yea Lu Bu is pretty tough. I actually tried him first, just cause he was always a badass in all the dynasty warriors series. Bad mistake. I could barely survive at first, after a couple restarts I was actually not only able to hold Lu Xian, but actually was able to capture Pu Yang relatively quickly into the game. But Cao still wouldn't budge, so I eventually just gave Pu Yang to him to end the war.
It was crazy though, I had to do retarted things like leave my capitol empty of defenders, to mount enough attackers to actually stand a chance against Cao Cao's MASSIVE starting army.
I rarely actually attacked, usually letting Cao Cao do that for me, trying to get hills/forest and across river bonuses whenever possible. I'm personally not a fan of cultural victory so I didn't even try for it, but I was at least able to stay alive and expand a bit.
ps. Lu Bu's capitol is terrible.... 90 turns for a school, forget it. Not only that, but no horse? no copper? no iron? its just not fair for Lu Bu. I just pumped military out of it the whole time. Once I finally managed to get military advisor in Lu Xian though, he couldn't kill me if he sent all his minions.
it was fun.
BTW there are some weird things going on with some of the tech buttons. Sometimes they appear normal, and sometimes not. for example, when "Way of the Celestial Masters", "The way of Peace", and "Drainage System", became available, the button icon was bright pink and did not look correct. I researched a different technology, and when I was done, and saw the options again, they looked normal. Kinda odd.....
I went into check the XML's for you, but most of the new techs are written in chinese and a search for any of the above techs yielded zero results.
A general rule of thumb though, if your pointing to an atlas it should look like this;
<Button>, ,Art/Interface/Buttons/TechTree_Atlas.dds,4,11</Button>
and to just a normal button;
<Button>Art/Interface/Buttons/TechTree/horsemanship.dds</Button>
nearly all of your entries already look like that, but still some of the buttons come up looking pink..... sometimes... one of the weirdest bugs I've came across. Some of your buttons defines do have spaces in them though.... Just as an example, some of them look like;
<Button>Art/Interface/Buttons/TechTree/horseman ship.dds</Button>
I would recommend putting a _ there in the file name and changing that. Not sure how it handles spaces.
Also, sometimes the music that is used bothers me, but I can get by it. Its just strange hearing Elizabeth's music when I'm thinking about ancient China.
But you did say "little traces of Civ4 left", and sorry but I disagree. I see thousands of traces of Civ4 left, and it begins at the main menu, and really never ends.
With all that said now, Great Job on the mod! Its really fun to play. Keep adding to it please, it'll just continue to get better the more you add