Hello everybody, hope everyone has had a good weekend. This week I have started a replay of the Mass Effect trilogy. I am playing the opposite of the way I played the first time I played through it, so I am going full renegade female Shepherd.
They tried to make the dichotomy between renegade and paragon akin to Loose cannon/by the book cop, but Renegade Shepherd is honestly steers between total asshole and complete psychopath, to which I’ve developed headcannon that my Shepherd is self conscious about being a women in a position of leadership and believes the way to gain respect is to overcompensate and act like a total murderous lunatic to show she’s “one of the boys”
Anyway, hope everyone has a good week
Continuing my Total War: Three Kingdoms game from last week, here is some border gore. The game doesn’t even let you zoom out far enough to see the whole map.
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As you can see, my previous vassal, the Kingdom of Yan, declared independence as soon as it was convenient for them. Looters are tearing apart their territory as the people are tired of taking L’s. I am mopping up pockets of resistance in the northwest with Han Sui almost gone, as well as Xie Yingxiu, Shi Xie, and the Kingdom of Nanhai.
Gong Du and Lady Wu have been my only consistent allies through the entire game, as I was much much earlier betrayed by Liu Bei. Never trust Shu. The Han Empire has reformed after some rebellions in Gong Du’s territory because he was under constant siege from Wei and couldn’t keep public order under control. They like me because I still have the boy emperor in my possession.
Cao Pi inherited the Kingdom of Wei after I spent about 15 turns trapping and baiting Cao Cao into a fatal battle around Poyang. I considered letting him live to see the fall of his kingdom, since he didn’t get to do that irl, but he took way too much of my time to catch and was arrogant to think he could so easily destroy the spirit of our tribe.
I have a limited pool of generals left because, well…
Nobody is willing to join me since I’ve pissed off 7 generations of families across the land. I execute every single general I capture and have been for a while. Surprisingly, Zhang Fei did join me after I executed Liu Bei and Guan Yu several years ago. This is why Gong Du is so happy with me.
Instead, I have to rely on my family, which is steadily growing and becoming truly multicultural, as I keep making the few Han generals I do have marry my children.
I expect it will still take a while longer to finish the campaign, but it helps that I have finally broken through the Hangu Pass, which was an impenetrable enemy stronghold for about 30 turns. Every time I took it, 3 more armies rushed over from Luoyang to take it back again, and so back and forth we went until my southern campaigns took enough of their forces away for us to break them.