About

Namco's and Tose's adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms managed to make it to the Famicom just three months before KOEI's better-known adaptation. Unlike KOEI's game, you are not given a choice of time frame to start the campaign, you start in 200 and have until 250 to finish the campaign. But you are allowed to select a difficulty (out of 3). The 6 playable warlords you choose from are Liu Bei, Liu Zhang, Sun Quan, Ma Teng, Cao Cao and Yuan Shao. And the way you select them is through a personality quiz. The hotseat multiplayer mode in Namco's adaptation is limited to 2 players. On each turn on the strategy map of the game, you have a limited number of orders that scales up with the number of castles you control (but not in a 1:1 ratio). You spend these orders for actions such as develop your castles, recruit troops, move your generals around your castles, order them to study or order doctors to restore a general's health. Notably, you can also view information of the other warlords' castles, but this is treated as an act of espionage and costs one order. Saving your game also costs one order. You can also send your general to go gather intel and despite the order is labeled as such, when your general returns in the next turn, he could bring back money, an item or another general who wants to be employed by you. The general you send out can also be recruited by another warlord this way, the chance for which is inversely proportional to his Loyalty stat. When you enter a battle, you first begin in the mid-level tactical map. You have 10 turns to finish a battle. Moving around on this mid-level tactical map costs mobility points depending on terrain types. You have a minimum of 10 mobility points per turn, scaling up with the number of generals you have on the map (also not in a 1:1 ratio). Unspent mobility points are kept for the next turn, up to a hard cap of 40 mobility points. When you come into contact with an enemy army from the mid-level tactical map, you enter the low-level of tactical map, where you don't control the boots on the ground manually but rather give general directives and adjust the directives as they fight autonomously. However, you can take control manually when your general and the enemy general directly fight each other. The win condition is either a defeat of the opposing general by combat or his surrender. The latter is done by surrounding the opposing general with troops. If the losing general is also a warlord, he loses all of his castles to the winning side.