Three Kingdoms Historical Information & Discussion

[zoner16]

Gong Du's entire faction is a mess. He starts in Wudu Commandery for some reason, a place I can't find any record of Yellow Turban activity at all, much less him. As you said, in the novel he's one of the Yellow Turbans who raises havoc in Yu Province with Liu Bei and has the be put down by Cao Cao's men. My guess is that his time under Ou Xing (in the novel) is what attracted CA to him, but the issue is I think that they were trying to force someone into the whole "Master of the Land" archetype and needed to diversify the start positions. I'm ok with a little bit of interpretation for the sake of gameplay, but there's not really a good explanation for this. The fact that Liu Pi is nowhere to be found just hurts this explanation even more. If anything, Liu Pi should be leading the faction with Gong Du as his henchman, if we're going to go the Romance route.

Zhang Kai is weird however. It'd make a bit more sense to me if not for the fact that his employment under Tao Qian is important for that drama that CA loves so much. His time with the Yellow Turbans in the novel is only ever a background note, and obviously not a factor in history. CA have written themselves into a weird corner if they ever want to make Tao Qian a playable faction, as it precludes his employment under him. I can't imagine why he was put into a Yellow Turban faction except for the fact that someone at CA thinks his story is cool and likes the "Former Yellow Turban" part of it a bit too much. His position in this game feels like fanfiction, where someone's favorite character got shoved into some important role that they had no prior association with.

I do actually find the lack of a White Wave faction to be a problem with the game. Currently, Yang Feng and Xu Huang are just a Han Empire army that attacks Nanyang and Xiangyang at the start of the game and usually gets wiped out by either Liu Biao or Yuan Shu, and since neither of the officers are legendary, that's usually all you see of them. It'd be nice to have a bandit faction that isn't starting up in the Heishan mountains, and it would help Yang Feng and Xu Huang survive much longer.