I have been discussing a few ideas with my Ugly friends and have come up with two that I would like to run by you vets . . I have noticed that there are 2 distinct groups of .org forum participants . . those who play the single player and those who play multi. There are a few who do both, but not many. A possible way to allow these groups to come together and compare their skills against each other would be to have a single player top ten scores competition. I would establish the game option for a particular clan in one of the periods, either Sengoku Jidai or Mongol and then everyone would play the game and then send their results to me thru a saved game file. I would look at them and post them as a "top ten scores for" that faction. Then everyone would have an idea of how good they are strategy-wise compared to others in this forum. The object would be to win the game in as few years as possible. Person who does this is named the Single Player Champion for the "(Put Clan name here) Clan" player. We are currently starting such an idea in the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri game, beginning with the Spartan faction. Let me know if anyone is interested.
The second idea was to somehow try and create a single player experience for the multiplayer community that would rely more on strategic choice of units and not take forever to play, plus would not depend on certain people having to play at a certain time. It would also eliminate some of the Super-unit issues that occur now. What I have done is make a spreadsheet with all of the building requirements and their actual build costs for each unit in the Sengoku Jidai period. Each player is given a certain amount of koku (Ex. 15,000 koku) and must purchase the required buildings before they are allowed to build that unit (Ex. Ashigaru/Yari Sam - would have to build Castle (500 koku) Spear Dojo (800 koku)). After building the required buildings then you would have to pay the actual cost of the unit to train them. In the case of Ashigaru (100 koku for an H0 Ashi) If you want to increase the Honor of this unit or its wep/arm upgrade then you must build the buildings required in the single player game to do this (Ex. Ashigaru - must also build a Large Castle & Famous Spear Dojo to get H1 Ashi) What this does is put a cap on ashi/yari sams units of H2 wep3 arm3, it also makes guns very expensive to produce and their honor is capped at H0 because there are no buildings that upgrade honor for musketeers in the single player game. I will be making the spreadsheets available to those who might be interested in giving it a try. The building requirements are given for each and a column on the right side will allow you to automatically calculate the total cost and how much you have left for your army. More details will be coming later.

If anyone would like to try it out with some of us Uglys or have some suggestions that might make it more fun/balanced without making it more complicated please send me an email at el-marko@insightbb.com. Hope to see you all soon. UglyElmo