YMMV / The Millionaire of 3 Kingdoms

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In M3K4 and M3K5, it's easy to stick to spamming Arrow Towers (see the Game-Breaker entry below for how useful they are) and Charging Stations (special buildings that cause opponents to pay some fee when they walk pass the town; while usually not a big threat if you aren't low in money, if an opponent passes a town with this with no cash, it's treated as being unable to pay rent and will cause them to lose a general). Most other special buildings have their uses, but you'll eventually be ditching them in favor of the two aforementioned buildings.
• Contested Sequel: There are some debates on whether M3K3 or M3K4 is the best installment in the series. M3K3 has the town actually growing in size (so that a town with a huge population will also be larger on the map and easier to enter) and features "special goods" that are a very good source of earning gold. M3K4 features a more creative touch on building your town, allowing you to build different buildings in your town instead of preset ones like in previous games, and the horse racing game being more interesting and allows for more player interactions.
• Critical Backlash: M3K5 is often poorly received within the M3K community for changing a lot of mechanics for the worse. However, there are also many players who find it to be alright, or even as good as M3K4. Mainly, the 3-on-3 duel and the pet system have their fans.
• Friendly Fandoms: The M3K series share many fans with Softstar's Richman series, due to both series being successful Taiwanese computer board game series in the 90s and early 00s. Fans from both series often recommend their games to each other. When discussing the lack of innovation in Richman series, this series is often among the first examples of successful innovations that these fans will mention.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In M3K2, the "Guest To Host" item lets you directly occupy a town with all its soldiers, gold and buildings, and it can be bought at the shop or randomly generated through events or other cards. If your enemy uses this on your largest town (or just one of your larger towns), things can range from being an annoyance to an outright disaster. The "Swapping the Beams and Pillars" item does a similar thing, and it's much cheaper. When the former returns in M3K4 only two characters can use it, and the latter does not returns at all.
  • The "Capture before Release" item lets you steal a general from your opponent. If your strongest generals get stolen by this item, you'll pretty much be doomed to losing. Thankfully, unlike the two items mentioned above, you can defend yourself with other items.
  • In M3K4 and M3K5, there's the Arrow Tower building (and Arrow Fortress, its upgrade) that you can place in your towns. When your opponent enters the town (or even gets close to it if using Arrow Fortress), all of their generals lose some HP. If you can occupy multiple towns close to each other and give each of them an Arrow Tower/Fortress and/or have a building that slows down the opponent, you can easily kill your opponents' generals (or at least severely injure them so they'll be unable to fight you), speeding up the process of them losing. It says a lot when most of the community mods Nerf the Arrow Tower family.
  • Towns are notoriously hard to take down in M3K4 even without the fortress building, as the attacking army die very quickly, and the few that manage to reach the castle wall will then struggle to break the wall, let alone being even able to attack the defending army normally. However, generals with the right Battle Cry abilities can melt the defending army quickly and make the battle much easier.
• Goddamned Boss: The penultimate stage for Cao Cao's story mode in M3K3 has him fight against Cheli Ji, a character with only three generals, but 50k soldiers. He'll almost always challenge any town with a siege, then just abandon it (unless he hires enough generals). The towns themselves are also all defenseless when they were occupied by the NPCs so you are unlikely to die from either them or Cheli Ji unless you are too careless: for most of the time of this level, you'll be hiring soldiers, deploying them in a town, have them fight Cheli Ji in a siege to reduce his own soldiers, and wait until he can't go on sieges freely anymore, then begin to actually occupy towns.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Most masters throughout the series that aren't one of the three main characters (Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Quan) are inferior to the main characters as they usually have worse generals than the main characters, and players will generally avoid using them (unless they want a challenge or are just trying them to enjoy their special gimmicks as a master). Even then, among the three main characters, Sun Quan is generally considered the worst of the three characters, since his main generals aren't as good as Cao Cao or Liu Bei's (Liu Bei does have better generals than Cao Cao, but Cao Cao usually starts with more generals and resources and he himself is a better combatant than Liu Bei).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Here comes my Limit Break, (the name of that joke attack)! ^note  The weak limit break has always been infamous throughout the series for appearing more frequently than players expect then to be, and often costs a good general a victory, but it becomes more hilarious after M3K4 changes its animation into an crow, and it becomes an even better meme than it already is.
  • "Aah!" ^note  The sound of a man relieved after receiving healing from an item or in the clinic in M3K3 and M3K4
• Sequelitis: M3K5 is generally seen as being worse than the previous installments, if not an outright terrible game. The main reason for this is a lot of underdeveloped or outright inferior changes to the mechanics (see the Scrappy Mechanic entry below; it tells a lot when most of its examples are solely from M3K5), while having very little meaningful improvements.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The dice casino in M3K4 does not have any possible means of influencing the outcome at all (whereas in previous dice casinos you can bet on various stuffs like if the outcome is odd or even or where the dice will be, and in the horse racing game you can at least try to guess which horse will win); all you can do is to throw dice and it's all up to your luck whether you'll win. Most people just ignore the dice casino as a result.
  • In M3K5 there are those resource tiles that can be occupied like towns, and they give resources instead of gold every 15 days. However, it's generally seen as an obsolete mechanic, as it's generally not worth it to invest in strong generals in something that won't even generate gold, but if you invest in weaker generals the resource tile can easily be lost when they lose a battle. For most of the time, you can simply buy enough resources from minigame shops or resource shops anyways.
  • Also in M3K5 army battles take on 5 lines of armies battling against each other and the side with more lines surviving wins. However, since the armies are randomly generated, it's very possible for a stastically superior side to lose just because their armies are positioned poorly even if they have more surviving soldiers.
  • Again, in M3K5. You can equip up to 5 equipments for each of your general, with most of them being armors that increase their defense. Without using cards that disable armors, even the generals with the best attack stats will struggle to take down a weaker general fully equipped. Sometimes the 3-on-3 duels also have some generals' Limit Breaks being raising the team's defense or healing them; these battles will most likely end in a draw as neither side takes much damage at all. In the late game, you basically have to rely on cards to even win duels. And often a lot of them.
  • Towns in M3K5 is only one tile in size, the smallest in the entire franchise. This makes it even harder for opponents to step into your town and possibly go bankrupt, and when they do, you'll have to deal with their challenges, which can be extremely hard to win without proper cards. Most facilities (clinic, bank, casino, etc.) have the same problem.
• That One Boss:
  • Generally, throughout the series, if you aren't playing as Liu Bei, then his most well-known generals like Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Zhuge Liang will most likely give you headaches whether they challenge you or you face them when entering towns occupied by him. The relief is that since the computer is usually not smarter than you, it's also possible for him to deploy them in a small town with neglectable rents, and you can just ignore them. But not all the time.
  • Hua Xiong in M3K3's second stage in the story mode, where he works for Dong Zhuo and occupies Luoyang, the largest town in the map with obscene rents. He is one of the best generals in the game and has excellent battle stats (that can even rival Guan Yu and Lü Bu), so you know how serious this is.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Lü Bu's design in M3K5 is supposed to be in a lion costume, but to many players it looks like a cockroach.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: M3K5 contains a few gags that may be inappropriate for some younger players. Some of the possible training courses are questionable things like "happy corner" (a school prank that involves slamming a person's crotch against an object; there has been a lot of reports on how some people have been permanently injured from such pranks), or "reading erotic novels" (and those are also some of the better courses). Some of the random events may also involve these things.