Nobunaga's Ambition: Won!

Three times I was snuffed

Two embers still burn within

One Shogun will rule 

 

1560

Tokugawa's stats, not mine

Even on the second-lowest difficulty, Tokugawa is still the one to be wary of, and yes, his stats are still a lot better than mine. Funny that his constitution seems to be the one random variable; everything else is fixed by difficulty.

I begin with familiar actions. Put everything I've got into the town. The next year, rice prices are high, and following Scribe's advice, I put my entire collections into dams, in the hopes it will bring a better rice yield.

And it is a good investment. This time, only one soldier deserts after his comrades eat everything! Next season I distribute coins to the peasants to boost wealth and loyalty, and the harvest becomes a surplus; no more desertions.

 

Now that my little province is self-sufficient, it's time to grow. The harvest can support 16 soldiers, but I'll need to pay them too; I put my gold into town and gift the rice surplus back to the peasants. War starts breaking out by 1564, and territories change hands, but I'm left alone, and the year's tax season brings in 54 ryo and 24 koku.

Let's see how I stack up against my neighbors.

 

Province	Owari #17	Iseshima #13	Mino #9	Mikawa #8
Clan	Oda	Kitabatake	Saito	Tokugawa
Age	30	23	39	22
IQ	39	78	62	120
Constitution	67	60	68	61
Ambition	59	89	89	120
Charisma	58	96	71	120
Luck	50	56	80	120
Gold	58	4	1	6
Rice	24	25	87	34
Debt	0	0	0	0
Towns	2	2	2	2
Productivity	40	20	64	35
Flood control	89	153	172	185
Peasant loyalty	127	87	67	86
Peasant wealth	146	80	90	110
Army size	9	7	12	11
Army loyalty	83	82	59	104
Training	177	75	129	120
Arms	100	87	87	60

 

I am not worried about Kitabatake at all. In fact I'm pretty sure I could march in and take their land if I didn't care about leaving Owari completely exposed. I'm not too worried about Saito either as long as I can match his army size and avoid a repeat of the last game (and I can). Tokugawa is a bit more intimidating.

I hire three soldiers, negotiate a non-aggression pact with Tokugawa, and put the rest of what I've got into cultivation, because my production stat feels a bit left behind. Rice goes to the peasants.

 

1565 

It's time to start thinking about conquest. The clans are already fighting, and some players have been eliminated. I assemble a strategic map, annotated with the controlling clans and their total army sizes.

Takeda is looking a bit intimidating, and makes Saito a risky take, but those 26 armies are spread between two provinces.

My first target will be Saito. I will want to have at least 26 armies to take it with, and at least 10 to leave behind. I'm going to need more money, and thankfully, I'm rich in rice and the merchant is here. Rice becomes gold, gold becomes soldiers, gold goes into more cultivation... and a typhoon immediately wrecks whatever good that did. No matter, I invade Mino to the north, and win very easily.

1566 

While I was fighting, Takeda was wiped out! And most of the regions to the east have strengthened. Imagawa is looking very dangerous. Tokugawa is not.

My plan will be to continue expanding north, split Japan in half, and prey on my neighbors to the west first. Owari is not vulnerable. Mino is. I move there, leaving a vassal in charge of Owari, and propose a non-aggression pact with Imagawa. With me goes Owari's entire rice surplus, which I exchange for gold and dump into the town center for more gold.

A few more turns of building up these provinces, and the map now looks like this.

 

1569 

Slight change of plans - I realize that if I invade Asakura from Mino, this will leave Mino vulnerable to its neighbors. But if I expand westward from Owari, I can fully commit; Owari has no hostile neighbors except Tsutsui. Iseshima #13 falls very easily indeed, and then we go onward to Iga #12 and Yamato #10, crippling the clan.

Sheer numbers, not skill, carry me to easy victory.

 

I'd show screenshots but it's just not all that interesting; I beat them with sheer numbers, not skill.

 

1572

Asakura have gotten quite strong in their sequestered, not-so-little province! I consider them my only threat right now, and focus on building up my territories and sending troops and rice to Mino #9 so that I can invade, while making sure that Tsutsui and Azai can't hurt me.

In 1573, Azai attacks me at Iga #12, and they're able to inflict some major damage on the troops despite my best efforts to match them for army size and skill, but I hold out in the relative safety of my castle as they starve to death outside.

Omi #11 is mine, and Asakura's army size in Echizenwakasa #5 mysteriously shrank from 1005 to 62, so I march in and take it.

 

1574

Tsutsui is all that remains to be conquered in the west, and I do with the greatest of ease.

They basically commit seppuku on our spears.

 

I start concentrating my wealth and soldiers east to Mino #9 and begin chipping away at the Honganji empire - to my surprise, the whole place falls in one stroke, and we push on to take Kaishinano #16 from Imagawa by the end of the year.

 

1575 

Hojo is having trouble feeding all of those soldiers! No problem; I can feed what's left of them. I do that, and win the game by summer. I honor my non-aggression pact with Tokugawa Ieyasu and kill him last.

 

GAB rating: Average. Nobunaga's Ambition was a tolerable experience once I survived long enough to defend myself, but not an especially interesting one. I can't say much that wasn't already said by Scribe; there isn't anything quite like this in 1983, and later incarnations definitely influenced the Total War series, but here, the various systems just aren't deep enough to interact in non-trivial ways. War is a major weak point; there is no tactic for dealing with a +10 strength doom stack other than digging in and hoping your provisions outlast his, and otherwise, you can win pretty much any encounter by holding out in advantageous terrain or by swarming the lord's position. The economic layer is where games are won and lost, and it seems to me that there is definitely an optimal way to play it, which I intend to explore in my next (and final) post on the subject.

I see a lot of similarities to Hamurabi and Santa Paravia, and the more I think about it, the more sure I become that Hamurabi, at least, must have been familiar to designer Yoichi Erikawa. The turn-based kingdom management, the simple resource management model, fluctuating rates of goods, and random disasters are all here and work so similarly that it doesn't seem like a coincidence. I can't find any record that David Ahl's seminal BASIC compilation was available in Japan at this time, but as I understand it, magazines like ASCII, which regularly printed type-in programs, were the main resource for computer hobbyists at the time, and it seems only natural that Hamurabi would have reached an audience this way. Somebody tell me if this sounds crazy, especially if you're more knowledgeable on this subject than I am!

Game 470: Nobunaga's Ambition

I'm still playing catchup with Wargaming Scribe - see his AAR/review.

Nobunaga's Ambition was the obvious next choice of the Koei ancestors. Between it and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you've basically got half their library right there.

Thematically, this one's almost a sequel to Battle of Kawanakajima, with the same setting and both clans of that game accounted for. But Nobunaga has more, you could say, ambition. Kawanakajima simulated a battle. This time we're going for Sengoku-era unification.

 

Historically, Oda Nobunaga did not live to see his dream fulfilled. And that's been my experience too; as of this writing, I have yet to survive a game longer than a few years! Poor Nobunaga is weaker than his neighbors, diplomatic options are limited, building up your military strength takes money, money takes time, and pitiless daimyo have a taste for weak neighbors with money.

For this initial post, I'm going to make five attempts, starting at the maximal difficulty, and decreasing on each failure. There will be no savescumming, and no privileged knowledge of the game's workings apart from the things I've already learned.

Interestingly, the game features a two player mode, but I'm not going to subject anyone else to it. 

Attempt #1: Difficulty 5 

Like Kawanakajima, this early BASIC Koei title was never officially released in English, though its sequel was one of the first that was. Unlike Kawanakajima, this was never unofficially released in English either. But Google's translation ability is much more powerful now, and at this point I basically understand what's going on enough to not need it.

It's the spring of 1560. Central Japan, which is as far as Nobunaga's ambition goes, consists of 17 provinces, each ruled by one of 17 clans. There won't be 17 clans for long! But for now, I'm concerned only with three; #17, Owari, is ruled by the Oda clan. #13 to my west is Iseshima, ruled by Kitabatake, whose leader is just a kid. To the north, #9, Mino, ruled by Saito. And to the east, #8, Mikawa, ruled by Tokugawa, whose stats are formidable.

My own stats are as follows:

Age: 26

IQ: 80

Constitution: 52

Ambition: 92

Charisma: 39

Luck: 58

 

I have no idea what any of that actually means! But next, in yellow/gold, we have wealth-related stats:

Gold: 10

Rice: 10

Debt: 0

Towns: 1

 

These are straightforward, although the "towns" stat is misleading. We don't care about the number of towns; we care how the town's commercial value, and that stat isn't shown on this screen.

 

In cyan, province stats - I'm taking these from the 1986 edition rather than Google's translation of the 1983:

Productivity: 40

Flood control: 48

Peasant loyalty: 62

Peasant wealth: 49 

 

All of these stats contribute to how much rice you harvest. Raising any of them is expensive!

 

Lastly, red numbers are military stats:

Army size: 10

Army loyalty: 52

Training: 56

Arms: 100

 

We are small, but well armed.

 

Each year lasts four rounds corresponding to the seasons, but autumn is the most important. Taxes are collected, rations and pay are given to your soldiers, debts are collected, and things generally get reset. You have fifteen commands, most of which dedicate the season to the action:

1. Move - Transfer soldiers and/or yourself to a neighboring fiefdom.
2. Attack - Invade a neighboring province.
3. Tax - Change the tax rate. This affects rice harvest, not cash collections, and also affects peasant loyalty and wealth.
4. Send - Transport gold or rice to a neighboring fiefdom.
5. Dam - Spend gold to increase the province's flood control level.
6. Pact - Spend 10 gold to ask another Daimyo not to attack you.
7. Cultivate - Spend gold to increase the province's productivity.
8. Hire soldiers - Spend gold to increase your army size.
9. Trade - Not always available, but if the merchant is in town, you can purchase/sell rice, buy arms, or borrow gold.
10. Hire ninjas - Spend gold to destabilize another province, lowering their peasant and soldier morale and loyalty.
11. Train - Costs nothing, increases soldier training.
12. Status - View the stats of any province/daimyo. Does not cost you the turn.
13. Develop town - Spend gold to increase the town value, which determines annual cash collections.
14. Give - Offer gold or rice to your soldiers or peasants, increasing their loyalty/wealth.
15. Pass. Why do this when you can train? 

So, right away we have a problem. The army eats a lot of rice. The land does not grow a lot of rice. Improving the land costs a lot of gold. We don't have a lot of gold. We have two turns until tax season - I use them to improve the town value and land productivity, 50/50.

Autumn 1560

Tax time, and the soldiers have eaten my entire rice reserve. The harvest only yielded 3 koku - not nearly enough to feed them next year! I train and wait for rice prices, currently at 3.6/koku to drop a bit, but they do not, and I spend my tax collections on cultivation.

Autumn 1561 - invaded!

I'm all out of food, some of the troops deserted, and Tokugawa attacks with an army nearly three times larger than my own.

Holy moly. Look at that kid's stats!

Instant game over.

 

Attempt #2: Difficulty 4

Never mind my stats, let's look at Tokugawa's.

 

He's down about 10 points across the board compared to the last run, but still beats me soundly in every category, and I'm still in big trouble if he gains soldiers while I lose them, which is what I can expect. And my land stats are a bit worse than before!

This time I put all of my money into the town, and am immediately hit by a typhoon that brings my rice production down to a pathetic 9 points. In the fall, the soldiers eat all the rice again, and the peasants produce none at all, but hey, I collected more taxes! Eight gold instead of seven. And rice is actually cheap, so I buy as much as I can afford; 4 koku.

Experience has taught me to never borrow. The interest is absolutely insane, and is collected on the next tax season. A rate of 1.2 means that for each coin borrowed, you're paying 2.2 in the fall, and this is low! Your income will be nullified next year and you'll just be broke again. Also, you can only do one merchant transaction per turn, and he might not even be around next turn to sell you anything.

I'm left with one coin which I give to the peasants, but this doesn't help. The next tax season brings no harvest, and half my soldiers desert, but gold income is 27, so I buy some surprisingly cheap rice considering the region just had a typhoon. And Tokugawa attacks before I can hire more soldiers.

Yeah... this ain't good. His army is twice as big as mine, and all of his stats are way higher. I already know this battle is lost, but let me explain what's going on.

My units are white, his are yellow. Unit ranks are the numbers on the right of the hex, with #1 representing the daimyo himself, and unit strength is the number on the bottom. Nobunaga is the white #1 hex in the northwest inside a castle hex, surrounded by three allies and two enemies. Unfortunately, the enemies' unit strengths are twice what mine are.

Nobunaga hides within the castle's defensive bonus, his men attack to absolutely no avail, and by turn 2 the enemy breaches the castle walls. On turn 4 they kill me.

 

Attempt #3: Difficulty 3

I'm attacked before I even get a chance to do anything, but this time it's Saito. And they only slightly outnumber me. Unfortunately, their stats are better, and "Yoshi" is an unstoppable 30-point doom stack. I can handle the minions okay, but attacking him would be foolish - so I try to delay.

My tactic of blocking the sole entry point does indeed delay, but not long enough.

Game over.

 

To be continued!