Total War will always have its place when it comes to strategy games.
One thing that sets Total War apart from the rest is how passionate the modding community has become over the years.
With each Total War release, the community finds new ways to give us new content, keeping every title fresh.
With the latest Total War Saga: Troy keeping players entertained, it could be fun to revisit some other releases. Total War: Three Kingdoms isn’t really old, but there’s always room for improvement!
And here are some of the best mods that really will improve the gameplay.
Camera enhancements are typically a must-have for strategy games, especially those as big as Three Kingdoms.
In combat with hundreds of units scattered across the battlefield, things can be… hectic. It’s important to have visibility of what’s going on at all times.
This Enhanced Battle Camera mod gives you more control of the in-game camera by allowing you to zoom closer or further away as you see fit.
There are additional options that make combat more exciting to watch, with cinematic options to remove the UI for better immersion too.
When it comes to visuals, Three Kingdoms isn’t that dated.
While this is the best-looking Total War game to date, the community has continued to find ways to make the game look ever better.
With small adjustments here and there, stronger graphics can greatly improve historical accuracy and unit designs too.
Make Them Unique is the first of these graphics mods, giving some of the lower-tier generals unique appearances.
It was disappointing to some fans that the unique characters were only given generic portraits and models. This mod gives them unique items and appearances to totally fix that.
Another little detail that you may have missed – generals are each given unique portraits based on historical precedent. But when you zoom into their models on the field, it appears like their faces weren’t given much attention.
Well poo on that!
The Generals Face Overhaul fixes that, retexturing faces of some of the generals to make them better resemble their portraits.
It might seem like a negligible change. But you’d be surprised how much it affects the visuals of the game overall.
Some of the generals altered by the mod include Ma Chao, Huang Shao, Ma Teng, and Sima Yi.
Another visual upgrade mod by deema, this time focusing on equipment on horses.
Like I mentioned earlier, each of these mods might seem like unnecessary minute details on their own. But combined, they make for big improvements to the visuals.
This mod distributes different horse armor types to the different generals in the game, giving some unit variety here and there.
It can get pretty boring looking at the same unit models copy-pasted across the field. Especially when they’re in the hundreds, and you’ve been playing for weeks on end.
One more mod that adds a bit of variety to something so small is this More Flag Variations mod.
Modder contactnovuspc gives us a few new versions of war banners, just to spice things up a bit.
You probably didn’t pay much attention to those flags your armies carried out into battle, maybe just brushing them off as another insignificant detail.
Well this mod sees them as a very specific detail!
It simply adds more immersion to the Three Kingdoms combat experience, and of course it’s totally free, so who could pass this one up?
I don’t think a war could be called a war if there wasn’t any bloodshed.
And that’s one way to improve the overall look of combat in Three Kingdoms, specifically with the Realistic Battle Blood mod by kelstr.
While the game provides a blood decal slider in the options panel, kelstr wasn’t satisfied.
Specifically with how blood would show up more on units, but not affect the environment.
This mod fixes that by drastically increasing blood spatters on the ground around battling units.
According to kelstr, setting the slider at around 50-60% will already give you a realistic effect, so maxing it out will probably make everything a bloody mess.
While the Total War series has become known for the scale of battles, it can easily get a bit cluttered at times.
You know, given the large numbers of units and everything going on at once.
These games are known to break lower-end PCs and push graphics cards to the limit.
While your setup might be powerful enough to run large-scale battles without any visual impact, you might not be able to enjoy it much, as things can get really messy pretty quickly.
Arrow Trails Redux aims to help with that by removing arrow and smoke trails.
Don’t worry though, you’ll still be able to track your projectiles with added highlighting effects. It’ll just be easier to see everything else that’s going on.
If you’re looking for a more cinematic way to enjoy battle scenes overall, kelstr’s Cinematic Campaign mod might be exactly what you need.
The mod makes the game much more enjoyable to watch, focusing on visual improvements through an updated map, new lighting effects, camera angles, and even a simplified UI.
With all these improvements combined, the game just looks stunning.
The lighting effects make for dramatic sunsets, and the UI improvements make it much easier to appreciate the visuals you’re given.
Ultimately this is a great way to enjoy the game from a more passive approach, which is definitely what some of us need after a long work week.
With Three Kingdoms changing things up and focusing more on heroes, previous Total War games always featured captains at the head of each unit.
They were easily identifiable since they would always have unique headgear, and would always stand ahead of each unit to lead them into battle.
This wasn’t included in Three Kingdoms.
Modder ProPanda wanted to bring it back.
With Captains For All Units, you’ll now have exactly that: a captain at the forefront of each unit, with a unique weapon depending on their type, along with increased HP so they can last longer in battle.
A lot goes into getting characters in Three Kingdoms, and you’ll probably find that you’ve spent way too much time buttering up a faction just to get your hands on their hero.
Once you finally do, you’re disappointed to find that the AI decided to spend their skill points on random attributes. Which basically renders the character useless.
Here’s a quick fix so you’ll never have to experience that problem again.
This mod resets the skill points of each character you recruit, so you can choose how they’re distributed based on your own needs.
22. Recruited unique character can use their special units
Modder Havie felt that many of the skill trees in the base game were quite repetitive, despite there being six different templates for each character class.
With Havie’s modded skill trees, players are given more flexibility in terms of character development. This allows your characters to excel at different roles depending which you choose.
You’ll have more freedom to tailor-fit development of each character, depending on your needs as well.
Do note that the mod was made specifically for Romance mode, so this is a cool mod to try if that’s what you’re looking for.
This time we’re focusing on giving more options to explore in battle.
Unlocker All 9 Formation takes a few hidden battle formations that didn’t quite make it to the final version of the game, and makes them available for you to use during combat.
It might not do much, but it will give a few new battle formations to play around with, making combat a bit more dynamic.
Note this only works in a new game file so you’ll have to install it, then start a new game to get it to work. Keep an eye out for future updates and maybe this will get fixed.
The Three Kingdoms Era included many notable names. And while Creative Assembly did their best to include all of them, you’re just not meant to meet every single one.
How it works in TW: Three Kingdoms is you meet some of the unique characters through random world events, but sometimes you’re just not so lucky.
Tw1tch’s “Heroes Join Your Faction” mod seeks to change that up, giving a few of the events a 100% spawn rate.
With this mod active, the event triggers for Dian Wei, Gan Ning, and Pang Tong, among others, are sure to happen in every playthrough.
It’s pretty common for the community to find flaws in the AI for these games.
While devs almost always argue that AI behavior are placed there for a reason, many fans still feel that they get an improved experienced by adjusting the AI.
If you’ve played through Three Kingdoms a few times, you’ve probably fallen victim to at least one of these issues.
Lucky for us, we have the AI Won’t Execture Characters mod by Alex Zhao.
It sucks when one of your heroes gets captured by an enemy faction. What’s even worse is the possibility that you might lose them forever if the enemy AI decides they should be executed.
This mod simply stops that from happening, as execution is no longer an option.
Enemy AI will now only have two options for captured characters: either recruit or release them.
Another one from Alex Zhao making the game a bit more fast-paced.
Here you won’t have to spend countless hours grinding, as the More Skill Points + Quicker Upgrade mod lets you get those skills a bit faster.
What it does is lowers the required experience to level up by 1/3 the amount of the base game. So basically your EXP requirements are dropped by 66%, meaning you’ll move through skill trees much faster.
It might be a bit of a cheat. But fun is fun, yeah?
More deployables is a preference mod which puts added focus on preparing field defenses for coming battles.
It just gives you more deployables, allowing you to place 30 stakes instead of the original 16 per group, as well as 60 caltrops instead of 40.
Deployables have been rebalanced as well, where stakes have higher HP, allowing them to deal more damage before they’re destroyed. This is balanced out by the changes made to caltrops, where they do less damage, but decrease enemy speed more than before.
As of now, only stakes and caltrops are included in the mod.
But barricades and sharp stones are already in the pipeline for a future update.
Another option is to introduce a completely new faction to the game.
Modders ADMIRAL and bastet do exactly that, adding Goguryeo to the playable factions in the Three Kingdoms campaign.
Goguryeo is actually a historical Korean kingdom, and the new faction has its own set of units and buffs. This includes updates for horsed units which an interesting dynamic to the game.
The faction is rated as very hard, so this should make for a challenging new experience for veteran players.
Dynamic Campaign+ is perfect for those who prefer to leave the game as-is, but also want variety across different playthroughs.
Think of it as a NG+ for Three Kingdoms, as the modder himself explains that Dynamic Campaign+ aims to increase the replayability of the campaign.
And I’d say it absolutely delivers on that goal.
The mod randomizes certain choices and faction attributes throughout the game, so each playthrough will present a unique set of challenges to overcome.
There are actually a lot of “total overhaul” style mods choose from when it comes to Three Kingdoms, so I suggest giving each a try to see which you like the most.
To start off we have Unify After Long Divide.
As with most total overhauls, the mod introduces loads of new units for you to play with.
Major changes have also been made to the morale system, greatly affecting how the campaign plays out.
TROM, or The Rule Of Might, is another mod if you’re looking for a completely fresh Three Kingdoms run.
This mod actually combines the Make Them Unique visual upgrades with the gameplay changes of HVO, to make for a completely different Three Kingdoms game, visually and gameplay-wise.
I mean, it might as well basically be a totally new game!
Other than the MTU graphics changes, this mod offers new unique characters, buildings, and battle mechanics, plus quite a bit of smaller changes you’ll notice as you play.
Ranking at the top here (but definitely not the absolute go-to) we have Beneath a Red Sky.
Beneath a Red Sky isn’t actually a single mod. It’s more a collection of little gameplay mods combined, that all drastically change combat in Three Kingdoms.
While staying true to vanilla as much as possible, BARS aims to make combat much more realistic, immersive, and historically accurate.
The mod places a larger emphasis on fatigue and morale during battles, along with updated unit behaviors to make battles more epic and drawn-out.
If you’re a fan of Three Kingdoms for the war aspects, you should definitely give this one a try.
