A good way to start off as Gongsun Zan to get through his early game, is start conquering the far north corner. Then when Yuan Shao inevitably declares war on you, ask Dong Zhuo for vassalage. This will free you from Yuan Shao's early doomstacks, and it's not like you have much tribute to give anyway at this point. Use this opportunity to take over the other smaller factions around you. Ask your sugar daddy Dong to declare war on your neighbors, and not only will he agree, he will pay you thousands of gold to do so. Get yourself established enough to compete with Yuan Shao (maybe even catch one of his stacks out in forced march) declare your independence from daddy Dong, and steamroll the map from there.
For me the hardest and actually most fun is definitely Yuan Shu. Since you're start at war with the next door Dong Zhou and will be forced to go to war against Liu Biao very early on. Then Liu Cong and Cao Cao will almost definitely declare war on you since the price hates you and Cao Cao always attacks player's faction. Even Sun Ce and Yuan Shao will join the party when you declare your ambition. Of course you may be able to avoid some of that if you keep the low profile and exploit the politics, but seriously, what kind of peasant does that? Definitely not emperor Yuan Shu. A real total war faction I would say.
zhang yan's probably only redeemed by the fact that you start in the north, and can get all the research nodes that give you the various nomadic shock cavalry units early. Rushing a ton of high tier shock cav is great for ambushes
I'm super excited for the next tierlist, i wish CA made more character based DLC with a lot of new arts and unique backgrounds! Hopefully in the next game
I'm a relative newbie to 3 kingdoms i had a few epic fails with yellow turban and Bandits faction but i found Lui Biao relatively beginner friendly with room for errors. The immediate vassalisation system makes this guy great hit weaker factions around you fast to make them vassals. Pretty soon i bought every cheap vassal on the map that wasn't treacherous, i over expanded not realizing the governance penalty but once i demolished a bunch of structures and got governance buildings in their stead it was smooth sailing. The hardest part is your heroes are weak, i struggled a bit against Dong Zhou as LuBu could just wreck my armies but eventually i vassalized him too and bought all his vassals as well. Id rate him as at least medium, maybe easy. As mid-late game he steam rolls with a horde of vassals. You have more money to know what to do with, and eventually you recruit better heroes for combat. But thanks for the guide!
She was my first campaign, once you hit unbreakable faction-wide it's honestly straight up broken, the AI will struggle to even take small resource settlements from you without a sizeable force
I honestly think u should do a redo of all duels in game. The previous winner was Dalai but he didn't win it, the mace did. I'm still salty lu bu didn't win haha. But it is fair really because that mace is just a automatic win. Dalai scares the bejesus out of me
Wow people still playing this game? I just got back into it. I remember seeing your commandery videos and how to manage economy, and reduce corruption. That bloody corruption, had me pulling my hair out!
I don't know if you're planning on doing a 94 version of this list, but I wonder where you'd place Sun Ce, who is in my opinion the most powerful faction in the game, but has a start that can be really dangerous to navigate.
no plans right to do the other dates but Sun Ce is probably normal. Similar to how I rated Cao Cao here as he is immensely powerful but difficult for new players to get use to all things you can do with his mechanics
I played like 3 campaigns as shamoke using the vassel mechanic, those vassels leads you into so wars you cant fight since you just got the tribe as a vassel having to fight meng huo and not focusing on getting your own province united, basically, just confederate every nanban faction as shamoke so you can also get the legendery characters and you can kind of control your wars, or you can just get them as vassels and then liberate them but your missing out on the income so yea just confederate
Great video, I’m going to give Zhang Yan a try next. I would love to see another video about this for the other start dates, I’ve been dying to find campaigns that are actually hard but don’t have the time to try every single one. Or if you could reply with the ones you would put in the “very hard” category i would appreciate that a ton! Thanks :)
Only thing I will disagree with are Tao Qian’s unique archers being trash. Territorial archers have the highest base ammo/ammo potential in the game (31 maximum). They can fire lots of fire arrows. Damage and range wise they’re equal to a normal archer. They’re very good on non-strategist generals, especially bandits with poison arrows. Also it’s a big plus that they’re recognized as a militia unit. Your mechanic will give you a discount and you can cut upkeep by 75% with Liu Bei and rites of Zhou item set. The spearmen are absolute trash though that are more or less outperformed by Ji militia.
What would you consider the most powerful faction in the hands of a capable player? For me its Cao Cao as he has the most potential to grow quickly. You can use his morale debuff scheme/charge bonus scheme to destroy much larger armies in the early game where you don't get a full stack for income and you can use his movement bonus to speed through conquering counties. His opinion scheme + food diplomacy helps secure your borders allowing you to just have one stack conquering in one direction. His -20 food scheme basically allows you to buy counties off of liu biao and liu bei as you have plenty of food. And qingzhou units are just monsterous when fighting off much larger armies as you just have cao cao give his unyielding skill when they are actually going to break. Once you unlock the northern army units, fighting multiple front wars are very doable with stacking off the northern army ancillary allowing you to have instant mustering 200% movement range elite armies which you only need to upkeep for a few turns
@@SeriousTrivia definately Sun Jian. You could make an argument as the most powerful faction in Total War, as no other game has the absurdity of instant armies, redoployment and just Sun Jian and Sun Ce's background bonuses.
@@1453YT I feel thats true but given thats its only for merc units which are pretty good but leaves you limited and the redeployment limit. As cao cao because both your heir and leader are commanders, you have 2 extra assignments. Have them stack the -3 mustering and 10% replenishment and with the tuntian building you have extra redeployment limit + -5% redeployment cost for each fully upgraded buildings add that on with flexibility on your council+ reforms you can get it pretty early. Plus you will be building tuntian buildings pretty much every food county for the extra food production boost
I feel that sun jian's main advantage is really because that south gives you massive eco and the charge bonus for the cav to take advantage of that eco
@@cheesecake39472 Certainly good points, but consider when redoployment is free (around turn 30-ish) and you can recruit double damage cavarly instantly anywhere on the map. The mercenary cavarly are also far more insane stat wise than any of Cao Cao's units. Cao Cao has lots of great factions, but his military is *fine*. Yuan Shao's obviously is better (probably less so in a H2H sense as it needs time to get going) and other factions like unbreakable everything Zheng Jiang and Mao Teng (at least on the battlefield) will wipe the floor with what Cao Cao can produce.
In my first playthrought as Lady Zhurong I got an event to marry and annex Meng Huo so she has that too. Combined with her position in a corner, I think she's actually easier than him.
As Huang Shao i acually find him incredibly hard, in one run i got swarmed by all sides and was eventually beaten, so i began a new run and retreated far south away from danger, i thought this made me safe but the people i 'escaped' from began launching multiple invasions of my new home totalling to i think 6 almost full or full armies invading over the course of 40 turns. Im doing ok (ish) now but a huge alliance is now at war with me and they don't want peace. Personally they feel very hard for them, or maybe i suck at the game idk.
Liu Bei is super easy in 190 because you can just disband your army and use the three brothers to annex the level 4 and 5 Han cities that are right next to you. Then you get a bunch of free land from the Tao Qian confederation. However as you said, Liu Bei kind of sucks late game because his faction mechanic simply becomes a buff to administrators and income. He really needed a rework to make unity useful in the mid to late game. TUP at least gives Pang Tong some OP items that turn him into an amazing prime minister. It gives him a bunch of faction wide ranged damage and reload speed buffs.
Huang Shao should be in easy, IMO. Faction-wide stalk is game breaking, especially if you cheese empty fort on Yuan Shao and focus beating down Tao Qian and Kong Rong.
that Liu Bei fight early one is the only thing that make it slightly normal as the three brothers do not care about invisible troops. If you beat them and take their weapons then its smooth sailing but they still pose some challenges
It all about location, location, location. Yuan shu, Liu Chong, Kong rong is really difficult because being surrounded by enemy or potential enemy. Ma Teng, Sun Jian and white clothes old man in the South is easiest to start
Just finished Yuan Shu 190 this is total war campaign. It was hard and slow at the beginning but slowly and boi Sun Ce is sending full stack troops every couple of turns. Have no problem to recruit general as you can just capture and marry to produce more generals for late game. It looks like the game decided not to award me this achievement again D:, may be I did some trading ancillaries at turn one or something. It's frustrating. Can we have a mini tier list of easiest faction to achieve this is total war challenge? XD
when you pick the looter faction council events that are pirate attacks in the northeastern commanderies, they never actually spawn on the map while the ones out west always spawn and cause problems for those who own Wuwei. So you can effectively corner camp the map on the northeast but not in the northwest
idk i feel like huang shao is pretty hard, you're facing a war on multiple fronts and no matter what you do, you'll eventually lose 2-3 settlements. or im just ass (which i kinda am) at tw games.
There's no way to continue playing this game without mods now. So it's only fair to talk about this game with the unlock every faction mod. And give ratings on difficulty as well as the fun aspects of them.
I don't think you need the Fates Divided DLC for either Cao Cao's and Yuan Shao's Unique Units. I only own the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Mandate of Heaven DLC and I have access to Cao Cao's Qinzhou units and Yuan Shao's Ye Vanguard units which is nice. I play on Hard difficulty on both Campaign and Battle so my skill is probably not as high as yours since you're rating based on Legendary Difficulty. From my perspective, I think Gongsun Zan is not super easy if you're not aware of tricks like avoiding meeting Yuan Shao or if you're not careful, Gongsun Du will stab you in the back while you're busy dealing with Yuan Shao which can be annoying. Liu Chong is also not that easy in the beginning since if I'm not mistaken Liu Chong no longer starts with Show of Force so you can't ability cheese from the start against Cao Cao which is a pain to deal with. The Yellow Turbans are quite tricky for beginners since everyone hates you but once you figure out you can general cheese and have multiple peasant crapstacks, they're hilariously powerful.
I am pretty sure you need them for multiplayer battles at least. 1. Gongsun Zan's situation is still not that bad even if Yuan Shao and Gongsun Du declares on you early when compared to some of the other factions. Like that is the worst situation you can end up in. 2. Liu Chong no longer starts with it, but you have basically a turn 1 trade available with Cao Cao so he can be on your good side for the time you need to build up (probably going to reclaim Luoyang and then once you have a little money, it is just premium troops and op skills the rest of the way). 3. Yes I agree as I probably skewed most of these rating towards the easier side as I will mention in the end as I just have played the game too much. But I still want to make a comparison with consideration to what the maximum potential a faction has at the end of the day.
@@SeriousTrivia I think liu chong "show of Force" get nerfed. IIRC, it use to be "poison volley" shotgun style, but since 1.7.1, it become Huang zhong "warning shot" single arrow style. But it almost 4-5 month since I played liu chong, not quite sure.
I made a Coalition between Liu Yao and Zhang Chao as Yan Baihu and they kicked me out by turn 2 or 3 of coalition then Cao Cao and Sun Ce Declared War on Me alongside Liu Biao makes me question his difficulty in most aspect unless im just that unlucky lol
I think the thing is, you should just ignore his faction mechanic and just do your own thing as the bonuses aren't great and the effort and randomness is just too annoying
9:25 disagree mostly because that early fight is so damn easy. I play on records but if anything, that should make stumbling into the fight against a full stack with 9 units including generals harder not easier, but because the AI basically has nothing but Militia tier outside of some good starting units chain routing is pretty easy. It was my first campaign and slaughtering Lui Biao was pretty easy, Xianyang fell very quickly, and I followed that up with crushing Yuan Shu in basically 2 turns.
you can but it is not going to work well. Like if you want to use melee cavalry against sword infantry, then you should cycle charge them to take advantage of your charge bonus. If you just sit there and fight them in melee, you are using a unit that is only a quarter in size to tank the damage from four times their numbers with similar offensive stats. You will definitely lose that engagement or come out with more casualties than you should
- It would be lovely to watch video about real three kingdoms historical places. If they are still remained. - weapons and war related technology of three kingdoms (if you are not already been made😂) - Do you have any suggestions for "what if" books/movies related to three kingdoms? Ive read some 90s manga that main young couples protagonists time-travel back to 3K and became one of generals.
Tao Qian was actually my easiest campaign,I kept CaoCao pleased and paid 1K gold to keep him in check and then I had to make my hardest choice Do I go South and and attack that Vanguard general holding that nice town with whom I had just started trading? Or do I go north and take everything Liu Bei was supposed to take? These 2 options will lead to either bully/scheme vs Yuan Shao or -Sun Jian- Sun Ce,as they're the ones the most annoying to deal with in the late game. Sun Jian with countless armies and good generals and Yuan Shao with countless Vassals. Oh,and you can also get Dong Zhuo's weapon and Bow after he dies by promising per turn only to declare war on the Han Empire the same turn,lol!
my point is, the things you named are things you can do with any faction and does not involve Tao Qian's faction mechanic or units at all, so my point is that his mechanic is weak and actually difficult to control, his units are trash, and he is an old strategist so the decks are stacked against you. Like you can do all those things with Liu Bei and have an easier campaign than having Tao Qian do those things.
Hey, Trivia! Something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but haven't been able to really get an answer for myself... I play a lot of co-op campaigns with a friend of mine, and we always play Timeless Generals just because it's fun to keep the legendary lords around. I wanted to try doing a Liu Yan campaign where I confederate Zhang Lu and make him my prime minister, so I can get +150% food production with him as Prime Minister and Liu Zhang leading the faction. Do you think there's any feasible way to save Zhang Lu from Gong Du, and keep him alive long enough to eventually confederate through vassalization or hitting a high enough rank?
@@SeriousTrivia Thanks for the tip! I'll have to rush north to meet him and give it a try. Last game I played, he had already killed Zhang Lu before I got up there.
If you chose to not use show of force then you will have a hard time. You need to build up enough of an economy to start hiring your op but expensive unique units. Then it’s just kill Cao Cao as soon as you can
How is yuan shao hard, for me its the easyest faction, ur on top right cornner with great units (spears with crossbows and dedicated ranged crossbows with sword and shield) plus decent ll heroes. I find the easy factions harder.
why? you play it normally (once you hit your max domain, you either make vassals by releasing administrators or just go over it because at a certain point, the negative penalties are not going to affect you much). If you look at my Liu Biao Let's Play, its a normal length just like the others.
I have to disagree that Liu Bei is easy. While the three brothers are oathsworn, they individually aren't very good. Zhang Fei is probably in the debate of being the worst legendary vanguard in game, while Guan Yu is at best a B-tier champion, and champions are arguably the weakest combat class in the game. Another problem with his starting army is the insanely low morale when played on higher difficulty, they are literally one cavalry charge away from routing. Zhang Fei's morale on VH battle difficulty is 42... you know what unit has high morale than that? Any non-militia unit. If you end up fighting against Cao Cao's starting army due to the Tao Qing dilemma, all your units will route in the first 5 min, and will be worse if it's at night. On top of that, you start off with an iron mine as your settlement, and it's super difficult to kill Huang Shao's army to get the province capital because he out recruit you, and you can't afford to replace your initial army with a strategist to recruit catapults and crossbowmen. His annexation mechanic will also eventually become obsolete, as the number of Han Empire provinces diminish. Overall, his faction is a bait, as it is the most popular faction in China due to Romance's portrayal of him being the "good guy", because in reality, his faction is boring to play, very vanilla, and really offers no good alternative options.
he really needed a DLC rework much like how Sun Ce from A World Betrayed gave a lot to Wu and Fates Divided give Cao Cao a revamp. Sadly Liu Bei never got his.
@@SeriousTrivia Honestly, they should give him some buff to militia units, as that would fit his historical theme very well. They should make him like the Oda of Shogun 2, except not as OP.
Liu Bei probably is "easy-normal". But he's faction definitely newbie friendly as his unity point does not decay, so, if you f-up, as long as you have a standing army, you can annex han land and "start-over". Rework-wise, I would do away the Yi marksman, and give him a shielded Ji militia, rank 6 recruitment, low damage but +100% anti- cavalry, game wise, that does some counter to cao cao T&L cavalry, and sun ce +100% cavalry charge damage.
Tbh after some time every faction is pretty easy without challenges. Im playing very hard battle (pause is sometimes crucial especially when battle reaches full time) and legendary campaign
yep once you know the game well enough all the factions are easy or normal for the most part. I think 182 Liu Bei is the only one whose start that I struggle with consistently
@@SeriousTrivia I feel like Liu Bei's 182 start is all about your starting ancillaries. If you get a decent weapon you can just duel all the early Yellow Turban generals for huge XP, which makes the campaign trivial. Not getting a starting weapon makes it quite hard.
you never play Yuan Shao, normal difficulty lel .... This is the only one i got real pb with like pb force me to restart again and again to have perfect start and survive early and there is some bad rng event making the ealry just impossible
I just beat my Yuan Shao VH/VH campaign and it can be a challenging start vs Cao Cao, Huang Shao, and GZ to the north but it's not impossible. What you want to do is keep your yellow Cav, yourself, and your eldest in an army and nothing else and use that army to reinforce any defensive forces: the Family Conflict boost to combat stats is great, so give them any decent weapons you can find and they can actually beat generic enemy commanders in duels. Once you confederate Han Fu you'll get a few decent heroes (I didn't get the legendary strategist sadly) and armies full of characters are going to be the basis of your defense. Don't draft too many Captains early on either, and don't disband them. If you get hammered from all sides (as I did) you won't have the funds to maintain them and you'll never have enough free time to recover between fights if you're hiring and firing them. You'll need standing armies that can remain standing and strong, so you need cost-effective units that can stick around and punch above their cost to maintain. Your faction crossbowmen and your faction elite saber cavalry are the ideal thing for this, so anyone who can recruit them should recruit them, and you also want to build a full faction council ASAP because rerolling Yuan Shao's Vain stat away will make him infinitely more useful as a commander. Han Fu has a wife who has Brilliant so she is a decent choice for holding crossbows too. She herself is nothing special, but Brilliant is so handy. Slowly seize territories and build tall on a few of them. Salt Mines are huge money. Heinan can be a super strong moneymaker. Wei is kinda weak but it makes good food, and you can sell a small amount of food to multiple factions for a decent bump in funds, helping you keep your econ growing. Yongbeiping or whatnot, GZ's big city to the North, makes an absurd amount of commerce income. Grabbing them bit by bit and keeping enemies out of your territory gives you the time to get going. Lastly, I think a lot of the Captain Retinue advice is wrong. You have a broad territory to defend so drafting them and then releasing them is incredibly expensive compared to building a small number of high-quality units (like the Ye Crossbows and Elite Saber Cavalry) and reinforcing with multiple generals to stack an army. That said, I think the archer captains are worth getting and moving around your armies to maintain access to Fire Arrows. Decent archers require reforms you'll skip and basic bowmen are so bad that you'll never use them instead of the Ye Crossbows for any standing army. If you find any decent strategists you'll want to fill them up with Ye Crossbows and a trebuchet or two, but trebuchets are expensive early on and can't be relied upon to both knock down a gatehouse and also take out enemy towers or bastion-mounted artillery. Archer Captains, however, can get flaming arrows, poison arrows (with the right title), stalk, guerilla deployment, extra ammo, extra range, smoke bombs, etc. Getting them early on reduces the need for trebuchets for city-sieging and gives you a chance to build up their capabilities with lineage so they'll stay useful into the lategame. They pay for themselves by eliminating the necessity of trebuchets for that first phase and will give you cheap and useful strategic options without any overpriced units in the mix. Plus, they get kinda worse as you improve in ranks, the opposite of everyone else. As you level up more and more of the archers are replace by crossbows--good for damage, bad for fires and poison. Once Yuan Shao hits level 7 you get Northern Colonels (if you hit it before Cao Cao) and all your captains become Northern Captains, which are GREAT except you don't have the option to hire archer captains anymore at all, and the only archers available will be in the Spear Guard Captains. Again, those are great captain units, but if you want to burn stuff down it's annoying to lose that strategic option. So get 1 or 2 of those early on (they come with basic Ji Militia for screening purposes so with Unbreakable they can actually hold out on their own pretty well) instead of a cavalry or infantry retinue and instead of an extra unit or two of crossbows and they'll be extremely cost-effective overall.
I'm sorry but I am lost from the get go of the "Cao Cao is said to be easy by the game's difficulty and I agree" then he's placed in normal anyways, did i have a seizure and miss something?
I made two points right after about how his starting location makes him open to attack from all sides unless you manage the diplomacy well and how his mechanic is the most complicated one in the game for inexperienced players so I ended up putting him in normal once you balanced both of these things out
Pretty much exclusively on legendary after one campaign on very hard when the game first launched so yes this tier list would be based on my experience playing on legendary/legendary
Serious Trivia has played the start of each character campaign extensively to develop the many guides he has on the channel. The caveat is simply that he didn't play through a full campaign - but the beginning is always the most difficult, and the mid- to late games tend to be much easier once you have a solid foundation in the first ~20 turns. I don't think there is a problem here.
I am just missing Tao Qian and Mulu I think. Plus, I can visualize campaigns and how they play out because at a certain point, every campaign is just a snowball and the ends play out the same.
@@SeriousTriviafair, though for someone who likes to be fairly meticulous in their explanations, i figured it would've been better to actually play them and get a feel for them to more accurately give your opinion on them,
Meanwhile its easier to bring in Lubu as Zheng Jiang, and have unbreakable cav... also adopting in Sun Ce as an Heir for that sweet sweet cavalry charge bonus
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A good way to start off as Gongsun Zan to get through his early game, is start conquering the far north corner. Then when Yuan Shao inevitably declares war on you, ask Dong Zhuo for vassalage. This will free you from Yuan Shao's early doomstacks, and it's not like you have much tribute to give anyway at this point. Use this opportunity to take over the other smaller factions around you. Ask your sugar daddy Dong to declare war on your neighbors, and not only will he agree, he will pay you thousands of gold to do so. Get yourself established enough to compete with Yuan Shao (maybe even catch one of his stacks out in forced march) declare your independence from daddy Dong, and steamroll the map from there.
I’m gonna try this cuz im suffering rn as gongsun zan
I haven’t played GSZ since before Fates Divided and I was really surprised with how hard he was lol
Lore wise that's pretty cursed
This is a good Tier List. Cao Cao is my favorite character. In my opinion he has the best faction whatever start date you pick.
For me the hardest and actually most fun is definitely Yuan Shu. Since you're start at war with the next door Dong Zhou and will be forced to go to war against Liu Biao very early on. Then Liu Cong and Cao Cao will almost definitely declare war on you since the price hates you and Cao Cao always attacks player's faction. Even Sun Ce and Yuan Shao will join the party when you declare your ambition. Of course you may be able to avoid some of that if you keep the low profile and exploit the politics, but seriously, what kind of peasant does that? Definitely not emperor Yuan Shu. A real total war faction I would say.
zhang yan's probably only redeemed by the fact that you start in the north, and can get all the research nodes that give you the various nomadic shock cavalry units early. Rushing a ton of high tier shock cav is great for ambushes
I'm super excited for the next tierlist, i wish CA made more character based DLC with a lot of new arts and unique backgrounds! Hopefully in the next game
i just started playin this. can't believe how many great videos you got, well done sir
I'm a relative newbie to 3 kingdoms i had a few epic fails with yellow turban and Bandits faction but i found Lui Biao relatively beginner friendly with room for errors. The immediate vassalisation system makes this guy great hit weaker factions around you fast to make them vassals. Pretty soon i bought every cheap vassal on the map that wasn't treacherous, i over expanded not realizing the governance penalty but once i demolished a bunch of structures and got governance buildings in their stead it was smooth sailing. The hardest part is your heroes are weak, i struggled a bit against Dong Zhou as LuBu could just wreck my armies but eventually i vassalized him too and bought all his vassals as well. Id rate him as at least medium, maybe easy. As mid-late game he steam rolls with a horde of vassals. You have more money to know what to do with, and eventually you recruit better heroes for combat. But thanks for the guide!
Once Zheng Jiang gets her ball rolling she's just unstoppable.
Yep as soon as u get a few ai factions giving tribute, the $ u get just breaks the game haha
She was my first campaign, once you hit unbreakable faction-wide it's honestly straight up broken, the AI will struggle to even take small resource settlements from you without a sizeable force
I honestly think u should do a redo of all duels in game. The previous winner was Dalai but he didn't win it, the mace did. I'm still salty lu bu didn't win haha. But it is fair really because that mace is just a automatic win. Dalai scares the bejesus out of me
I can't change their weapons in custom battles but I do agree, weapons have too much influence on combat in the game as a whole
Wow people still playing this game? I just got back into it. I remember seeing your commandery videos and how to manage economy, and reduce corruption. That bloody corruption, had me pulling my hair out!
I don't know if you're planning on doing a 94 version of this list, but I wonder where you'd place Sun Ce, who is in my opinion the most powerful faction in the game, but has a start that can be really dangerous to navigate.
no plans right to do the other dates but Sun Ce is probably normal. Similar to how I rated Cao Cao here as he is immensely powerful but difficult for new players to get use to all things you can do with his mechanics
I played like 3 campaigns as shamoke using the vassel mechanic, those vassels leads you into so wars you cant fight since you just got the tribe as a vassel having to fight meng huo and not focusing on getting your own province united, basically, just confederate every nanban faction as shamoke so you can also get the legendery characters and you can kind of control your wars, or you can just get them as vassels and then liberate them but your missing out on the income so yea just confederate
There’s only so many you can do but I like these tier lists
Great video, I’m going to give Zhang Yan a try next. I would love to see another video about this for the other start dates, I’ve been dying to find campaigns that are actually hard but don’t have the time to try every single one. Or if you could reply with the ones you would put in the “very hard” category i would appreciate that a ton! Thanks :)
Love this tier list. Very interesting.
Only thing I will disagree with are Tao Qian’s unique archers being trash. Territorial archers have the highest base ammo/ammo potential in the game (31 maximum). They can fire lots of fire arrows. Damage and range wise they’re equal to a normal archer. They’re very good on non-strategist generals, especially bandits with poison arrows. Also it’s a big plus that they’re recognized as a militia unit. Your mechanic will give you a discount and you can cut upkeep by 75% with Liu Bei and rites of Zhou item set. The spearmen are absolute trash though that are more or less outperformed by Ji militia.
What would you consider the most powerful faction in the hands of a capable player? For me its Cao Cao as he has the most potential to grow quickly. You can use his morale debuff scheme/charge bonus scheme to destroy much larger armies in the early game where you don't get a full stack for income and you can use his movement bonus to speed through conquering counties. His opinion scheme + food diplomacy helps secure your borders allowing you to just have one stack conquering in one direction. His -20 food scheme basically allows you to buy counties off of liu biao and liu bei as you have plenty of food. And qingzhou units are just monsterous when fighting off much larger armies as you just have cao cao give his unyielding skill when they are actually going to break. Once you unlock the northern army units, fighting multiple front wars are very doable with stacking off the northern army ancillary allowing you to have instant mustering 200% movement range elite armies which you only need to upkeep for a few turns
It has to be either Cao Cao or Sun Jian (Sun Jian only because Sun Ce changes the game with his charge bonus).
@@SeriousTrivia definately Sun Jian. You could make an argument as the most powerful faction in Total War, as no other game has the absurdity of instant armies, redoployment and just Sun Jian and Sun Ce's background bonuses.
@@1453YT I feel thats true but given thats its only for merc units which are pretty good but leaves you limited and the redeployment limit. As cao cao because both your heir and leader are commanders, you have 2 extra assignments. Have them stack the -3 mustering and 10% replenishment and with the tuntian building you have extra redeployment limit + -5% redeployment cost for each fully upgraded buildings add that on with flexibility on your council+ reforms you can get it pretty early. Plus you will be building tuntian buildings pretty much every food county for the extra food production boost
I feel that sun jian's main advantage is really because that south gives you massive eco and the charge bonus for the cav to take advantage of that eco
@@cheesecake39472 Certainly good points, but consider when redoployment is free (around turn 30-ish) and you can recruit double damage cavarly instantly anywhere on the map. The mercenary cavarly are also far more insane stat wise than any of Cao Cao's units. Cao Cao has lots of great factions, but his military is *fine*. Yuan Shao's obviously is better (probably less so in a H2H sense as it needs time to get going) and other factions like unbreakable everything Zheng Jiang and Mao Teng (at least on the battlefield) will wipe the floor with what Cao Cao can produce.
In my first playthrought as Lady Zhurong I got an event to marry and annex Meng Huo so she has that too. Combined with her position in a corner, I think she's actually easier than him.
As Huang Shao i acually find him incredibly hard, in one run i got swarmed by all sides and was eventually beaten, so i began a new run and retreated far south away from danger, i thought this made me safe but the people i 'escaped' from began launching multiple invasions of my new home totalling to i think 6 almost full or full armies invading over the course of 40 turns. Im doing ok (ish) now but a huge alliance is now at war with me and they don't want peace. Personally they feel very hard for them, or maybe i suck at the game idk.
I don't know any Chinese, but the way in which you pronounce the faction names is beautiful lol
16:24 Commanderirs you say... I have a suggestion of making tier list of commanderies. Preferably with pointing them on map.
Liu Bei is super easy in 190 because you can just disband your army and use the three brothers to annex the level 4 and 5 Han cities that are right next to you. Then you get a bunch of free land from the Tao Qian confederation. However as you said, Liu Bei kind of sucks late game because his faction mechanic simply becomes a buff to administrators and income. He really needed a rework to make unity useful in the mid to late game.
TUP at least gives Pang Tong some OP items that turn him into an amazing prime minister. It gives him a bunch of faction wide ranged damage and reload speed buffs.
"Sucking" lategame doesn't mean much when every lategame campaign is easy.
Huang Shao should be in easy, IMO. Faction-wide stalk is game breaking, especially if you cheese empty fort on Yuan Shao and focus beating down Tao Qian and Kong Rong.
that Liu Bei fight early one is the only thing that make it slightly normal as the three brothers do not care about invisible troops. If you beat them and take their weapons then its smooth sailing but they still pose some challenges
I had to fight only one battle in an entire Cao Cao campaign.
It all about location, location, location. Yuan shu, Liu Chong, Kong rong is really difficult because being surrounded by enemy or potential enemy. Ma Teng, Sun Jian and white clothes old man in the South is easiest to start
Great tier list
Sun Jian and Cao Cao are my personal favorites
Just finished Yuan Shu 190 this is total war campaign. It was hard and slow at the beginning but slowly and boi Sun Ce is sending full stack troops every couple of turns. Have no problem to recruit general as you can just capture and marry to produce more generals for late game. It looks like the game decided not to award me this achievement again D:, may be I did some trading ancillaries at turn one or something. It's frustrating. Can we have a mini tier list of easiest faction to achieve this is total war challenge? XD
1. He Yi
2. Gongsun Zan
3. Yan Baihu
Hard to find someone who can get all these names right these days
Gong Du be my bestie and he wrecks the kingdoms in my liu bei campaign lol
7:57 what bug are you talking about? I never notice it. Is it for gongsun zan only?
when you pick the looter faction council events that are pirate attacks in the northeastern commanderies, they never actually spawn on the map while the ones out west always spawn and cause problems for those who own Wuwei. So you can effectively corner camp the map on the northeast but not in the northwest
@@SeriousTrivia thanks for answering ❤
I guess it is fixed in bug fix mode
idk i feel like huang shao is pretty hard, you're facing a war on multiple fronts and no matter what you do, you'll eventually lose 2-3 settlements.
or im just ass (which i kinda am) at tw games.
I82 version of this list please?
There's no way to continue playing this game without mods now. So it's only fair to talk about this game with the unlock every faction mod. And give ratings on difficulty as well as the fun aspects of them.
I don't think you need the Fates Divided DLC for either Cao Cao's and Yuan Shao's Unique Units. I only own the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Mandate of Heaven DLC and I have access to Cao Cao's Qinzhou units and Yuan Shao's Ye Vanguard units which is nice.
I play on Hard difficulty on both Campaign and Battle so my skill is probably not as high as yours since you're rating based on Legendary Difficulty. From my perspective, I think Gongsun Zan is not super easy if you're not aware of tricks like avoiding meeting Yuan Shao or if you're not careful, Gongsun Du will stab you in the back while you're busy dealing with Yuan Shao which can be annoying. Liu Chong is also not that easy in the beginning since if I'm not mistaken Liu Chong no longer starts with Show of Force so you can't ability cheese from the start against Cao Cao which is a pain to deal with. The Yellow Turbans are quite tricky for beginners since everyone hates you but once you figure out you can general cheese and have multiple peasant crapstacks, they're hilariously powerful.
I am pretty sure you need them for multiplayer battles at least.
1. Gongsun Zan's situation is still not that bad even if Yuan Shao and Gongsun Du declares on you early when compared to some of the other factions. Like that is the worst situation you can end up in.
2. Liu Chong no longer starts with it, but you have basically a turn 1 trade available with Cao Cao so he can be on your good side for the time you need to build up (probably going to reclaim Luoyang and then once you have a little money, it is just premium troops and op skills the rest of the way).
3. Yes I agree as I probably skewed most of these rating towards the easier side as I will mention in the end as I just have played the game too much. But I still want to make a comparison with consideration to what the maximum potential a faction has at the end of the day.
@@SeriousTrivia I think liu chong "show of Force" get nerfed. IIRC, it use to be "poison volley" shotgun style, but since 1.7.1, it become Huang zhong "warning shot" single arrow style. But it almost 4-5 month since I played liu chong, not quite sure.
I made a Coalition between Liu Yao and Zhang Chao as Yan Baihu and they kicked me out by turn 2 or 3 of coalition then Cao Cao and Sun Ce Declared War on Me alongside Liu Biao makes me question his difficulty in most aspect unless im just that unlucky lol
I think the thing is, you should just ignore his faction mechanic and just do your own thing as the bonuses aren't great and the effort and randomness is just too annoying
Totally agree on Shou. Not easy
9:25 disagree mostly because that early fight is so damn easy. I play on records but if anything, that should make stumbling into the fight against a full stack with 9 units including generals harder not easier, but because the AI basically has nothing but Militia tier outside of some good starting units chain routing is pretty easy. It was my first campaign and slaughtering Lui Biao was pretty easy, Xianyang fell very quickly, and I followed that up with crushing Yuan Shu in basically 2 turns.
Will there be more tier list in the other dates? Also will you do a tier list in Warhammer?
I do not have the expertise in warhammer to do these type of tier lists. As for the other starting dates, it is going to be a maybe for now
I have a question nkt related to this video
Can i use yellow melee cavalry as tank against sword infantry?
you can but it is not going to work well. Like if you want to use melee cavalry against sword infantry, then you should cycle charge them to take advantage of your charge bonus. If you just sit there and fight them in melee, you are using a unit that is only a quarter in size to tank the damage from four times their numbers with similar offensive stats. You will definitely lose that engagement or come out with more casualties than you should
Not to mention we have yet to see a Yuan Shao Total War Victory on the channel - at least I don't think so.
we have not
- It would be lovely to watch video about real three kingdoms historical places. If they are still remained.
- weapons and war related technology of three kingdoms (if you are not already been made😂)
- Do you have any suggestions for "what if" books/movies related to three kingdoms? Ive read some 90s manga that main young couples protagonists time-travel back to 3K and became one of generals.
There are plenty of places that are still around although those would mainly be tourist sites. I personally like Advisor Alliance
I agree with most actually !
Tao Qian was actually my easiest campaign,I kept CaoCao pleased and paid 1K gold to keep him in check and then I had to make my hardest choice
Do I go South and and attack that Vanguard general holding that nice town with whom I had just started trading?
Or do I go north and take everything Liu Bei was supposed to take?
These 2 options will lead to either bully/scheme vs Yuan Shao or -Sun Jian- Sun Ce,as they're the ones the most annoying to deal with in the late game.
Sun Jian with countless armies and good generals and Yuan Shao with countless Vassals.
Oh,and you can also get Dong Zhuo's weapon and Bow after he dies by promising per turn only to declare war on the Han Empire the same turn,lol!
my point is, the things you named are things you can do with any faction and does not involve Tao Qian's faction mechanic or units at all, so my point is that his mechanic is weak and actually difficult to control, his units are trash, and he is an old strategist so the decks are stacked against you. Like you can do all those things with Liu Bei and have an easier campaign than having Tao Qian do those things.
Hey, Trivia! Something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but haven't been able to really get an answer for myself... I play a lot of co-op campaigns with a friend of mine, and we always play Timeless Generals just because it's fun to keep the legendary lords around. I wanted to try doing a Liu Yan campaign where I confederate Zhang Lu and make him my prime minister, so I can get +150% food production with him as Prime Minister and Liu Zhang leading the faction. Do you think there's any feasible way to save Zhang Lu from Gong Du, and keep him alive long enough to eventually confederate through vassalization or hitting a high enough rank?
best thing to do is to declare war on Gong Du right away so the AI focus on the player would send him south rather than into Hanzhong
@@SeriousTrivia Thanks for the tip! I'll have to rush north to meet him and give it a try. Last game I played, he had already killed Zhang Lu before I got up there.
I cannot find liu chong easy faction, especially because I play without exploiting one man army. What’s the best opening for him?
If you chose to not use show of force then you will have a hard time. You need to build up enough of an economy to start hiring your op but expensive unique units. Then it’s just kill Cao Cao as soon as you can
@@SeriousTrivia i use it, but dont try to fight battles with this guy alone. What science tree is good for Liu Chong?
Will you do a 182? Im having a hard time with ma teng and who to attack first
a 182 tier list or a 182 Ma Teng Let's Play
@@SeriousTrivia let’s play , or at least a start playbook 😬
How is yuan shao hard, for me its the easyest faction, ur on top right cornner with great units (spears with crossbows and dedicated ranged crossbows with sword and shield) plus decent ll heroes.
I find the easy factions harder.
How to finish game as Liu Biao? It’s like a 200-250 turns campaign no?
why? you play it normally (once you hit your max domain, you either make vassals by releasing administrators or just go over it because at a certain point, the negative penalties are not going to affect you much). If you look at my Liu Biao Let's Play, its a normal length just like the others.
cant play 182 with Trom plus tup mod anyone having same issues?
*NOT COMPATIBLE WITH 182 (MOH) AND 8P START DATES*
(copied from the mod description)
I have to disagree that Liu Bei is easy. While the three brothers are oathsworn, they individually aren't very good. Zhang Fei is probably in the debate of being the worst legendary vanguard in game, while Guan Yu is at best a B-tier champion, and champions are arguably the weakest combat class in the game. Another problem with his starting army is the insanely low morale when played on higher difficulty, they are literally one cavalry charge away from routing. Zhang Fei's morale on VH battle difficulty is 42... you know what unit has high morale than that? Any non-militia unit. If you end up fighting against Cao Cao's starting army due to the Tao Qing dilemma, all your units will route in the first 5 min, and will be worse if it's at night.
On top of that, you start off with an iron mine as your settlement, and it's super difficult to kill Huang Shao's army to get the province capital because he out recruit you, and you can't afford to replace your initial army with a strategist to recruit catapults and crossbowmen. His annexation mechanic will also eventually become obsolete, as the number of Han Empire provinces diminish. Overall, his faction is a bait, as it is the most popular faction in China due to Romance's portrayal of him being the "good guy", because in reality, his faction is boring to play, very vanilla, and really offers no good alternative options.
he really needed a DLC rework much like how Sun Ce from A World Betrayed gave a lot to Wu and Fates Divided give Cao Cao a revamp. Sadly Liu Bei never got his.
@@SeriousTrivia Honestly, they should give him some buff to militia units, as that would fit his historical theme very well. They should make him like the Oda of Shogun 2, except not as OP.
Liu Bei probably is "easy-normal". But he's faction definitely newbie friendly as his unity point does not decay, so, if you f-up, as long as you have a standing army, you can annex han land and "start-over". Rework-wise, I would do away the Yi marksman, and give him a shielded Ji militia, rank 6 recruitment, low damage but +100% anti- cavalry, game wise, that does some counter to cao cao T&L cavalry, and sun ce +100% cavalry charge damage.
Tbh after some time every faction is pretty easy without challenges. Im playing very hard battle (pause is sometimes crucial especially when battle reaches full time) and legendary campaign
yep once you know the game well enough all the factions are easy or normal for the most part. I think 182 Liu Bei is the only one whose start that I struggle with consistently
@@SeriousTrivia fair enough
Uhm, how you can do that? ( VH battle & legendary campaign) ??? if i start the campaign in legendary, tha battle non pauseable...
@@SeriousTrivia I feel like Liu Bei's 182 start is all about your starting ancillaries. If you get a decent weapon you can just duel all the early Yellow Turban generals for huge XP, which makes the campaign trivial. Not getting a starting weapon makes it quite hard.
you never play Yuan Shao, normal difficulty lel .... This is the only one i got real pb with like pb force me to restart again and again to have perfect start and survive early and there is some bad rng event making the ealry just impossible
I just beat my Yuan Shao VH/VH campaign and it can be a challenging start vs Cao Cao, Huang Shao, and GZ to the north but it's not impossible.
What you want to do is keep your yellow Cav, yourself, and your eldest in an army and nothing else and use that army to reinforce any defensive forces: the Family Conflict boost to combat stats is great, so give them any decent weapons you can find and they can actually beat generic enemy commanders in duels. Once you confederate Han Fu you'll get a few decent heroes (I didn't get the legendary strategist sadly) and armies full of characters are going to be the basis of your defense.
Don't draft too many Captains early on either, and don't disband them. If you get hammered from all sides (as I did) you won't have the funds to maintain them and you'll never have enough free time to recover between fights if you're hiring and firing them. You'll need standing armies that can remain standing and strong, so you need cost-effective units that can stick around and punch above their cost to maintain.
Your faction crossbowmen and your faction elite saber cavalry are the ideal thing for this, so anyone who can recruit them should recruit them, and you also want to build a full faction council ASAP because rerolling Yuan Shao's Vain stat away will make him infinitely more useful as a commander.
Han Fu has a wife who has Brilliant so she is a decent choice for holding crossbows too. She herself is nothing special, but Brilliant is so handy.
Slowly seize territories and build tall on a few of them. Salt Mines are huge money. Heinan can be a super strong moneymaker. Wei is kinda weak but it makes good food, and you can sell a small amount of food to multiple factions for a decent bump in funds, helping you keep your econ growing. Yongbeiping or whatnot, GZ's big city to the North, makes an absurd amount of commerce income. Grabbing them bit by bit and keeping enemies out of your territory gives you the time to get going.
Lastly, I think a lot of the Captain Retinue advice is wrong. You have a broad territory to defend so drafting them and then releasing them is incredibly expensive compared to building a small number of high-quality units (like the Ye Crossbows and Elite Saber Cavalry) and reinforcing with multiple generals to stack an army.
That said, I think the archer captains are worth getting and moving around your armies to maintain access to Fire Arrows. Decent archers require reforms you'll skip and basic bowmen are so bad that you'll never use them instead of the Ye Crossbows for any standing army. If you find any decent strategists you'll want to fill them up with Ye Crossbows and a trebuchet or two, but trebuchets are expensive early on and can't be relied upon to both knock down a gatehouse and also take out enemy towers or bastion-mounted artillery.
Archer Captains, however, can get flaming arrows, poison arrows (with the right title), stalk, guerilla deployment, extra ammo, extra range, smoke bombs, etc.
Getting them early on reduces the need for trebuchets for city-sieging and gives you a chance to build up their capabilities with lineage so they'll stay useful into the lategame. They pay for themselves by eliminating the necessity of trebuchets for that first phase and will give you cheap and useful strategic options without any overpriced units in the mix.
Plus, they get kinda worse as you improve in ranks, the opposite of everyone else. As you level up more and more of the archers are replace by crossbows--good for damage, bad for fires and poison. Once Yuan Shao hits level 7 you get Northern Colonels (if you hit it before Cao Cao) and all your captains become Northern Captains, which are GREAT except you don't have the option to hire archer captains anymore at all, and the only archers available will be in the Spear Guard Captains. Again, those are great captain units, but if you want to burn stuff down it's annoying to lose that strategic option.
So get 1 or 2 of those early on (they come with basic Ji Militia for screening purposes so with Unbreakable they can actually hold out on their own pretty well) instead of a cavalry or infantry retinue and instead of an extra unit or two of crossbows and they'll be extremely cost-effective overall.
I'm sorry but I am lost from the get go of the "Cao Cao is said to be easy by the game's difficulty and I agree" then he's placed in normal anyways, did i have a seizure and miss something?
I made two points right after about how his starting location makes him open to attack from all sides unless you manage the diplomacy well and how his mechanic is the most complicated one in the game for inexperienced players so I ended up putting him in normal once you balanced both of these things out
@@SeriousTrivia thanks for elaborating, I clearly missed that so whoops.
On what ingame difficulty is this tier list based on? I mean from easy to legendary and both on campaign and inbattle.
Pretty much exclusively on legendary after one campaign on very hard when the game first launched so yes this tier list would be based on my experience playing on legendary/legendary
@@SeriousTrivia Thanks man. Me too. Appreciate you.
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What about lu bu?
he is not playable in the 190 start, but given his faction mechanics, he is definitely easy
Liu Chong is not easy.
i personally wouldn't have done a vid like this until i had done every character campaign available
Serious Trivia has played the start of each character campaign extensively to develop the many guides he has on the channel. The caveat is simply that he didn't play through a full campaign - but the beginning is always the most difficult, and the mid- to late games tend to be much easier once you have a solid foundation in the first ~20 turns. I don't think there is a problem here.
I am just missing Tao Qian and Mulu I think. Plus, I can visualize campaigns and how they play out because at a certain point, every campaign is just a snowball and the ends play out the same.
@@SeriousTriviafair, though for someone who likes to be fairly meticulous in their explanations, i figured it would've been better to actually play them and get a feel for them to more accurately give your opinion on them,
Me as Lu Bu tryna slide into Zheng Jiang's DMs to breed the most beast offspring that will single handedly conquer China
Meanwhile its easier to bring in Lubu as Zheng Jiang, and have unbreakable cav... also adopting in Sun Ce as an Heir for that sweet sweet cavalry charge bonus