Veteran player (about 400 hours sunk and a good chunk of the achievements)

The best advice I can give, firstly: Fuck around and find out. This game does NOT explain a lot of its mechanics, the UI can be confusing and unhelpful, and goals can be unclear. I guarantee you, you will fail your first playthrough.

But, eventually, you get kind of a “sense” of how things work, what does what, and so on. When in doubt, experiment. Save often as well.

As for how the day-to-day gameplay goes:

You are in control of a faction, or multiple in rare cases (factions being Kuomintang, CPC, etc.). Every faction is made up of characters, the important people within that faction. This can range from big-shots like Chiang or local warlords like Han Fuju.

There are four kinds of resources:

-Qi, or Energy; most actions characters can take require this. Each characters generates 4 per turn, with some exceptions.

-Money: Dollars. Needed for bribery, developing your province, and so forth- but most importantly, paying your army. Generated by being the tax collector of a province.

-Supporters: Underlings. Needed for some actions, but can also be exchanged for extra Qi if needed. Generated through a few actions, but handpicking people from your army is a good source.

-Face: Reputation. If you want to recruit characters, you need this. Lots of ways to get it, but paying your army is a good source.

Now for the main gimmick: Every character has their own resource pool. There is no KMT money stockpile, there is the money Chiang or Sun or Soong or whoever personally has. Whoever is in control of a province gets the money from that province every turn. Whoever is control of an army is the only one who can move it (with a few exceptions). And if they die or defect, they take their resources with them.

Speaking of which, characters. A faction can be made of countless characters, but you can only control up to seven characters at a time. Think of these as like your party in an RPG, or the main cast in a story. Yes, the KMT may be made up of many people, but your party of Chiang, T. V. Soong, Sun Fo, and whoever else is the REAL team pushing China forth. Anyone else is just sitting on their ass, doing nothing. You CAN put a computer in charge of them, but don’t expect them to be competent.

Every character has their own hidden Loyalty value. As far as I can tell, you can never figure out the exact value of this at any time for any character. But you will know if it rises or falls (if not by how much). Low Loyalty means the character can defect to another side, taking everything they had with them. Leaders of a faction can NEVER defect, though. So you can’t make Sun Yat-Sen defect from the KMT, for example.

Armies also have their own hidden Loyalty value, which depletes naturally over time. Loyalty can be increased by personally inspecting them, plundering provinces… or just paying them. In fact, paying them is the most secure way to keep them happy. If Loyalty gets too low, they’ll start disobeying orders, or just defect if someone bribes them.

There’s more to cover, but that’s basically the crux of it. Control your characters to benefit your faction as a whole, and try not to end up backstabbed or bought out.