There’s an extra cool twist once someone becomes strong enough to make a credible claim for emperorship: their capital becomes an “imperial seat”, meaning that if someone captures the city and chooses to hold onto it, they are also choosing to proclaim their empire. Even if they’re not exactly ready for the shitstorm their declaration is about to bring down on their heads. Which is what I did when, after thirty some hours, I finally stormed the rich imperial capital of the Song along with all its industry and advanced bureaucracies and decided that actually, I’d be keeping this city for myself. My allies in the war immediately abandoned me and I got notice that to win the game, I’d have to eliminate anyone else who was calling themselves emperor or empress. One of them was Lady Wu, who had taken command of her faction when her husband Sun Jian was killed in a battle, and then ruthlessly seized all remaining Han holdings in southern China. She’d been a close ally since the beginning of the game, her increasingly unstoppable armies had crushed two of my worst adversaries. Now we had to destroy each other, and I was frantically trying to buy-off or bully the remaining second and third-tier powers to keep them on the sidelines while the heavyweights started in on each other.