I think it'd be Nobunaga 13 by the number terminology. It's available on Steam but only in Chinese (not Japanese, for some inexplicable reason). I figured it was going to be a bad idea but since I pirated ROTK 11 and Nobu 11 & 12 and all three turned out to be decent games I figured Koei deserves some of my money, and this indeed turned out to be a bad idea. The complexity got pointlessly worse and now you've to manage your empire down to the road level on what is in theory a real time strategy game, as if anybody's going to build all those road in real time without pausing the game. The decision for this series to be real time is always kind of perplexing, since this game has an unbelievable amount of micromanagement that you either end up just select the 'let computer do everything' option or you pause the game because even a Korean 500 APM pro would barely be able to cover all the things you need to build in a couple city let alone when you have 50 of them.
In this version now each character have their own special skills and apparently skills are learned or something, so hopefully you majored in Japanese history to know exactly what every trigger event is. Nobunaga, for example, doesn't start with his unique skill "Nobunaga's Ambition", and I don't think the trigger event is something trivial either. At least there's this 'cat mode' where all the people who are important have their portraits replaced by cats. That way you'd at least know anyone with a cat face is someone who potentially could be awesome. By the way there are a lot of guys with super powerful abilities that have really sucky stats, so it's not sufficeint to look for people with a high command ability (the dominant stat in the game). I remember there's a guy whose stat totally sucks but he has an ability called "Legendary" where he randomly kills everyone or himself because he's supposed to be a legendary figure in this time. Miyamoto Musashi's stats also suck, but again he has specials that more or less instant kill everything because he's Miyamoto Musashi even though his stat is usually garbage.
This game is pointlessly tedious and complex and if ROTK 11 requires you to know the history of the that period like the back of your hand, Nobunga's Ambition probably expected you to be a leading authority on the Sengoku era. Of course you can probably get away with not knowing the stuff if you picked Nobunaga or the other powerhouses that can just win on auto (I think there's still an auto option, but haven't figured it out). I started building infrastructure, and say I want to build up my cities, here's my options:
1. I can increase the territory size, which leads to more food yield and more troop to hire, but I don't know how much.
2. I can increase barracks which allows more troops to be hired, but I don't know if this is better than increasing territory size.
3. I can improve the economy for more gold.
4. I can build more roads which will improve the population which will improve food yield and more troop to hire.
5. I can acquire new territory but there's no indication of how much extra yield is produced by the new territory except on a very rough level.
6. I can run a bunch of policy that increase and decrease a bunch of things without any numbers. The real awesome one is the one that increases your troop and decrease your troops. I think it was +conscripted troops and -standing troops. And if you're saying what does that even mean, I was wondering the same thing, and it doesn't show you the numbers either.
7. I can build a farm which increases food yield, but I don't know how this compares to option #1.
8. I can build a structure that improves farm yield in adjacent areas, but I don't know how this compares to #7 or #1.
9. Repeat this for the economy/troop options.
You can always click on the 'I have no idea what the heck's going on' option and the AI will recommend everything you should build. It's probably not the worst thing to do but probably not the best either.
I doubt anyone's going to buy it but Nobunaga 11 is a much better game for a macro level grand strategy game. Nobunaga 12 actually looks decent instead of Nobunaga 11's ghetto graphics, but it doesn't play quite as well though it's still acceptable.
In this version now each character have their own special skills and apparently skills are learned or something, so hopefully you majored in Japanese history to know exactly what every trigger event is. Nobunaga, for example, doesn't start with his unique skill "Nobunaga's Ambition", and I don't think the trigger event is something trivial either. At least there's this 'cat mode' where all the people who are important have their portraits replaced by cats. That way you'd at least know anyone with a cat face is someone who potentially could be awesome. By the way there are a lot of guys with super powerful abilities that have really sucky stats, so it's not sufficeint to look for people with a high command ability (the dominant stat in the game). I remember there's a guy whose stat totally sucks but he has an ability called "Legendary" where he randomly kills everyone or himself because he's supposed to be a legendary figure in this time. Miyamoto Musashi's stats also suck, but again he has specials that more or less instant kill everything because he's Miyamoto Musashi even though his stat is usually garbage.
This game is pointlessly tedious and complex and if ROTK 11 requires you to know the history of the that period like the back of your hand, Nobunga's Ambition probably expected you to be a leading authority on the Sengoku era. Of course you can probably get away with not knowing the stuff if you picked Nobunaga or the other powerhouses that can just win on auto (I think there's still an auto option, but haven't figured it out). I started building infrastructure, and say I want to build up my cities, here's my options:
1. I can increase the territory size, which leads to more food yield and more troop to hire, but I don't know how much.
2. I can increase barracks which allows more troops to be hired, but I don't know if this is better than increasing territory size.
3. I can improve the economy for more gold.
4. I can build more roads which will improve the population which will improve food yield and more troop to hire.
5. I can acquire new territory but there's no indication of how much extra yield is produced by the new territory except on a very rough level.
6. I can run a bunch of policy that increase and decrease a bunch of things without any numbers. The real awesome one is the one that increases your troop and decrease your troops. I think it was +conscripted troops and -standing troops. And if you're saying what does that even mean, I was wondering the same thing, and it doesn't show you the numbers either.
7. I can build a farm which increases food yield, but I don't know how this compares to option #1.
8. I can build a structure that improves farm yield in adjacent areas, but I don't know how this compares to #7 or #1.
9. Repeat this for the economy/troop options.
You can always click on the 'I have no idea what the heck's going on' option and the AI will recommend everything you should build. It's probably not the worst thing to do but probably not the best either.
I doubt anyone's going to buy it but Nobunaga 11 is a much better game for a macro level grand strategy game. Nobunaga 12 actually looks decent instead of Nobunaga 11's ghetto graphics, but it doesn't play quite as well though it's still acceptable.
