifically. I have Bo Hai and Pingyuan, have played whackamole with the turbans for the past 10 turns, wiping stack after stack and I look south and there's Lu Zhi with no land. I look Northwest and Tao Qian force marched himself PAST ZHONGSHAN to hit a random holding in the mountains meanwhile the Turbans are literally bordering Luo Yang. I can't move south to re secure that territory because when I do, here comes Zhang Jue with a full stack at Bo Hai. I can't move North because when I do, here comes Zhang Liang at PingYuan. Can't just play Whackamole because when I do, HERE COMES ALL OF THE BROTHERS AND EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ YELLOW TURBAN REBEL STACK IN THE ENTIRE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ COUNTRY. Can't have an economy because I can't hold anything if I want to expand, can't expand or I lose all of my gains and my allies can't hold ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anything. Evert time I hit a stack and win they retreat then bam, next turn they just say ♥♥♥♥ it and take a county from an ally then come right back at me with a full stack 2 turns later. Rinse and repeat. I've restarted this campaign 12 times. I've done every amount of cheese in the books. I've gotten to Noble rank but by that point I see no point in continuing due to the AI Han ineptitude and the feeling of impending doom anyways. Send help.

the truth is,the liu bei in romance three kindgom story always lost all his land and flee all the time with both his brothers during starting and mid period until he gets zhuge liang with him,then finally have own stable faction at where liu zhang/liu yan territory was xD

That came later. He went to Liu Biao first. Zhuge Liang then joined him, and they joined Wu at Red Cliffs. It was a long arduous path to get to Chengdu. Honestly, it's a miracle he ever managed to form Shu as it is.

[Fenris]

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

Originally posted by Fried Noodles:

There's no more Fervor once you win the Mandate War.
Could just eat it during the war and focus on eliminating the Zhang brothers. Then you won't have to worry about it later.

Well that is nice to know. May revisit it after my sun ce AWB campaign.

Arguably the worst aspect of that dlc is that cao cao will run and settle south of sun jian. Even if you play it out you will still never get a true playthrough because cao cao will be in Taiwan. It's so annoying

[Pᴀχ LLMCxDak]

Originally posted by Fenris:

Originally posted by LLMCxDak:

Well that is nice to know. May revisit it after my sun ce AWB campaign.

Arguably the worst aspect of that dlc is that cao cao will run and settle south of sun jian. Even if you play it out you will still never get a true playthrough because cao cao will be in Taiwan. It's so annoying

Yeah I noticed that. Causes Sun Jian to never gain a foothold because Cao Cao encircles him. Really dumb decision to have him inherit Cao Song's lands by default