Romance of the Three Kingdoms 3 208 AD Han Xuan

Zhuge Liang Plots Strategy – 208 A.D.

Han Xuan has it pretty tough in Chang Sha, probably tougher than the other three “warlords” in southern Jing Zhou. Sure he starts off with some quality officers, but they are all disloyal towards him, and Han Xuan’s 10 Charm (as low as it gets) means that it takes forever (and a lot of money) to get those generals loyal towards you. For the other rulers like Liu Du and Zhao Fan, at least you can Spy on Chang Sha and just recruit Huang Zhong and Wei Yan and could conceivably get them at a high loyalty.

First of all, survey the rulers around you. Liu Yan can be had in Ling Ling, while Gong Zhi can be had in Wu Ling. They are vital for building economy early (along with Yang Ling). Liu Bei has an officer in Pang Tong that has 70 loyalty, so recruit him as well (Jiang Xia). You should have 8-10 decent officers, so build up your economy right away and search every month(so that if you find something special you can reward Wei Yan / Huang Zhong so that they don’t leave). Until you get Wei Yan and Huang Zhong at high loyalty counts, you cannot rest. Losing them is devastating.

Anyway, Jin Xuan in Wu Ling was over-ran shortly by Liu Bei, and the heat was on so I allied with Liu Bei and Sun Quan. This bought me a few years so that I could take out Zhao Fan and get some breathing room.

Sometimes when I feel cheap I send Han Xuan into battle to get him killed. After he is gone you can put Huang Zhong on the throne and not have an issue with the loyalty thing, not to mention Huang Zhong is 10-times the officer that Han Xuan is statistically. Elite charm, elite War, etc. Regardless of whether or not you do this, you’re going to want to seal off the bottom to have a chance (Nan Hai / Gui Yang and Ling Ling), eliminating Zhao Fan and Liu Du in the process. This shouldn’t be hard especially if you can pull it off early before they build up their own cities. Once all of these weak rulers are out of the way you can focus on building up Chang Sha and Wu Ling, if you have sufficient amount of loyal officers for both. The castles below these two cities can act as reinforcements both in terms of soldiers and for having another protected area for farming and economy.

Liu Zhang and Liu Bei were feuding around Wu Ling / Jiang Ling in my quest and it allowed me to get Wu Lan, Yang Yi, Jiang Wan and Zhang Song as they switched sides to Liu Bei and were disloyal. Having Huang Zhong, a Shu-based general as your ruler, makes this even easier plus said characters have a naturally high loyalty then.

Liu Zhang surprisingly was still one of the more dominant rulers around this time, and Sun Quan was pretty stationary except for some skirmishes with Cao Cao at Shou Chun.

Anyway, Sun Quan betrayed Liu Bei at some point and I raided his officers at Chai Sang. This gave me around 10,000-14,000 loyal soldiers, including some of Wu’s best generals. I kept Huang Zhong at Chang Sha as the Governor and hid Han Xuan in Gui Yang.

Remember, when you have a low charm ruler, you can still reward your characters with other governor’s (ie Huang Zhong) at much better rates. So even if you still have Han Xuan as your ruler you can offset this by having Huang Zhong a Governor elsewhere. When the time came around the mid 210′s, we advanced on Sun Quan to the east. His forces in the south were depleted from betraying Liu Bei. Cao Cao had taken He Fei but we took that from him and continued on through Jian Ye and finally Kuai Ji to eliminate the idiotic Sun Quan. Cao Cao however had massive amount of troops (15,000) in both Xia Pi and Shou Chun. Meanwhile, Liu Bei had moved into Jiang Ling and Wu Ling (both were un-occupied) but our alliance with him allowed us to concentrate on Sun Quan to the east.

Further inspection shows that (as per usual) Cao Cao has all of his troops stationed in a few big cities and the rest of them are poorly covered (to the center and north). So what’s the plan? We’re leaving 50,000 at Jian Ye to cover against Cao Cao (who we also just allied with to buy time) while we focus our efforts on taking out Liu Bei. Chang Sha and especially Ling Ling are weak, so the extra 100,000 from Jian Ye are garrisoned around there. Liu Bei is still our ally also, but that’s just so that we can get good position for an assault on his part of Jing Zhou.

29. Chang Sha Recruits:

Liu Pan (208)