If you work hard, build infrastructure, and retake territory… you can fire like one dude. So every single firing costs 80 “political influence” points. But remember the Han Dynasty has gotten weak, and the retainers are the ones running the show. No problem, just start downsizing right? That’s what you’d do in a normal game, where you can remove people from your fledgling court at will and have personally recruited just about every one of your generals and retainers. (Remember this is an era before corporate boards and university administration existed, so elite looting was a bit more direct.) The whole thing has created a massive patronage system as well as a host of expensive sinecures that are rapidly bankrupting the empire. The various generals and officials may serve the emperor, but they work for the eunuchs.
The Han have a doozy: to rule China for centuries, they’ve built up a massive bureaucracy, and to safeguard the dynasty they have placed just about all that machinery under the control of Imperial eunuchs, who hold all the key government offices and who enjoy the loyalty of just about every member of the court. One of the cool things in Three Kingdoms is that just about every faction has a unique game mechanic that can help them triumph in the face of adversity, but also some constraints that impose special challenges. This is what we’ll call “the eunuch problem”. Mandate of Heaven’s earlier starting date opens just as the first stirrings of the infamous Yellow Turban Rebellion are first being reported in the countryside but, superficially, the Han dynasty is still at peace. Its action begins just as the usurper Dong Zhuo is about to flee the Imperial capital, and the coalition of Han loyalists, ambitious nobles, and upstart officers has come undone as everyone finally recognizes there’s no putting the dynasty back together. Three Kingdoms’ main campaign opens well after the Yellow Turbans have been suppressed. You could argue it’s the one campaign that provides context for the entire expansion and the main game that was released last year. But this also puts the most panoramic, dramatic campaign in Three Kingdoms behind glass. Among the factions you can select, the Emperor’s is rated “very hard” implying that it’s the kind of brutal and unforgiving experience reserved for those who are already pretty seasoned veterans.
Mandate of Heaven commits one sin, however: It tacitly discourages new players from playing as the Empire. They become the tragic heroes of the expansion, racing to overwhelm the Han Empire and its ambitious and self-dealing leadership before the might of its institutions and infrastructure can be brought to bear against them. Instead of a fanatical personality cult, Mandate portrays a popular communitarian movement whose aim is to tear down both the Han Dynasty and the deeply hierarchal economic structures it has codified for centuries. Mandate of Heaven takes a different tack, de-emphasizing the mysticism surrounding the Yellow Turbans and focusing instead on the fact that it was apparently an unprecedented mass uprising across a wide swathe of China. That’s understandable: For reference, this is all stuff that’s covered in the first half-dozen chapters of the 120-chapter Romance of the Three Kingdoms epic. In Dynasty Warriors, the Yellow Turbans are brushed-off as a level 1 prologue to the main action of the story.
Total war three kingdoms mandate of heaven review series#
There’s a mass revolt of cultist fanatics, and the Han Dynasty’s sluggish and inept response is what reveals the depths of its incapacity, while the rise of a coterie of effective commanders and governors opens the door to a series of coups. If you’ve played a Dynasty Warriors game at any point in your life, you have heard of the Yellow Turban Rebellion that is at the heart of this expansion.
0 kommentar(er)
