A bit under a year ago, I reviewed Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII, a solid strategy game with a lot of different things that you could do. The new Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII: Fame and Strategy Expansion Pack adds quite a few more things that you can do. Do you really need them? Well, that is for you to decide.

Nothing has really changed with the sounds and music. You can still only play in Japanese or Chinese with English subtitles. It still doesn’t affect much since the combat is more or less separate from the talking. You can always pause the combat at any time to catch up on logs. As far as I can tell, there is no new music added to the game either.

The graphics still look the same overall, but there are some changes. The major thing that you will notice is that the battlegrounds have been greatly enhanced. They have added a lot more tactics and some of them are dependent upon the landscape. This means that they really needed to up the game on the landscape so that you can get the full potential out of your battles. Since you can now have children, you will have some new graphics associated with that as well.

I am going to go on the assumption that you have played the Romance of the Three Kingdoms without the Fame and Strategy Expansion so you want to know what is new. If you haven’t played the main game yet, check out my review of it first.

Since you’ve probably played the original game, you will most likely have a save file and maybe even some game edits. If you have a previous save file, you have the option to carry it over. It’s the same with any edits you may have made, so don’t worry about losing your customizations. This is a huge relief because you can spend a lot of time in those customizations, so you really don’t want to lose anything and you can still customize in the expansion. There are now even more events and even items that you can customize.

They have increased the things that you can do with your officer. As you might expect from the title of the expansion, they have made it so that your officers can do a lot more strategy. The more they strategize, the more famous they will become. There are other ways to gain fame as well. Officers can now choose a way of life. To do this, you pick the role of your officer. These include bandits, assassins, merchants, and more. You can also have free officers that have their own private armies. These are great when you don’t really want to follow history or any of the historical generals.

Don’t worry about learning how to do all these new things. Hero Mode from the Main Menu will still take you to a tutorial stage, like before, but now there are two new tutorials to teach you the new things that they have added to the game and how they work.

The difficulty hasn’t changed, but it might be hard for you to get the hang of some of the new things. Since a lot of the new things are geared towards changing up your officers to acquire fame and such, you are naturally going to want to play with all of this stuff. You can set things down on Low Level like before so that it is easier to get the hang of, if you want. Of course, that is purely up to you.

Since they have also improved the combat experience, you will need to get the hang of the war council and the new tactics. As I mentioned, the battlefield landscaping has been enhanced so that you can do things like set up rock slides to fall down on troops. There are also now "key points" in various places that can be very beneficial to conquer and hold. Granted, you don’t have to take them, but your life will be much easier if you can find them quickly. These are things that you are going to need to explore and play around with before you figure out what works best for you. This is not a game that you can just jump into and kill everything around you. It is going to take time and finesse to rule the world!

The mechanics are almost all still the same as before. The one thing that I did notice is that with the new tactics and such, I had trouble finding the exact spot that I wanted to set things up or send troops. If you have trouble using the map to deploy troops, try zooming in and turning the camera. I found it much easier to find things from different angles. They have changed up debates and duels as well. You will really need to get used to the new systems as they can be more challenging now.

You might be wondering if you really need to buy an expansion pack that is quite expensive. That probably depends on how much you play the game and how much you really want to use the new features. If you’re someone who likes to keep things exactly as they were historically, you might not get as much out of this expansion as someone who really likes to tinker with everything. This expansion is a must have for those of you that want to do a lot of "what if" stuff.