If history class was this fun, more kids would stay in school.
Speacking of city, defending a city changed quite a bit as well. Aside from the aspect I've just mentioned, now when you defend a city, you have to worry about both your troops and the walls because when you attack a city, both walls and your troops gets injured. As result, defending a city becomes much more difficult. Not only that, transportation became quite a bit of hassell, because now you actually have to transport them instead of having them delivered magically in a second. Unlike previous RTK, instead of having a battle field, the entire world is a battle field. The whole world has grids for your units to march, and if you want to transport materials, you must march them like you would with your army. This also means they are vulnerable to being attacked by bandits and opposing army, so securing your transportation of your units, food, and weapons becomes vital towards winning the war. This is very good annoyance they added as now you can perform the similar strategy as Cao Cao when he took over Guan Du, or you can lose the war like how Zhuge Liang have because Ma Su failed to deliver the food. Because the entire map has grid, now you can build camp and various trap just about anywhere. Now the battle is often decided how well you've prepared before the fight than what you do during the fight. Just like what Sun Tzu have said. Good stuff. Speaking of Sun Tzu, there is plenty of unlockable characters in this game. No, I'm not talking about characters you have to perform search to find (of course they have that), but I'm talking about characters that doesn't belong in RTK world. Koei have added many chinese heroes to be used, very much like the created characters. Now you can use Guan Zhong, Sun Bin, and even Liu Bang who founded the Han you are trying so hard to protect or destroy. These characters are unlocked by finishing tutorials which is actually quite amusing because it's full of jokes. Diplomacy has changed a little bit as well. Now there is something called Exchange. Exchange is when you exchange captured officers. Yes, you got that right. They finally brought back the imprison option back. Now when you capture enemy officers, you no longer have to release or execute because they don't want to join you. You can lock them up in dungeon for very long time until they will join you, or to exchange prisoners if one of your valued officer gets captured. Good stuff yep yep. Speaking of officers, now there is option before you start a new game. The option is for death during the battle. You have the choices of none, normal, and high. This is a great option as it allows you to relive the RTK story with more realism now. The death of officers during battle often happens in duel, which is another thing that changed quite a bit. The duels happens in somewhat of real time. You will see your officers fight and you have the 4 choices of what kind of stance you are taking, and when your special fills up, there is good number of selection of skills you can use. Also you are able to change the dueler on the fly, making duels very interesting part of the game. Another part of the game they tried to improve, but became eh.. is the debate. It's quite different from RTK X, due to lack of number grid thing, but the basic idea is similar. Higher number wins, but now there is topic so higher number + idential topic wins. Of course there are those special cards you play, but overall it isn't as well made as duels, especially because duels seems somewhat realistic because they fight on the horse on a field. Debate is done on two rocks that keeps crumbling down. Not very realistic. Also if you read the novel, Zhuge Liang debates against large number of scholar at once. It is a shame that debate don't have the same swap option like duels. It is something Koei has to work with. Another improvement of RTK is something that's related to Dynasty Warriors. Yes, I mean women. Now you have option to have all the pretty women in RTK series become officers instead of NPC. Which also brings interesting marriage options as well. Marry Dian Chan to Cao Cao instead of Lu Bu? Da Qiao to Sun Quan instead of Sun Ce? Interesting stuff there. Speaking of marriage, now for the first time ever, marriage is not freakishly complicated. All you need is 500 techique points to have two people married (as long as they are male and female. No same sex marriage). This goes for oaths too. Technique points are important part of the game. You gain it whenever you accomplish something, such as building facility, attacking enemy unit, capturing a city, etc etc etc, and when you collect enough points, you can either use it for oaths and marriage, or more importantly, use it to upgrade multiple features like calvary. When you use 1000s of points and gold, you get to those special skills. There are good number of those skills you can get and each of those you get is permenant towards your force (not just a city). So once you develop them, you have it for good. If you like Ruler based RTK, this is probably like dream come true. The game very come to close having all the option that previous RTK had, and plenty of new features included. Too often fans were frustrated seeing new RTK series only to omit many good features previous game had. Well not this time aside from the fact it got rid of entire RPG feature. Hopefully, RTK 12 will come out, and make a refined version of RTK with RPG elements.