The perils of premature domination

[Jacobin]

Just finished a Shimazu legendary domination campaign in 1577 - way earlier than any previous campaign.



This left me feeling strangely flat and unsatisfied - all my victories were achieved with armies made up almost entirely of ashigaru (I don't think I recruited more than half a dozen samurai units in the whole campaign and all but one were still alive at the end), I never even got the chance to recruit legendary geishas or hero units or maxed out warrior monks, never built a citadel, never went bankrupt, never had to fight epic battles with 4 or 5 enemy stacks etc.

I don't use any exploits, only camp in desperate battles where I am hugely outnumbered have no escape and just want to inflict maximum damage, only start using agents really aggressively when I have captured the Ninja provinces in the centre, don't use nanban trade ships as historically I don't think any playable clan other than perhaps the Oda should be able to convert to Christianity, etc

So what else can I do to slow things down for my next campaign which will be as the Mori? - spend 20 years on the edge of Realm Divide teching up, buying every building upgrade and building uber-samurai stacks? campaign as a peacenik faction and only attack rebels and clans that attack me first (which would work historically for the Mori - if Eiji Yoshikawa's Hideyoshi novel is to be believed Mori Motonari admonished his sons to never expand beyond the west of Honshu), find a mod that speeds up research?

[Hamata]

check out mods made by radious over at twc he's got some research mods

[Maltz]

+1 vote for mods - even better, make one yourself!

I used to struggle with exploit issues, because for me the minute I start to analyze AI's behavior patterns to optimize my moves, it is already an exploit! I also feel sorry about myself if I do not optimize my moves based on information and data I collected. But then the games would become boring fast because the shortcuts really made it too easy.

Then I started making mods myself - such as by creating an extra difficulty above the max difficulty, just to make the game still interesting. I think you can try that, too! A good starting point is to give the AI more discounts on army recruit & upkeep and building fee.

A less technical, but probably more difficult-to-define way is to give yourself more handicaps. For example, you have to play a campaign without loading the game, with the only exception that you ended a previous session and now needs to resume. But you will probably find it too tedious as your ship accidentally sailed the wrong direction from a misclick and you need to correct that, your kid/dog pressed your keyboard... there are just too many grey areas in these things.

Or you can try to go for the extreme of exploits - you can do whatever you want with the game AS LONG AS you do not use any external help, and see how fast you can win a Domination Campaign! It is fun, too.

[Jacobin]

My definition of an exploit is any option that is not at least theoretically available to the AI as well.

Anyway decided to play Hojo instead of Mori as I was fed up of all those silly little provinces in the West and am rather perversely playing them as a pacifist clan, allying to neighbours, only wars fighting when attacked, accepting most offers of peace and always choosing the make vassal option when available.

Its now 1557 and I still have just my original two provinces plus a string of vassals - its a very different game and it'll be entertaining when I hit RD and must fight all of my lovingly accumulated vassals.