Quote Originally Posted by frogbeastegg View Post
The out of battle bonus to these ashigaru-cored armies is that they fix very quickly no matter where you are. Sometimes that's the edge you need: getting back into the next battle in better shape than your enemy. Sometimes it lets me push on for one more battle when I would not do so if I had more samurai, because I know one more round of losses will be replaced swiftly if I win that push and take the province. When you start adding honour and armour bonuses on the yari ashigaru, plus a ranked up monk for bonuses, plus some general stars and abilities, they remain relevant into the mid-game. And what does it matter if a few yari ashigaru units are totally destroyed? I can have them back in two turns.

I'm surprised by how much use I have found for the yari ashigaru units. I never used them in shogun 1, and didn't like them at all at first. Then something clicked and I have used 6-8 of them as the core of my armies since. They do the standing and dying so my precious samurai can do the safer killing. The bows are nice too. Teppu ... ah, need more practice.
I wanted to second this. In many ways I think this game is a bit unbalanced - ashigaru are so much dramatically cheaper than samurai, especially when you factor in the cost of buildings required to train samurai. Buildings in Shogun 2 are incredibly expensive, particularly when you compare how many troops you could have had for the same price. Often it's half a dozen units of samurai or more.

Which means even more absurd amounts of ashigaru could be had for the same price. At the most extreme, you have the Oda - it's a hard first couple turns, but I remember reading a guy who won a Legendary Campaign as Oda about 30-40 turns in, just by building nothing but ashigaru from the start. This pretty much matches my experience: in campaign mode, samurai just aren't worth investing in. If I capture a good AI training province, I will train them there, but otherwise, I'll just do ashigaru. Unit losses are not important; a decent-level general and Heaven and Earth and the fact that the AI always upgrades roads means that your ashigaru units fill back in just a couple turns.