This weekend I beat Nobunaga’s Ambition (SNES) for the first time in probably a decade. I beat ‘Battle for the East’ (the only scenario I’ve beat) with Yoshitsuna. It took most of my Friday evening and Saturday day.
Yoshitsuna starts off in bad shape, and always gets attacked right away, but I like him in part because he starts with only one adjacent territory. I died right away three times with him Friday, but that’s pretty rare. The fourth time, and time I won, started like most times, where I survive the first battle and actually gain troops. I then gave to my soldiers and peasants to ensure they wouldn’t revolt, and raised taxes to 55%, and the next fall began working on my town and training, and was on my way.
By the time I had built up my territory, adjacent territories were in pretty good shape, many with large armies. There were often periods of stasis where no one would attack because everyone had so large armies. As I progressed in expansion, the smallest territories remaining went from 100 some to 200 some and eventually worked their way up to 400-500.
I took over one territory at a time. I usually built up large enough numbers to send in well above their numbers while still leaving enough behind to be near what the neighbors had. By the end, when I had many territories, I was able to quickly build up a large army in the territory I wanted to attack from, sometimes over 1000, and swoop in. I largely gave up on developing domestically, in part because the territories were already built up in that respect when I took them, and focused on quick military building.
I made some blunders in some of my attacks and defenses. Sometimes I tried to optimize for the maximum number of remaining troops but failed to pay attention to days or rice. I even lost some battles where I had well above the enemy troop count due to running out of time or rice, or once I even used my control unit to attack theirs but lost numbers faster than expected and was killed even with large numbers in other units rushing in that could’ve crushed their control unit quickly. I learned from these blunders, though.
I think with my experience I will be able to reproduce a win and do it faster next time.