How is your first campaign going?

[Gregoshi]

Don't give up thirdangletheory! See if you can salvage the situation. Just think how glorious the campaign victory will be if you can turn things around.

[thirdangletheory]

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm still learning Shogun 2 and some of the replies in this thread seem to indicate expansion is a lot harder in this game than others in the series. I would probably learn the most if I just sit down and power through it. Maybe some browsing of the strategy section would help too. :)

[Gregoshi]

That's the fightin' spirit!

[Andres]

Well, my first campagin was as the Chosokabe, N/N. It went well and it didn't take me too long to conquer the island I started on and a few provinces on the mainland. Then I got this crazy idea to build up castles and to build a large army to march on Kyoto. Who said that doing that with only 6 or 7 provinces is a bad idea? I never got to it, since all my provinces started to rebel, because of lack of food. Apparently, the bigger the castle, the more food needed. I was broke, my large army was expensive, so no money to build farms. In short: I wasted a lot of time. I could have disbanded about half of my armies, oppress the rebellions and slowly started to build farm upgrades, but I didn't want to go through the hassle, so I started again as the Date.

So far, it has been great fun. Early on, I lost my daimyo and all my generals, except for one brother (my best general) in an epic battle against a minor clan (Satomi?). My daimyo's wife became regent. The one remaining brother had "delusions of grandeur", so I decided to send his army to finish of those Satomi. He was seriously outnumbered, but managed to win the battle. He died an heroic death. That'll teach him! Delusions of grandeur, ha!

After that battle, I got a message that some low samurai had distinguished himself and blahblahblah. I promoted the man to general and he conquered province after province for the Date clan. In the meanwhile, I got opportunities to hire some more generals. The late Daimyo's son still didn't come of age when he was 19. His mother was doing a great job and managed to establish peace with all clans and to form an alliance with the Takeda, the Hojo and a minor clan (Sagetake?). The Hojo broke their alliance and I used the opportunity to declare war on them and to destroy them (and to take that province of theirs with that shiny gold mine). The general leading the campaign against the Hojo was again the man who started as a low samurai.

Then I remembered how Toyotomi Hideyoshi took power after his master Oda Nobunaga had died and I figured, why not do something similar? The low samurai who got promoted to general when our clan was without leaders, was now a four star general. Half of my empire consist of provinces conquered by him. I made him my heir and he instantly became the new daimyo. Thanks to his 4 command stars, he has high honour and my generals suddenly became much more loyal.

I'm now very close to the Realm Divide event and am building up my armies and developping my provinces how I want them to be.

If things go well, the former lowly samurai will soon become shogun.

I've never written an AAR, but this campaign has been so interesting with lots of drama, that I might write an AAR about it one day.

A pity RL doesn't allow me to play more. It's been ages since I've had so much fun with a game.