Now we're playing Chang Ban on the Wei side. As you might expect, we lose if Liu Bei reaches the escape point. The good news is that even if he does manage to make it to the escape point he'll sit there and wait for the peasants to escape.

...The annoying part is that if you kill the peasants under an officer you're gonna hear Liu Bei repeat the same line about "the people" over and over again. This can either be comical or grating depending on how you look at it. There's a cutscene that plays when you approach the peasants, so there's that at least.

Now for how the stage actually starts. We're facing down Zhuge Liang, Zhang Fei, and a few other generics. Some of the generics make a run for it along with Liu Bei who's a bit behind them. If you're fast enough, you can kill some of the retreating generics before they get away. If you waste enough time, Zhang Fei will back up to the Chang Ban Bridge and you can see a cutscene play with him standing up to Wei forces, but more than likely you'll just defeat him before he ever makes it that far. Same for Zhuge Liang.

After that you'll probably want to chase after Liu Bei. If you're slow, Guan Yu will appear as reinforcements with Guan Ping around the area Xu Zhu is at and get in your way. If you're fast you'll be well past that point before he appears. Then you can defeat all the generics around Liu Bei, which will raise morale of the units holding them off and allow them to hold Liu Bei in place indefinitely as you go around defeating the rest of the enemy officers for EXP and drops. Zhao Yun is hard to notice, but he's fighting Cao Cao's troops in the northwestern path if you want to go after him. Unfortunately, he won't drop a +10 sword like in DW2. Fortunately, he's not incredibly powerful either.

Anyways, relatively easy stage. You aren't really pressured at all despite the possibility of losing from Liu Bei retreating. Unless you really dick around he'll never make it to the escape point.

Also, Zhang Liao is absolutely brutal here. He straight up murders Liu Bei and most of his officers here at Chang Ban, eliminating Shu extremely early on. I guess this explains why Zhang Liao gives them so much trouble in DW7 lol.