Alongside today’s announcement of the upcoming Eight Princes DLC, Creative Assembly has also launched a new Total War: Three Kingdoms patch. Known as the Family and Court Patch, this update is now available in the opt-in beta. Players can access this beta through Steam. The patch fixes a wide variety of bugs and exploits. However, the more notable parts are several major changes which have been made to the game’s family and court mechanics.
What’s in the Family and Court Total War: Three Kingdoms Patch
“The Family and Court patch fixes a lot of issues raised by the community but also adds in some of the requested family features that we have seen discussed since launch,” explains the patch notes; “We want to make sure that, with every patch, the game is becoming more stable and overall a better Total War experience.”
The first major change is that players will now be able to view the family trees of any faction in-game. This feature can be found in a new menu on the Family Tree tab. This allows you to see the line of inheritance in other factions, marriages between characters, and also keep track of spies more easily. Due to their play-style, the Yellow Turban factions don’t have family trees. To help players arrange marriages in the mid-to-late phase of the game, the new patch also weights the gender of newborn babies to 50/50. Plus, players can now arrange marriages for any single members of their court.
Players will also find that character Satisfaction is more important in the new update. If your court has a high overall Satisfaction, corruption in your faction will drop and your military supplies will increase. Conversely, low overall Satisfaction in your court will increase corruption, reduce military supplies, and even slow the XP gain of your characters. A new indicator for the overall Satisfaction of your court can be found in the top-left corner of the UI. (Below the icons for Court and Diplomacy.)
New Bug Fixes and Exploit Fixes
Of course, the new Three Kingdoms patch also fixes plenty of bugs and exploits. Players will no longer be able to get infinite money through a rounding exploit, for example. Plus, you can no longer buy territories and sell them back to the owner for more. Additionally, you will no longer be able to divorce new spouses and generate infinite characters by using them to initiate new marriages!
When it comes to bugs, players will no longer accrue an Untrustworthy penalty when they protect their vassals. Meanwhile, AI behaviour in the Forced March stance has been fixed so that they cannot retreat or attack other factions. Interestingly, the developers have also made a change so that Guan Yu and Zhang Fei will never betray Liu Bei. This was done so that the Sworn Brothers would better resemble the historical characters. In fact, Guan Yu will now never betray anyone! The full patch notes can be found here.