The discussion in the Legendary thread regarding the difficult of playing Oda emphasized to me how important defensible provinces can be when playing campaigns. To make it easier to visualize the strategic situation and create plans for strategic movements, I created the following map:
The map should be mostly self-explanatory, but I'll give a brief rundown on what I consider to be useful about it.
A good example is for a Date player. The Echigo to Uzen/Ugo path is off-road and very long. As such, it is almost never used by the AI and even when it is the player will see the army coming for a very long time before it threatens either province. So Date can defend five provinces with a single army in Fukushima; with the only caveat being that the army might have to leave the castle every once in a while to deal with an army trying to use the nearby indirect route to Miyagi. Thus, Fukushima is basically a perfect choke-point. However, pushing beyond Fukushima starts opening up many different avenues of approach, particularly around Hitachi, Shimotsuke, Shimosa, Musashi, and Kozuke. The 'natural' expansion to Hitachi and Shimotsuke now requires 3 armies to defend from the previous requirement of 1. One province cannot pay for the maintenance on a full stack army (at least not those provinces, and not early in the game), so that expansion is not good for your finances. So, the proper strategy for Date is to expand quickly to take all the provinces behind the chokepoint of Fukushima, then defend at Fukushima and build up. When ready, then blitz and take Hitachi, Shimotsuke, Shimosa, Kazusa, Musashi, Kozuke, and Echigo. That entire line can be held with the same 3 armies that were required to hold the far smaller area when the frontline was at Fukushima/Hitachi/Shimotsuke. After that, the next push can take Sagami, Izu, Suruga, Kai, and North Shinano... and still require the same 3 armies to hold all fronts.
This map also shows why Oda is so difficult to play. While the Oda east and south both contain nice choke points, the Oda are open to a very large number of approaches to the west and north. Expansion into those areas causes even more problems, as the defensive situation does not simplify until the entire central 'bulge' around Kyoto is taken. That simply cannot be done early on, so Oda are forced to live for the entire early and mid-game with a wide-open territory which can be attacked my multiple enemies from multiple points with little warning.
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