how many castles and where?

[Sabretache]

how does everyone manage their castle buliding? i know it's a really broad question. more specifically how do you decide which ones to upgrade, and do you do something like....say have one castle specializing in armor and weapon upgrades and calvary, and another specialising in strategic units?

[KumaRatta Yamamoto]

A Broad question gets a broad answer.

It All depends of how many provinces you have, wich provinces you have, the koku you have, the clan that you are playing etc...

BUT YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO KEEP IN MIND THAT YOU CAN ONLY BUILD ONE STRUCTURE AT A TIME AND TRAIN ONE UNIT AT A TIME IN A SPECIFIC PROVINCE.

This means:

-Poor koku clans don't build or tech up a lot in the beginning of the game. They need to conquer territory, the fastest way to get more Koku.

-If you have a province with an honor bonus for certain type of units, you should build castles there and specialise in those units.

-if you have some Koku rich provinces, don't build up too much structures , instead build farming upgrades.

-If you have some provinces with mining possibilities, build those mines, they are always a good deal.

-Provinces with iron and sand deposits are also good place to build castles and training centers, because they offer armor upgrades and you need those to train Nagis and Heavy cav.

-Keep in mind that the more you concentrate building structures in only a few provinces, the more time it takes to build eveything you want, so you should spread it out a bit.

-The more provinces you have, the more you should think of building ports to transport quicly your troops to the front lines.

In any case i could go on and on.....but hope that this helps a bit. Come visit my clans site, our forum and E-Mail me if you need help to find certain specific information concerning the Single player game.

KumaRatta Yamamoto (Emissary of the Ratta clan) www.rattaclan.homestead.com

[Kraellin]

as a general rule of thumb, i build ports and castles every third province. that's general, of course. by doing this you keep every province bordering at least one castle which can help if you're attacked and have units garrisoned in the castles. it also helps with the ports cause it's only 1 move to a port then a teleport to wherever you want to go.

but like kumaratta says, you want to also take advantage of the special features of some provinces and, it's not a bad idea to put castles at choke points to reinforce positions that could be used by the enemy to get into the heart of your lands.

K.

[solypsist]

I tend to buiuld castles only in provinces with some sort of troop production bonus or upgrade factor (Shinano, with an option for an armory and bonus to cavalry is the sort of thing). I'm not the type to build castles just to have a castle; usually I castle-build with troop-production in mind only. The castle I start off with is usually used for upgrades in agent (ninja, shinobi) production, but sometimes not for spear/archer dojo upgrades (depends on the clan). Usually what ends up happening is that I have three focal points of troop-production, one that makes archers and such (preferably coastal provinces for future musket training also), one for shock-troop production (which tend to have armories/swordsmiths,etc. as high as I can afford) and one for standard troop making (yari samurai and others where I don't feel the need for high-spending upgrades).

[Teng Fuh]

Like Soly said, usually you should just have a few (I go up to about 8), but make sure it takes no more then one turn to get the troops made to a port (Shinano to Totomi, Yamashiro to Wakasa etc...) I usually have one province for Archers (Totomi if I can get it) Yaris (Armouries are nice since you can build Naggy there too) Cav (Shinano) and Monks (home, or Kii or Kaga (?) if I can get them early enough). Remember ports are a shoguns best friend too.