Date starting advice

[Jacobin]

Thanks - that's truly an impressive collection of screenshots.

Do you have a link to the non-English site story? - as even if I don't know the language it might be easier to follow than going through the screenshots without a next button (it might also be an interesting challenge for google translate).

FWIW I also went straight for Ugo castle after destroying the rebels so T4 would be about right - and I had a similar mix of units when I got there as well (IIRC 2 generals, 1 YS, 3
YA and 2 BA).

The problem was the additional turns it then took me to get to Uzen during which they magically recruited those two stacks and those are the turns where our campaigns seem to have radically diverged.

(come to think of it one problem may have been that I used my sword school or whatever it's called to recruit 2 katana samurai rather than demolishing it in T1 to build an agent producing building as you seem to have done and then waited for them to catch up before attacking Uzen - next time I'll just spam YA and BA instead as while those KS did win that big battle with the Mogami arriving 2 turns earlier with 4 additional YA or BA instead would clearly have been far better).

IIRC it went even worse in a previous attempt when I went for Uzen first and when I got to Ugo castle they only had one full stack but it included a half dozen bow samurai units as well as a mass of YA (and BS tend to be my early and middle game nemesis particularly in siege battles).