Yee-Yee-Oh!: Mori (Legendary, Domination)

[Maltz]

Motonari: "Ha, this is easy! Once we surround them, there is no way for them to go."
Takakage: "Indeed. Ships are much harder to manuever than units, which can be broken down into individual soldiers."
Motonari: "So the best way to make sure we capture ships is to swarm them in the chaos!"
Takakage: "When we hold the advantage, yes!".

[Maltz]

Motonari: "A fine job by the captain! Too bad we cannot promote him even after such a nice victory."
Takakage: "Hm, eventually we want at least three fleets. One for Wakos, two for offence and defence along each shore. So we still need one more general. I will see if we can create the situation in the future."

[Maltz]

Takakage: "Here we go, the third admiral!"
Bukabara Hidesato (福原秀穎): "What an honor, thank you!"
Motonari: "Nice! Where did you find him?"
Takakage: "Chosokabe's Iyo province was taken by rebel... which of course was incited by us. And I managed to rush there just days before Chosokabe's army took it back - but I stayed behind and let captain Bukabara do the work."
Motonari: "I see. Good job here! So you will be responsible for the Shikoku campaign then. I will relax a bit and take the new generals and our future admirals to train in Hyuga."
Takakage: "Father, please don't worry. I will prove that I can do just as well as my two older brothers. Especially now I have level 6 Bow Ashigaru... oh wait, there is one level 7 unit now! But I already sent the damaged seed back to Hoki!"
Motonari: "Keep them fighting and see if you can get that unit to level 9!"

This concludes chapter 7 of our story.

[Maltz]

Naval Tactics #1 Trapping

Naval battle is a totally different game. Many principles in land battles do not apply, and we have to find new tactics to excel. But the general principle is the same: bring a larger navy that is designed to counter your enemies' ships! Or more practically, we will field a mixture of ships so we don't have to swap ships constantly.

For argument purpose we will categorize ships into three:
Damage output: These ships have a high bow crew count or cannons. They provide the most damage. Good examples are Medium Bune and Cannon Bune. Most of the fleet has to be damage dealers. Even if the worse happens, you win the combat but every routing ship runs away - you are still invincible!
Boarder: These have a high melee crew count. Their purpose is to board the enemy ships. Good examples are Sengoku Bune and late-game large ships (which can also serve as damage dealer). You only need about 2 of them, since they deal very little ranged damage.
Kobaya: They are great counters of giant ships as they set them on fire. They can also help intercept the routing ships. But if there is no such giant ship in the enemy, we do not need a lot of them. Setting ships on fire is not very easy - routing smaller ships with lots of arrows IS.

The three categories of ships also has a paper-rock-scissors relationship. Boarder eats Damage dealers (but can't board Cannon Bune!), Damage Dealer eats smaller ships (Cannon Bune eats everybody!), and smaller ships can set heavy ships on fire.



The first tactics that works well is Trapping, designed to board an enemy ship efficiently. Note that the tactics does not guarantee the victory in boarding - we still need a superior boarder. Ideally, we have some designated boarder like Sengoku Bune, against an inferior ship that has a lower seaman (melee crew) count like a Medium Bune. A Medium Bune can board a Kobaya or a hurt Medium Bune.

There is a good chance that when the AI ship approaches, they look for gaps in our formation and try to go through it. This happens very frequently for AI's first ship. So if you see a group of Wako Pirates and you use the wind correctly (let the wind blow to the face of your opponent to slow them down), the Wako Trade Ships will fall behind, and the Wako Medium Bune will come to you. This is our chance to capture one of the Wako's better ships (a crap ship for us to keep, though) without even having to move and break the formation. We leave the gaps for them to do just that, and wait for them to get close.

So we need one ship beside the gaps that can easily beat the approaching ship. For example, if the AI has a Wako Medium Bune, we can use a Sengoku Bune. Or if you are Mori, your Medium Bune has 10 more melee crew, and is therefore a good counter of Wako's Medium Bune. In late game, if the AI has a Sengoku Bune, we can use an O Atake Bune. Nothing can go wrong if we bring better ships! Close the gaps during deployment if you do not want the AI's ship to come in between. This may have a side effect of disabling the AI from ever coming to your remaining opened gap, as they tend to go strait ahead. And if you happen to close a gap "strait ahead", they simply circle to your flank. So try to create open gaps close to the center of your formation.

Prepare the trap so there is one ship, any ship, behind the line. One ship can watch over multiple gaps. So you can promptly cut the exit of the trap once the enemy ship enters a trap. They can also help firing and make the surrender come even more quickly. If you have Medium Bune, don't forget to do war cry.

Boarding is an art. The command of boarding has to be issued about 3 seconds (1X speed) before the two ships are completely parellel to each other, or it is too late! Your ship will attempt to turn around to chase the target, which takes forever. Everything is messed up if you fail the first chance! It is actually OK to issue the command a little too early, since all your ship will do is to row forward a bit, without turning left or right, when the target come straight to you (for the gap). Once you start the boarding, you have the superior melee crew, and your damage dealers are raining arrows on the target. The enemy ship is pretty much dead meat.

Once you finish this first ship, OR the enemy does not go for the trap for whatever reason (sometimes they can get blocked by a surrendered ship), we will enter a shoot-out phase. The AI does not move any ship forward anymore. So we will have to go to them, which requires another tactics.

[Maltz]

Naval Tactics #2 Chaos Begins

Most conventional naval battles will end up in a shoot-out stage, when the AI ships no longer moves forward, and simply stand and shoot. If we do not do anything, our superior ranged damage will eventually win us the combat, but most routed ships will simply run away. We want to capture them before they run away!

A big difference between naval and land units is that ships turn very slowly. Therefore, if we block their front and sides, they are pretty much stuck! When they are stuck, they become very easy board targets. For medium ships and above, boarding is a much faster way to capture them than shooting them to rout, then capture.



In reality, this phase of combat will probably end up a huge chaotic mess especially on Legendary mode, where we usually are too busy to tell individual ships to go to a specific spot and orientation. But the ideas are the same.

The AI ships have a tendency to form clusters. If the AI ships form multiple clusters, or one large clusters at front and scattered ships in the back, we can simply ignore the others and focus our attention on one cluster, defeat it, and move to the next. All we need to do is to use our ships to surround this cluster and block their front and sides to block their escapes, and pour our superior ranged damage to them. Once they are damaged and weakened, even routed, they can be boarded and captured easily.

Since enemy's fires are also quite concentrated, protect your weaker ship in the back of the net, or they may be killed very quickly.

The key of boarding at this stage is to be flexible. At this stage, the enemy ships should be weak enough so any of our medium or better ship can easily capture them. So it does not really matter whether we use a designated boarder to capture ships - of course, it is a lot safer if we do.

Avoid sending a board command when the target ship is still far away from your boarder. This is because that once a board command is issued, your ship will attenmpt to row to the side of the target in their CURRENT location. If the target ship moves, your ship will have to change their position - and often this results in your ship turning endlessly on the same spot and accomplishes nothing.

Worse, since you can only issue One Board Order per target ship, this also PREVENTS your other ships from boarding the target even they happen to be right beside it! If this happens, you will have to cancel the board command of the original boarder, then activate boarding from the closeset boarder. So we should have a habit of ONLY issuing a board command if the ship is going to come in very close contact with a target ship. Otherwise don't - it often makes things worse.

There seems to be a glitch for Kobaya - from time to time, after successfully surrender a routing ship with the boarding command, the boarding command is not canceled, and we have to manually cancel it, or the ship cannot be ordered to manually do ranged attack (as it will try to board it instead).

On Legendary, things could be chaotic especially because you cannot pause to issue command. When there are lots of actions going on, and when you click on ships, you not necessarily gain control of the new ship! This control is not very responsive probably due to the slowed graphic response. So we will from time to time order the wrong ship to do things. This contributes greatly to the chaos factor, unfortunately. It is easy to say "double check whether it is the right ship!", but in reality there is probably too much going on to check.

But since we have suprior ranged power anyway, it is just a matter of the time that individual enemy ships gets boarded and captured. Don't feel too bad if you let one or two run away. You can use your many captured ships, which should have full movement left, to chase down the fled ships and easily kill them all in auto-combat.

[Maltz]

Chapter 8. Taming a crazy dog

Motonari: "So... I remember your name now! You are general Kobayakawa Atsuyori (小早川敦賴)!"
Atsuyori: "Thank you, my lord. My family name is easy for you to remember; it is identical to your third son's adopted family..."
Motonari: "Yeah... what a shame that I did not remember... anyways, let's train!"
Atsuyori: "So where do we begin?"
Motonari: "First, we need to train our courage, so we are not afraid to face a superior enemy. Let's take Hyuga's rebel-controled castle for an example. There are a bunch of infantries and two units of Light Cavalry. We have to fight them."
Atsuyori: "Hm... but isn't this going to lead to us being killed?"
Motonari: "The true courage is not to face a superior enemy without a plan. If we can draw out the Light Cavalry and kill them, the rest of the infantry can never catch up with us!"
Atsuyori: "Why don't they spread out and surround us?"
Motonari: "They are not as smart as you! Like I used to say - that's why you are here and they are there!"



Atsuoyori: "Look out, the enemy Light cavalry is charging at you!"
Motonari: "The other one is still far away! It is our chance! I will face them - you charge them in the back!"

[Maltz]

Atsuyori: "Woo... after some hard works, we finally routed the rebels' two Light Cavarlry units. But we also lost 1/3 of our men."
Motonari: "We can relax now - the Light Cavalry is the only enemy unit that runs faster than us. From now on we are not going to lose any more if we do not want to."
Atsuyori: "Great! So I will live to become a good naval general for the clan!"
Motonari: "Speaking of navy... there is some Wako threatening us, but this time they prefer to talk. If we pay them 2000 koku, they actually will reduce the raids of our foreign supplies. What do you think?"
Atsuyori: "I say we kill the pirates!"
Motonari: "Hm... there is still much for you to learn, Atsuyori. Look at that bonus of foreign trade goods - 25%! How much do we gain from each trade node?"
Atsuyori: "Hm... let me see... we get 103 units of cotton and silk, and 138 units of incense."
Motonari: "The average price of Cotton is 33. The average price of silk is 40. The average price of incense is 47. So how much does 25% of the above profit us?"
Atsuyori: "Let me take a brush and paper..."



Atsuyori: "103/4 x (33+40) + 138/4 x 47 = 3500!"
[B]Motonari[/B}: "We profit 3500 koku for 8 season! 28000 koku of profit! Of course in reality we cannot sell all of those. For domestic market we only get half of that. But that's still far more than the investment of 2000 koku."
Atsuyori: "Wow! Definitely deal with the Wako! Can we sign a permenant deal with them?"
Motonari: "I like your thinking, but unfortunately we have to maintain our image in front of the samurais..."

[Maltz]

Yorinobu: "Haha! We have arrived at the coast of Imagawa's home land, and their navy is nowhere to be found! Let's land!"
Jaku: "If you land now, your army will suffer from winter attrition. Better stay on the boat and eat canned Tuna."



Yorinobu: "Ok... so I will delay the attack for a season. It seems that Imagawa has gathered all its two stacks of army in Totomi to defend its Fortress."
Jaku: "Do you think you can beat them?"
Yorinobu: "The headquarter already sent some monks and Ninjas to help. So there are lots of flexibility of what we can do. We will start with turning their defenceless provinces to rebel."
Jaku: "Nice!"

[Maltz]

Takakage: "Ha, Chosokabe has two stacks of army, that means they can only defend at most two provinces."
Monk: "So we will work on the third!"



Ninja: "Don't get over-confident. Their remaining two armies are still very powerful."
Takakage: "I actually want them to declare war so I get more chances to train our soldiers. I remembered that I once received a Threat of Attack message from our source... wait, that's you."
Ninja: "Strange, I don't remember sending that warning."
Takakage: "Huh? But who else can be the source?"
Ninja: "Not me... but now you mentioned it, I did have some vague memory of sending a warning of Threat of Attack."
maltz: "It is from a parallel universe! Too bad we never got it back once we jumped to this universe."
Takakage: "What are you talking about?"

[Maltz]

Atsuyori: "My lord! Imagawa asks us for peace again!"
Motonari: "A few seasons ago they bumped the threat to 24000 koku! After a while that's not even funny anymore. "
Atsuyori: "Yeah... too much idiocy brings more frustration than humor. So what did we do?"
Motonari: "We castrated that emissary and sent him back."
Atsuyori: "... I am glad I picked the military career path. Anyway, here is their new price!"



Motonari: "Haha. Now our army is right in front of them, they start to get scared, huh?"
Atsuyori: "Let's beat them up and see what's their new offer!"
Motonari: "I have a feeling that they will sell their sons and daughters for it. Wahahahah..."