Recently I tried my hand at TROM with the Warlord difficulty mod. Playing as Gongsun Zan, Zheng Jiang, Han Fu and Yuan Shao quickly formed a coalition against me to the west. Yuan Shao even threatened me to give up a province, which I'd never seen the AI do before, and I had no choice but to agree as I needed time to deal with Liu Yu. Sadly even after defeating him I was placed in terrible danger when Gongsun Du betrayed me and attacked from the east. I actually had to submit to Cao Cao, which caused everyone except Yuan Shao to back off. I have to pay Cao Cao a lot now, but fortunately he agreed to compensate me handsomely for agreeing to join his other wars in the south.

What followed was two years of grinding warfare and now I've slowly crawled my way back against Yuan Shao. I'm considering rebelling against Cao Cao in order to make peace with Yuan Shao and settle the score with Gongsun Du, but it's questionable whether I could make the peace in the first place. Overall the mod is good. I'm a little bothered by how inert diplomacy is relative to vanilla, but it's still workable and the revamped unit roster feels much better. Imagine being forced to become a vassal to the AI!