Aizu guides, hints and tips

[Minimoto]

I'm addicted to trying to play the Aizu and failing.

I've played about twenty heroic victories in the last couple of days, always outnumbered and desperately in need of some troop replenishment, successfully fighting five enemy provinces at the same time while desperately hoping I'll have time to repair the fortress I'm hiding in, and still ended up over-extending myself, being way too poor to afford garrisons and more troops, watching our ally Nagaoka get flattened by Imperialist Pigs for over-extending itself trying to help me while not watching its own backside, and then getting stabbed in my own super-distant backside by the opportunistic Sendai.

Its teaching me to play the game way way way more strategically and slowly and carefully than I did when I simply marched and took boatrides across Japan and whupped the universe and its brother with the Satsuma, I'm like, desperately trying to figure out how to eek out a few more koku everywhere I can and worrying about exactly how far I am away from everything, the distances and poverty are terrifying.

But that also makes it way more dramatic and heroic and fun.

Plus we got the coolest colors, so there's that.

Once you take that province to the south, half the time Musashi/Edo declares war on you (along with all its friends), so I end up taking Edo, and then its an octopus of enemies surrounding you (but Musashi is a Citadel, so its a great place to hold off five armies with a tired handful of troops).

Plus its the Ancient Capitol and seat of the Shogunate, which is good for my ego.

Sagama is right next door, and its a blacksmith, and there's a goldmine owned by that clan too, right next to that, but while I usually take all that land after they self-destruct their armies against the citadel in Musashi I don't really have enough cash to make use of it at that point.

The other half the time you get tangled up with the guy on the right and Jozai, although I notice if I leave them alone the AI has a tough time converting provinces, and there's a very good chance that some of the places they conquer will have uprisings and "come back to life" with giant rebellion-spawned stacks of troops (which is half of what kills Nagaoka in my games when it expands along with me into the south).

And you need to prepare for problems in the North at right about the time that you finishing cleaning up the South, which is horribly far away but at least taking that land would give you some wealthier farmland, and if you can take out the Jozai you'll get three really nice provinces over there, and just past the crummy lands that surround Musashi is a tea place and another copper mine (usually Nagaoka takes those and then starts to die due to attacks from Sado and his super-powered imperialist friend to the left of Nagaoka's lands, who will be coming after you next).

That's the positions on the chessboard where I typically have Sendai turn on me and I give up and start over.

So heading west and helping Nagaoka might actually be a pretty good if-not-as-dramatic-and-heroic-as-my-own idea haha.

Taking Sado and having a goldmine and not being poor all the time would be pretty nice.

But its also very bomb-able by boat.

Somebody said "just go north" and that's starting to sound like a good plan, one that would meld better with helping Nagaoka and taking Sado.

Plus then you could just invade the good places in the south by boat, and its much nicer to force your enemies to march across all that boring land of yours to come and attack you than it is for you to have to march for three turns just for the honor of starving for troop replenishment on THEIR doorstep haha.

Still, its missing that certain something I always look for in a plan, like, where is all the impossible odds and fear and starvation and not being able to afford anything while waiting for certain doom haha.