Three Kingdoms: Unit Progression

Three Kingdoms was always going to struggle to match the variety of Warhammer, but I think Creative Assembly have done a decent job of building a fairly diverse unit roster. The problem is, I’m not seeing many of these units being utilised during the campaign. At the time of writing, I’ve completed two Hard campaigns, each in around 135 turns. I’ve enjoyed both campaigns, but I’ve also noticed the lack of any real unit progression.

There are two ways to unlock new units in 3K – by ranking up your class, or via reforms. Whilst I do tend to retrain my militia units to whatever the 2nd tier class unlocks are, I’ve not really been using the reform unit unlocks at all. I think there’s two reasons for this –

 

1) there’s no way to increase the rate of reforms, so the choice of reform every 5 turns is important. And when that choice is a new 1st or 2nd tier unit with only slightly better stats than a class unlock – not to mention, an increased upkeep – it seems like a wasted investment. As for the tier 3 dragon units, unless you go for these directly, you may not even unlock them before completing the campaign. But even if you do, that leads onto the other problem –

2) higher tier units aren’t worth the cost in recruitment, upkeep or reform investment. There’s not a great difference in performance between tier 1 and 3, not when you factor in upkeep costs. I’m not saying the high tier units aren’t good, just that the investment they require in cost and time to unlock means in both campaigns I’ve played, I’ve not used them at all.

 

A level 10, tier 1 unit is simply not worth replacing with an equivalent tier 3, level 1 unit during the latter stages of a campaign. So even in the late game, I’m still using tier 1 and 2 units because I’ve either not unlocked the tier 3 units yet, or because their performance and cost just isn’t worth it. And the AI seems to have the same problem.

In two campaigns, I’ve not seen a single AI army fielding any dragon units before turn 150 or so, which is well beyond the point at which I’d completed both campaigns, and only played on to see how the AI army composition would evolve.

Now, this may be a difficulty issue. Perhaps if I bump it up to very hard or legendary the campaign will take longer and unlocking and using the higher tier units will become more important. But this also feels like a balancing issue.

 

I think reform unit unlocks need to offer a significant upgrade over the class unlocks to make them worth the 5 turn investment. I also think they may need to be more than just ‘new’ units, but allow you to retrain existing units to the higher tier with no loss of unit level.

A great example would be the basic ji militia unit which, through reforms, a 2nd and 3rd tier variation can be unlocked. This upgrade would be so much more viable as you progress if, once unlocked, you could simply retrain your existing ji militia to the higher tier without losing the individual unit experience.

It would encourage both the player and the AI to actually unlock and upgrade units throughout the campaign. It would mean that as the campaign progressed, we’d actually see more of these higher tier units coming into play. As I said – 3K has a pretty decent unit roster but right now, it’s not being very well utilised.

That said, I still have plenty more to play before writing my final review. I want to crank up that difficulty and experiment more with the reform tree. But even if I feel unit progression remains an issue, it’s nothing a few small tweaks and balance changes can’t fix.