Heroes of the Three Kingdoms 2

My first instinct when I spotted this on Steam was cautious excitement. The Three Kingdoms strategy genre has a long, rich history, and Heroes of the Three Kingdoms 2 is one of the foundational entries, a Taiwanese real-time strategy game originally released in 1999 that quietly defined how a hybrid internal-affairs-plus-battlefield RTS could feel. USERJOY brought it to Steam in late 2020 as a largely unmodified preservation release, which is both its biggest selling point and its most honest flaw. The core loop is built around two alternating phases that feed into each other in genuinely interesting ways. When the calendar flips to January, play shifts into an internal affairs mode: you collect taxes from occupied cities, manage population growth to raise troop caps, and recruit and equip your generals. When you march your forces out, the game transitions into real-time tactical combat across a strategic map that covers more than 60 cities and fortresses. The goal is total elimination of rival monarchs, and you can start that conquest from one of five historical scenarios, ranging from the Yellow Turban Rebellion through the final Three Kingdoms standoff. Each starting period changes which rulers and generals are available, giving experienced players meaningful replayability in how early or late a campaign they want to inherit. The general and troop-type systems are where the real depth lives. The game runs a hard counter table: spears beat swords, swords beat archers, archers beat spears, flying blade units beat most ranged types, and so on. Ignoring that counter grid will get your armies erased fast. On top of that, each of the 400 generals in the roster has distinct equipment slots (three per general, expanded from the first game), separate warrior skills and tactician skills, and stats covering loyalty, morale, fatigue, and raw combat power. Figuring out which generals to run together, which troop composition suppresses an opponent's formation, and when to spend your limited skill energy is the actual strategic puzzle here. It is not immediately obvious, and the game does not hold your hand explaining any of it. That is the honest truth for western players especially: the interface and all text are in Traditional or Simplified Chinese only, with no English localization available. Strategy veterans who can navigate a menu by layout memory and trial and error will adapt. Everyone else will need a guide open on a second screen. The Steam version's reception among Chinese-speaking players sits at Very Positive overall, which tells you the core game still holds up for its original audience. The nostalgia factor is real, but so is the actual mechanical density. Troop positioning, the morale and fatigue drain during prolonged campaigns, and the prisoner-of-war management system all add layers that feel considered rather than arbitrary. The AI is a product of its era, aggressive in early-game pushes but exploitable once you understand the counter system. Modding support is indicated by the Steam tags, and the Chinese-language community has produced a healthy number of guides and general tier lists that rank fighters like Guan Yu and Zhao Yun at the top of the damage ceiling. For western strategy players, the language wall is the deciding question. If that wall is not an obstacle for you, or you played this series in its original Taiwanese release and want it back on a modern system without emulator headaches, this is a clean preservation of a genuinely layered historical RTS that still has more decision-making per battle than many games released two decades later. If you need English text to function, this is not the right entry point into the series.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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