Date starting advice

[Jacobin]

Damn, its quiet here....

Anyway have temporarily given up on the Uesugi at legendary and am trying my hand at the Date who should be easier but am having huge problems with the Mogami

By the time I marched all my way north to their N province, took it and then marched all the way back down south to Uzen to finish them off I found they had raised two near full stacks of troops to defend it.

Now given that the AI seems to be able to raise twice as many units per turn as I can and that it takes multiple turns to get from the frontier to their castle I am not altogether sure how to deal with this.

Any tips?

(other than the 'use a ninja to sabotage the other stack' one which is a somewhat high risk strategy with a crap low level ninja if you don't cheat and fail at the 25% or whatever chance).

[faker01]

I would need more details, but I have two tips(don't know if they help).
Take the next province. (I think the next is near, so it's a good place to wait a bit(or prepare))
Attack the castle. Normaly it's an easy win against the 2nd stack as they try to get into the castle. Then attack the 1st stack or retreat and siege the castle.(a 2nd stack would be nice for autoresolve)

[Jacobin]

Problem with two stacks and a castle in a valley is that you usually can't get past the one outside the castle to siege it.

I tried pulling back in the hope that one of the two stacks would follow and be beatable separately but they wouldn't take the bait - and that gave them another two turns to add half a dozen or whatever new units.

What eventually happened is that a Honma stack fortuitously appeared to attack the Mogami and I followed it and when the Honma suicidally attacked and I had the opportunity to join the battle won an epic victory against a ridiculous 7,000 Mogami (two near full stacks of mostly yari ashigaru)

However with no cavalry other than a couple of much depleted general units I could make all the Mogami run away but could only kill a couple of thousand - and next turn I still had 5,000+ Mogami left in and outside the castle vs only a few hundred surviving Date (and the Honma stack had all died in the battle or just disappeared as AI stacks sometimes do).

While I think I am pretty good at SP battles I can't beat those odds so had to make the long trek back to my own territory to reinforce and regenerate my own army - and then hordes of Satake invaded from Miyagi and it all became hopeless.

[Maltz]

By the time I marched all my way north to their N province...

How long did it take you to do it?
In my game I was able to beat up most of their army on Turn 4 (1545 winter):
016.


Took Ugo on Turn5
030.


And finally marched into Uzen on Turn 9 (where Honma tried to rob it from me)
040.


By the way, I have all my Date Legendary screenshots stored here (which I wrote in a story in an non-English site):
http://ccc-ccc.ca/tmp/temp_2012/stw2/date/date_###.jpg
If you want, you can take a look and have a good idea of what happened during my game. There are in total 610 pictures, all the way to the end.
The numbers of the pictures above are supplied on top of each picture.

[Jacobin]

Thanks - that's truly an impressive collection of screenshots.

Do you have a link to the non-English site story? - as even if I don't know the language it might be easier to follow than going through the screenshots without a next button (it might also be an interesting challenge for google translate).

FWIW I also went straight for Ugo castle after destroying the rebels so T4 would be about right - and I had a similar mix of units when I got there as well (IIRC 2 generals, 1 YS, 3
YA and 2 BA).

The problem was the additional turns it then took me to get to Uzen during which they magically recruited those two stacks and those are the turns where our campaigns seem to have radically diverged.

(come to think of it one problem may have been that I used my sword school or whatever it's called to recruit 2 katana samurai rather than demolishing it in T1 to build an agent producing building as you seem to have done and then waited for them to catch up before attacking Uzen - next time I'll just spam YA and BA instead as while those KS did win that big battle with the Mogami arriving 2 turns earlier with 4 additional YA or BA instead would clearly have been far better).

IIRC it went even worse in a previous attempt when I went for Uzen first and when I got to Ugo castle they only had one full stack but it included a half dozen bow samurai units as well as a mass of YA (and BS tend to be my early and middle game nemesis particularly in siege battles).

[Maltz]

Here is the link of the story of my Date campaign. Hope it helps.
http://www.clanlong.com/forum/thread-203537-1-1.html

[Jarmam]

Finally got my computer working again with 16g RAM instead of my old 4 and Im also breaking my own hairs with Uesugi, though I've finally stabilized. My Date save was lost in my meltdown but I distinctly recall 1 thing I did wrong which was this:

(come to think of it one problem may have been that I used my sword school or whatever it's called to recruit 2 katana samurai rather than demolishing it in T1 to build an agent producing building as you seem to have done and then waited for them to catch up before attacking Uzen - next time I'll just spam YA and BA instead as while those KS did win that big battle with the Mogami arriving 2 turns earlier with 4 additional YA or BA instead would clearly have been far better).

Katanas arent worth it pre-full stack or unless you need to sit back and wait (aka let their low upkeep work for you). I wouldn't demolish it since I found Katanas exceptionally useful against Hatak... Hakate... the green guy who seems to love himself some Yari Samurais (free xp), but against Mogami I think its better to just go with Ashigaru. In my campaign I didnt have the top 4 provinces secured before turn 25ish, which was a massive flaw in my play that Ashigarurushing would have easily fixed.