View Full Version : Kensai
Here's a thought for you regarding Kensai.
Under the SP campaign, there is a trigger point that must be reached in order to be able to build the Sword Dojo and gain
No-Dachi.
Perhaps the same type of process must occur in order to obtain the Kensai. The only difference is that when the trigger is hit, that particular soldier becomes his own unit.
To me, this would make much more sense that simply being able to purchase a Sword-Saint regardless of the cost. The additional advantage this would provide would be the extreme rareness of the Kensai, as the opportunity for an individual soldier to hit a target number of kills without dying would not be easy, let alone having multiple soldiers accomplishing the same thing.
After all, it's not like there were a large group of Musashi's or Masahige's running around Japan!
Just a thought
------------------
FearObake http://members.tripod.com/smilecwm/cgi-bin/s/net8/laghost.gif
I am the ghost of your fears.
Got a compliment or concern about a Fearful Ways member? Let us know about it HERE (http://pub24.ezboard.com/bfearfulways)
Interesting... so if a christian ashigaru gets enough kills mid-way thru a battle, would he separate from the group into a Kensai midstream or wait until after the battle to get his new rank?
Probably the latter... lol
Dark Phoenix
12-22-2000, 11:07
I thought that if that was the case would it not have to be a samurai or more particular a samurai using a sword as it is also refered to as a sword saint. Do you think that that it should follow after the Sword Master event of getting No Dachis.
------------------
DoragonPhoenix of the Clan Doragon
BakaGaijin
12-22-2000, 15:45
Perhaps the Kensai event and the No-Dachi event are related. After all, the requirement of a "Legendary Swordsman" is a very good description of what a Kensai is. Maybe you can opt to either release the Legendary Swordsman as a Kensai instead of asking him to settle in a dojo to train other soldiers or maybe you can request that he leave his dojo for the field of battle, thus allowing a more normal type of "production" for Kensai, even down to the fact that an expenditure of koku is required.
Still, the Kensai seems like something that would be more of a random event than something a Daimyo has any control over. The only Kensai I know is Musashi, but I do know that he really only mastered sword strategy after travelling a musha-shugyo (I hope I got that right) and fighting many duels -- not by fighting in battle. It would seem that the chaotic nature of a battle would make it difficult for someone to truly refine sword skills to the point of art, as is required of a Kensai. It seems as it it would be hard to master the application of a sword when you've got hundreds of spearpoints charging you and several dozens of arrows with your name on them.
Still, I suppose we'll have to wait for drawing any real conclusion about the Kensai. Bugger. I hate when that happens. =/
Ii Naomasa
12-22-2000, 18:39
BakaGaijin-san's point, also calls into question the true usefulness of such in a pitched battle. Being the epitome of perfection in the art of swordsmanship and becoming spiritually awakened by such does not necessarily mean you'll do any better on the field of battle than a samurai just passed his gempukku ceremony. We use to unofficially spar in multiple opponent situations (what do you expect when you put shinai in the hands of a bunch of teenage Kendo players? http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif ) and even a three-for-all feels different than a duel.
Battles are inherently chaotic, and its hard to implement your perfect form when you have arrows to dodge, bodies falling about you, hardly any room to maneuver, and never knowing if there's a spear or sword pointed at your back. And that's before you consider the numerical advantage a 1 man Kensai unit will face against 120 No-Dachi, for example. As much as the Japanese love their legendary one-versus-many-and-succeeding scenarios, the dozen or two opponents are usually peasants, brigands, low-ranking guards, or other warriors of limited skills. And even these battles are usually fought in an environment that promotes dividing the large number of men up into smaller, managable chunks, not the open fields of battle.
I'm glad this unit is causing much concern and confusion among the fans of the game...it reminds me that the average Shogun player is a bit more intelligent and mature than some of the RTS fan-base, who would've be jumping for joy to see a 'hero' unit, especially a kick-butt swordsman type.
Anssi Hakkinen
12-22-2000, 19:05
Agreed! Kensai and Legendary Swordsmen should be connected somehow, even if not to the point of being the one and the same - after all, most people get a LS Event pretty soon into the game, which would devalue the Kensai quickly.
Dark Phoenix, note that in my understanding the Legendary Swordsman Event is independent on what type of unit achieves the required amount of kills. Kensai should perhaps be limited to samurai units (barring the chance of promotion), but otherwise, they all carry swords, and I've always assumed they use them in addition to their primary weapons. A YS's spear will not last in one piece for too many minutes into a pitcehd battle, after which they must resort to their katanas, even if the sprite animation doesn't reflect this.
On further reflection, perhaps SA and CA kills should not be counted either, unless achieved in melee. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
------------------
"The right use of the sword is that it should subdue the barbarians while lying gleaming in its scabbard. If it leaves its sheath it cannot be said to be used rightly."
- Tokugawa Ieyasu: Legacy
I don’t see why the spear wouldn’t last for a battle, In Europe pike battles would last hours, the spears would even survive war horses throwing themselves against them. I would have thought it more likely that after the initial charge the spears would be dropped in favour of the sword, unless you’ve met some Cavalry….
I would agree that the production of Kensai would have to be tied to events, not facilities. Why it should and should not be based on battle has been gone over above, I wondered though if it might not be an event similar to having a new heir. ‘My lord a Kensai has emerged in Aki…’. Then whoever owned the province at the time of the master swordsman’s emergence would get him. Perhaps if the province wasn’t loyal to you there would be a chance he would belong to whichever clan the province used to belong to, or the rebels.
[This message has been edited by johnmcd (edited 12-22-2000).]
Hirosito
12-23-2000, 03:39
interesting thought johnmcd...come to think of it the best one yet ( in IMO) this ensures rarity if he devs get it right and BTW why should we be honoured with a kensai just because we own half of japan or something
------------------
Hirosito Mori
A warrior's wisdom is shown in the treating of his defeated opponent http://cgi.tripod.com/smilecwm/cgi-bin/s/owen/sid.gif
If the Kensai (unit) represents a legendary swordsman, I think it would be best represented as a strategic unit that would appear on the map after the legendary swordsman event had occured.
The effects of a kensai would be to significantly improve the quality of troops trained in the province where the kensai is located.
It would make him a valuable mobile asset that is also vulnerable to ninja attack.
To me this makes more sense than allowing a clan to franchise the sword dojo and start cranking out no-dachi or any other special units,including 60 man units of rare swordmasters (and is what should have been done with the legendary swordsman event in the first place IMO).
At this point I have no idea how the developers are going to add these new units to the game,I'm just wishing out loud.
Have a nice day.
[This message has been edited by Kage (edited 12-23-2000).]
[This message has been edited by Kage (edited 12-23-2000).]
Um, Kage, I assume you haven't seen the screen shots, but it looks like the Kensai is a one man unit on the battle map, not a strategic unit.
The Black Ship
12-24-2000, 20:47
I hope it goes something like this:
Achieve Legendary Swordsman event as currently implemented in the game, 2 honour point increase by any individual unit above their starting honour (that's easy enuff http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif). Achieve Kensai event when one of your new-fangled ND units achieves a 2 honor point increase from his baseline honour.
Thus only a sword No Dachi can achieve a Kensai event. Thus the Kensai will remain a rarity.
Have you guys thought about how useful this fellow will be? He occupies an entire slot after all, what could he possible bring to the battlefield to justify this price?
Dark Phoenix
12-24-2000, 21:02
Ship that is the way that I thought it would happen as well. But I think that it should be higher honour than 2 as that could be acheived easily or will it be that you can only have a limited number of the sword saints?
------------------
DoragonPhoenix of the Clan Doragon
solypsist
12-25-2000, 06:13
it's going to be interesting to see all these threads becoem moot when the actual game comes out!
Maybe we can archive them and laugh at our mad theories http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
------------------
MizuRob Hojo
Honour to clan Takiyama
Johnmcd, you are correct, I had not seen the screenshot but now that I have all I can say is, OMG. Several things seem clearer(and not good IMO). The kensai looks silly standing there waiting to buzzsaw through those 120 man units (can't wait to see how archer fire works against him, probagbly has built-in air defense I'm sure). There seem to be alot of honor 9 units on the field (thanks to the new training buildings I guess).
It seems my last hope is for a scenario/ campaign editor that will allow feature tweaking for each individual clan so I can turn off some of the units and buildings from ever being produced in a game ( I really want to be able to adjust unit costs and production times and an option to allow or deny certain units from being available on a clan by clan basis ).
IMO a good comprehensive campaign editor will do more for variety and replayability than all these new units/buildings ever could, I just hope we are allowed to keep what we like and turn off or at least limit what we don't like.
Have a nice day.
[This message has been edited by Kage (edited 12-25-2000).]
The problem is abstraction. In your armies you may well have several soldiers who have killed many men in battle but the game does not display this. The closest you get is the 'Legendary Swordsman' event and that is a one-off event that can be forgotten once it has happened.
The Kensai certainly should be an above-average soldier, indeed even an exceptional one. However I hope that his main power will be to provide morale and possibly training to your men. After all, he provides them with an example of what one can achieve when they work hard, study the Bushido etc. So I could see a possibility that fighting alongside a Kensai might allow the honour of your men to improve more quickly than normal.
There are a whole range of ways a Kensai could be made to be important in the game, without resorting to turning him into a Terminator.
------------------
MizuRob Hojo
Honour to clan Takiyama
the Kensai will almost certainly have a morale bonus on the troops around, and maybe a negative effect if he is killed (should Kensai be able to rout? http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif )
In combat he probably increases the fighting ability of the troops around him - I believe he will act as a sort of second Taisho...whether he is armed with multiple rocket launchers and has M-16's coming out of his ears we do not yet know but I doubt that the dev team would turn him into the universal soldier, I do have worries though, that a 1 man unit has very little place in armies of 901 men...espeacially when the unit count is at 120, I do not think the dev team would not have sorted this out and that is why I think that the Kensai is less of a combat unit and is used in more of a 'go get em boys - they're over there, I'll just polish my armour' role
------------------
If you havn't seen it yet...its already too late.
Anssi Hakkinen
12-26-2000, 18:22
I think it would be pretty hard to rout a Kensai, considering he really can't suffer "excessive casualties" and then rout. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif His high honor will probably prevent routing because of flanking or army-wide morale collapse, so lost battles likely mean lost Kensai.
------------------
"If you start a fight, you must win it. Fighting, however, is not your objective. The most important thing is to win without fighting."
- Risuke Otake Sensei
As it stands now, the Legendary Swordsman event is supposed to occur when an individual soldier within a unit achieves a specific number of kills (we've had several threads on whether or not it actually works that way). I envisioned the Kensai event to work similar, but with a much higher threshold.
I also feel that it may work out similar to what BlackShip suggests. Quote Achieve Kensai event when one of your new-fangled ND units achieves a 2 honor point increase from his baseline honour.[/QUOTE]
Where I see the difference is that one of the individual ND's much achieve a certain kill threshold rather than unit honor increase. I would also imagine that that threshold would be much higher than it was to achieve the Legendary Swordsman event (12 kills?). I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the Kensai event would require an ND to achieve 24 kills!
As to what the unit would provide on the battlefield, morale bonuses to surrounding troops should definitely be in there as Whitey and others suggest. Who wouldn't want to have Musashi fighting next to you! By the same token, the loss of a Kensai should have an even more pronounced effect. Imagine having Musashi go down while fighting next to you.
I don't know that we need to turn him into a Terminator unit, but he should be able to be used in combat. In the same way that we must decide if, when and how to commit our Daimyo in the campaign. The same must be done with the Kensai. Then the burden falls back on us to decide if we want to risk the unit.
------------------
FearObake http://members.tripod.com/smilecwm/cgi-bin/s/net8/laghost.gif
I am the ghost of your fears.
Got a compliment or concern about a Fearful Ways member? Let us know about it HERE (http://pub24.ezboard.com/bfearfulways)
By its very name -- sword SAINT -- it seems obvious to me that no matter how they become available (via events or facilities) they will likely ONLY be available to CHRISTIAN daimyos. This will offer another incentive for taking the papist yoke. Maybe this will also require a Cathedral or something before they are available or before the event CAN be triggered.
Uh huh, its seems obvious to me that ‘saint’ is a translation and the Christian connotations it has in English aren’t necessarily there in Japanese….I would be amazed if it was a Christian only unit.
Vanya,
As Johnmcd supposes, "Sword Saint" is the english translation of the term Kensai. The most literal translation of Kensai is "gifted swordsman" but doesn't quite do the trick.
Kensai is a term bestowed by the Japanese on Samurai who have transcended how we view the sword. Kensai have achieved enlightenment through the "Way" of the sword. For them the sword is no longer a weapon or tool, but a part of who they are, as much as an arm or leg.
The end result of the heightened awareness and integration is an individual who knows where a threat is coming from before it manifests. There is an old story about a Kensai by the name of Munenori that illustrates this concept. Munenori had been in the garden of his home when he felt a threat behind him. He saw no-one other than his old servant. Later, he retired to bed early being depressed that his senses had misled him. His servant asked what was wrong with his master and Munenori told him. It was at that point that the old servant confessed that he had wondered if even the great Munenori could be caught off-guard at that moment.
His faith in his senses restored, Munenori rewarded his servant for his honesty. The point that Munenori was able to perceive even the thought of a potential threat.
This is the level of skill that is attributed to Kensai!
I would hope that CA/DT do not limit Kensai to Christian only because of our translation of the word. That would be a great disappointment.
------------------
FearObake http://members.tripod.com/smilecwm/cgi-bin/s/net8/laghost.gif
I am the ghost of your fears.
Got a compliment or concern about a Fearful Ways member? Let us know about it HERE (http://pub24.ezboard.com/bfearfulways)
Who knows what is in the mind of CA? Another thought about this unit is that it could represent any hero - not just a sword saint.
After all, Japanese history is full of examples of individual warriors who attacked whole armies, either to buy time for their own side or to atone for a personal failure.
These heroics often kept large numbers of enemy troops amused while the friendly side regrouped or withdrew.
Takeda Kenshin's advisor at 4th Kwanikajima, seeing how badly his advice miscarried, personally charged the Useugi, sustaining more than 30 wounds before he commited seppuku.
This Kensai unit could do the same, at least taking on a 60 man unit for a good while. Just a thought.
Hoichi
hee hee hee..........
Hoichi................heh heh heh heh
Who is Takeda Kenshin? MWAHAhahahhahahahah
(Just Kidding of course! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif)
------------------
FearObake http://members.tripod.com/smilecwm/cgi-bin/s/net8/laghost.gif
I am the ghost of your fears.
Got a compliment or concern about a Fearful Ways member? Let us know about it HERE (http://pub24.ezboard.com/bfearfulways)
What do you expect from a peasant? Of course I meant Takeda Shingen and Useugi Kenshin -- I shall now commit seppuku to atone for my mistake.
Hoichi
Very interesting... thanks for the info on the background of the Kensai; a void has been filled in my sphere of ignorance. Lets hope the same happens in the expansion.
And here I was thinking it was some sword-wielding Jesuit nutcase... lol
vBulletin® v3.7.1, Copyright ©2000-2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.