The perils of premature domination

Just finished a Shimazu legendary domination campaign in 1577 - way earlier than any previous campaign.

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This left me feeling strangely flat and unsatisfied - all my victories were achieved with armies made up almost entirely of ashigaru (I don't think I recruited more than half a dozen samurai units in the whole campaign and all but one were still alive at the end), I never even got the chance to recruit legendary geishas or hero units or maxed out warrior monks, never built a citadel, never went bankrupt, never had to fight epic battles with 4 or 5 enemy stacks etc.

I don't use any exploits, only camp in desperate battles where I am hugely outnumbered have no escape and just want to inflict maximum damage, only start using agents really aggressively when I have captured the Ninja provinces in the centre, don't use nanban trade ships as historically I don't think any playable clan other than perhaps the Oda should be able to convert to Christianity, etc

So what else can I do to slow things down for my next campaign which will be as the Mori? - spend 20 years on the edge of Realm Divide teching up, buying every building upgrade and building uber-samurai stacks? campaign as a peacenik faction and only attack rebels and clans that attack me first (which would work historically for the Mori - if Eiji Yoshikawa's Hideyoshi novel is to be believed Mori Motonari admonished his sons to never expand beyond the west of Honshu), find a mod that speeds up research?

check out mods made by radious over at twc he's got some research mods

+1 vote for mods - even better, make one yourself!

I used to struggle with exploit issues, because for me the minute I start to analyze AI's behavior patterns to optimize my moves, it is already an exploit! I also feel sorry about myself if I do not optimize my moves based on information and data I collected. But then the games would become boring fast because the shortcuts really made it too easy.

Then I started making mods myself - such as by creating an extra difficulty above the max difficulty, just to make the game still interesting. I think you can try that, too! A good starting point is to give the AI more discounts on army recruit & upkeep and building fee.

A less technical, but probably more difficult-to-define way is to give yourself more handicaps. For example, you have to play a campaign without loading the game, with the only exception that you ended a previous session and now needs to resume. But you will probably find it too tedious as your ship accidentally sailed the wrong direction from a misclick and you need to correct that, your kid/dog pressed your keyboard... there are just too many grey areas in these things.

Or you can try to go for the extreme of exploits - you can do whatever you want with the game AS LONG AS you do not use any external help, and see how fast you can win a Domination Campaign! It is fun, too.

My definition of an exploit is any option that is not at least theoretically available to the AI as well.

Anyway decided to play Hojo instead of Mori as I was fed up of all those silly little provinces in the West and am rather perversely playing them as a pacifist clan, allying to neighbours, only wars fighting when attacked, accepting most offers of peace and always choosing the make vassal option when available.

Its now 1557 and I still have just my original two provinces plus a string of vassals - its a very different game and it'll be entertaining when I hit RD and must fight all of my lovingly accumulated vassals.