Discharge the Honourable: Chosokabe (Legendary, Domination)

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Chapter 07. Great Leap to Richness

Planning for Exodus

We now have a full-stack army and two Ninja. Situation on Shigoku is very stable, as we have two peaceful trading partners who even do not fight each other. (They did this on us in a previous parallel universe. But at that time we were not smart enough to relocate...)



Thoughts #11. 1 Very Fertile Province = 3 Average Provinces

So where shall we go? If we look for tragedy, we could relocate to central Japan. But if we look for prosperity, we should find rich and weak "fat meat" candidates nearby. Northern Kyushu has three very fertile provinces, Hizen, Higo, and Tsukushi, all concentrated in a small area. At 30% tax rate, these three provinces will give us 2500 koku per season. This would be an excellent place to setup our second home.

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We are ready to move! How long will it take to reach Northern Kyushu? Probably a year and half if we simply broad a bow kabuya and sail and sail and sail. How does a bow kabuya hold 2000+ men? Maybe most had to swim behind.

Exploit #10: Ship Relay Transport Chain

The details are explained here. In short, if we have a series of ships spaced within one season's travelling distance, we can instantly ship units and agents to the other end within the same season. A little like Chinese checker.



For example, we already have the second Bow Kabuya waiting on the eastern coast of Kyushu, so it will take all passengers on the first Bow Kabuya.

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Of course we already have the next ship waiting for us further south, so the relay continues. We decided to take the southern route to reach northern Kyushu so we can reserve one of the incense nodes before Otomo and Miyoshi makes their own reservations.

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After two more relay points, this is what we achieved in one single season of autumn, 1546. We started in Iyo and ended at the other side of Kyushu! We could have invaded Shimazu, but their lands are just average.



We ran out of ships at this point, or else we could simply make the landing here. The invasion will formally launch in the spring of 1547.

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But declaring war is not the first step of war. We have lots of preparations to do. First, we assigned a new duty for my father's ramen noodle general. Since we won't hire a lot of new units for a while, he can save us more money as a Commissioner for Development

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We have sent a Bow Kabyua to explore east at the same time. This gives us the oppurtunity to set up sea trades with distant but powerful Daimyos. Oda, who miraculous survived up to this point, would continue to thrive and would form a very profitable trading relationship with us.

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Diplomatic Effort

The Shoni clan holds northern Kyushu's richness. Shoni is unfortunately a difficult opponent to take on, as Shoni starts out with multiple allies close by - Sagara clan to the south and Ouchi clan to the east. Both Shoni and Ouchi has powerful navies. Sagara clan has a powerful land army measured at one full stack and half. At this time, Sagara is also allied with the Ito clan to the south, which had successfully eliminated Shimazu. So essentially we might become the enemy of all Kyushu (Shoni, Sagara, Ito) plus the rest of Chugoku (Ouchi) if we simply declare war on Shoni and fight.



Let's see if we can somehow isolate Shoni through diplomacy. After some probing, we found that the Ouchi clan in the east is interested in forming a military alliance with we Chosokabe AND abandon their alliance with the Shoni clan, IF we are willing to send my first younger brother, Motochica, to them as a hostage for two years.

That's a great deal. We have no intention to fight Ouchi any time soon, so my brother is likely to return unharmed... physically, at least. We will just make up an excuse to tell him that the Ouchi clan has better schools so he will go as an exchange student. Now we have successfully elminated Ouchi as Shoni's help on the sea and possibly their surprise landing on Shigoku (it actually happened in a parallel universe in the past).

Unfortunately, Ouchi refused to break up trades with Shoni. So they might not fight each other any time soon. But in return they agree to cover our boat tickets of 50 koku.

Note: Past allies have a tendency to restablish their alliance quickly, so we had to make this Ouchi deal moment before we decalred war on Shoni, to make it impossible for Ouchi to restore its alliance with Shoni again (as their current ally, Chosokabe, is at war with Shoni).

Exploit #11: Hostages are powerful diplomatic chips

While daimyos' daughters are sold for just 50 koku, boy hostages are much cuter not just to Catholic missionaries. Whenever a clan has a male child, letting somebody else babysit them for two years might complete a highly unlikely diplomatic arrangement. However, if war breaks out within the following two years between these two clans, the hostage will be executed.

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We also found out that Ito clan has an unmarried daughter. Why not becoming in-law relatives iwth them? If we make friends with Ito, they are less likely to join our inevitable war against Sagara, their ally.



Now have have narrowed our enemies to just Shoni and Sagara. If we ship a full-stack army to Kyushu, we have a great chance to utilize their respective predictable behavior and take them down one after the other.

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And then we can have a second sea trade partner. We ended up picking the Kikkawa clan, which defeated Mori and spoiled our trade agreement with them.



The Kikkawa clan has emerged as a formidable power in the Chukoku region (that narrow land strip above Shigoku). With our alliance with Ouchi and trade with Kikkawa, it is unlikely that we will receive any additional problems while we focus on Kyushu.

This concludes Chapter 7 of our story.

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Chapter 08. Shoni, the fat meat

Spring 1547 - our army landed on the shore of Hizen! There was no resistance sighted. We were able to easily take the castle in the summer.



This province is so well-sheltered and so close to trade nodes (we successfully reserved 3!). No wonder so many people recommend to move here no matter who you are.

Note: There will be a problem with Wako Pirates getting stuck below Hizen's port, making its trade ships unable to sail out. But there is a bright side of that problem. We will discuss it later.

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There was still no sight of Shoni's coutnerattack. So we marched on and invaded Tsukushi in the next season. This castle is a basic Fort and has no ranged defenders at all, so we saw 11 units of Bow Ashigaru making porcupine of those poor 45 Samurai Retainers.



The Sagara clan soon marched a powerful army to the border. At the same time, our Ninja successfully sabotaged their castle gates. The Sagara stack promptly returned to garrison the castle. Perhaps they thought some consealed army is going to steal their castle when they are away? We can't afford that.

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Seeing that Sagara's army retreated, we decided to push further east to take the third province from Shoni, Buzen. The castle there is a stronghold, but does not have a lot of defenders. We easily siezed it without full stack (auto-combat). Buzen's craftsmen enable us to train more accurate bow units. A very important province for Chosokabe! Shoni's main army is probably further south of Buzen, as they just wiped out the Otomo clan in Bungo.



Now we are neighbors with the Ouchi clan. We are unable to do land trade with them because our capital is in Shigoku. However, we can sell military access to them. They are our allies, so we don't plan to attack them anytime soon. Besides, if they join our war against Shoni, they might gain automatic military access from us. So better take their money when we can!

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In the winter of 1547, we have the oppurtunity to hire an additional general. Our trade ships have been hunted badly by Shoni's navy. Maybe it is a good idea to train a naval general. He also takes up the job as the Finance Commissioner, although we doubt he had any experience stimulating the economy.

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The Sagara army came back in the winter, with thier one full stack and half of army parked right between Hizen and Tsukushi. Also came uninvited was one full stack of Ouchi units just within our border. Are they here to help us, or fight us?



Let's assume that the Ouchi daimyo still cherishes his reputation. So he is here to help us. This means that we now have a good barrier between Buzen, our newest acquisition, and Shoni's last province, Bungo.

The bulk of our army is in Buzen, one and half season away from Sagara's army. Sure, we could sabotage their castle again to see if they would return to defend against ghosts, but isn't this a good oppurtunity, since we don't have to worry about Shoni too much for now, to get rid of Sagara once and forever? We have our two Ninja around, and Ouchi has pre-paid their advanced door tickets...

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Let's fight Sagara's full stack! It is not that full anymore, for they already suffered from attrition in the winter. My father sent his ramen cook general to defend Buzen with about 1/3 of the stack, and called up new recruits from the other two provinces. He has with 19 units. The advantage is on our side!

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The battle begins! Strangely, the Sagara army actively came to us, although they could camp on a tree-filled hill. Their arrogance will spell their doom.

We first considered deploying on the tall mountain just behind us, but there were too many small obstacles for a full-stack army to properly form a line. So we opt for a tiny hill to the west. We used most of the Yari Ashigaru to make a thin spear wall in front of the loosely formed sea of Bow Ashigaru.

There were three mobile Yari units as reserves, in additional to my father's unit. Experience shows that the opponent sometimes try to flank us with cavalry. So we should be fully prepared for that.



The enemy quickly approached us and started a duel between the Bow Ashigaru. Since we had superior numbers and quality of bows, we were winning the duel. The Sagara general lost patience and ordered all of his men to charge forward - up the slope, toward our spear wall.

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Here comes the charge! They did not even bother for flanking manuever, probably because they saw our reserves waiting for them to try.



Good luck breaking the spear walls before getting pinned to the ground!

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One of their Light Cavalry did try to flank, but it was greeted by two blood-thirsty spear units. Our spear wall held extremely well. It didn't take long before Sagara's generals were killed by the spears.



My father ordered a counter-charge of our Yari Ashigaru toward their Bow Ashigaru. That was the last straw on their morale!

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A decisive victory! We lost 1/3 of our men, but Sagara had 2 men left standing.

As our archers had to fight into heated melee just in front of them, friendly fire was unavoidable but surprisingly few (16). Sagara also had 8 friendly-fire casualties.



Now that Sagara's main army is defeated and dissolved on the spot. The remaining half-stack is not going to stop us from taking Higo in the next season. But just to be safe, we sabotaged their castle again so they won't be training any new units.

Exploit #12: Easily paralyzed castle

Ninjas have an easier time opening castle gates compared to other missions, and they only charge a minimal fee like 100 koku. This actually counts as a damage on the castle, which is unable to recruit until the castle is repaired. Opening castle gate is a cheap and effective way to paralyze enemy's unit replenishment, which can be quite crazy on Legendary difficulty. Also, as shown above, the AI tend to return to the castle to defend when the gate is sabotaged. This could be useful to delay an invasion.

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Our great battle with Sagara, although only a Decisive Victory, earned a landmark on the spot, and the Emperor in Kyoto was impresed by our progress. Indeed, the Shoni clan is such a fat meat that so far we have not met any meaningful resistance.



The only big battle we have to fight is against its small one-province ally. Not with very small army, though.
From the picture above you can see an annoying Metsuke from the Shoni clan. Our ninja, who has gained significant experience from Sabotage missions, met him in his sleep easily.

This concludes Chapter 8 of our story.

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Chapter 09. The last stuck samurai

Welcome back, wise daimyos.

Our conquest of the rich lands in Kyushu continues. In the autumn of 1548, we received mercahnts' request to look for trade opportunities in far-away lands. If we are not capped by 4 trade routes, maybe this is a good idea...



But we ask them to improve our domestic markets, which gives more town growth and income in the long run.

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My father's 2/3 full stack marched to Higo and laid siege on the castle, defended by half a stack of nothing but archers. It would be a pain to watch the endless archer duels, so let's just skip the details (auto-resolve) and say that we won.



It is still possible to win with less loss, but it will take a lot of time to watch. Since we are in no hurry to fight the next battle (the Ito clan has a marriage relationship with us), we can afford to wait a few turns for the units to replenish to full strength.

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Now Sagara is gone, all that's left is Bungo's Shoni, which still has some considerable military strength. It seems that they have given up the idea of attacking Buzen after Ouchi landed their full stack on the beach. Ouchi has severed its trade relationship with Shoni after we setup a temporary blockade on Bungo's port, but has not declared war on them yet.



When Shoni's main navy returned to Bungo, we found out Shoni has boarded a 4/5 stack army on the fleet. There are quite some Bow Samurai in there. Are they thinking about landing in Shigoku?

That is actually a very good news for us, because this will leave Bungo relatively defenceless. At this time our ramen cook general in Buzen has accumulated a small army with 5 units of Bow and 3 units of Yari Ashigaru. It may be possible for him to steal Bungo from somewhat weak defenders. If we take the Bungo castle, Shoni's navy and its passengers will forever vanish on the sea.

We hide the ramen general and his force in the forest just north of Bungo, so we may get a chance to put an end to Shoni in the winter. We again sabotaged the Bungo castle so they can't hire new units. Why is that our ninja always succeed? Because there is a castle siege happening in the same season. Maybe later we should purposely keep an useless inland province rebel.

In addition, just for experiment, we "blocked" Shoni's fleet with one single bow kabyua, led by our third general (the finance commissioner), in the expectation that Shoni's fleet will certainly attempt to attack it and lost to the 20-minute timer. The Shoni's fleet will have nowhere to retreat. Will it sink to the bottom of the ocean? We will have to find out.

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If we can defeat Shoni, all that's left in Kyushu is the Ito clan. But we decided to sell them advanced door tickets as well.



How come?

First, we need time to consolidate our new domains. Buzen and Bungo will have a huge Christian population that needs to be converted back to Shinto Buddism.

Thoughts #12: Converting to Chrstianity?

Now religious difference incur a terrible diplomatic penalty of -40. I do not see how any diplomatically conscious daimyo would commit such a political suicide. The best benefits of converting to Chrstianity are (1) invincible navy and (2) very effective agents for inciting rebellion.

(1) Navy is not a big problem if we are rich enough to afford enough traditional navy. We now have three very rich provinces and 3 trade nodes, so it is just a problem of time before we can amass a powerful full-stack fleet. Before we have this powerful navy, we can almost always repel attacks with one single Bow Kabuya. In fact, we have been doing that outside of Hizen's port against Wako pirate for a year.

(2) Inciting rebellion is simply a factor of luck, which will be easily on our side if we leave one province with rebels and constantly lay siege on it. Or we can try the slower method of trial and error to figure out the correct sequence of movement of units in order to make all agents successful or surviving failure.

So converting to Christianity isn't really a good idea, at least when we play dishonorably.

Another important reason to temporarily slow down our expansion is the timing of relocation.

Thoughts #13: When to announce the move

We have full freedom to decide when to move. All we need is to raise tax for two seasons for peasant rebels to march to Tosa.

In the meantime, we will need enough garrison in Kyushu to keep the population happy in the three very fertile provinces (we can exempt the taxes from the other provinces if there is not enough garrison) so we have enough income to support the clan.

The five northern Kyushu provinces has 4 sea trade routes (2 Trading ports, 1 Nanban port), plus whatever land-route trade partners we have. So there is no net loss of trade. But before the move we can use Tosa's port to build more cheaper trade ships. Besides, Tosa has a Buddhist temple. Before we have five monks out in the field, we should keep the province so we don't have to build additional temples. Then we can demolish it to make a market so we can support 5 Metsuke a little sooner as well. Hm, maybe followed by Sake Den so we also get 5 Ninja and just get this agent building thing over with.

So it takes about two more years until the move, and we need some army in the north to garrison the three rich provinces.

Past experience shows that Iyo is a popular candidate of the new capital once Tosa is lost, so we should consider giving up Iyo at the same time (and quickly retake it). Sogo and Miyoshi have been ever peaceful on Shigoku. But once we are no longer trade partners of theirs, we will be able to declare war on them without much difficulty, leaving Tosa in a safe permanant rebellion state.

As for Ito, we will let our 5 monks and 2 ninja handle them.

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Shoni was of course very angry that we dare to use one little Bow Kabuya to block their large navy and army for shipment. They attacked our ship from both sides. Thanks to Bow Kabuya's superior maneuverability, they were close, but not close enough.



Unfortunately, their ship did not sink after the unheroic loss.

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Our intentional negligence to foreign trade options have apparantly back-fired in a good way - we got a bonus of foreign trade income! How does this make sense?



But we will happily take the bonus.

Note: If we load the auto-save at the beginning of the turn, whatever bonus we receive this season will be lost.

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As Shoni's large army remain stuck on the sea, the Bungo castle is only mildly defended. We have 1 general, 3 Bow Samurai, 1 Bow Ashigaru, 2 Yari Ashigaru, and the samurai retainer.



A very equal match to the little force led by our siege specialist (retainer: +10 bow accuracy) ramen chef general!

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First we tried the old trick of luring out defenders with archer duel. Unfortunately, the defenders have become smarter now - none of them took the bait.

Also, while our Bow Ashigaru was almost as accurate as Bow Samurai (+10 general bonus, +5 Buzen craftsmen, +general's inspiration), they easily beat Shoni's Bow Ashigaru, but were losing the duel against Shoni's Bow Samurai. Maybe those Bow Samurai are also from Buzen. We had to find other ways.



While we tried to move around units to lock up Shoni's archers as wall defenders (so there will be no mobile shooters and we can safely shoot them from the sides), a very strange thing happened - Shoni's only mobile shooter unit, the Bow Samurai who were winning the duel, suddenly got stuck in a permenant "W" formation. This allowed us to shoot them down to 7 men, when they finally decided it was better to run back and forth like idiots.

They are getting smarter, but still not smart enough. Now there is no more mobile shooters, we safely approached the wall defenders from the sides and wore them down. We also relocated the wall defenders to the side and then back to the middle, so they are more compactly grouped for our arrows.

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The battle ended when the last Shoni solder was shot in the castle. We did not lose any extra man after the duel.



And that's the end of Shoni's stuck samurai, both on the water and in the castle. They are history. Northern Kyushu is ours!

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Want to guess the Christianity population in Bungo? Of course, 100%. The Nanban trade port is equivalent to a 3.5-starred missionary. So we either demolish it and lose one trade route later, or overpower it with monks and temple. The latter is more profitable, so we will do just that.



There is no more enemy (other than Wako pirates - there are two fleets of them harassing us already). With very a healthy income, we will soon gather a powerful fleet and send them packing.



Chosokabe has two friendly neighbors. If they don't betray us, we will gladly keep the peace and focus on development for a while. From now on we should minimize our war declaration, and always let our monks and ninja to do the dirty work.

That concludes Chapter 9 of our story.