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With so much to choose from, it might be hard to get yourself started, but there's a short personality test that will help you chose the officer that suits your own style, and every last aspect of the game has a fully fleshed out tutorial that covers everything you'll ever need to know—with the only problem being able to retain this overload of information. Even with the relatively simple tasks of a free officer or vassal, there's still a mountain of knowledge to absorb and understand, not even considering the rich history of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga that you're smack in the middle of. Though trial, error, and manual in hand, you'll manage what will soon become second nature.
Freedom shouldn't have to depend so much on luck though.
No developer has forever to work on a game, so there's only so much they'll ever be able to cram into it. Even if we accept the limitations, it's hard to ignore that the otherwise engaging dueling and debating systems are inherently broken. Dueling is a complex battle of rock, paper, scissors, where your have six normal attacks, the ability to guard or evade, and use whatever special dueling skills you've managed to pick up. The problem is what particular options you have in any one round are chosen at "random." This is a rather suspicious sort of randomness where you're sometimes repeatedly left at a disadvantage, getting all the worst skills while you're opponent always seems to have the right one to beat you: occasionally predicting your moves with accuracy that seems just a little unreasonable. As a result, dueling is never something you can become good at beyond raising your WAR attribute. As a result, it's no fun.
Debating suffers from the same dubious "luck." The system is rather complicated where you choose arguments of three different sorts (logic, virtue, profit) to match against your opponent. The higher number wins, but these values are also placed on the board, and getting a row of the same type will count as an attack in itself. These can be further enhanced if you have special debating skills, such as Awe, which will damage your opponent every round it's in play. Face an opponent with higher stats, however, and you'll never seem to get the options you need to counter his, always getting low values so he can easily verbally pummel you into submission. Something is a bit fishy when the highest number you ever get is five, yet your opponent never runs out of nines.
The third flaw in Three Kingdoms seeks to undermine the otherwise engaging turn-based combat by providing a schizophrenic AI that doesn't seem to know what it's doing half the time. Sometimes it'll hammer at you mercilessly, raining fire down upon your troops as it exploits every flaw in your defense, while in other instances, enemy units will run all over the board at random—not even bothering to launch an attack. Sometimes it'll preserve a unit low on men, while other times it will blithely send them off to commit suicide while a more powerful unit runs for the hills. At least it's unpredictable, but more often it's too easy to defeat, leeching the challenge from combat. What's worse is the ally AI, which seems more interested in getting in your way than actually helping. The position before a gate is the most important spot during a siege, but while you're getting a ram ready to smash the door to splinters, your ally will take that place with a severely weakened unit that can barely do any damage at all. Thanks a bunch, Sun Jian.
Even flawed as it is, Romance of the Three Kingdoms X is a fiendishly addictive experience, especially when you reach the rank of prefect, and have a dozen different issues all demanding your attention at once. While you're in the middle of building up the city walls after the last attack, your rival sends a fresh troop to hassle you again, throwing you back into battle before repairs are finished. Or while you're away hunting for more officers, your ally is double teamed and in danger of ceasing to exist, and would have been crushed if not for your power to change history. There's almost always something happening that'll keep you playing for "just a few more minutes," which will quickly become hours lost in reliving ancient China in all its myth and splendor.
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