So who’s playing what?

[Puzz3D]

It would be good to have a historian look into the above for verification, but I think it is reasonably sound. Basically removing from the Warlord Expansion, all unit types not in the original STW, and banning Arquebusiers and Musketeers.

To me, with the above gun restriction, playing at 5000 koku becomes very interesting

Thoughts?

I think you can leave the Arquebusiers in the game. They have the accuracy of the muskets in original STW, don't fire in rain, have higher power, but are much slower firing and shorter range. They are cheaper than the original muskets, but they might work ok in the gameplay. You could run some test battles to make sure.

My own feeling on battlefield ninja and kensai is that they don't fit well into the battle engine. They benefit too much from battlefield upgrades, and aren't even balanced well, despite great effort to do so, in STWmod for MTW/VI which doesn't have battlefield upgrades.

The naginata cav does serve a gameplay purpose as assault cav if you wan't that kind of unit in the game. However, I don't think it's necessary to have it in the game especially if muskets are eliminated.

[Tomisama]

I think you can leave the Arquebusiers in the game.

I guess if we were going to move up to the 16th century, they would be ok.

Chinese handguns entered Japan in 1510. But the Arquebus had to wait for a Portuguese shipwreck in 1543. Six years later, the Tanegashima matchlock (reproduced Arquebus), was in first used in battle, remaining virtually unchanged until the 1860s.

As far as I can find, “any” muskets must have been imported from Europe (Spain) in the later half of the century, but the Japanese were not manufacturing them. So I doubt that there would have been many of them in comparison to their own guns.