1. Make a strategist-type character without making the rest of the casts seem like a complete buffoon.
2. Create a world where characters are allowed to lie and deceit each other, naturally causing a complex world
3. Keeping the moment-to-moment story stay interesting without a drastic downtime between every climaxes.
To explain:
1. Make a strategist-type character without making the rest of the casts seem like a complete buffoon.
This is something that plenty of war stories, even a widely beloved classic like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, seem like they can't help but fall into, where the story has a clear-cut line separating the casts between competent people that actually know what they're doing, therefore labelled as strategist vs the other commanders, whose only tactic is to charge over and over again and fall for what's clearly a trap. I get that someone needs to lose so that the strategist can show off their brilliance, but if you're hoping this other commander to actually become an intimidating presence your protagonist needs to watch out for, then you have a big problem, because at some point you need to sit down and think about how many men did he lost for nothing and why he's still given a command of an entire army despite of that.
2. Create a world where characters are allowed to lie and deceit each other, naturally causing a complex world
Now, why is it so great that characters can lie at one another? Well, lies don't come from nothing. There is an intention behind it, a motivation to do or get something, and no matter what that thing is it can cause a conflict, and conflict by nature can create an interesting story. As an adaptation of the Three Kingdoms, TRoT is a political story where every major casts are trying to not just survive but thrive on the chaos that ravage the land, each with their own goals and ambition, including but not limited to: killing all your brothers to become the sole inheritor of your father's land; saving the child emperor and rescue the crumbling Han dynasty from its seemingly inevitable collapse; and massacring villages and cities and end the ongoing chaos with a swift and brutal conquest.
3. Keeping the moment-to-moment story stay interesting without a drastic downtime between every climaxes.
Something that many stories almost can't help but fail at at least once or twice is keeping the moment-to-moment events to stay engaging without a huge down time between each climax, which I often feel keep happening in war stories because there's a need to build up too much exposition so that the next battles are set up properly, especially when the enemy is a completely new cast of characters. The Ravages of Time solve this by relying on two things behind-the-scenes politic and multiple main casts. By using behind-the-scenes politic, TRoT has basically created a 24/7 conflict that allow players from all levels of status and profession to fight one another through words, coercion, and small-scale violence, resulting an endless conflict that progress naturally to the decisive battle that serve as one of the climaxes amongst many others we'll see until the story ends. Meanwhile, multiple main casts allow the story to flow naturally between each event, very beneficial especially around after chapter 30 where the line between friends and starts to blur.
Overall, easy 9/10 at least. I believe that this series will be one of the big classic people will remember in the future, an excellent example of a huge and complex story.
