Romance of the Three Kingdoms

"Too simplistic to be worth playing over its sequels."

Every gamer knows of a few genres that were practically created by a single company. Enix created the console RPG, id created the modern FPS, and Konami created the rhythm game. But in addition to those relatively prominent genres, you have others that are not as well known but were also the brainchildren of one entity, sometimes even filled with games created just by that one corporation. One of these doesn't really have a name, but I call it the turn-based strategic wargame genre. The Japanese developer Koei was responsible for its creation, and few other companies have mimicked it despite a sizeable niche audience. Ironically, Koei's most successful creation is the Warriors franchise, which introduced a couple of popular ideas into the third-person action genre but doesn't fall too far outside of the norm. However, Koei's wargames have been a cornerstone of the company for the past 25 years, and are a large part of why the company still exists today.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is by far the most respected series in the genre. As of this writing, there are a whopping eleven games in the series, with only the fifth not being released in America; the eleventh is due on our shores in a matter of days. Though some of the games added a liberal amount of RPG elements to play, they all have the same fundamental approach: You are a warlord in China during the civil war that followed the fall of the Han Dynasty back in the 2nd century AD. You must gather followers, conquer provinces, and develop them into power bases, eventually placing the whole country under your rule. As you might expect, the first game, only released on the NES and some computer systems, portrays the most basic concept of this design.

One begins Romance of the Three Kingdoms by selecting from one of five possible scenarios, each taken from a pivotal point in the civil war, going from the evil Dong Zhuo's invasion of the imperial capital at the beginning to the rise of the eponymous three kingdoms towards the end. You then select from a number of rulers who were in power at the time; you generally only get to choose from the most important ones even if more exist. Up to eight players can choose from the list depending on the scenario, but you must have enough controllers to accommodate them. After rulers are selected, the difficulty level of the computer AI is selected (with ten choices) as well as whether the computers have passive or aggressive tendencies. Once all of this is set, you start the game as the leader of at least one of the 58 provinces in China.

Generally the first thing you want to do in Romance of the Three Kingdoms is build up your home provinces. You get one turn in each province you control, which allows you to do various things like recruit men for your armies, develop the land, and spy on enemies. Spending money on your land gives you protection against floods as well as more food and money every year. Giving food to your peasants raises their loyalty to you, giving you more tax revenues and deflecting any possible revolts. Doing both of these gives you a lot of leverage to build large armies with, especially since your land value and the loyalty of the peasants rarely goes down, unlike in the later games.

Once you've got good support from your lands, the next thing to do is hire generals and upgrade your armies. The best way to get generals in the beginning of Romance of the Three Kingdoms is to steal them from your enemies by finding the most disloyal generals and enticing them with gold, a horse, or your own personal charm. Then you have to increase their loyalty to you by giving them more money. Again, it's easier to do this in the original game since a general's loyalty rarely goes down. Of course, that also applies to your enemies, so later in the game this becomes a rare tactic overshadowed by capturing generals in battle. More on that later.

Though you can figure out which generals are the best if you have a passing knowledge of the history involved, the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff is by looking at a general's attributes. The most important ones are the general's power, which determines how strong his army is in battle, and the general's IQ, which determines how well he will handle a province's affairs. The greatest generals have high values of both, but usually you'll have one group of generals for battle and another for domestic concerns. There are also a lot of bad generals, but even they are useful for filling space on the front lines and in less important provinces.

Once a general is hired, you can give him up to 20000 men and then spend money and time training and arming them. Yet again, while your men will obviously die in battle, the general's training and armament values will never go down. This simplifies matters tremendously as a huge portion of the time spent in later games in the series is used to refortify your troops after a fierce battle. In the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it's a simple matter of hiring replacements, which is cheap and quick.

At this point you'll be prepared to expand and deal with rival warlords. You can deal with them diplomatically, offering them tribute or a daughter to lower their hostility towards you, but that usually is just a waste of time unless you bite off more than you can chew. The main way of dealing with enemies is by invading their provinces and killing them. Battle in each of the 58 provinces takes place on a unique grid map made up of hexes (squares, actually, but laid out like hexes), covered with various bits of terrain and dotted by castles, and with predetermined spots from which attacking and defending armies can begin the fight. Unlike the later games, it doesn't matter which direction you attack from, as you'll always get the exact same map; in the sequels, the direction of attack could have a major effect on your chances of winning due to differing terrain and fortifications.

The objective of the attacking force is to take over all of the castles in the province or defeat all of the defending armies, unless the leader of the opposing kingdom is there, in which case simply capturing him will suffice. The defenders must either defeat the attackers' commander or take over their rice depot. It sounds like the defenders have the advantage, but in fact the attackers always get their turns before the defenders do, so it's impossible to take over the rice depot unless you're really lucky or they're really stupid. This also makes it a lot easier for attackers to take the castles, since they can move into them before the defenders can.

Further compounding this advantage are the attack options. In addition to regular attacks and simultaneous attacks (which attack a target using all of the armies that are surrounding it), you can set fire to an adjacent square. If a unit is in this square, it must leave it (either by moving or fleeing the battle) or be exterminated at the end of the turn. This tactic works a great deal of the time, and terrain seems to have little effect on it; you can set castles or water (!) on fire as easily as the plains. Thus the best tactic for an attacker is to set fire to the units in the castles, then moving in after the fire is extinguished. Romance of the Three Kingdoms tries to make up for this by making generals nearly impossible to capture when they run, but all you have to do in that case is push the enemy back until he is surrounded by provinces controlled by other rulers. Then he has nowhere to run and you can capture everyone there.

Upon capturing generals, you can choose to kill them, free them, or recruit them. Killing them is useless, since it increases hostility towards you and you gain nothing from it. Freeing them is also usually a bad idea since in the original game, generals never deny you if you try to recruit them. This doesn't apply to rulers, who are automatically executed when captured. Once a ruler dies, a successor is chosen from his pool of generals, which makes this automatic killing unfortunate since sometimes a good general will be selected, making him permanently unavailable to you.

All of the above issues combine to make Romance of the Three Kingdoms a pretty easy game, and the poor AI doesn't help matters. While it's true that I always play these games at the lowest difficulty level, the later games are still a lot harder even then, and the computer seems to be smarter. In the original game, you'll see the computer do some stupid things both on and off the field. When defending, the computer likes to leave a minimal defense with its castles, sending most of its units towards your commander. If your commander is any good, you can take over the castles long before your commander can be defeated. It does better with attacking, but even then it makes poor decisions on the strategic scale, overextending itself and allowing for a counterattack that often leaves it worse off than it was before. This also applies to your own units and provincial leaders, who can be put under AI control if desired.

As you can imagine, this all gets pretty tedious when stretched out over nearly 60 provinces. Chances are you'll quit before you get that far. The first Romance of the Three Kingdoms is just too simple to be very fun. If this game still sounds appealing in some way (and, well, even if it doesn't), I strongly recommend trying the first sequel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms II for the 16-bit consoles. It's just like the original except better in nearly every fashion, with a lot more complexity. Unfortunately the sequel didn't include the rice depot or the ability to split a unit in half (useful for surrounding enemies and taking multiple castles), but I suppose you can't have it all.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/29/07, Updated 08/31/07

Game Release: Romance of the Three Kingdoms (US, October 1989)