Mori Guide

[Drisos]

Timer off, for two reasons:

1.There's nothing worse than trying to hunt down that last broken unit with only a handful of soldiers in it that's hiding in the woods somewhere. Some maps are absolutely huge, made even worse if you have no cavalry to speed up the process. So you've won the battle.....except you haven't cuz' of a busted Ashi unit with 4 men that you can't find before the timer runs out. Even more frustrating is a successful bridge defense against overwhelming odds....except....that pesky Cavalry Archer unit with about 8 horsemen, keeps rallying....and rallying....and re-rallying for the umteenth time, and you have no Yari Cav to kill it or chase it off the field. You lose....even though you've actually won.

2. The really, REALLY, epic battles can take 1-2 hours, player time. Now most really big battles can be resolved in 1 hour or less (IIRC 60 min is the max on the clock) but I'm not losing one of those that takes longer because I ran out of an arbitrary set amount of time (and when the AI sends 6-7 full stacks, THAT is going to take longer than 1 hour). I'm surprised you haven't run into the AI cheat where it just waits for you to attack, even if you are on the defensive. Kinda shoots to hell the idea of a bridge defense, no? And really, is there a timekeeper on any real-life battlefield?

Hey ReluctantSamurai! I agree on those, getting stressed out on the offensive while you've absolutely destroyed the opponent is a bit ridiculous. I played a couple of campaigns with the timer off, and really liked the longer battles when army sizes grew 1000+. Then, I ran into the Owari bug and was forced into attacking them instead with an awkward army composition for the job. I've also seen the AI be unable to decide which route to take to approach your defensive position, and keep walking back and forth. That's extremely rare though. The Owari bug also only seems to happen in a minority of cases.

I think I would prefer to have a custom set battle time limit (I'm thinking twice the normal limit, maybe). More time to find stragglers and long battles, but AI can't troll you and force you into attacking. I suppose you could Save the game every turn, but what if you have 1 (or more) successful battles on the same turn, before getting trolled? No chance to Save between those. ;) I did a search on the forums, and looked around the game files, cautiously concluded it's not possible without some very specific skills I don't certainly don't have.

I guess the 'wrong side' reinforcements thing doesn't happen in the Steam version (don't know what patch that is, probably latest?), haven't seen it in many campaigns at least. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure if I ever experienced the "unable to decide an attack route" on this version, or whether I only remember it from playing the hardcopy version I had.

What I do get though, is no reinforcements showing up until almost all of your army is off the field. That's not supposed to happen, is it? I'm not sure. But it's annoying, I'll hold off the first waves and then Withdraw like 6-8 units of archers. But nothing shows up, and I would've been better off keeping the archers to use in melee instead. I'd almost consider trying to Withdraw much more (even units who don't need to), just to try and trigger the reinforcements, but that only becomes useful when I have double stacks (2000+), not so much with armies of like 1.500. In my recent campaigns (Time Limit ON) I usually never bring more than 1.000 on an attack. I send in a single stack with either an expendable general (Rank 2 usually), or e.g. a Daimyo/Heir that is on 16 Wins 0 Losses. Getting to 32-0 won't happen in most campaigns, and dropping to 8 won't happen either, so I can accept the guaranteed loss. I would prefer though to send bigger stacks when necessary and fight it out, as long as AI doesn't troll me and reinforcements work fine.

Thanks a lot for the tips on editing the building preferences (done!) and downloading an edited version of Owari (I'll look into that, and perhaps turn off my Battle Time Limit again for next campaign).

Edit: The Owari swap worked, I think! =]