How to be a conniving SOB...

[Lord Aeon]

I don't know about you guys, but the best part of the game for me is calculating strategic map strategies to weaken, confuse, and eliminate my oppponents. Ostensibly, one of the best tools for accomplishing this would be to make my enemies fight each other.

But in this game, there seems to be no way to influence this. Yes, you can make alliances, but they are so tenuous that they can't really be counted on.

What i'm talking about is sewing dissention among allied clans.

Now, i remember in the original STW you could use a ninja for assassination and pin in on the daimyo if another clan. Keeping this in mind, i'm wondering:

1. If this actually affected the game in any real way,
2. If anyone has seen this in the x-pack, and
3. If there's any other way to accomplish this.

I mean, i don't necessarily have to get two CPU clans to engage in all out war, but influencing the cancellation of an alliance would be really nice. It's the only thing the SP campaign is really missing. It would be EXCELLENT if, say, emissaries could foul up alliances as well.

Any thoughts on this, or any other strats?

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[Khan7]

Realistically adding such features to the game would require so many rather difficult to program layers of complexity and depth, ahead of other much more lucrative and promising fixes, that it's probably not worth it. Needless to say it would require a full-blown diplomatic system the likes of Alpha Centauri, and probably even more complex than Alpha Centauri to get all the options you're wanting, and given the nature of this game that is not the most important thing, and given the nature of the additions and the engine they'd have to fit into it would be quite time-consuming and possibly rather difficult to do.

How about I just assure you that having such a system in place would only open you yourself up to the same sort of thing, which could be quite aggravating (as it has been for me in dimplomatically complex games with similar features), so you're probably not missing much :-)

But the main thing is that there are much more promising issues (in my opinion) to work on now.

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Khan7

[Hosakawa Tito]

The one thing you can do to keep your neighboring rival's busy is to build the teahouse right away and send shinobi to the ronin province that your rival just conquered.In the early part of the game everyone's armies are small,so it doesn't take more than one or two shinobi's to start rebellions that your rival has to waste time and koku to put down.

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Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell so that they look forward to making the trip.