The Chaotic Era Begins – 194 A.D.
Li Ju 13. Chang An Strategy:
Li Ju can have one of the tougher scenarios for the first few years with his chaotic mix of poor officer loyalty and lack of popular support, but it can turn into a really easy one if you survive the first couple years. First of all, Li Ju himself is a below-average military officer with a poor charm, so you already have that going against you. Second of all and most importantly, several of his officers are disloyal to him and his poor charm can be a nuisance in building up that loyalty. It pretty much has to be rebuilt through cash unless you get your hands on the Imperial Seal. However, Chang An has a decent economy and the Civil Officers to build it up, and ultimately that outweighs the negatives.
The first few years might be rough and you may need to move some of your officers to An Ding in December to make sure you make enough money at Chang An. Plus, you can work on building that up as support for Chang An. Zhang Lu and Yuan Shu probably will leave you alone, although if they attack it shouldn’t be anything you can’t handle. Cao Cao on the other hand often times builds up huge armies in Hong Nong, only to have the high officer count / low economy come back and hurt him (if he can’t advance his forces through Li Ju). If he’s really running Hong Nong like shit, feel free to recruit the warlords who lose loyalty at the end of the year. Still though, it’ll take a while to overcome Hong Nong, so let him self-destruct.
By the way, it is IMPOSSIBLE for Li Ju to ally with Cao Cao, as he’ll never allow it no matter what you give him. Trying to ally with anyone with Li Ju is difficult, just like with Dong Zhuo.
As you can see below, Li Ju doesn’t get much in the way of productive free officers at Chang An. Sure they can help, but you’re better off getting Zhao Ang and Zhang Yan and some other decent Generals at Hong Nong that start off with subpar loyalty towards Cao Cao. Anyway, we made our first move after about five years, going after Yuan Shu to get the Hereditary Seal. This is paramount in making Li Ju go from an average ruler to a good ruler. He’s still a poor ruler but having 100 Charm should allow you to keep up with loyalty much easier. Not to mention new recruits are more apt to like him.
When you have a formidable enough army to hold off Cao Cao at Chang An and be able to send troops to Zhang Lu, do so. The sooner you can wrap up Zhang Lu / Ma Teng, the faster you can get on with taking over China. Ma Teng should be very easy as usual and Zhang Lu shouldn’t be much harder, although beware of Liu Zhang getting involved if you do defeat Zhang Lu and he flees to Xia Bian.
We then allied with Liu Zhang and baited him to attack us so that loyalty would go down amongst his army.
Once this happened we immediately recruited Li Hui, Governor of Zi Tong, and moved most of our troops (including the recently-loyal Xi Liang troops) to Zi Tong to go after Liu Zhang. While the economy is high at Jiang Zhou and Cheng Dou, his entire army is recruitable, and once Cheng Dou is taken, he’ll roll over easily. Yunnan and Jian Ning aren’t hard citadels, although sometimes he’ll move most of his officers to one or the other. Again, that’s why you bait him into turning on you when you are allies.
Taking over Liu Zhang is the push that your army needed. If you recruited Liu Zhang’s officers, you’ll have plenty of soldiers and plenty of high-economy cities to fund your army. As you can see, I refrained from moving to Yong An or Shang Yong, and instead moved my entire army to Chang An in an attempt to give Cao Cao all I’ve got. He’s not going to ally with you, so just start pushing and he won’t expect it. Chances are he’ll be busy with Yuan Shao to the east, so you can catch him in a pincer-attack of sorts. His army will be tough and you probably won’t have the luxury of depleting it by recruiting them, unless Cao Cao betrayed someone else (can’t be you because you can’t ally with him).
By the time Cao Cao was finished in Xu Chang, Yuan Shao had taken the entire east side of the map, with Liu Biao being the only other decent ruler (but taciturn like usual). Yuan Shao passed away soon enough and Yuan Shang took over, leading a Wu-based army at us. We didn’t ally with him as we matched up well and just went straight at them. Again, it depends on how you got to where you are, but chances are the Yuan family will be the last challenge left on the map.
Liu Biao was actually about as tough as Yuan Shang to overthrow, as Xiang Yang was extremely built up by the time we made our way over there. However we had 4/5’s of the map at this point and getting him to roll over was more an issue of getting the entire army moved to Xin Ye and Lu Jiang. Zhou Yu and Ji Ling were ruling in Gui Yang and Nan Hai respectively, and both had armies that were the quality of a Wang Lang-led army.
Most of the time that I go through Li Ju’s scenario, I notice it gets pretty easy once Cao Cao goes down. And generally, that’s the story of the game, especially this scenario, as other than Cao Cao only Yuan Shao is set up to do well. Sun Ce is often times destroyed very early by weaklings such as Liu Yong and Liu Biao, and both of them rarely ever do anything once they take over the Wu army. Thus if you can take over the western part of the map while holding Chang An from Cao Cao, that alone should be enough to propel you into a long march to take over China.
13. Chang An Recruits:
Zhang Xiu (194)
Song Guo (195)
Wang Chang (195)
Wu Xi (197)