SandTable War: Three Kingdoms

This is easily the best grand strategy game I have ever played. The amount of forethought and planning required to effectively wage wars is incredible, and yet so easy compared to other, more complex games. The complexity is just right, with plenty to manage and track and yet not so much that it's unfathomable. And the feeling of pulling off incredible tactics that result from the interaction of simple mechanics is the height of emergent story-telling. The best way to play is Ironman mode, where every decision matters and blunders have to be accounted for and overcome. I love this game, and if you're a fan of Three Kingdoms strategy games, this one is absolutely worth a try. Just be sure to do the tutorial and read the tooltips on stats and stuff. The game is not perfect, for the record, but it is close. The Diplomacy system is very simplistic, but it seems to have been improved to be less exploitable. The end-game can be a bit slow, but it has been drastically improved as a result of the recent changes to introduce global food/reserves to permit a rolling sweep of the map, in addition to the Annex option for lesser factions, greatly improving the final conquests. I wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone into strategy/Three Kingdoms games.

ROTK Clone without the QOL. Spent more than a few hours got the scenario down to 3 kingdoms. Every step of the way was like pulling teeth. For some reason the dev's decided it was a good idea to impede every thing you want to try to do. Every process is cumbersome and Inundated by limiters that do nothing other than limit your ability to play. Your Kingdom has a Tech tree which you put points into the specific node to increase your Kingdom modifiers. You have 4 Ministers that help you expedite the Accrual of these points. If you do anything else with these 4 ministers they automatically get removed from your cabinet. So these 4 officers are now basically bunkered down in BFE while they run your kingdom. - 4 Officers. Each town/city requires a Prefect, Military Officer, and Building Officer. These are unique positions so if you have even just 4 towns to fully maximize everything especially early on you would need 12 officers. - Just get more officers.. DUH. Except doing most of your schemes require a "tactical" resource point. (the accrual is expedited by installing an officer in your cabinet) except its not enough. EVERYTHING from sowing discord {lowering officer loyalty}, to moving officers, boosting defense, searching, EVEN MOVING FOOD requires these points. On top of that you need an officer at the location where you want to move the food from. To do anything in the game requires a lot of TEDIOUS MICROMANAGING that felt like it was added just to make the players miserable. All the convoluted steps do nothing other than impede your ability to get anything done. There needs to be automation of some sort, Regency etc Doing EVERYTHING MANUALLY is Mind-numbing l. Save yourself time and money. Game needs alot of work from features, character customization, rework alot of systems etc.

A little bit too micro intensive for my comfort. It feels less like a game and more like a deskjob. A lot of these micro-tasks need better management features. - Have to zoom-out to see border color. - Have to manually transport foods from town to town. - Have to manually click each town to check its available reservists. - Have to manually click each town to modify tax policies. - Have to manually go to diplomatic menu to check whether alliances need renewal every few minutes. - You can ignore most of the features in game and focus on big troop number then play it like Mushroom Wars. - You can also renew alliance indefinitely. You have total control when to fight the AI. - I thought the game could at least let me create custom general, but nope. For whatever reason, this game reminds me of Plebby Quest. It's game that could be something, but end up nothing. Maybe it might receive future updates? lol