Beating shogun is just plain easy after you do it once or twice. I have tried handicapping myself in various ways, but the fact is the AI is just too stupid. So what do we do to stupid things? We watch em fight, but stop them short of killing eachother so they can fight some more! With this in mind I set a new goal:
Try to make it to 1600 with as many clans intact as possible!
In an expert campaign as Hojo I built spear dojos in all my lands and by year 5 had thousands of ashigaru. With 1 good general leading real troops (i.e. not ashigaru) I had 3 blocks of 960 ashigaru follow him around as he took a scenic route through Japan like General Sherman, giving me a easy and permanent development advantage for the rest of the game.
I had an idea: for fun, I took a few very strategic territories (Satsuma, Harima, Owari) and built ports. Then my goal was to keep all the remaining daimyos alive forever! Whenever one daimyo gets too strong, I can use one of those 3 provinces to launch a punitive expedition and kill his dojos, which halts his reinforcements and lets his target drive his back.
It is still 1560 in that campaign and all but Takeda and Uesegi are alive and well. Takeda was being mindlessly aggressive so I killed him off to give Imagawa more room to grow so he could stop Oda's bullying, and Uesegi was just in my way haha.
If anyone is up for a challenge see if you can pull it off, and post comments/ideas etc.
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