Five things (1-3 on game play, 4-5 on setup/documents)
1) The two most important territories in the game are #10 and #20 (Jun and Ji). It takes a while, but you need to take them over. When you occupy them both and have support in them high enough you create a special mountain lair. This makes your popularity sky rocket.
2) If you don't know who would make a good brother and who wouldn't, the easiest way to find good people is to use the people that you can select from when you start the game. They tend to lead their own territories. Corner them, capture them, imprison them, and then recruit them. One time I decided that I wanted to hold onto wizards, so I made them all brothers. It didn't work very well...especially since you bothers tend to do more work than other people and you need wizards to have "body" left in battles.
3) Invite to lair is a great command... it costs money and you have to have enough space in your castle to except everyone, but it works well. Zhu Wu (the spelling might be wrong on that) is probably the most likely to accept an invitation early on. You do need to have several territories and some popularity, but you can probably invite him to join you before you could even recruit any other wizard. It also works to invite people who would be good brothers. You get their people and a good brother out of it. Well worth the few hundred it costs to make the offer and the few thousand to get them over.
4) If you can't get it to work, go to the dosbox tutorial on Abandonia.
http://www.abandonia.com/main.php?nav=index&FAQ=1 It shows step by step everything you need to do. If you don't have the emulator set up correctly, it won't work. Their are a few different executables. The file you need to run is Koei.exe.
5) If you want the instruction book, map, files that work etc. Go get get 'em:
http://www.abandonia.com/games/502/downloa...ncientChina.htm. Just follow the links. I find that replacementdocs.com is very slow. Right click on the link you want to download and click "save to disk." Trying to view them online doesn't seem to work for me.