The Shrine

I think it's called Nobunaga's Ambition: Iron Triangle in the US but it's only on the console and I don't recommend playing any KOEI strategy games on console since saving/loading is annoying on a console and it's something you do a lot.

Superficially this is a real time strategy game where you're a warlord trying to unify Japan. Realistically this is more like a game of Starcraft elements RPG or whatever plotting you against the united ninjas of Japan. The first thing you should do is use an editor to give yourself half a million soldier (more than rest of the country put together) and max gold/food and probably max tech too. The computer does not receive resource advantages even on highest difficulty as per KOEI games so it's just a matter of time (like 50 hours) before you have your stuff maxed out and this will save the boredom. You might think the computer is a pushover since they usually field like 20K soldier and now you have 500K, but that's only the soldiers you can see. There are local miltias and local navies that field army the size of 50K+ with S class tactics for everything that generally comes out from nowhere to fight your army while the player you're trying to kill is cowering in his castle, and these guys are tough. If you think they're really militias and try to walk around them you'll probably get annihilated really quick. In fact usually the local miltias are a lot stronger than whoever you're trying to defeat.

And then there are the ninjas. Here is where your Naruto knowledge can come in handy. If you see any force that sounds like they could be someone from Naruto they're probably a ninja, and ninjas are really powerful. Your first encounter with them will probably be your unit alert when a ninja has killed 50K people by himself (Naruto is apparently real in ancient Japan). There's pretty much no protection against whatever the heck they're doing. Whenever you see a ninja appear one of your unit is probably going to die no matter what its status is at. It could have 15000 man with max morale led by a guy with 130 in all stats (normal max is 120) and it still wouldn't matter. I think you're supposed to either kill all the ninja clans (who are surprisingly bad at defending their own home) before you wage war, or try to bribe them on your side, but ninjas only fight for people on the defense I think (the AI won't have units out to fight you anyway if you've a numerical advantage), so you probably should just kill them all.

Actually, the game is more like Naruto RPG now that I think about it. Trying to beat the game without getting rid of ninjas is very difficult even on easy. I got destroyed by them multiple times already.

The economy part of the game is also worth mentioning, because unlike most strategy games that tries to simulate some kind of war economy you're having a game that basically simulates corporate America. As mentioned before your officers are useless slobs who will most likely get killed by a ninja the moment they step outside of your castle, but you still got to have some of them around. However they cost a lot of money to employ. A gold mine has a revenue of 4000 gold/quarter, and even the most worthless officer expects about 500 gold/quarter. The people who are actually useful expects to have a starting salary in the 1K+ range. Gold mines are a unique feature only available to the certain cities (usually belonging to the major powers, for obvious reasons). The average city, depending on how you gear its production, will rarely be able to produce more than what a single gold mine produces.

But wait, it gets worse. Every year just about everyone expects a 20% raise or they get mad and leave you. They also sometimes just get mad anyway and you'd have to give them a raise too to appease them. The editor shows the highest you can pay someone is 5000 gold/quarter, which is more than what a gold mine/single city produces, and it doesn't look like it'd take too long to get there. Now you can fire your own officers before the pay gets out of control, but clearly you can't fire all of them or you won't have enough people to work with. So the economy becomes an interesting game of managing salary and finding various way to avoid paying. You can build a castle for your guys for 8000 gold and give it to them, and they'll become 100% loyal and stop demanding a salary, which is kind of funny since most of the guys makes more in an year than what it costs to build a castle. But there are limited number of castles you can build so those should only be reserved for your best guys.

The easiest way to avoid paying is to make an alliance with a random weak power, and they'll usually demand a hostage for the duration of the alliance. Obviously someone who is held hostage doesn't have to be paid, and he's not going to defect while being held a hostage either. Now you can send people to their doom so they get captured, but people might escape on their own and if they do they'll be back on your side but now they'll be disloyal because you let them get captured. Of course you can just fire them too, but if you fire someone deep in your territory it might take a while for him to wander to some opposing power's city (you want him to get hired by your enemies so it drags down their economy), so it's easier to lose someone if you send them directly to attack, but only if you're sure they won't manage to escape before they defect. You can always execute someone, but execute your own people have a nasty reputation hit, so again you've to get the people you want to execute to join the other side so you can execute them without a reputation hit when you beat them.

The game sounds very very broken by your description =P

Although I remember enjoying some of the really old games in the series. It's kind of like Romance of the Three Kingdoms where I am unsure if I really need to update (for RotK I still own only the third and fourth game).

I do think the main selling point for me in the series would be if I could manage my provinces indefinitely; in 3 and 4 your officers will eventually all die off of old age, and everyone elses will to, there's no way to replenish them; yes, I am a crazy player that actually does want to play the game for longer than that.

In all the later ROTK and Nobu there are settings/scenarios that lets you use every person that ever lived and they'll live indefinitely. Well I think you get some really large number of turns like 2000 (a game of Civ on normal is only 500 and you can do considerably more in one turn of ROTK compared to Civ). There's also a lot of scenarios in the modding community for the PC, but they're pretty much exclusively Japanese/Chinese.

The local forces are only in the expansion. If you play the normal version the game plays like any other strategy game, except the officer salary part. I think the point is that you're not supposed to be able to hang on to people who don't like you. A scrub that hates you would require a salary of 1500/quarter to retain, and this is an amount that can cripple your economy. In reality it's just a lot of hassle since the game will randomly take a scrub that hates you as the leader of a city, and then he rebels against you (kind of like Genghis Khan 2 on SNES) because you didn't pay him enough, and you're wondering how did that scrub ever become the leader of the city.

It seems like you can only ally with one of the five local forces (militia, navy, merchant, monks, and ninjas) at a time because I've never seen a computer player with say ninjas + militias at the same time so you have to figure out who has the ninjas and who has the militias. Allying with the ninjas seem to be extremely tough because your affinity is determined by your infrastructure and ninjas don't like any of the buildings you'd build for a successful empire. Ninjas seem to be mostly defensive since there's a building that reduces the effectiveness of ninjas in your territory (ninja school), so while they're devastating on defense (you can't carry your ninja schools to enemy territory) they're stopped easily once on the offense by some cheap buildings.

Monks can force the enemy to sign a peace treaty with you unconditionally for a pretty long period of time, though it also works reverse on you. I don't think you can kill any of the local forces permanently, but if you destroyed their operating point it prevents them from participating for a while.

The fanmade scenarios in this game are really challenging. Similar to ROTK 11 there's no point to play as a scrub leader in Nobunaga on the regular scenarios because on hard the computer will just bulldoze you immediately (they don't particlarly hate you for being a human but the fact you're super weak makes you a likely a target for everyone), and it's pretty trivial as anyone who doesn't suck. On this scenario I downloaded I took out two of the minor powers around me and had 40K troops in newest city and was preparing to mop up the rest when Shingen attacked with all his best guys with 360K troops. I made the mistake of putting a castle in his territory which means you can't use ninjas there (gets canceled by his ninja schools) though I don't think it'd have mattered. The scenario is set up such that as soon as you're done mopping up one area there's always someone who is a lot stronger than you nearby, so that it stays challenging. If you get past Shingen there's Nobunaga behind him who has 1 million troops sitting around doing nothing besides researching all the techs while you're busy trying to stay alive.

I managed to hold him off because I got lucky with a monk showing up at the right time(unconditional peace treaty!) and the situation looks winnable but it's going to be an extremely protracted war so I started over and will try a different strategy to see if I can put myself in a better position before confronting Shingen.

I can never understand the guys who play these challenge scenarios using AI exploits to kill them without ever taking any damage and then say it was too easy. I mean the game comes with a built in editor, so just give yourself max everything and start slaughtering stuff if that's your thing.

The only Nobunaga's Ambition game I played was on the NES a lonnnnnnnng time ago.

I think I played that too, and I keep on try to send ninjas to do stuff or behead my own guys, and never got very far in that game.

I played a game that has the similar background back in the SNES era, and if you didn't pay people in that game your generals will try to assassinate the ruler. It's pretty funny when you take out a major city and watch next turn the ruler gets assassinated 3 times before it's over (i.e. he dies, someone else assassinated the successor, and so on).

3/4th of the way toward beating Hard. It looks like the computer purposely do not hire troops at every opportunity which means if you survive long enough you'll eventually win. The zone of control on the units is extremely high, which means it's almost impossible to try to flank the opponent's range units unless you approach them from a completely unguarded direction. There is virtually no unit level tactics involved (let AI handle it, it's like better than you 99% of the time since it has infinite reaction speed on specials) so the strategy is all about trying to flank/pincer somebody from multiple areas assuming they used some kind of combine arms. Of course if they have only infantry or cavalry there's no point to try to manuever, but in that case a standard infantry + bow/gun formation will win easily.

There's way too many no name officers in this game. After you control say 1/4th of Japan you're better off just beheading anybody whose stats is below 70 when you capture them. That way you don't have to worry about paying them later. The game seems to determine the leader of your city as the person who gets paid the most or the person with the highest seniority, which might as well be the same thing due to your officers demanding a raise every year they serve you. In my game my highest paid officers have totally worthless stats. I don't even use them and if the game wasn't already in control I really should have fired them to avoid having to pay such a ridiculous amount of money for a bunch of buffoons.

I attacked Himeji castle head on (the Civ 5 Wonder of the World) thinking it'll just be the same as the other 2 Fortresses I already took and got burned pretty badly. The defender had 100K and I think I used about 500K troops in the fight including the reinforcements I added with the editor. The sieges in this game are really epic. Fortresses have a massive 40K HP and the defense of a structure is proportional to the amount of HP it has left. That means at 40K HP it will literally only take like 10 damage from an attack that can do 10000 damage to a unit. I didn't realize the last two Fortresses I took were pretty much unstaffed (the AI was out fighting someone else apparently) so there wasn't anybody manning the castle defenses. When you're taking like 10K damage for every 1K you dish out to the castle it's not something you can fight for long unless you vastly outresource the other guy. I suppose you could try to build siege weapons but they're countered very easily by just about anything (units can attack you from inside the castle, but you can't attack them). There's a comlicated method of sieging that the game does NOT tell you about (which is why I lost a lot more troops than I should) where you're supposed to surround the castle on all sides (which is hard due to ZOC) and then if the moon line up in the right phase you'll dig tunnel or something that vastly reduces the castle's durability, but I have never got it to work and lost a ton of troops trying because it fails the moment any of your units move away from the exact spot they have to be to surround a castle.

I really don't see what's the point to make this game real time because when you've large battles it's pretty much impossible to see what the heck your units are so unless you want to just randomly lose a bunch of them you got to pause the game and look at every one of them every couple of seconds. I actually like the extreme ZOC in this game. In a turn based game it'd be like say movement is prevented in a 180 arc where the opposing unit is facing you, so you can only move back to disengage. It never made much sense to me how in war sims you can just move past the enemy even with ZOC in a few turns with some simple manuevering (and not just against AI, works fine on humans too). There's no effective *front line* unless you're in a game with a ton of units where it is possible to just clog up all the hexes so that you can't just walk around the guys protecting the range units. The AI is surprisingly difficult in this game, and people who say it's easy probably just ran a cavalry unit in a large circle while the AI chases it down and then take an undefended castle or whatever. If you fight them head on they pretty much do everything as well as you would. One of the really interesting concept is that attacking ANY structure causes a significant fame less, even defensive structure. When you invade someone the only target you're allowed to attack is their castle, so even if it's surrounded by all defense structures you usually can't attack them unless you want to cripple your economy later. You can destroy structure by collatoral damage without losing fame (fighting near them causes damage to them) but this means even very obvious traps (i.e. towers on two sides with only enough room for one unit to pass through at a time) are tough to counter.

I messed around some settings so that I actually had to defend at a disadvantage more than once in the entire game and defensive siege battles are a blast. The problem is that defenses have such a huge advantage that once you have a numerical advantage in troop you'll pretty much never get attacked for the rest of the game, since the AI isn't stupid, so you spend the rest of the time try to dig someone out of an equivalent Starcraft turtle position. It's actually pretty hilarious to see people post stuff like having a castle set up like a SC chokepoint (8 turrets and stuff) and brag about the kills. Even a single turret can utterly own the opponent because they're, for all practical purposes, indestructible. Imagine in SC someone has 10 photon cannons at a choke, and that they have 1 HP but if you destroy them you lose 10 supply permanently (and the opponent can rebuild the photon cannons). That's how hard it is to break a chokepoint in this game, which is why you're really not supposed to build more than a couple turrets unless you want the game to just stall forever.

Beaten it (sort of) with 3 major styles of playing (infantry/guns/cavalry) and this is a game where the computer is definitely a lot better than you than you are, which is why the computer purposely builds slower than you on Hard. Unless you go with an infantry based guy (which would mean you're playing as Tokugawa) logistics is going to beat you up very badly at some point because you have to be producing horses/guns every 5 seconds for the entire game to keep your army supplied and at some point you're going to lose track of that, and then you'll find yourself in a major battle with no guns or no horses to use and then die horribly. It's still a mystery to me why the game isn't turn-based since if you want to play competitively against the AI you end up having to pause every 5 seconds to reissue commands to all your units.

On the flip side if you play someone like Takeda Shingen you can probably just start delegate your starting one city to the computer and then the AI will win the game for you in about 5 hours without your supervision. He might as well be the boss for the campaign mode and usually the only way you'll beat him is hope he dies of old age. Right now I'm tinkering with some smaller scenarios because it's like a 90% chance you'll lose to Shingen on any campaign mode no matter what you did assuming you didn't resort to stupid AI cheap tricks. I'm guessing they want to have a game that has constant flow of continous battle, but really there is just no way for a human to keep up with all the micro you'd have to do to be at all competitive against the AI without pausing the game. Really once you developed your economy you should just let the AI control every one of your units/cities, but then what's the point of playing the game like that?