"All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved." Sun Tzu.
"Which is a good thing - I'd lose whatever reputation I have for strategic know-how!" froggy.
(with zero pretenses at historical or cultural accuracy, Eastern or Western)
Mr Aizu thumbs his nose at Westerners mocking his need for comfortable trousers.
The situation is intolerable!
A state of emergency must be declared!
The gods of our forefathers will surely abandon us!
Foreigners are once again on Japanese soil, bringing rifles, long-range artillery, steam ships, railways, factories.
Worse, they laugh at us.
It cannot be borne. It will not be borne! Here, now, with one brave clan, we will draw the line and make our stand!
Suicidal some may call it. Necessary, we call it. A few brave men may start a revolution. A few strong soldiers may hold back an army. Some ideals are worth dying for, as living without them is not living at all.
And besides, they keep saying Aizu sounds like someone sneezing!
In the shade of pleasant trees, let us plan ...
And so, seated in the palatial surrounds of his home, our heroic leader began to plan. That's what my biographers will say one day. Personally, I've always found it a bit pretentious to speak of myself in the third person.
I am Matsudaira Katamori, leader of the mighty Aizu, the people of the black and gold armour.
The foreign ships came, shattering our tranquillity as they forced moorage at our ports. Ignoring our requests that they leave, they threatened our officials until they accepted letters intended for the bakufu - for our government, as they insisted on calling it. Rid of one nation, another arrived. The same demands, thought politer in delivery. We knew our isolation was at an end.
What could we do? In three hundred years of peace, our swords had grown blunt, our samurai soft. We, who prided ourselves on our warrior traditions, found ourselves too weak to fight. The shame! The humiliation!
We could not prevent the ships from landing. We could not deny their impudent demands. When they came again, we accepted their technology, let them dress us in their fashions, let them advise us on how to fight, work, speak, think, live.
As we did this, they laughed. They mocked my new clothes, said I did not wear them correctly and that I was not fit company for polite ladies. They laughed, saying the proud name of Aizu sounded like a sneeze. They laughed, calling my armour quaint. They asked to buy a sword such as mine to "Send to the folks back home." because "It'll look neat on the mantlepiece."
He who laughs last, laughs the longest. So says one of the foreign proverbs. So it shall be. You laughed, and now so shall we. If need be, we shall laugh until our final breath is spent and our blood nourishes the soil.
I will don my armour and take up my yari. I will rediscover the warrior spirit which lies beneath the forms of martial arts learned in the name of readiness for conflict I knew would never come. Brave samurai will join me. The peasants will be called to arms, as were the ashigaru of the past. With the weapons of our forefathers we will fight. We will prevail, or die as true samurai!
We will take from the foreigners so far as suits us. What we wish to have, not what they wish to give.
The shogun is weak. Had his line not allowed our nation to sink into feebleness, we might have challenged the foreigners when they arrived! We cast them from our shores once, why not again? Because the Tokugawa wished us soft and feeble for the comfort of their own rule. Once harmony is restored to our land, we will replace them. A stern shogunate capable of ruling a nation fit for war. Nonetheless, we shall fight under his banner for now. The alternative - aiding those fighting to place the emperor at our head - is worse. We will not permit a return to the civil wars caused by an Imperial family left free to engage its ambitions!
When I am quoted by future generations, I would have them say this: I'm gonna take my sword and shove it through your face!
An Empire in Black and Gold: The Beginning.
I bet no one can say where that title comes from without google ...
You may find this map useful to check province and clan names.
As the game opens, the Aizu clan's goal of traditionalist traditionalism gets off to a fantastic start: a pop-up instructs us to raise our modernisation level by 1, ASAP. Gah! Fine. We won't get far without some economic tech and buildings anyway. Grumble, grumble. We'll aim to reach the next level via economic means, and maybe a single cadet school to open up another recruitment slot. After we strip out the interior we can use it for a fitting purpose, like as a storage dump for muddy sandals. That will put us in a better position to raise sizable amounts of samurai when our income is better than 3 grains of rice and a bent button. For now, though, austerity is the name of the game (is it? I thought it was 'Fall of the Samurai? (Shhh! That's not a very encouraging name!)) and we will mostly field levies. As muskets were good enough for Oda Nobunaga and his contemporaries, they are just barely good enough for us despite their nasty "Pwoof!!" noise and gouts of smoke. We will field a small number of levy infantry: no more than six per army.
Our starting army does need a bit of an overhaul. It's a motley collection of random units. I wouldn't want to clean a barn with them, let alone seek out cut-price fertiliser for my farms. That means it's going to be several turns before we're in a position to attack anyone. That's good - if we tried to attack now we'd get spanked by the defensive force the enemy build up in the meantime.
The Aizu start at war with the Utsunomiya. We hate them! Problem: they are a very long walk away. That makes us hate them more! We have a shinsengumi nearby, and he may be able to carry out some action against them. Does that make us hate them less? No! Not until they are fertilising our rice fields with their rotting corpses!
But wait! That resource map linked up above? It has some useful information. Namely, this:
Circled, riches beyond our wildest dreams.
The green areas are fertile or very fertile farmland. That means a minimum of triple income from whatever farm building is present in the province. That means crazy money! Fertile farms are one of the best sources of income in this campaign, and considering how much samurai cost we'll need as much cash as we can possible grab. Look at how much greenery we are surrounded by - we could be rich, filthy stinking rich! Rich enough to afford an entire stack of samurai, even! There's just one teeny, tiny problem. Those provinces are mostly occupied by our friends. The Utsunomiya have a crappy 'meagre' farming province, and it's infested with the smelly railway special. Blergh!
Do we need friends? Hmm, I don't know. We don't need a bad reputation. But we do need money. And friends sometimes get in the way, squishing us all up into a little ball until we go sailing off to conquer the far side of the world. Perhaps we could try to make revolts everywhere? Then we could move in without looking bad. Or perhaps we should play it straight-up and not go after anyone sharing our allegiance to the Shogunate? We could gather up Utsunomiya-land and the neighbouring Imperialist fertile province, clear up anything else which is opportunistic, then try to do a naval invasion of central Japan to grab the fertile provinces there.
The decision, dear readers, is in your hands. Try not to get me killed on turn 3 or this is going to be a very short AAR.
Did I mention that we should probably try to be quick? The longer we hang around, the more likely it is that the AI will field large numbers of bullet-making devices, thus turning us into black and gold Swiss cheese. But not too fast! Mass rebellions, bankruptcy, and over-stretched armies are a terribly ugly sight. Remember: traditionalism. It's all about pretty calligraphy and stuff. We don't do ugly in this campaign.
No Gun Shogun: A Self-Proclaimed Suicidal Campaign in Futility
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Originally Posted by frogbeastegg
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