>>529747556
If the main campaign is what you want you can skip Eight Princes and Mandate alltogether. Mandate is good but is way earlier than the main campaign. The others will add units and faction stuff to the 190 start date.

A thing to note tho is that significant portions of content are "locked away" behind the stat dates. For example, Lu Bus faction mechanic can only be used if you play as him in the 194 start date.
There's also a bunch of unique event decisions, like Sun Ce getting a very special choice to go south with his fathers generals, that require the later start date.

This might be way too autistic for you, and I dont necessarily recommend it on your first campaign, but I found it very fun to essentially play along with the different start dates. So I would start a campaign as say Liu Bei in 190, play fairly historically until 194, boot up the relevant DLC, play to 200, boot up the next DLC, and then go nuts.

Again, very time consuming and autistic, but it can be fun. Using the Red Cliffs historical battle as my campaign climax was great