Hojo Hoard, by bloody arse!!!

[Raging Road Rodent]

I shove off with the mori clan. Before the starting season even changes, I clean the takeda clan right out of southern Japan. Approx eight turns later, I am building a temple, and monks are on the way, I have also taken over a territory on the ronin islands, and taken over Nagato (or whatever the heck the name of that shimazu clan turf is in my perceived land. I then invade the Oda, and starts slowly pushing and grinding them away. Now, it seams that the computer always throws everything its got at me? The Shimazu were thankfully quite puppies this time. However, the Oda threw everthing, I mean everything. I had to win each fight, with much blood, and had some seriously rank honoured soldiers.

Then comes the Hojo, and blows my plans to pieces.

I have read a number of different strategies, and all seems decent enough, but please, tell me how in the name of hell can I cope wiht 30 000!!!! yes, thats 30 000 troops. Even if I kills 20000, he still grinding me to dust, he still has enough to walk all over me, and produces literally 2000 a turn.

I lost my quality armies very quickly. It only took a couple of seasons. I fought each battle like a pro, or so I though. Well, sure enough, I took seventy casualties, then another one hundred twenty, to six hundred I deal him. But even when I out kill his soldiers, the machine pumps out more soldiers than I can possible kill in one turn.

Pretty fed up. There is very little point in taking a clan from the South, unless you do it by Geisha.

[QuietWolf]

If your talking about the original STW then yes i agree hojo is just too tough; however, the WI has solved all that it is now definately possible to "win from the left".

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In Reality ...

[Kiwi]

It is now easier to take a clan from the left. Shimazu is not too easy even on expert.
With the others you at least have some pretty intense competition at the beginning and you have to expand into other clans not ronin to survive.
Amazing the change.

[Khan7]

I have never found enormous eastern armies to be more than a slight annoyance. Battles, especially large ones, don't usually last very long. So all you have to do is get 16 real good units and win the first bout, and all of the enemy backup is meaningless.

I really have never been able to figure out why people are so upset about this feature. Not that their opinions and experiences aren't valid, it's just I've never been able to personally understand it.

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Khan7

[Gothmog]

In original STW, Hojo horde is tough but doable.

Part I: play defensive to wear them down.
1) Consolidate your front. It's best if you can have a front line, consist of, say 3 provinces, each with defendable terrain, decent sized army, and at least a rank 4 general (considering only 8 wins are needed, it's pretty easy). If it's a coast province, make sure to have port so that you can transport troops easily.

2) When playing defensive campaign, it's essential to have a lot of missile troops. Because you can take advantage of the terrain and make the battlefield a slaughter house. Muskets are ideal for they have virtually unlimited ammo, and the demoralizing effect helps too. You don't want too many muskets though, for they are useless in the rain, and they don't kill as fast as Samuri Archers.

Of course, you also want some naginata just to hold the line, some Yari Samuri to counter the cavalry, and most importantly your own cavalry to chase the routed enemy. Because if you don't, they will come back with an vengeance anyway.

Even though actually in a defensive battle, only the first 16 units count, you can place more than that in the province, and withdraw some of the troops to bring in reinforcement.
For instance, if it's raining, it might be a good idea to withdraw your muskets right away so that you can bring in more archers.

3) Turn the timer on. It's the realistic setting anyway.
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Part II: strengthen yourself to have quality troops and eventually break the stagmate.

Pretty brainless here. Build armory and weapon update.
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Part III: Infiltration -- using dark side

You don't really care about territory, and you don't really need the koku. What you really want, is to destroy the AI's huge production potential.

Note that AIs don't put 3000 troops in each and every province. Their home provinces are usually lightly defended. And, those provinces usually have port!

Here is where shinobis come in. Dump dozens of shinobis to those provinces. And before long, Hojos will have to deal with a lot of rebellions in their beautiful homeland. Those rebellion usually will be quenched pretty easily, but the usual scenario is: peasants take over the province, hojo retake it, the structures got destroyed. You get the idea.

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Part IV: sweeping technique
This is another one of my favorite strategy. Say, if you are able to break a weak spot of the Hojo line, hen send a full-sized army, led by a decent general, and attack those lightly defended provinces. Usually you can take the province without a fight (AI will simply retreat to the castle), but it's not likely you can hold it because you bet next turn, 4000+ troops will flood in from all adjacent provinces!

But you don't have to stay, just move on to the next weak province, and during the process, you have destroyed those valuable dojos.

Of course, this is kinda of risky, because if you get caught, your army have no place to retreat. What you can do is to find a port province, then sail back home.

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Part V: Finish them off.
Once you have shattered AI's homebase, and your troop become far more superior than AI's, you know you already won.

[Raging Road Rodent]

Failed again. BTW, how the heck can you possible have a full sized 16 unit army to "spare" when the hojo attack. pfft. I am barely able to keep three in the field that are decent. Oda threw everything it had at me, and that ate a lot of troops. Now, Oda is gone, ants 2600 versus 30000+, plus 2000 troops a turn.

I tried a little insurrection, didn't work.

[BlackWatch McKenna]

its doable - keep the faith, brother.

[solypsist]

at one point in the original release of STW, the "you only have to fight 16 units" argument worked. Now, however, enemy reinforcements show up superfast, even at the point when the last of the 'original' enemy army has left the battlefield. This means you potentially wind up fighting *every* enemy unit in the province. So things have changed, more so for any Horde that pops up.

[celtiberoijontychi]

I know how you feel. Playing Mori at Expert with 120 man units, you build a defense line at Owari-Mino-Wakasa and win battle after battle against the hordes. But you are soooo poor, your armies shrink to 15 units, 14, etc., while the enemy looses all his Ashigaru masses (or archers if it's Uesugi)and when you are weakened he sends all his damn monks in, while you just have a couple of them cos you're still poor as Mori.
The defense straeegy won't work if you can't replace lost units with better ones while the AI techs up.

in order to win with Mori in Expert/120-men-units you have to attack, attack, attack. Forget upgrading (except for the monks and the 2 mines in Aki and Harima), forget Cav until you conquest some teched-up province from Oda.
Yom ust always attack and spend all your koku in troops, because if you don't, you arrive at the stalemate at the Owari-Mino-Wakasa line.
If you find the time for it, conquer the imagawa and shimazu holdings to your left, if not, you'll have another horde at your rearguard.

Mori Campaigns at this level are a race against time, it took me 3 tries until I made it. Now i canproudly say I've won with all clans at all levels and woth all unit sizes, just in time for the expansion, now i can start again lol

[monkeydan]

Raging Road Rodent -

This will probably just annoy you BUT the Horde is non-existent in the X-Pack

[Raging Road Rodent]

Well, I was considering the xpack, but since its not just an xpack, but STW included, I am spending 50$ on a game I already bought. Nice marketing gimick, but screw that. Second, if the moral issue is that bad, I would prefer beating my Mori Monk Marbles against the Hojo. They can keep their silly xpack.

[Gothmog]

Quote Originally posted by celtiberoijontychi:
you build a defense line at Owari-Mino-Wakasa and win battle after battle against the hordes. But you are soooo poor, your armies shrink to 15 units, 14, etc., while the enemy looses all his Ashigaru masses (or archers if it's Uesugi)and when you are weakened he sends all his damn monks in, while you just have a couple of them cos you're still poor as Mori.

Mori Campaigns at this level are a race against time, it took me 3 tries until I made it. Now i canproudly say I've won with all clans at all levels and woth all unit sizes, just in time for the expansion, now i can start again lol[/QUOTE]

Agree with you to some extent. The thing about quick expansion is that: it's usually the easiest approach, but you will also miss the fun of exploiting the variety of the troops and the thrill of tech-up.

Also, cheap army can only get you to some point. I noticed that after a while, when the AIs have developed upgraded naginata/monks/cavalry/etc and use them em masse, you will have a real hard time without quality troops, no matter how great your generals are (say rank 6). And as for Uesugi's nasty archers (they are not tough, but there are just too many of them), you really need cavalry to avenge the death of your troops during the initial archer duel. Once the Uesugi's archer-only army rout, you can pretty much slaughter them all the way across the battlefield, with, say 3 units of Yari Cavalry.

Of course, sometimes you will run into the reinforcement at the endline. That's why you need to bring your entire army forward, including the arrow-depleted archers. The idea, is to scare the new reinforcement off with sheer number. Even a unit of monks will rout if they see 500 (no matter how tried) men appear in front of them as soon as they arrive.
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The importance of muskets. IMHO, defensive technique probably won't work well without the god-sent muskets at the late stage of the game. Use them whenever possible, then you can afford the realatively heavy casualties in the rainy seasons.
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Playing Mori/Shimazu, you will probably reach your first stagmate when you have to challenge the full might of Oda. You build your first defense at around Wakasa-Tampa-Kawachi. Now Tampa is nicely shielded from Oda because you have the strong ronin province Yamashiro as the buffer zone (Especially after that rank 5 ronin general shows up)thus can be garrisoned with a token force. So the fight will probably be mostly in Kawachi (because it's rich), which is pretty easy to defend.

By this time, portugese should have arrived. If you don't want to embrace christianlity, then you have to do a quick conquer game. Otherwise, you can take advantage of the breathing time and start building ports/churches/trading posts. Koku is really tight at this point, so you have to do a lot of careful domestic management. Use your winter to plan the expense of the whole year. The goal is hang in there. And remember, boosting economy is just as important as building military updates.

Eventually if the emperor's place falls into the hands of Oda, you know this is the time to attack. For if you don't you'll be in trouble. If you don't have the strength to take over central Japan, at least attack some provinces then retreat to destroy the infrastructure. Hopefully you will eventually reach the wakasa-mino-Owari line.

At this point, with added wealth (especialy from Owari), and new constucted trading posts/ports/churches, you should be doing a lot better financially. And if possible, the defense line can be extended to wakasa-mino-mikawa. (Mikawa leaves you three front-line provinces just as Owari does and from Mikawa, at least you can raid Totomi.)

And that's when the process of attrition begin. The bordering AI provinces are either near impossible to take, or too costly to take, or not worth taking, or not worth defending after taking. But you improvise and hang in there while harassing behind the enemy line with your shinobis.

You see the sigh of winning when you can finally take Shinano and hold it.

The process sounds pretty scary but it's doable. Also luckily once in a while, the enemy Daimyo will be foolish enough to show up personaly in the battle, and you might hear some nice death poems next turn and a huge portion of the map might suddenly turn white. Hehe.

Of course it might take a long long time, and certainly won't be easy. You might even lose , you might have to start over, but that's the fun of it.




[This message has been edited by Gothmog (edited 08-29-2001).]

[Whitey]

hojo hoard - always been a joke, 20,000...30,000? who cares, every army has a rear and a flank - in the original which is the only place you get hoards, you attack them with 13 or 14 unit armies, although you are strategic offensive they are happy to loose a few thousand attacking the attackers, you drive their main line armies into a small area (this takes around 5000 men, then force them out of existence - i've driven 30,000 men into the sea before, its the only way to win, surround them in one province and attack

PS for holding attacks send in one or two YA units or the like to bordering provinces while you strike at the others...never stop attacking until you literally only have 2-3000 men left in your font armies...by then you'll have the reserves coming through and you've gone foward about 10 provinces.

...rinse and repeat

if you have less men, hold the rivers - they always seem to attack you there, keep pumping the troops there 'till you have enough.

[Jackson]

Quote Originally posted by Raging Road Rodent:
Well, I was considering the xpack, but since its not just an xpack, but STW included, I am spending 50$ on a game I already bought. Nice marketing gimick, but screw that. Second, if the moral issue is that bad, I would prefer beating my Mori Monk Marbles against the Hojo. They can keep their silly xpack.[/QUOTE]

Go to EA.com and just buy the expansion pack. It's $12.00 plus shipping and handling, not $50.

As for the morale, it's not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. The biggest complaints are in MP, not SP. The single player game is great with the new morale.

I could go on and on about how to beat the Hojo as Mori, but it all boils down to one thing: port invasion. Mutsu, Dewa, Hitachi and Musashi are just waiting to be liberated. Go east young man! But do it early enough to make a difference. If Hojo has 30,000+ troops, you've waited too long to take on the big boys.

[Khan7]

hehe, there IS no new morale in SP!

And Whitey just illustrated what I was talking about quite well. Take notes ppl. Gothmog also has ideas worthy of study.

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Khan7