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| Rolling a super-Nobunaga. |
For this last post, I'm going to try to tackle the hardest difficulty of Nobunaga's Ambition, but I won't play fair. I have save states. I have the source code. And I'm going to do my best to explain how things work. And oh, boy, is it kind of insane!
First of all, let's look at the stats. Everyone's got them, but on anything but the lowest difficulty, pretty much everyone gets better stats than you, especially Tokugawa. So I am savescumming to ensure I get something decent.
I have an IQ of 108 (this might not sound amazing but my last Nobunaga was basically an inbred imbecile), constitution of 98, ambition of 110, charisma of 100, and luck of 93. What does it all mean?
Not much! These stats, as it turns out, are simple combat modifiers, and there is zero distinction between the first four. I'll get into the specifics later, but at a glance, just average them, compare them to the average of the other guy, and that shows you how much of an advantage/disadvantage you are, all other things being equal. Tokugawa, at the highest difficulty, easily has an average of 140 across these stats, so I would need 140% the number of troops in order to match his power. Either that or beat him in other stats.
Luck applies a small combat bonus which does not scale with your army size/morale/training. It's basically inconsequential unless you're very evenly matched otherwise. Even then it's probably inconsequential because combat rolls are a factor, and those do scale with your other stats.
One other factor here is that constitution increases in the spring, but decreases during random plagues. Apart from that, your stats are set.
1560
A plague has hit. Every spring, there is a 30% chance of typhoons, and a 7% chance of plagues (but no chance of both). Either event affects the region as a whole, but not every province; in the event of a plague, each province has a 25% chance of being affected, and mine was. This reduces your rice production to 40%-90% of its previous value, and your army size by the same value.
Not a great start, but I have math on my side.
[Production] * [Flood control]/100 * [Peasant loyalty]/100 * [Peasant wealth]/100 * [Tax rate]/100
This maximizes at 1000. Not important right now, but it will be!
My values right now are the cyan numbers - 24, 45, 49, and 67. At a base tax rate of 50, I'd get one lousy koku this autumn, and I'm going to need nine to sustain the army as it is, let alone grow it!
At first glance, you might think the best way to get these numbers up is to increase the lowest stat, which is production. This is wrong for a simple reason; production is by far the most expensive stat to raise! One gold raises it one point, while flood control goes up by five points per piece, and also has the benefit of mitigating typhoon damage.
Even better than that, gifts to your people increase both loyalty and wealth by 100/[Production] per coin/koku, or 4.2 each.
But if you really want to get those numbers up, you gotta do it the same way as the 1%. Abuse the tax code!
50 - [new tax rate]See how this might be abused? It's not diffing the old rate and the new. It's diffing the old rate and the baseline of 50! Set it to the minimum of 1, and you increase both numbers by 49. You can do that repeatedly. Then you can set it right back without affecting them at all!
So that's what I do. In the spring, I lower the tax rate to 1, and in summer, I raise it right back to 50 in time for the harvest, which produces 6 koku rather than the 5 I'd get from gifting my gold. But that's just the beginning. Over the next three seasons, I set the tax rate to 1 three times, which does nothing but make the peasants happier and richer, and in the summer, just before harvest, I set it to 100 which makes them a little sadder and poorer. This gives me a harvest of 45 koku, a decent surplus of 36.
1561
I'm still lagging behind Tokugawa, and at this point investing in flood control would be more valuable than tax abuse. So I do both. Provincial wars start to heat up, but I'm left alone for now. The harvest next autumn is 263 koku, which way outpaces Tokugawa, though his wealth and martial growth is starting to be worrisome.
1562
I'm rice rich, but gold poor. Too bad the merchant isn't here right now. I spent what little I have on troops, train a bit, and Kitabatake attacks with a slightly superior force.
I said I'd explain how combat works, and a roughly even battle is the most interesting one, so this is the ideal place for it.
The single most important stat here is each unit's strength, a number at the bottom of the hex. These are distributed in proportion to the overall army size, always in multiples of ten, and priority given to the highest rank. My army size is 12, so my hex strengths are 30+30+20+20+20. His is 13, so they are 30+30+30+20+20.
[Unit strength] * ([Stat bonus] + [terrain bonus]) * [Random factor] * [Lord bonus] + [Luck bonus]The stat bonus is the sum of seven stats, divided by 700. IQ, constitution, ambition, charisma, army loyalty, army training, and weapons. His bonus will be 1.21, mine will be 0.98.
The terrain bonus applies a flat bonus from 0-2 based on the terrain the unit is in. 0 for plains, 1 for forests, 1.5 for forts, and 2 for castles. As my strongest units are in a castle and fort, respectively, I'm actually in a pretty good position. And I believe the bonus applies even if you are attacking from a fortified position.
The random factor is a multiplier from 0.6 to 1.6.
The lord bonus is a flat multiplier of 2 if the clan lord is personally leading the fight. 1 otherwise. When you attack, you can decide to have Nobunaga lead or not, but if your #1 unit is lost, then it's game over. When you are attacked, this depends on whether the province attacked is where Nobunaga currently is or not.
Finally, the luck bonus is your luck stat divided by 50.
30 * 2.98 * [Random factor] * 2 + 1.86 = 109-28820 * 1.21 * [Random factor] * 2 + 1.86 = 31-79 Whoever's is higher does damage, unless the difference is less than 10. Mine is guaranteed to be bigger, so I will do damage, and this will simply be the difference divided by 10.
An average random factor would mean 13 points. This is exactly how much damage I do.
So, this is really my #1 and #2 units' fight, and the best thing they can do is not move from their fortifications. #3 and #5 are stuck on the left side and won't be able to do much but finish off wounded units. #4 is stuck on the right side with all of Kitabatake's stronger units and won't be able to hurt them much even from the advantage of cover in the woods.
I take a few losses but I win and take his province. Unfortunately, Saito immediately invades and takes it from me. But then he immediately invades Owari and loses! Both provinces are mine! But then Tsutsui invades Iseshima, which I cannot possibly defend, and forces me to retreat.
1563
After that tumultuous winter, I'm still alive, but the weakest clan on the map. Gotta arm in a hurry! Good news, though - the merchants are here, and I have over 300 koku stocked in Owari. And prices are decent! I sell it all, and with the cash, hire 234 soldiers; just enough that I will have money left to pay them - the harvest will bring enough to feed them. From Mino #9, I transport the entirety of its wealth back to Owari; I cannot defend two provinces at this time. Sure enough, Mino is attacked and taken this season by the Tsutsui clan. But the rice arrives in Owari, which I sell and use to cultivate the land, maxing out the rice harvest.
The remaining money, and I will definitely want more of it, goes into the town itself. The formula here is simple; each coin you invest in the town improves the town value by one point. And each autumn you collect cash revenue equal to your town's value multiplied by a random value between 0.5 and 1.5. It's a fast return on your investment, but that doesn't do you much good if you get invaded before you can spend it. But if I put in my entire savings of 523, the worst I can collect from that is 261, which will still pay the soldiers.
1564
Oh, boy. Miyoshi and Asakura are quickly unifying! And I'm looking like I might be Miyoshi's next territory. But Owari is an economic powerhouse that just withstood a plague and collected 422 ryo and produced 868 koku in one year. Imagine what I could do in another!
I'm not going to invade anyone yet, though - I don't feel confident enough I could conquer a province and then defend it and Owari.
I invest in more flood control, sell the excess rice when the merchants come, and dump the gold right back into the town - all 1646 of it. The rest of the year is peaceful.
1565
It's time to start thinking about invasions. Tempting as it might be to eliminate Tokugawa, any force I might send his way either leaves Owari inadequately defended from Miyoshi, or is itself inadequately large to defend itself from, well, everyone. Besides, my army could stand some improvement before I go all-in. I buy weapons; 9000 points worth of them (which is all I am allowed), give all of my rice to the army for a nice loyalty boost, and spend the rest of my cash on more soldiers.
Only then do I invade, and I target Mino #9 to the north, bringing 247 well-armed soldiers to engage the 109 stationed there. And the fight is over before I can even issue an order.
1566
Well, crap. I expected Mino to fall easily, but I didn't expect this would get me the whole Miyoshi territory!
While optimizing the newly conquered realms, I continue to push into Hida #6 from Mino. They won't have the same weapons advantage that they had coming from Owari, but they won't need it; my force outnumbers them 3:1. This converts the entire Asakura territory to me. With them out of my way, Owari can, quite safely, invade Tokugawa's realm with their entire army. Sayonara, old friend.
And honestly, the rest of the game just isn't all that interesting to write about. So I won't. I isolate the rest of my rivals and conquer them one-by-one with overwhelming invasion forces by the end of the year.
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| The last, hilariously stacked battle against Uesugi in their little alcove. |
Some additional notes:
A non-aggression pact costs both lords 10 gold and sets a diplomatic relations value to 70. It will always be accepted as long as this value is not negative, but it does not guarantee non-aggression! Essentially, it means that if the lord decides to attack you, there's a 70% chance of changing his mind. This value trends 10 points toward zero every spring, and I'm not sure what makes it go into negative.
Typhoons, like plagues, have a 25% chance of affecting each province on the map. The effect is to reduce productivity to [Flood Control]/220 of its original value. It also reduces peasant wealth by 1-5 points.
The AI has a routine to evaluate potential invasion targets, and part of it is estimating the regional strength. If a region has more rice than soldiers, then it evaluates the strength as [Soldiers]². Otherwise, it is evaluated as [Soldiers]*[Rice]. This is doubled if the lord is present. They tend to attack weak provinces if they have a stronger adjacent province.
Ninjas will do damage to a target provinces' army loyalty, training, peasant loyalty, and wealth. The amount decreased is five points per ninja.
