Total War: THREE KINGDOMS

TLDR this will take a while

1. Choose Cao Cao for extra spies
2. Recruit as many spies in the same faction as possible (more chances to discredit)
3. Discredit character and faction as much as you need to (DON'T go to 0 satisfaction)
4. Recruit the faction heir and use them to assassinate the leader

The easiest leader for this is probably Cao Cao, since he gets 2 extra spies and his schemes include a number of ways of messing with other factions directly (not to mention that all the schemes are kind of OP and very spammable). There's a fair bit of RNG involved here. You can try to send your own people to spy on others, but they're not guaranteed to be hired (in my experience, they almost never get hired). More reliable is to check the list seeing if there's any discontent people willing to spy on their own faction (they'll show up on the bottom of the candidate list with their faction's flag in their name banner). Be on the lookout for family members or even faction heirs, as they are directly in the line of succession, but don't worry too much for your first few spies, as you can use them to lower the satisfaction of other faction members and make it easier to gain more spies within the same faction. I recommend choosing one faction to focus the majority of your spies on and only sending to other factions to have visibility on them and make it easier to re-pivot if your chosen faction doesn't pan out.

Once you have a spy, you'll want to spam discredit faction and discredit character as much as possible. Prioritize the faction heir if you can, but sometimes characters won't be selectable for either action for some reason (the game doesn't explain a lot of stuff very well, but the spy system is probably the most vague out of all the systems in the game. I'll update if/when I figure out the reason behind this), so just do whoever you can. Be somewhat careful and don't push them to 0 satisfaction, as that will cause them to leave the faction or maybe even do something more drastic, depending on their position and other factors. I found that between 10 and 30 is a good range to pushing them to betray their faction. Note that the numbers might not update until after you close the spy window and let the event play out. Other things such as the spy candidate list may also not refresh until the next turn as well. Anyway, keep doing this and recruiting more spies until you can finally recruit the faction heir.

After recruiting the faction heir, you can finally assassinate the faction leader and claim your achievement. This should also unlock Ill Omen at the same time.



Depending on your undercover network and cover amounts, you may want to use the interference action first, as this prevents all spy actions from being intercepted for a time, which means you don't have to worry about spending extra of either or wasting the action altogether.

If you have the opportunity, you could also try killing the faction leader in combat instead of assassinating him. Be aware that there are even more RNG elements in combat though (capture chance, character health, even just whether or not the faction leader will show up as a general on the map). Theoretically you can do this with the entire family line, as if there are no heirs I believe the game will pick a random general to be the new leader (naturally there's exponentially more RNG here).

Be sure to also pick up Point Break, as the instigate civil war action actually requires your spy to be the faction leader, not just a family member as the UI suggests.


Final note, things that might make this easier are the blue reforms that relate to spies (masterful disguies techniques, dedicated spy network, and divine manipulation of threads) and spending prestige points (the points you get when you rank up) on spies. You first need to unlock private tutors to get the reforms, which is also unlocked by having a county school, first buildable with a small city (Cao Cao's capital Chen starts as a large town, iirc). You may be tempted to rush these as soon as possible, but it might be better to focus on expanding your territory and building your economy for the first few turns to support it later. This achievement will most likely take a bit of a slog unless you get particularly lucky, so be prepared for that.