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 east, 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!