Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII

First off, don't even bother playing this without the expansion. It gives the player goals to work towards even when there's nothing going on. As for the game itself, compared to the older RPG style games (7,8,10), this one obviously looks nicer but has too much Ancient China social networking and busywork. Real Time battles severely dumbs down the combat as they have removed a lot of depth to accomadate being able to move around freely; for example units only have one special ability now, and that's usually just some simple buff effect. No more cunning strategists with a list of battle tactics. Most of the game will just be the player endlessly doing menial city tasks and watching numbers slowly go up. Since these tasks don't change regardless of who or where the player is, once you've played a few hours you have seen 90% of the gameplay. Historical events tend to go screwy if the player is not playing a major character. I had my custom NPC try different things during the classic 183 scenario start, and all manner of events can go sideways. Sometimes Sun Ce fails to break away from Yuan Shu at all and Wu never gets established, often times the sequence of events that lead to Cao Cao beating Yuan Shao never trigger and they pretty much end up in a forever war, and most of the time Shu goes nowhere and just hold on to their little 1-2 provinces in the NE. It's actually kind of funny to watch, but it makes the game laughably easy when the major powers never get established. Inversely starting your own empire in this one feels absolutely painful to get going and you should always just join someone else. I would highly suggest just playing RTK 10 with the translation patch instead as long you don't mind the old graphics. The battles were better and events didn't go completely off the rails.