Game 471: Romance of the Three Kingdoms

 

A selection of screenshots of the PC-8801 version, which I won't be playing

 

My dad used to tell me tales of the far east at bed time, and taught me while feudal Japan did not tolerate misbehavior, there was just no surviving ancient China. There were, of course, famines, wars, disease, and earthquakes, but the real threat was execution. Didn't make rice quota? Death. Soldiers mutinied? Death. Told an unfunny joke? Death. Didn't listen to the teacher in school? Death for you and your parents so they don't make any more rascals like you. That last one came up more than once.

Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, inspired by Guanzhong's massively successful novel about historical Chinese characters getting hacked into historical little pieces, was their true breakout title, and the earliest game to receive an official English localization, although not until 1989 at which point Genghis Khan and the second Nobunaga's Ambition had already been localized.

In a lot of ways, the first Nobunaga's Ambition feels like a prototype for Romance of the Three Kingdoms - all of the systems from that earlier title are intact here, but everything is more detailed, more complex, more balanced, and, well, there's just more of it. The map triples in size from 17 provinces to 59, a year consists of twelve turns instead of four, diplomacy and combat are greatly expanded on, and a major number of new systems concern the addition of employed generals who are needed to carry out your orders outside your home province.

The original version was on the PC-8801, now written in C instead of BASIC, and a PC-8801mkIISR version followed in early 1986 with the addition of FM music. Releases to other contemporary Japanese computers came next, and in 1989, English localized ports to the Amiga, PC, and NES. I've decided to play the Amiga version, as overall it seems the closest to the original.

 

There are several options to select before playing - first there is the starting year, which determines the number of empires and how consolidated China is at the game's start. I pick the earliest period, 189 AD, in which the Han dynasty is deteriorating and regional officials with their own armies begin fighting over the pieces. The latest period, 215 AD, has the majority of China belonging to the kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu, and the goal to defeat your rivals and unify the kingdoms under your rule.

You can play with between 0 and up to 8 players (depending on the scenario) - zero if you want to just watch the computer play itself. The 189 scenario, with the most fragmented map, allows the full eight. 

If you say "Cow Cow" you're Rong, Kong. It's more like Çao Çao.

Next, you pick which of the eight masters to play as, and with those amazing stats, how could I not go with Cao Cao? The manual says that he is not available in the first scenario, but the manual is wrong about that. And this isn't the only thing the manual is wrong about.

The AI has two parameters - strength and personality. The former is an overall difficulty modifier that increases the enemy stats, just as in Nobunaga's Ambition. Personality can be "warlike" or "rational," and the manual advises that "rational" makes for a much more difficult game as they will not hesitate to attack when victory is assured. I'm not sure if that assessment is correct, but I select a strength of 5/10 and a rational personality.

Prior experience has shown me two things - war is costly, and the AI cheats. They will rally troops faster than what should be possible, they will turtle in their fortifications at a massive combat bonus unavailable to you, and they will spam fire attacks and caltrops with improbably high accuracy. My strategy for this real go bears that in mind.

January 189AD

First order of business - know the enemy, and know yourself! Half of that is easy; we have one moderately rich state #7 in the capital of Yanzhou, where summer flooding is a major risk. Our immediate neighbors are Dong Zhou, to the west, and Yuan Shao, to the north, but we're going to get acclimated to more neighbors very soon.

A quirk of ROT3K, somewhat reminiscent of the weird turn-wasting "order" mechanic in Kawanakajima, is that querying information outside of your own state counts as an action for that month. In some cases, even querying information inside your state counts as an action for that month. However, the game is perfectly happy to let you query all of the states on the map before your turn ends, so I do that.

Dong Zhou, with a combined 94,000 soldiers across four provinces, is by far my greatest threat, so I personally pay him a visit with a gift.

Gou Yu is being a worrywart. The messenger (me) will be fine.

 

This arrangement ensures a few months of peace while I pick territories around him, and in the future when I'm wealthier, I'll be able to pay off his growing animosity for cheap and at less risk to my pages so long as I don't let his contempt grow too much. However, accepting a bride is seen as a favor to me, not to him, and he may demand repayment some day in the form of one of my territories. If it comes to that, better that than having him take what he wants by force.

Next, I waste no time in having my generals expand and conquer the surrounding territory. Another quirk of ROT3K is that actions (such as moving) are centered around states, not generals, so if you are lucky with the randomized state order, you can move your generals pretty far in a single month.

May 189AD

 

Seven generals have taken seven states. I need more generals, and at this stage of the game the easiest way to recruit more is by scouting your territories for freelance leaders. Not every search is successful, and each state has a finite number of generals to be found, With Cao Cao's great charisma, I can usually persuade one each month with a personal visit. But they are freelance, and other masters can and do scoop them up right from my own territory.

Yuan Shao, being a distant second-greatest threat, also receives a bride of the Cao bloodline. 

July 189AD 

July is tax month, and by now most of the searches for new generals are unsuccessful. But I have ten in my employ and another five have been discovered, waiting to be recruited by someone. Hopefully me.

I still prioritize expansion, but also turn some of my attention toward developing provinces. Here, growth is a much slower process than in Nobunaga's Ambition. Cultivation and flood control are the main activities, and the manual advises investing no more than a few zhu per month, but this is bad advice; either put in just one, or put in everything you've got. There's a growth floor, so investing just one coin will always be beneficial, but you have to invest quite a bit more than that for a bigger benefit, and the better your state is, the more zhu it takes, so unless you have enough money to max out the region's value, you're better off doing the bare minimum and saving your cash.

Opportunities to develop, in my order of priority, are:

• Build a castle. The amount this takes is usually between 3,000z and 10,000z, and is randomly changed every turn. Each castle built improves your tax collections, so I always build one if I can afford it - and since the cost changes for every province every turn, I can usually afford one at some point during the year if I keep trying. And I'm going to need more money very soon.
• Buy rice. The merchants aren't always in town, but when they are, you can quickly fill up your stocks of rice on the cheap when prices are low. Prices fluctuate madly, though the number shown is misleading; a value of 83 means "83 units of rice per zhu" and hence you want to buy when the number is high. Just be sure to leave something in the coffers and stores for your soldiers, or you'll be sorry. Selling, sadly, is not as lucrative as you might wish, but you might profit a few thousand zhu in a year if you're lucky.
• Give to the peasants. Loyal peasants are more productive, and a maximal gift of 10,000 of the rice you took from them boosts loyalty nicely.
• Flood control. Floods aren't as devastating as you might think, but having them less often is a good thing, and with an intelligent governor in charge it doesn't take too long to get this close to zero.
• Cultivation. Slowly raises your land value unless you put in a lot of money. Peasant loyalty is a quicker way to get improved harvests, so this is only resorted to if I have nothing better to do.

Winter falls in October, and my expansion pauses for the season, as forced marches in the winter can be deadly.

 

January 190AD 

Spring starts, and my conquest of the path of least resistance continues.

July 190AD

Sun Jian, who controls region 41, commands seven generals and 9,900 soldiers. I have 22 generals and over 17,000 soldiers throughout my regions, so he doesn't really pose a direct threat, but might be a hindrance to my expansion into the south. I could spend a year training, arming, and mobilizing my troops to his doorstep to explain to him a little bit of arithmetic. Or I could just send him my last daughter and keep going. Guess which one I prefer.

With the funds generated from my newly conquered provinces and whatever castles I could build in a year, I also butter up the rest of my rivals, and give what I've got left to my less-loyal generals. You have a number of gift options for improving subordinate loyalty - gold, rice, books, horses, women, but why complicate things? Generals have their preferences - meatheads prefer women, eggheads prefer books, and warbros like horses, but everyone likes gold, and it makes the soldiers happy too. Generals of stronger moral fiber also tend to gripe when you traffic provincial girls along with the rape and plundering that goes with it, though brutish ones enjoy it.

I'm able to take a few more states before winter falls, which I spend building up my territories and continuing to recruit more generals. One defects in December, but I have plenty left.

January 191AD

Tao Qian, master of states #10 and #11, dies of illness and his favored general Mi Zhu takes over. Cao Ang also comes of age and serves me as a moderately strong but intensely loyal subordinate; he'll make a good governor, I think.

The aggressive expansion and recruitment continues, as I'm too broke to do anything else. This includes province #10, which Mi Zhu abandons in February.

 

July 191AD 

 

A few no-account generals left me, but I'd say I'm doing pretty well, albeit spread thin with each province allocated only the bare minimum of military force needed to control it - I have 29 generals distributed among 27 states, and soldiers allotted haphazardly. The recruitment of new generals is slowing down, too - I've probably found most of them in the territories I control. But now that taxes are in, I can easily pay my neighbors not to invade me, with cash to spare for my remaining generals.

Winter falls before I can reach state #23 with my free generals to complete my sweep of the white regions, and one disgruntled general leaves me, but I recruit another two.

The rest of the winter is spent building up the provinces. It seems a better use of my time than scrounging my territory for whatever freelance scoundrels are still lurking.

 

So far, I'm impressed with ROT3K's scope and attention to detail, and I can forgive some of the weirder gameplay mechanics, but I confess I'm not having a great deal of fun playing it. Perhaps this is partly my own fault for taking a safe approach, but the game does not reward reckless aggression, and slowly building up your territories isn't particularly exciting. Maybe other scenarios are more interesting, or maybe using a more challenging or "warlike" AI setting would have made things more fun, but I don't feel like starting over to find out.

To be continued! 

Nobunaga's Ambition: BASIC bushido

Rolling a super-Nobunaga.

For this last post, I'm going to try to tackle the hardest difficulty of Nobunaga's Ambition, but I won't play fair. I have save states. I have the source code. And I'm going to do my best to explain how things work. And oh, boy, is it kind of insane!

First of all, let's look at the stats. Everyone's got them, but on anything but the lowest difficulty, pretty much everyone gets better stats than you, especially Tokugawa. So I am savescumming to ensure I get something decent.

I have an IQ of 108 (this might not sound amazing but my last Nobunaga was basically an inbred imbecile), constitution of 98, ambition of 110, charisma of 100, and luck of 93. What does it all mean?

Not much! These stats, as it turns out, are simple combat modifiers, and there is zero distinction between the first four. I'll get into the specifics later, but at a glance, just average them, compare them to the average of the other guy, and that shows you how much of an advantage/disadvantage you are, all other things being equal. Tokugawa, at the highest difficulty, easily has an average of 140 across these stats, so I would need 140% the number of troops in order to match his power. Either that or beat him in other stats.

Luck applies a small combat bonus which does not scale with your army size/morale/training. It's basically inconsequential unless you're very evenly matched otherwise. Even then it's probably inconsequential because combat rolls are a factor, and those do scale with your other stats.

One other factor here is that constitution increases in the spring, but decreases during random plagues. Apart from that, your stats are set.

 

1560 

A plague has hit. Every spring, there is a 30% chance of typhoons, and a 7% chance of plagues (but no chance of both). Either event affects the region as a whole, but not every province; in the event of a plague, each province has a 25% chance of being affected, and mine was. This reduces your rice production to 40%-90% of its previous value, and your army size by the same value.

Not a great start, but I have math on my side.

You need rice to feed your army, and the formula for the autumn rice harvest is deterministic:

[Production] * [Flood control]/100 * [Peasant loyalty]/100 * [Peasant wealth]/100 * [Tax rate]/100

 

This maximizes at 1000. Not important right now, but it will be! 

My values right now are the cyan numbers - 24, 45, 49, and 67. At a base tax rate of 50, I'd get one lousy koku this autumn, and I'm going to need nine to sustain the army as it is, let alone grow it!

At first glance, you might think the best way to get these numbers up is to increase the lowest stat, which is production. This is wrong for a simple reason; production is by far the most expensive stat to raise! One gold raises it one point, while flood control goes up by five points per piece, and also has the benefit of mitigating typhoon damage.

Even better than that, gifts to your people increase both loyalty and wealth by 100/[Production] per coin/koku, or 4.2 each.

But if you really want to get those numbers up, you gotta do it the same way as the 1%. Abuse the tax code!

Taxes adjust loyalty and wealth by this formula:

50 - [new tax rate]

 

See how this might be abused? It's not diffing the old rate and the new. It's diffing the old rate and the baseline of 50! Set it to the minimum of 1, and you increase both numbers by 49. You can do that repeatedly. Then you can set it right back without affecting them at all!

So that's what I do. In the spring, I lower the tax rate to 1, and in summer, I raise it right back to 50 in time for the harvest, which produces 6 koku rather than the 5 I'd get from gifting my gold. But that's just the beginning. Over the next three seasons, I set the tax rate to 1 three times, which does nothing but make the peasants happier and richer, and in the summer, just before harvest, I set it to 100 which makes them a little sadder and poorer. This gives me a harvest of 45 koku, a decent surplus of 36.

1561

I'm still lagging behind Tokugawa, and at this point investing in flood control would be more valuable than tax abuse. So I do both. Provincial wars start to heat up, but I'm left alone for now. The harvest next autumn is 263 koku, which way outpaces Tokugawa, though his wealth and martial growth is starting to be worrisome.

1562

I'm rice rich, but gold poor. Too bad the merchant isn't here right now. I spent what little I have on troops, train a bit, and Kitabatake attacks with a slightly superior force. 

I said I'd explain how combat works, and a roughly even battle is the most interesting one, so this is the ideal place for it.

The single most important stat here is each unit's strength, a number at the bottom of the hex. These are distributed in proportion to the overall army size, always in multiples of ten, and priority given to the highest rank. My army size is 12, so my hex strengths are 30+30+20+20+20. His is 13, so they are 30+30+30+20+20.

Combat strength is determined by this formula:

[Unit strength] * ([Stat bonus] + [terrain bonus]) * [Random factor] * [Lord bonus] + [Luck bonus]

The stat bonus is the sum of seven stats, divided by 700. IQ, constitution, ambition, charisma, army loyalty, army training, and weapons. His bonus will be 1.21, mine will be 0.98.

The terrain bonus applies a flat bonus from 0-2 based on the terrain the unit is in. 0 for plains, 1 for forests, 1.5 for forts, and 2 for castles. As my strongest units are in a castle and fort, respectively, I'm actually in a pretty good position. And I believe the bonus applies even if you are attacking from a fortified position.

The random factor is a multiplier from 0.6 to 1.6.

The lord bonus is a flat multiplier of 2 if the clan lord is personally leading the fight. 1 otherwise. When you attack, you can decide to have Nobunaga lead or not, but if your #1 unit is lost, then it's game over. When you are attacked, this depends on whether the province attacked is where Nobunaga currently is or not.

Finally, the luck bonus is your luck stat divided by 50.

 

So, let's look at my #1 unit vs. the #4 intruder outside his gate. My combat strength would be:

30 * 2.98 * [Random factor] * 2 + 1.86 = 109-288

His would be:

20 * 1.21 * [Random factor] * 2 + 1.86 = 31-79

 

Whoever's is higher does damage, unless the difference is less than 10. Mine is guaranteed to be bigger, so I will do damage, and this will simply be the difference divided by 10.

An average random factor would mean 13 points. This is exactly how much damage I do.

 

So, this is really my #1 and #2 units' fight, and the best thing they can do is not move from their fortifications. #3 and #5 are stuck on the left side and won't be able to do much but finish off wounded units. #4 is stuck on the right side with all of Kitabatake's stronger units and won't be able to hurt them much even from the advantage of cover in the woods.

I take a few losses but I win and take his province. Unfortunately, Saito immediately invades and takes it from me. But then he immediately invades Owari and loses! Both provinces are mine! But then Tsutsui invades Iseshima, which I cannot possibly defend, and forces me to retreat.

 

1563

 

After that tumultuous winter, I'm still alive, but the weakest clan on the map. Gotta arm in a hurry! Good news, though - the merchants are here, and I have over 300 koku stocked in Owari. And prices are decent! I sell it all, and with the cash, hire 234 soldiers; just enough that I will have money left to pay them - the harvest will bring enough to feed them. From Mino #9, I transport the entirety of its wealth back to Owari; I cannot defend two provinces at this time. Sure enough, Mino is attacked and taken this season by the Tsutsui clan. But the rice arrives in Owari, which I sell and use to cultivate the land, maxing out the rice harvest.

The remaining money, and I will definitely want more of it, goes into the town itself. The formula here is simple; each coin you invest in the town improves the town value by one point. And each autumn you collect cash revenue equal to your town's value multiplied by a random value between 0.5 and 1.5. It's a fast return on your investment, but that doesn't do you much good if you get invaded before you can spend it. But if I put in my entire savings of 523, the worst I can collect from that is 261, which will still pay the soldiers.

 

1564

 

Oh, boy. Miyoshi and Asakura are quickly unifying! And I'm looking like I might be Miyoshi's next territory. But Owari is an economic powerhouse that just withstood a plague and collected 422 ryo and produced 868 koku in one year. Imagine what I could do in another!

I'm not going to invade anyone yet, though - I don't feel confident enough I could conquer a province and then defend it and Owari.

I invest in more flood control, sell the excess rice when the merchants come, and dump the gold right back into the town - all 1646 of it. The rest of the year is peaceful.

 

1565 

 

It's time to start thinking about invasions. Tempting as it might be to eliminate Tokugawa, any force I might send his way either leaves Owari inadequately defended from Miyoshi, or is itself inadequately large to defend itself from, well, everyone. Besides, my army could stand some improvement before I go all-in. I buy weapons; 9000 points worth of them (which is all I am allowed), give all of my rice to the army for a nice loyalty boost, and spend the rest of my cash on more soldiers.

Only then do I invade, and I target Mino #9 to the north, bringing 247 well-armed soldiers to engage the 109 stationed there. And the fight is over before I can even issue an order.

 

1566

Well, crap. I expected Mino to fall easily, but I didn't expect this would get me the whole Miyoshi territory!

While optimizing the newly conquered realms, I continue to push into Hida #6 from Mino. They won't have the same weapons advantage that they had coming from Owari, but they won't need it; my force outnumbers them 3:1. This converts the entire Asakura territory to me. With them out of my way, Owari can, quite safely, invade Tokugawa's realm with their entire army. Sayonara, old friend.

 

And honestly, the rest of the game just isn't all that interesting to write about. So I won't. I isolate the rest of my rivals and conquer them one-by-one with overwhelming invasion forces by the end of the year.

The last, hilariously stacked battle against Uesugi in their little alcove.

 

 

Some additional notes:

A non-aggression pact costs both lords 10 gold and sets a diplomatic relations value to 70. It will always be accepted as long as this value is not negative, but it does not guarantee non-aggression! Essentially, it means that if the lord decides to attack you, there's a 70% chance of changing his mind. This value trends 10 points toward zero every spring, and I'm not sure what makes it go into negative.

Typhoons, like plagues, have a 25% chance of affecting each province on the map. The effect is to reduce productivity to [Flood Control]/220 of its original value. It also reduces peasant wealth by 1-5 points.

The AI has a routine to evaluate potential invasion targets, and part of it is estimating the regional strength. If a region has more rice than soldiers, then it evaluates the strength as [Soldiers]². Otherwise, it is evaluated as [Soldiers]*[Rice]. This is doubled if the lord is present. They tend to attack weak provinces if they have a stronger adjacent province.

Ninjas will do damage to a target provinces' army loyalty, training, peasant loyalty, and wealth. The amount decreased is five points per ninja.