One of the most important and potentially time consuming parts of Legend of Cao Cao is going to be leveling up your commanders. You’re going to want to level a lot of them up to use on defense and to have available as backups for when your main guys are low on energy.

Luckily they’ve made it easy for us, if you go to Quests -> Special -> Military Drills, you’ll be able to see a bunch of quests that you can run on “Repeat Assignment” and level up your units without much oversight.

Now there is a few tricks to note here, so you can run your squad on auto without too much worry.

Firstly, energy usage and ration cost for running quests is based on commander level, this means when you’re leveling low level units its going to cost very little of each, which is great! It actually costs zero energy to use a unit up til it hits level 11, after that its 10 energy 5 for every 10 levels after that (21 is 15, 31 is 20, etc). This means there’s really no real reason not to level up every character to at least 20.

Next, the enemies levels in these training quests will be an average of that of the units you bring (limited by the level range of the quest you pick, first one is 1-19), so you want to make sure everyone’s as close in level as possible. This will keep your low level units from being 1 shot and keep em gaining xp.

Not surprisingly, bringing a healer is also a good idea, you face four groups of varying numbers of enemies so being able to heal up in between fights (or during) will also help keep the full group alive.

Every 7 levels you can upgrade your gear, this is important because to promote your unit every 20 levels to raise the level cap you have to be on the highest gear level for that level range, so at 7/14/etc start checking to see if your unit has maxed out the XP on it’s gear and is able to have its gear upgraded. This can be slow, particularly armor on ranged units, so make sure you upgrade as soon as you can to get started leveling the next tier. Plus it’ll give you a boost to your stats.

Speaking of gear, make sure to load up your guys with all your best artifacts while they're fighting. Your other units won't miss them and you can always equip them back on to them later. If you don't have many try Story mode, there's lots of ones you can get there which can be pretty powerful.

Another to keep an eye out for is the peddler! At the end of every battle there’s a chance for a special peddler quest to become available. Doing this is highly recommended as he sells goods for cheaper than normal as well as materials you can’t normally find in the shop. I had a big bottleneck with wood early on but even just buying all the lvl 7 weapons is useful as well so you can use them in crafting.

This should give you a pretty good start to getting your guys leveled up, obviously prioritize commanders you think you'll want to use first and then work your way backwards. If you have any other tips or questions let me know! ( or if I'm posting too much :) )