As the title says, the following small guides are entirely the work of Maltz. I can only take credit for bundling them.
Clicking on the title will bring you to the original thread.
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As the title says, the following small guides are entirely the work of Maltz. I can only take credit for bundling them.
Clicking on the title will bring you to the original thread.
Tips for Beginners: Besieged AI's behaviors
This guide is written for beginners who find castle assaults difficult, and those who love to exploit AI's weakness for evil laughs. Let's use the most basic castle as an example.
Autoresolve or Not?
There are two conditions that favor autoresolve during a siege battle:
(1) You vastly outnumber the AI, say more than 2 to 1
(2) The AI has a lot of ranged units than you
If both of the conditions satisfy, auto-resolve will actually cut your loss. If only (1) is true, fight manually (if autoresolve gives you 0 loss, of course go for it). If only (2) is true, wait for the sally. If none are true, fight manually. You will get better outcome, much better than the outcome of a field battle if you wait for the AI to sally from the castle.
This is because AI's behavior can be easily predicted and exploited, as explained below.
Ranged units
There are two kinds of AI's ranged units.
(A) The wall defenders
AI uses ranged units to defend walls, just like a human would. These bowman can only attack the area in front of them - they cannot turn around and fire all of a sudden as if on the field. So basically as long as you march to their side or back, they ignore you even if you are within their range.
Besides, once the AI assigns a unit of bowman to a particular wall, it is extremely reluctant to move away , unless you have successfully breached into the castle (then they will abandon the wall and attempt to shoot you - see B - the mobile army).
The location of these wall defenders are determined based on your deployment. This means that you can easily lure all wall defenders to one or two sides of the castle by deploying all units together, then march individual units away to work on undefended places in complete safety, if there is no mobile shooters.
(B) Mobile shooters
The AI usually assigns half of its ranged unit to defend walls, and make the other half ranged units mobile. They will do their silly march inside the castle, and shoot at anything that comes close. If you don't kill off the mobile shooters first, you will suffer heavy loss.
The most conventional, and not very good way to work on the mobile shooters is use one of your own ranged units to duel them one by one. March your unit in loose formation to the other side of the castle so they only have to worry about incoming fires from one mobile shooter unit. Slap your general's inspiration on them. You can usually win the duel with reasonable losses.
If the AI has more than one mobile shooter, you might have to worry about another mobile shooter joining the shootout. That could be a bad news for you. So pull your guys back as long as that happens. That brings us to the "better way" to deal with mobile shooters.
As long as you pull back your duel unit, there is a very high chance, if not 100%, that the duelled AI mobile shooter will "chase you" out of the castle. Lure them far away from the castle with your general, and mob them up with everything you have once they are out of their friends' fire coverage!
If you have light cavalry, a charge sandwich by the light cavalry and your general should be good enough to rout them in seconds and kill them off. If you immediately retreat from the duel without killing off too much of the AI's duelled unit, you might have a harder time routing them quickly. It is a good idea to plan your ambush unit in nearby forests if there is any.
You can lure out the AI's mobile shooters one by one this way, without suffering heavy losses on your end. When you have disposed all mobile shooters, the AI will not reassign the wall defenders to become mobile shooters. So...
(C) Scoring 10/10 in targeting range
Since the wall defenders do not move, this is exactly like those brainless sieges where the AI has no ranged unit, so you can you march up your bow crew to kill everything. All you need to do is to pick a good angle from the back or side. Here is how to achieve most kills from your arrows.
First, you are in a real treat if you have "unlimited" battle timer. Because you can always wait for your general's next inspiration once the old one expires. Inspiration greatly increases your ranged unit’s accuracy. (Each Inspiration lasts about 10 rounds of fire.) Remember to turn off fire at will.
The AI's melee units march around the castle in a fixed pattern. They will remain stationary in one place for a while, and move to their next destination. They will also move away if they are being targeted by arrows, usually after 2 volleys.
What this means is that you can:
- Wait for at least one group to come into your range and just begins to stand still (stationary).
- Start shooting.
- When you see your first volley hit the target, attack a different stationary target (as the second volley might have just left the bows by the time the first volley hits).
Repeat this until the inspiration runs out, or when you cannot find any stationary target to shoot. Then you can order them to stop shooting and wait for the next inspiration.
This way you can make every one of your arrow count. Don't shoot sheltered targets (such as the wall defenders if the walls are not damaged). Don't shoot if you find out that if the arrows travel rather flat and mostly get blocked by the wall.
Sometimes, an AI unit will get stuck in a running mode, although they are actually stationary. This makes them really easy targets for you - just keep shooting them.
You can usually achieve at least 200 kills per ranged units. After some practices you might even get more than 300 kills! Keep shooting until all of your ranged units have run out of arrows. It is a very good idea to bring a lot of ranged units to these kind of siege assaults. By the time you run out of arrows, the battle is almost over.
(D) Storming the castle
When you finally run out of arrows, the rest is quite fair game. You can expect a 1 to 1 exchange of lives if the troop quality are roughly equal. If you have a lot of yari ashigaru, here is the perfect use of them. Don't forget to inspire the first unit charging in!
If one of the un-opened doors is not covered by a wall defender, you can safely burn it down without any loss, and rush your men in. Try not to attack the doors that is covered by arrow fire - those arrows hurt a lot.
Once your men are in, assign at least one unit to attack the wall defending archers. If you leave them alone, they will keep shooting you while you deal with the melee units. Your general can kill them pretty easily, too. Force them to melee as soon as possible.
That's it! Have fun!
1. Now let's discuss the AI's behavior in more complicated castles.
More complicated castles are multi-layered, and each situation is quite different. The AI is usually smart enough to move forward or backward, and they have a lot more interesting behaviors to be discovered. But we can still exploit some of their key stupidity.
(1) Breach the undefended section
Deploy all but a few units of your army on one side of the castle. The goal is to draw defenders away from a certain area so you can sneak up with minimal casualties. Once you get in, you have a whole lot of things to do from there. It might take some trial and error to know which kind of deployment gets the best result. Try to capture a section that:
- Has a tower that has good potentials to kill defenders.
- Can trap enemy's ranged units for easy melee mob up. The wall defenders are very reluctant to move.
(2) Gate captures
When your unit stand in the circle in front of a tower or a gate, or anything that can be captured, you can notice the enemy's flag being lowered, followed by your own flag raised. If you capture a gate without destroying it, the AI will remove the gate in its path-finding effort. This could mean that they will take some ridiculous long route, allowing you to set up a perfect trap.
(3) Height advantage enables luring tactics
Since more advanced castles have better walls, shooting enemies from outside might not be very effective (there are still plenty of good angles, but you have to watch out for tower fire). Sometimes you can find a hill overlooking a particular section of the castle. If you can lure the enmies there, you can really make lots of kills. Watch out that the defenders will come out of the castle to chase you down. Again, easy trapping situation.
There will be also situations where you can shoot defenders from a higher layer of the castle. Watch out - the defenders will also chase you down.
You might be able to lure mobile ranged units to go after you similar to the basic Fort siege situation.
(4) Towers
Towers are probably the biggest concern in the siege. You want to dodge getting into the range of any tower that you do not intend to capture.
The great things about Towers are that it has unlimited arrows, and the AI neither knows to move away from them, nor captures them back when they pass by. A stationary AI unit within your captured Tower's range will be slowly shot to piece while you have dinner. Here are a few examples of why an AI could be locked within a tower's range.
- Ashigaru only have unlimited morale in the top layer of the castle. So it is possible that an AI unit will fall into a cycle of "Attack the intruders on the level below! - No! We are shot! Run for your lives!". All you need to do is to lure (with your arrow) one unit to chase you. Eventually the unit will be locked in a permenant routing stage just on the top layer. It will not move at all. Very easy picking. If you lure too many units at once, they might not rout very quickly. So just lure one unit at a time. If too many units respond, it might be better to pull out of the castle and take those out from the outside (much easier as the annoying tower is probably a non-factor now).
- If you have broken a gate, the tower can shoot through the gate opening to get units hiding behind it.
- Some towers are tall enough that they can shoot at units even one layer above. Free kills.
(5) All rout = win
This is one of the few cases that you want to end the battle as early as possible. This can be achieved quite easily - just keep isolating units and kill them while the rest of them are NOT on the top layer. Then suddenly all of the units will rout. You win! And all the un-killed units are automatically dead by the end.
Have fun! :D
Guide for the Dark Side: How to be Lucky if Luck is involved
This is mostly for those who enjoys the Dark Side. Let's get started!
(1) New random seeds are generated when a new save is loaded.
A lot of games nowadays are like this. What this means is that if you don't like the outcome of anything that involves a roll of dice, simply load a new save made before the event. For example, before your Ninja is about to flip a coin, save the game. If the outcome is undesirable, load the new save (and make another new one) then try again. Repeat until happy.
*Legendary mode? The game's save file can be found on the Hard Drive. Do a quick google search to find the locations, make a desktop shortcut to this folder. Make a habit of backing up this file. (Which is always a great idea regardless of your path. Saves can be corrupted, too!)
(2) Retainers are randomly generated at the experience gaining event
This means that you don't get a new set of retainer choices if you simply make a game save after the general or agent levels up. You have to make the save before the last battle/mission. Now since you keep loading the same save to carry out the level-up mission, you will always get the same outcome.
(3) Wife's trait is rerolled after every diplomatic transaction with that clan.
Save before proposing. If you don't like a bitter wife, load the save, do something else first (trade deals, etc.), then propose again. Repeat until wife is helpful. If only life is like that. :p
(4) Offspring can be randomly born in winter.
For those who get a good wife but now considers fertility clinic: Loading the autosave made at the end of autumn until you have a son. (A new autosave is generated every time you press end turn, so there is no need to make additional save. So you might get different end-turn events by doing so, too.)
*If all you need is additional generals, it is probably much more efficient to simply to promote generals for 1000 koku. It is also a random event available in the winter (maybe also other seasons).
The above are probably the most luck-dependent aspects of the game. Enjoy the force of the dark side! :D
Legendary is meant to be hard because you can no longer manually save the game. But there are work arounds that makes this handicap almost non-existent - it just takes a little time.
First, we need to know when the game makes autosaves:
(1) Before a battle. As soon as you enter the zoom-in view of the armies on the campaign map (and decide whether to fight manually, auto-resolve, or retreat), the game makes a save.
(2) After a battle. The saving action is a little delayed. It is possible to load the autosave made before the battle if you hit Esc fast enough.
(3) At the BEGINNING of every turn. Sadly, no autosave before the end of a turn. So if something screw up, you might have to replay a whole turn.
You can always make a backup of every different autosave above. These are also your oppurtunities to get a new random seed for agent actions. There is also a 100% reliable way to stay lucky even if there is no battle or new turn involved. We have to exploit the feature that moving some unit also generates a new random seed.
(a) At the beginning of a turn (autosave (3) is made), carry out agent #1 action. If succeed, perfect.
(b) If the agent fails, load the (3) autosave, move sometehing else, such as a navy fleet, then carry out agent #1's action. If succeed, write down what and how you moved. If he fails, load the save and move something else. Repeat until success.
(c) If you have more than one agent, simply repeat the steps to make agent #1 successful, make it happen, then do the move-act thing with agent #2, #3.
That's it! No difficulty stands in the way of the Dark Side! (hope it is fun for you)
Tip: Exploit of "Request to War"
Whenever you don't feel the need for expansion (to delay the Realm Divide), why not extorting some koku from AIs?
Requirement:
(1) An enemy that is badly beaten and is willing to pay for peace. If it is not, try to march anything into their territory. Suddenly it is very willing to pay for peace.
(2) An ally that is warring that particular enemy.
What to do:
(1) Accept the enemy's peace treaty, and ask it to break all other alliances (so you don't complicate things when you declare war on them later). Take their koku.
(2) Go to your ally. Use "Request to War" and offer your service declaring war to the same enemy. Your ally is likely to pay for your effort, too.
So you can simply repeat above and extract koky from both your enemy and your ally, as long as your enemy remains weak and is willing to pay for peace. There is no penalty for breaking the peace treaty. Nice!
Tip for Beginner Traders: Trade Agreements and trading nodes
Do you find out that the AIs are less and less likely to trade with you?
The tutorial tells you to give them 1000 koku first. This is ridiculous!
AIs are less happily to trade with you once you start occupying the six trading nodes on the sea.
All you have to do is, immediately before negotiating for a trade agreement, manually move your trading fleet slightly away from the trading nodes.
The AI is tricked to think that you have 0 trade nodes, and will be very happy to trade with you. You can even ask them to pay some koku for this privilege.
After the deals are reached, move those fleet back to the trade nodes. Buhahaha.
Guide for Beginners on High Difficulty: Selling Military Access
This is mostly written for new players who have not appreciated the power of the technique, and for the keeners who insist on squeezing out every penny out of the AI legally (but probably not ethically). Welcome inputs.
I guess a lot of people may call selling military access to willing AI neighbors an exploit. (So is selling open borders to other Civs in Civilizations.) On lower difficulties you can always get away without them. However, selling military access provides much needed initial boost for the top difficulties. Besides, military access still has to be sold carefully so to avoid nasty troubles later.
Summary
- Selling military access is a significant additional income especially in early game. It still generates a steady stream of income from neighboring clans until they turn against you.
- Declaring war on the buyer causes diplomatic penalty to ALL clans.
Whom to sell
- Neighbors who have direct access to your territory. When you offer the access their willingness would be "High", so you can bundle up the deal with a payment demand.
- Neighbors whom you DO NOT plan to attack in the near future. If you attack anybody who bought your military access, you face a diplomatic hit to ALL clans. That includes the case when you are forced to war that clan by your ally.
- Neighbors who will be wiped out immiedately in the end turn. Load the auto-save and sell the military access for eternity, which means 1 turn.
How
- Turn 1: Sell the lowest 5-turn access for about 400-600 koku. You can probably squeeze some additional cash from establishing trades.
- Turn 2: Sell the 10-turn access for about 1000-1500 koku.
- Turn 3: Sell the 20-turn access for about 1500-2000 koku.
The reason not to sell 20-turn access at the beginning is that the AI might not have enough cash/willingness to pay. But if you really need cash that badly, why not?
After that, every few turns come back and re-sell the 20-turn access for about 1000 koku. The military access date will not be extended by 20 turns, but simply reset to 20 turns.
After expansion, you might acquire new neighbors and who are willing to pay to visit your new acquisition. As long as you don't plan to attack them, this is always a good idea.
*Never sell the indefinite access (since you can keep selling the 20-turn access forever) unless the buyer clan is about to attack you, or be eliminated in the end-turn.
How to spend the income
- Hire lots of Ashigaru and mop up your top-priority enemies while the AIs are still relatively weak.
- Get agents. Build temples and hire monks. Demolish temples, build Sake Den and hire ninjas. Demolish Sake Den, build markets and hire the secret police. Agents are just great.
- Get some ships to secure and profit from nearby trade nodes.
Concerns
Q: Suddenly my military ally has indefinite military access to me! Can't sell anymore!
A: This is because you are fighting the same enemy. When that condition disappears, you can sell again.
Q: Will the AI suddenly declare war on me while his army is right beside my defenceless capital?
A: The AI's army will be bumped to the border when it declares war.
Q: Will the AI be more likely to declare war on me?
A: Doing so will greatly damage its reputation. Probably not.
Q: Will I make a jail for myself if I run out of place to expand? Then I will have to pay for military access.
A: Ship your units to jump across your buyer. Or use monks/missionary to incite rebels to take over your target province, followed by your own merger without any diplomatic penalty (yes, that qualifies for another exploit).
Tip: Sea transport relay chain
I guess most people already know this... just in case. If you played Mass Effect, this is the exact same thing on a smaller scale.
We all know that shipping units from the sea is faster than having them walking on land. But there is a little exploit on sea transport, too. When you merge two navy fleets (A and B), you can double the travel distance of the transported army.
How
(1) Army to be transported boards fleet A.
(2) Fleet A merges with fleet B. Position fleet B within fleet A's range. DO NOT let fleet A use up all its movement while merging with fleet B. Save just a little bit of movement.
(3) Manually moves fleet A away from the merge fleet (so you need just a little of movement left on fleet A). The army transported by fleet A is now left on fleet B, which has full movement.
(4) Extend the chain further if longer travel distance is desired.
Practial Uses
(1) Transport fresh elite troops or a new general from the production base to the front line quickly.
(2) Relocate a powerful army to a new front line.
Concerns
(1) Each relay costs at least 50 koku upkeep.
(2) Can be easily disrupted by enemies/pirates.
Inciting rebellion
I guess many people already know the technique/exploit to use monks/missionaries let a target province taken over by rebellion. Just in case you don't know yet...
There are a few distinctive advantages about it:
(1) The rebels could successfully take the province if it is poorly defended. Then it does not invade other places. Simple and predictable.
(2) A powerful foe could lose a lot of non-front line provinces in a short time, severely crippling it.
(3) This is a very effective way to take over an ally-controlled province without any diplomatic penalty.
Here are some additional tips:
(1) Only incite rebellion when there is little garrison. The rebels will attempt to attack the castle ONLY IF they think can win. If the garrison is too powerful, the rebels will wonder in the field amd does nothing (waiting to die by the winter cold, basically). So getting a rebellion in AI's well-defended front-line city helps very little, while you might end up dealing with it later. I read from multiple sources that the resulting rebels scale with the size of the defence. But I find the rebel's size does not go over a certain maximum - probably restricted by the agent's level?
(2) The chance of success tops at about 50% if your agent has the same religion as the target province. For example, if you use a six-star monk to incite rebellion from a Shindo-Buddhism province, the best chance you have is only a little more than 50%. However, if you use that monk to incite rebllion from an Ikko-Ikki or Christian province, the success rate could be a lot higher.
(3) Prepare your own army to beat the rebel-controlled province before the AI takes it back!
(4) Your agent has to have a reasonable success rate at this mission or the game would not allow you to even try. Fortunately, it is realtively quick and completely free to train monks (demoralizing armies on plain soldiers).
(5) The rebels do not take the city straight away even if it thinks it can win. Wait for an additional turn.
Ninja + Monk = Win
Teaming up Ninjas with a Monks will achieve some great effect. Use the Ninja's Sabotage army ability to prevent the super army from returning to defend a province, when the incited Rebel marches freely to take a ill-defended castle.