The main thing to know about building those character relationships is working through the story paths for wei wu and shu which opens up most of your bonding opportunities. After finishing the main campaign, you'll want to hop into the post-game story mode, where things get really interesting with characters like zhang jiao who need some extra attention.

The shui jing retreat becomes your home base for tracking everything, and you'll want to keep an eye out for those handshake icons on the world map since they point to special bond events. Something worth remembering is that training missions with the blue scroll icons and regular requests really help boost those relationships quickly. You can actually meditate at the retreat to auto-complete some training stuff if you've got the gold for it which is pretty handy when you're trying to max everyone out.

For the romantic side of things, characters like diaochan and sun shangxiang have special scenes you can unlock when you max out their bonds, though don't expect any marriage system or anything. A good approach is choosing your faction early around chapter 3, since that'll make your bonding path a bit smoother. And here's something interesting - you can actually change some characters' fates by replaying certain chapters like saving sun ce or dian wei which opens up even more bonding opportunities and true endings. Just remember that maxing out everyone eventually gets you that spirit of camaraderie achievement if you're into that kind of thing.