When it was announced that Three Kingdoms’ next expansion would focus on the war between Cao Cao and Yuan Shao and the Battle of Guandu, I had one question: are they going to recreate that scene from the TV show? You know, the one where Cao Cao laughs in Yuan Shao’s face and then runs off waving his arms and snickering, like the pantomime villain he is?
I figured the answer would be no (fair enough: I’m pretty sure that never actually happened in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel), but even without it this new expansion has plenty of rich and enjoyable tools to play with. Fates Divided is in many ways the opposite of The Furious Wild: whereas that expansion gave us the vibrant, warlike factions of the Nanman, Fates Divided and its accompanying update enrich the game's existing factions with more subtle, underhanded means of approaching problems.
Many of those factions are already pretty Machiavellian, and none more so than Cao Cao. His new 'schemes' mechanic enables him to spend his credibility to basically trick the game, or as a resource to swing diplomacy in his favour. Yuan Shao’s rework, on the other hand, is military minded, making captain retinues more useful by letting you upgrade them with lineage points.
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