Ashigaru

[Rob]

This question is really a result of the 'UNIT COSTS' thread in the Editing forum.

How realistic are the abilities of Ashigaru in the game?

In particular, is there any kind of historical precedent for, say, honour 9 Yari Ashigaru beating honour 2 Yari Samurai. It has been suggested in the other thread that this is impossible, that Ashigaru could never beat Samurai troops.

Also, were arquebus-equipped soldiers actually less expensive than archers (including costs of Samurai training as well as equipment)?

A proper historical viewpoint on this might help to settle our argument

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AkaiRob Hojo
Honour to Clan Akai Ken

[Tachikaze]

Yes, I think very well trained peasant troops could defeat samurai.

The key is that it's a group. Samurai may be individually more skillful at fighting, but a good general could train the ashis to coordinate better as a team than a group of individualistic samurai haphazardly thrown together.

On the second question, if you consider training time part of the cost, teppo guys would be cheaper than samurai archers. Guns cost more, but the soldier demands a smaller salary and can be trained in a much shorter period of time.

Now, if Shogun: TW had ashigaru archers, they should probably be 200 koku.

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A murky puddle becomes clear when it is still.

[Tenchimuyo]

The game had definitely underminded the importance of Ashigaru. In fact, it was vastly used by the clan daimyos during the Sengoku Jidai, since they were cheaper to maintain. Samurais were used, too. But not as much as Ashigaru since maintain a whole army of samurai means a higher cost.

[Anssi Hakkinen]

The cost of samurai training vs. ashigaru training is really a moot point, because samurai are born samurai, and commoners are hired as ashigaru. The daimyô wasn't really able to choose whether to have ashigaru or samurai. He had a set number of noblemen, who would serve him if he had the money to maintain them in the field, and then he had the option to recruit peasant troops. Both troop types had advantages and disadvantages, in a logistical as well as tactical sense.

Samurai were, for the most part, already trained - having been tutored in bujutsu since their childhood, as the cliché goes. The daimyô had them in his service by default, but the economic burden of actually mobilizing them into an army was notable: their equipment, their living standards, their families, not to mention lavish gifts as rewards for succesful campaigns.

Ashigaru, on the other hand, were available in near-limitless quantities, and they cost far less than samurai: their training time was short, they required only cheapo armor and weapons, and food was sufficient pay for them (plus some small rewards at the end of a campaign - certainly less costly than the gifts given to succesful samurai). Unfortunately, this was reflected in the quality of ashigaru troops, in terms of discipline as well as combat value.

I think STW models the combat effectiveness of ashigaru pretty well. It must be noted, however, that a H9 YA unit is probably ahistorical. Usually, entire regiments never survived in their original form to achieve that kind of battle experience, and the daimyô had little interest in maintaining elite ashigaru forces - they had samurai for that, after all. Individual ashigaru who achieved high "honor" (to use STW terms) were promoted to samurai soon enough - after all, that's how Hideyoshi started out.

Please note: I don't really know what I'm talking about.

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"If the choice is given between life and death, a samurai must choose death. There is no more meaning beyond this."
- Yamamoto Tsunetomo: Hagakure

[Tachikaze]

Training Expense
The only cost to choosing units for MP batles is koku. In real life, there were many costs involved when equipping an army with samurai.

The military service a samurai gave was in return for services rendered by a daimyo (e.g. subsidies, land grants, protection, emergency food). These services are reflected in the cost of the unit. The amount of training a warrior had was directly related to his family's wealth, which was directly related to the daimyo's wealth (= koku expenditure).

When I mentioned training time as a cost factor, I was considering these factors.

The main cost of training teppos was the time lost by men who should be planting rice fields or harvesting tea plants.

Honor
I see honor as a multi-dimensional representation also. It can be thought of as the training level, as well as experience level, of a unit. If taken this way, a group of H5 ashis could have received better training than H2s, rather than surviving more battles.

I feel that this is valid because training is not represented in any other way, and is a huge factor in real battle. And, to repeat the point I made previously, can produce an ashi unit that can out-perform a samurai unit.

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A murky puddle becomes clear when it is still.

[solypsist]

LOL

I love Annssi's disclaimer..but I think that for the most part that's implied in most things everyone discusses on here!

[FwSeal]

One important thing to consider, of course, is that 'units' did not exist, per se (beyond a given daimyo/general's retainer band).
There are a few possible exceptions, however, if only because they are so well-known. The most famous is Ii Naomasa's 'red devils' (although whether or not they were called that at the time is unclear). These men were noted for going to battle in uniformly red armor. The idea actually came from the Takeda. According to tradition, Shingen allowed Obu Toramasa to dress his front ranks in red to scare the enemy. When Toramasa was made to commit suicide in 1565, his younger brother Yamagata Masakage (both were actually from the Iitomi family) took up the practice. While there is some question whether this was all just a myth, the story goes that when Tokugawa gained control of Kai after Nobunaga's death, he studied Shingen's military tactics and liked the red armor idea. He not only allowed Naomasa to take up the idea but also to recruit former Yamagata retainers into his ranks (the most famous of which is probably Hirose Kagefusa). Naomasa (and in turn Ii Naotaka) thus became the leader of the 'red devils'.
Another example, on a broader scale, is Amako Kunihisa's 'Shingu army/contingent'. Named after the area Kunihisa, a younger son of the well-known Tsunehisa, held, the Shingu troops are supposed to have formed the core of the Amako army. When Haruhisa (Tsunehisa's successor), for reasons that are a bit murky, wiped out the Shingu faction (executing Kunihisa, his sons, and a number of grandsons in 1554), the power of the Amako began to decline. As always, these are just stories - most of what we in the west (and to an extent in Japan) know about the sengoku warlords has been considerably embellished since the 16th Century.