Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII

Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII (三國志XIII, Sangokushi XIII) is the thirteenth installment of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. This entry returns to the move role play and individual character growth then from previous titles. Originally an English translation was not revealed until the series' 30th anniversary announcement, releasing westward to coincide with said anniversary.

Gameplay
The gameplay takes place in real time, with three different speed settings and the ability to pause time at any point. When paused, no assignment, fight, or any other task can be performed, only ordered.

Players can choose between many different characters to control. Depending on the timeframe of the game's scenario, different characters hold different positions. Each character has a merit rank within the faction they have joined, the exception being rulers, who always rank highest in their group. The ranking system counts down from 9-1, with each improvement in rank granting more freedom in the options the player has at their disposal. Rank 5 is needed to serve as a governor of a city, and rank 2 to act as a viceroy, leading multiple cities at once.

Bonds
A highlighted feature in this iteration of the Romance series is the bonds forged between characters. Every character has an opinion of every other character they’ve met. This opinion rises if players assist in tasks, visit them at home and chat, bring them gifts, hosts or attends a banquet they attend, and fight alongside them in battle. Their opinion drops if the player takes items from them, defeats them in battle, or harms their family/sworn siblings. The scale of opinion swings from 100 positive to -100 negative.

Each score caps at a certain level before a proper bond is formed. For instance, a character's opinion of the player character is limited by a positive score of 80, until the player performs a quest for that officer to unlock the first tier bond, friend. They also refuse to offer this personal quest until they hit an option score of 80.

The ranks of ones between officers are:
 * Friend
 * Best Friend
 * Boon Companion
 * Sworn Brother
 * Spouse

Both Sworn Brother and Spouse share the same tier level 4, which makes the characters permanently loyal to the player and unable to betray or leave their faction. Up to three spouses are permitted for male characters, only one for females, and three Sworn Brothers can be formed in the course of a campaign.

There also exist Special Bonds formed between historical characters which are classified as level 5 bonds, the strongest in the game. Special bonds are formed only through hisorical events and certain trigger conditions.

Known Special Bonds are:


 * Peach Garden Oath - Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei
 * Ruler and Counsellor - Liu Bei, Xu Shu
 * Unswerving Loyalty - Liu Bei, Zhao Yun
 * Like Fish and Water - Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang
 * The Inheritor - Zhuge Liang, Jiang Wei
 * Blade of Virtue - Zhuge Liang, Ma Dai
 * A True Counsellor - Cao Cao, Xiahou Dun
 * Fruit of My Loins - Cao Cao, Xun Yu
 * The Two Xiahous - Xiaohou Dun, Xiaxou Yuan
 * Unbreakable Bonds - Sun Ce, Zhou Yu
 * Blade of Trust - Sun Ce, Taishi Ci
 * Wisemen of Jiandong - Zhang Zhao, Zhang Hong
 * Wheel of Last Resort - Zhou Yu, Huang Gai
 * Two Leading Actors - Wen Chou, Yan Liang

The personal quests are chosen from a range of options, with the character's likes and dislikes altering their pool to choose from. A good example is if a character is rowdy and combative, they are likely to request a duel for their quest.

If a player offends or upsets an officer enough, they may make the player their mortal enemy, creating such a distaste between the two officers that they cannot serve in the same army or ever make amends. Killing family members of characters or destroying their faction can easily lead to this negative relationship.

Governing
Every faction strives to control every occupied major city to win the campaign. Each city has two main focuses the player and other officers must develop if they want their armies to be stronger. The first is their domestic needs, which are divided between three groups, commerce, farming, and culture. Commerce increases how much gold is generated in the city per quarter, farming does the same for food supply, while culture unlocks technologies, which provide bonuses to the city's production or defense, at set intervals. All three must be upgraded to a rating of 2,000, 4,000, and 6,000 to achieve a new level of prosperity.

The second major focus is on military. Unlike other games in this series, soldiers are not directly recruited. Instead, the population, loyalty, and proficiency of the soldiers' training controls how many soldiers are available per city. The maximum number is 100,000. Population grows on its own, but is influenced by how happy and safe the city feels. Loyalty is generated by patrolling the city's streets and outskirts, looking for bandits and other ne'er-do-wells. Training proficiency is split between three categories, spearmen, horsemen, and bowmen, with tiers of ability unlocked at each 1,000 increment, capping at 3,000.

Alongside these major cities are satellite towns, which remain neutral to any faction until they are persuaded, coaxed, or suppressed into submission to nearby major cities. Characters can persuade or coax these smaller locations into joining peacefully using their diplomacy. Persuasion is the slower, guaranteed process, while coaxing is faster, but requires winning a debate or all progress is lost. Another option for the player is to march an army over to the village and wait in it, suppressing it through military might. Once convinced to join the player's faction, they will offer a set bonus to their benefactor's city, such as increased moral, more food produced, or even special units unavailable otherwise.

The special troop types are as follows:

Adding another layer of strategy to the game, are the councils. These councils set missions to accomplish. They can assign the collective goal of increasing the infrastructure, improving loyalty and soldier proficiency, or capturing enemy towns/destroying rival factions. Both faction leaders and lower ranking officers benefit from fulfilling these goals. Faction leaders, who have the final say in which policy proposed to fulfill, can better direct the actions of their subordinate officers through their chosen mission. Upon completing a council's objective, the loyalty of everyone involved increases proportionately to the difficulty of the objective. Players serving under a faction leader also benefit from completing these objectives, as they earn merit and gold for their efforts, also tied directly to the mission's level of challenge.

Three types of councils can be held, force, district, and city. Force councils determine the focus of an entire faction, prompting most allied characters to cooperate in completing the goal. District councils can only be held for a viceroy's district, which must be established by the leader of a faction. Only the reasons under the control of the chosen viceroy can contribute to successfully completing this type of council. City councils are held for individual cities, only factoring in their own efforts and capacities. All three types of councils give one year for their policy to be fulfilled, but they can be finished early, allowing a new one to be appointed in its place. Councils are held at the city the faction leader occupies.

character type must grow their city's income by increasing food production, living space, and court the favor of officers. Building relationships permits their recruitment into the player's ranks. Subordinates are needed to fill positions for administrators, army commanders, and/or diplomats. Resources, both food and coin, must be managed in this phase, broken up into monthly sections. They also can each maintain an army, at a cost, and have civilians that can be conscripted into the army in dire need.

Battle
Like the rest of the game, battles take place in real time. They are fought between at least two armies of opposing factions. During times of alliance or ceasefire, players cannot attack those factions they've joined in such intrigue. Otherwise, any existing faction is considered a rival open for attack. Combat can either be directly controlled or given over to the computer to resolve on their own.

Battles are fought with three primary types of units. Spearmen, horsemen, and archers. They have a rough triangle of advantage over one another. This advantage is referred to as strike, which considers the damage critical. Spearmen have strike damage against horsemen, horsemen have strike damage against archers, and archers have strike damage against spearmen. All three types of soldiers come in three degrees of class as well: light troop, heavy troop, and elite troop. The level of training a city possesses for each troop type dictates which tier soldier is available. 1,000 in a category is needed for heavy troops and 2,000 in a category is needed for elite troops. Both heavy and elite troops cost food and gold to deploy, but have vastly superior stats.

Armies are mustered from cities, which are limited in how big a for e they can raise by the pool of soldiers available and how many soldiers the officers deployed and command. The number of soldiers a character can command is dictated by their rank, merit, and ability overawe. Each army consists of as many units as desired/available within the city. Characters can serve as both lead officers and support officers in an army. Support officers, up to two for each unit, add their strength to their lead officer, increasing the bonus if a bond exists between the characters. An officer can only lead one type of unit at a time, but an army can possess any and every type available, as long as enough individual units are included.

When fighting battles, each unit operates separately. Unless the player is the ruler or highest ranked officer present, they will not have full command over all allied units. Battles consist of trying to either capture the enemy's main camp or to destroy/force to retreat every enemy army unit. As armies can only carry 200 days worth of supplies, battles have a soft time limit, as a starving army depletes without any combat and has the lowest morale possible. Camps provide morale boosts, and capturing them reduces enemy morale. Morale itself dictates how well the unit will fight. Many battles feature walls and gates, with archer towers and ballista to whittle away at the attacking forces, giving the defender the advantage. When an army is defeated, officers who did not retreat are usually captured.

Many units have a strategy they can employ, which either buff themselves and/or allies or debut enemies. The limitation on these strategies is the number of meter bar points required to execute the strategy. The meter bar fills over the course of the battle, at an accelerated pace when fighting with type advantage or capturing strategic locations. When the player is not in command of every officer on the field, they have their own separate bar that siphons off some of the allies' meter growth for their own unit to utilize as they see fit.

RPG Elements
Alongside the bond system, players also have many characteristics they can utilize to follow their own chosen path of gameplay, each with rewards and benefits. Characters have unique stats, abilities, aptitudes, and like/dislikes. Both stats and abilities can grow during gameplay, permitting a level of customization and rewarding different styles of gameplay.

Each character has four main stats, Leadership, War, Intelligence, and Governing. The first two categories primarily concern themselves with leading armies and battle, while the last two primarily affect the character's ability to administrate. Each stat has its own experience bar, increasing by one point for every 100 experience earned in the same stat. Experience is earned several different ways. Players can enlist other characters they have a good relationship with to mentor them in any stat, granting a minimum of five experience after twenty days of training. As an added bonus, the character who mentors the player character has a chance to increase an ability the stat being trained in question and a chance to pass on their strategy they can perform in battle.

The association between stats and abilities are as follows
 * Leadership - Train, Overawe, Speed, Endurance, Siege, Defense, Weapons, Naval
 * War - Patrol, Arose, Duel, Heroism
 * Intelligence - Coax, Negotiate, Orator, Virtue, Strategy
 * Governing - Commerce, Farming, Culture

Both the War and Intelligence stat can be increased by winning duels and debates respectively. Both contests involve a variation of rock, paper, scissors mechanics and last for five rounds or until one character's health bar is depleted. Duels follow a system of Defend beats Attack, Attack beats Unbalance, and Unbalance beats Defend. Since defend does not actually do any damage, successfully blocking an attack with it grants the player or foe one of three possible points. Each point adds or increases the power of a fourth attack, overpower, which always wins against attack and unbalance. At the beginning of the duel, both the player and their opponent will choose all five of their turns at once, attempting to predict the other's decisions. Victory in a duel can earn up to ten experience points in the player's war stat.

Debates follow a system of Assert beats Provoke, Provoke beats Retort, and Retort beat Assert. Instead of choosing all five rounds at once, however, the player and opponent each choose one attack at a time. Once a player uses one of the three options, it cannot be used again in the next round. Ties damage both player and opponent proportionately to each character's intelligence. Characters of high intelligence can also use a + version of the three types of debate strategies, which win ties when both the player and opponent chose the same ploy. Each turn also favors a second category: fate, virtue, and logic. Whichever one of these three is displayed between the two characters increases the power of any attack used that shares the same secondary typing. Like dueling, debates can net up to ten experience points for intelligence.

Alongside stats are abilities, twenty different bonuses and boosts to the many different tasks and objectives a player can choose to perform. Abilities range in effect from directly increasing combat prowess to boosting how well an officer performs at a certain task. They can be increased by items, bonds, and occasionally by being mentored.

Modes
There are two main game modes, with a few other options on the title screen to aid with accessing other content within the game.

Hero Mode
Hero mode acts as both a living tutorial to the game's many mechanics and as a set of increasingly challenging objectives, limited by unique goals, temporarily blocked actions, and a tight time limit. They are better viewed as an active puzzle then a campaign, as very specific goals usually need to be fulfilled to win as opposed to just defeating rival factions as one wills

Main
The campaign mode, called main on the menu, is where full conquests of China are fought. Players can choose this mode and then select for a number of available scenarios to begin working towards unifying China. Difficulty, merit growth, when officers die, game language (between Japanese and Chinese), etc. are all decided after choosing one of the scenarios.

The list of scenarios in the game:
 * 184 A.D. Feb. The Yellow Turban rebellion
 * 190 A.D. Jan. Anti Dong Zhuo Coalition
 * 195 A.D. Jul. Warlords
 * 200 A.D. Feb. The Battle of Guan Du
 * 207 A.D. Sept. The Three Visits
 * 214 A.D. Jun. Yi Subjugation
 * 251 A.D. Jan. A Gathering of Heroes*

* unlocked after completing any one of the other campaigns.

Collection
Allows the player to see what play records they have completed, officer profiles they’ve unblocked by either capturing or controlling (directly or indirectly) them during a campaign, events and event movies unlocked in the main campaign through fulfilling historical objectives.

Settings
Allows players to adjust sound. Music, contrast, controls, etc. to their personal preference.

DLC
Takes players out of the game and straight to the store page where the game's downloadable content is located.

Characters
700 unique officers are available in the game. Each have their own preferences, stats, ability to lead different types of soldiers, abilities, and strategies. More talented officers also have a focus on a type of activity, from governing to warfare, that benefit's their whole faction when properly utilized as a minister. Characters come equipped with their historical specialty, their famous items, depending on the scenario the player joins. Many other items exist within the game for characters to use that have no set master.

Secret Characters
These characters are only unlocked by completing the different play records in the game. They are all famous figures from across China's history, usually hailing from before the three kingdoms era.


 * Ying Bu
 * Fan Zeng
 * Zhang Liang
 * Han Xin
 * Xiao He
 * Liu Bang
 * Xiang Ji
 * Yu Ji
 * Ying Zheng
 * Lu Buwei
 * Li Xin
 * Meng Tian
 * Wang Jian
 * Li Si