Strategic Wisdom
How To :-
Conquer an 'Impossible' Province!
Effective Castle Placement and Use!
Garrison a Castle!
Launch a Seaborne Invasion!
Reinforce a depleted unit!
Exceed the Unit size!
Track am Emissary, Priest or Diamyo!
Recon!
When you're facing a tough battle
with defenders holding a river or a stubborn hilltop position, you're often
better off throwing overwhelming numbers at him and using the "Resolve
Combat Automatically" option.
This generates the outcome through a formula
that puts more weight on numerical superiority than tactical advantage.
Try to get odds of 3 to 1.
This is also a good way to use hordes
of Yari Ashigaru; throw them at a province and wear it down using the automatic
combat resolution.
Cheap, yes but so effective.
It's not necessary to keep border territories
garrisoned with large armies if you use castles wisely.
Castles are less useful for any direct
defensive benefit during a battle than they are for stalling an attacker
until you bring reinforcements in.
This is how you can effectively park your
main army one or two territories away from a potential threat.
Keep a castle in a border province and
garrison it with a token defence.
When the province is attacked, hole up
in the castle until your main army arrives to break the siege and hopefully
destroy the aggressors.
Garrison a Castle
Select an individual unit from within
an army and drop it in the castle.
You can't drop multiple units - nor can
you drop a single unit army into the castle - a design flaw I think.
Building a Port in a province makes
it effectively border every other province with a Port, no matter who owns
that Port. However, you must verify the presence of the target Port before
you can move an army there.
You can do this with a recon unit, like
an Emissary or Shinobi.
Simply try to move one of these units
from one of your provinces with a Port to another coastal province.
If there's a Port in the target province,
you'll be able to drop your unit there.
The next turn, he will have confirmed
the Port's location and you can move armies in.
Using Ports as avenues of invasion
is especially important in the endgame, when you have to do a lot of long
range manoeuvring and mopping up.
I have never seen the computer player
invade this way.
It opens up a whole world of possibilities!
You can reinforce a depleted unit
by dragging and dropping it onto another depleted unit.
The maximum unit size is determined in
the Options-Performance screen.
There's a slider here labelled Default
Unit Size. This is set to 60 unless you've changed it. This means that
newly trained units will begin with 60 men and you won't be able to combine
two units if they add up to more than 60 men.
But when you increase the setting, Shogun
will allow units containing up to 120 men. This takes effect immediately
and can be changed at will with no effect on stacks you've already made.
If you change the setting to 120,
stack two 60-men units into a 120-man unit, and then change the setting
back to 60, you'll still have a stack of 120 men.
Maximimum army size is still 16 times
unit size, ie. with the setting at 60 men an army can hold 16 units of
60 men or 8 units of 120 men.
The advantage to all this? Patch
the game to v1.11 and try to get the Legendary Swordsman event with unit
size of 60. It Won't Happen!
Too many casualties.
Plus you'll lose Great Generals and Heirs
with frightening regularity.
So combine your Generals with other units
to keep them safe, and having your samurai running around in units of 120
will (almost) guarantee being able to build No-Dachi Samurai.
Why play with a unit size of 60? When
you are fighting battles on more than one front the flexibility and rapid
builds are far more important to me.
Having the unit ready for deployment next
turn and being able to send 60 men to a province may stall the assault
that you know is coming.
Rather than wait 2 turns and expend 120
men trying to retake your province.
Plus if i'm low on koku I can build 60
ashigaru easily.
Having trouble with a Diamyo who moves
all over the place when you want an audience?
You can drag a unit onto a Daimyo from
any territory and it will track the target and move, turn by turn,
until it reaches it.
Even though you can't see the Diamyo your
emissary, ninja or geisha can.
The same holds true for assassinating
any target - once you see the target set your dogs on it. From any
province on the map! They'll hunt him down!
Be wary of setting more than one assasin
loose at the same target at the same time. If your first assasin kills
the target the others are likely to track the database character slot.
(a glitch)
Meaning your ninja goes rogue and can
wind up on the far side of japan attacking total strangers! The odds of
him running all the way back to base are remote - unless he happens to
be in a province with a port.
Emissaries and Priests are good for
reconnaissance, since they can't be caught and killed by traditional
defences like Border Forts and Shinobis.
Use them to determine just how many troops
your opponent has - it's amazing how good the computer players are at appearing
to have fewer or less troops as the situation calls for.
The Hojo are excellent at 'hiding' their
numbers.
The computers players are also very skillfull
at shuffling units.
Especially the Oda!
Their goal is to trick you into positioning
your border forces in such a way that you are vulnerable - in an even fight
the defender wins.
If they hold your province, even if you
hold the castle, They are the defender!
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