[三国上] Rise of Three Kingdoms - Official Mod Preview

[Seether]

Don't know if it is a difficult thing to do, but if possible, Gan Nin should start in Liu Biao's faction, since he was Huang Zu's retainer at this time.
Maybe whend Jiangxia is conquere could Gan Ning be given to Sun Ce.

The reason he is with Sun Ce is because we didn't have Sun Clan missions (or really any missions) until a couple years into development. After that, Gan Ning's status was just forgotten about. It wouldn't be difficult to do - would just need to adjust the descr_strat and make an alteration to one of the mission scripts.

[Morrowgan]

new victory theme

[Seether]

Patch #4 is ready and available for download!

[Fahnat]

Good changes.
I was hoping to get this patch to be able to finish my changes on this mod so that i can make a unnoficial patch for this mod.

[Morrowgan]

Just when I started my first playthrough in ages, a new patch releases. Very nice!

[Seether]

Greetings All!

While I previously said that version 4.0 was going to be where development for this mod ceased, I keep finding both new content to add and existing content to either update or fix. In this latest update for Rise of Three Kingdoms, I have finally taken on the task of overhauling the steeds and horse barding found in the mod. This was brought on regarding the sizes of steeds by Pooploop and an old suggestion by AnthoniusII on modifying Marka horses specifically for the mod.

Up until now there were only a few variations of horses and pretty much every cavalry unit in the mod had them. In addition to that, there was really only one type of barding - a complete body type - and it was spread amongst all of the factions that had access to it. Needless to say, horses and their associate panoply were in sore need of an update. Honestly, it was something I had planned to do about a year ago, but it got lost in all the other projects I have undertaken for this mod since then. But, here we are, so I'll get this going by displaying a few screenshots of the work that can be found in the latest update.

First, we will take a look at Cao Cao's famed Tiger and Leopard Cavalry. This elite and unique cavalry unit now rides atop steeds covered in steel lamellar-plated barding and a sturdy head covering, making them a truly fearsome force on the battlefield.

Next on the list, and another example of full body barding, is the Imperial Han's Northern Army Tiger Cavalry. Similar to the above example, these horses instead wear fish scale barding - made up of hundreds of small metal scales sewn together and layered from bottom to top. Along with that, bear pelts adorn the steeds, displaying to all the martial prowess of both the rider and horse.

The next example is what you will find as the typical horse armor found among a general's buqu, or personal retainers/bodyguards. This type of war horse armor is what I classify as "3/4 Barding", in that all areas of the horse are covered except for the neck. While generals and their personal retinue would often engage in the thick of combat, their main roles were to move about the battlefield (observing, issuing orders, etc.) between units and also serve as a strategic reserve - essentially used to quickly plug or exploit critical gaps in the line until those gaps could be properly reinforced. As such, the armor of a horse carrying on such a crucial role needed to be not only well-armored, but also highly mobile and not too physically taxing on the animal.

Next up is the renowned Bingzhou Cavalry - made famous by Lü Bu during his exploits against the Black Mountain Bandits. Unlike the prior examples, this cavalry unit makes use of leather, as opposed to metal, lamellar plating. They can be found in two variations: full-body and half-body. The idea of this comes from a region that was relatively hard pressed for quality steel, yet rich in game and agriculture, and so leather would make a suitable substitute to armor an elite and quick-striking cavalry unit.

Moving away from the full-body, super-heavy cavalry types, we now find purely half-bardings on the mounts of elite horse archers. This type of armor covered the most vital areas (heart, lungs), thus offering fairly good protection, but more so sacrificed non-essential armor for speed, mobility and stamina. Heavy horse archers, some types of shock cavalry, and steeds of affluent gentry would normally be found with this type of covering.

Last, but not least, I have for you a snapshot of your typical non-armored horse variations. While this is by no means all of the variations to be found in the new update, you can see several different breeds of horses with varying styles of manes, harnesses and saddles. Most notable, I believe, is the upscale in quality of these horses from the previous versions of this mod.

While this was sort of a lengthy update, this is far from everything; there are many more horses and bardings to be found in the update, such as Lü Bu's famed Dayuan-breed Chituma (Red Hare), updated horses for Gongsun Zan's White Riders, and dark-steel lamellar for Ma Chao's infamous Xiliang Cavalry. The version 4.1.1 (Warhorse) Update can be downloaded here - note: the patch is NOT save-game compatible and does NOT require the prior version 4.1 Update.

Happy gaming!

[Morrowgan]

Would you maybe consider integrating the additional faction missions submod in another patch?

[Seether]

Possibly. I'd have to look at his files and how to properly merge them, then consider how increasing campaign_script could cause problems (CTDs, instability, longer load times, etc.). But first I'd need to contact theharkonnen.

[Seether]

Mounted archer. Full-body scale armor with armored collar. Any guesses which faction this will belong to?

[Fahnat]

Gongsun Zan's faction?

[Deserk]

Korea! They have similar colors and texture, slightly different helmets. Please make this unit unique.

[Seether]

Correct, it is Goguryeo. It is one of the new Armored-tier units, as a part of the Korean roster improvement and expansion I’m working on.

[Fahnat]

garsh darnit!
A new cool change that will be impossible to add to my patch.
What a shame.

[Seether]

Greetings once again, everyone!

It is time for another update release for Rise of Three Kingdoms, this time to version 4.2. This update adds quite a bit of minor, but important, quality of life improvements to the mod, starting with the much needed expansion of the Goguryeo unit roster. Since their inclusion to the mod, Goguryeo had pretty much been limited to only light and heavy native units, their elite Ironclad Warriors, allied Samhan Cavalry, and regional recruitment of local Han and Xianbei units. In addition to that, the native light and heavy units only had one model, despite armor upgrades, and so a change to that norm was sorely needed to bring their quality in line with the rest of the mod's rosters. What you will see below is the visual difference in armor for light Goguryeo units, starting on the left with the basic unit. The second is of the first armor upgrade, with soldiers now wearing two different types of leather armor - one lamellar and the other plates. On the far right we have the second armor upgrade, with units now wearing much heavier steel lamellar helmets and a steel scale cuirass and skirt.

Speaking of the Ironclad Warriors, their model and textures were improved in several different regards. First, where as they only had one face previously, the unit now boasts 5 different faces. Also they were given a second uniform color (brown) to go along with the existing red. And finally, their lamellar armor was visually improved by cleaning up the lamellar itself and adding red stitching to the plates, while also making small changes to vertex assignments with the model.

The biggest change to the Goguryeo roster, however, was the addition of a Tier 3 Armored set of units. Inspiration for these units were taken from historical sources of 3rd century Goguryeo soldiers and I feel they turned out much better than I had anticipated. This new tier of units come in four varieties - swordsmen, spearmen, foot archers and mounted archers - and are exceptionally armored from head to toe. A steel lamellar helmet, iron collar, layered lamellar scale shoulders, iron bracers, lamellar scale cuirass and skirt, and finally lamellar scales covering the front of the legs make these units some of the most heavily armored in the entire mod.

Something else that was updated, but isn't exclusive to the Goguryeo faction, was the improvement of the banners carried into battle by individual units. Up until this point the banners were from the original beta version of the mod and had never been touched upon in all of the years of this mods development. They take inspiration from the banners of Total War: Three Kingdoms, but each faction (specifically the Han factions and Goguryeo) has banners unique to their faction. Below you can see the banner for the Yuan Clan (Yuan Shao), followed by the Sun Clan (Sun Ce).

In addition to the improvement of the Goguryeo roster and new battle banners, we have included the use of Chinese voices when selecting units or groups and issuing commands on the battlefield. The longer pieces of speech content, such as general's pre-battle speech or advising when ladders are at the walls, have not been updated yet as those will require some very specific and elusive audio files to overhaul. Also the content from v4.0 Patch #4, which created an event for Gan Ning to join Sun Ce and fixed a recruitment issue in the settlement of Dandong (among other things), was reimplemented, as those changes somehow did not make it into the v4.1 Update that followed. Finally, Gigantus included the use of the Affinity Switch to the .bat command - it prioritizes the use of the first core for the game and should help a bit in the stability and FPS department.

Happy gaming!

[Seether]

Greetings once again, everyone!

It is time for another update release for Rise of Three Kingdoms, this time to version 4.3. As with the last version release, this one has quite a few quality of life changes but, more importantly, it will focus on drastic overhauls to both the Nanman unit roster and Sun clan starting position and character acquisition. Starting with the former, the Nanman have been a part of the mod since it's days of beta, however since then they had had minimal attention given to either their roster or unit models and textures. After the previous v4.2 Korea Update, I figured it was time to finally make some much needed changes to the Nanman, starting with eliminating the "cookie-cutter" soldiers in their units. A great example of this is the tier-1 Nanman Warriors (seen below), in which I created five more face variations, three more headband color variations, and three more belt/waist-coat variations. The cookie-cutter soldiers are gone, replaced with a much more diverse and colorful band of warriors.

Another example is the tier-3 rattan units but, instead of just creating new face and color variations as above, I also added two more helmet variations and completely re-textured both their armor and clothing. What we have now is a much better quality product than before, specifically the rattan armor that these troops don for battle.

Up until now the Nanman did not have a true "armored"-tier of units and, particularly in the late game, they did not have any units that could even come close to matching what Han factions could muster and throw at them. Such was pretty unfair and unbalanced. That has changed with the introduction of the Tengjia Guard units. Essentially these are on the same level as the Han "armored"-tier of units and come in two variations: sword or spear. They are tough, reliable units and bring to the Nanman a 4th-tier set of units that allows them to compete with all other factions in the late game.

Along with the creation of soldier variations and re-textures, there was also a much needed change to the Nanman unit roster. As you can see in the second picture above, the Nanman now have spear and shield units, which is particularly useful in countering the cavalry of the Han armies they will eventually be forced to fight. Spear and shield units are available from tier-2 to tier-4 and have the same recruitment restrictions as all other Nanman units. And finally for the Nanman, I made some major modifications to Meng Huo's battle model and his bodyguard unit. I re-textured and re-modeled about 75% of Meng Huo, added Lady Zhurong to his bodyguard unit, and created a modified Tengjia unit (sword and shield with javelins) to protect their King on the battlefield.

While the changes to the Nanman were by far the most time consuming and labor-intensive, I also made some very necessary changes to the Sun clan in terms of both their starting situation and how they acquire new characters. For starters, the Sun Clan has been reduced to two regions, with one of those regions (Danyang) being given to the Yangzhou faction and the other becoming rebel. Below you can see how the new faction selection screen looks with those changes.

In addition to that, the number of starting characters for the Sun clan have been greatly reduced. Now it consists of characters who historically served Sun Ce at the onset of his invasion of Yang Province (mostly family members and former retainers of his father, Sun Jian). But those characters that were removed can be obtained through two methods: conquering specific regions and completing missions. While that is similar to how it was before, the characters that join, what causes them to join, and where they spawn has received an overhaul. In the image below, you can see the starting campaign situation for the Sun clan.

Finally, and this was a pet project of mine, the great hero Qu Yi has been given some love with his own unique battle model. For those of you who don't know of Qu Yi, he was arguably one of the best field commanders during the Three Kingdoms era and was responsible for Yuan Shao's total victory over Gongsun Zan (who had one of the strongest armies in all of China). He is often overlooked, mostly because in the novel he is a nobody and is unceremoniously killed off by Zhao Yun, but in the official histories he was an absolute beast that was executed for making his liege Yuan Shao look bad. Even Cao Cao, upon defeating Yuan Shao and acquiring many of his officials, lamented that if he could have had Qu Yi join him he could have easily conquered China. Maybe not, maybe so, but in any regard, this guy deserved something nice.

The v4.3 Update also does a bunch of modifying to unit stats, specifically unit upkeep, recruitment cost, mass, and stamina, while specific changes were made to a few attack and defense values of units. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, some of the quality of life improvements are fixing the incorrect road levels that can be built, giving 4 recruitment slots to Huge Cities, the update of dozens of portraits, and including the fixed unit cards for ships (that were "missing" because I previously put them in the wrong folder). The full changelog can be found here.

The version 4.3 (Nanman Sun) Update can be downloaded here - note: the patch is NOT save-game compatible.

Happy gaming!

[Fahnat]

You kill me, Seether, such great changes that make me unable to continue the current submod work.
Need to redoo.

[Morrowgan]

Amazing, still more new patches

[TomMills]

I don't usually comment on minor things, but I have to say the colour scheme for units is amazing! I started out not liking it because changed lol, but in the end it's really grown on me. Thank you for this amazing mod AND the updates

[Realeasethemods]

Its awesome that you folks are making this awesome mod even better!!!!

[Seether]

Here is a little preview of what I have been working on...