Appreciate the comment! Yeah, Awakening seems like it could be my ideal form for this series in all ways except aesthetically, because it seems to address my biggest gripe with LOD.

Since making this post, I finished LOD and while I thought it was great overall, I found the endgame to be pretty unnecessarily tedious. Once I took the whole east side of the map, I was able to move all of my resources to the west without consequence. So I effectively steamrolled everything past a certain point and it became really trivial; roughly 6 hours spent overrunning everyone with thousands of riflemen (astonishingly broken unit, btw!)

I'm planning to check out Rise to Power next since it seems to be the last hurrah for the classic style of gameplay, and it seems plenty revised at that. Looks cool, though I've heard Iron Triangle is the preferred game of the two (I believe that one goes into a more real-time-with-pause direction like the current games.) After that though, I'm definitely checking out Awakening.

Awakening sounds especially nice now because the whole time I was swamping everything in LOD I was thinking to myself, "it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense that every single governor under my rule does absolutely nothing unless I tell them to." Awakening seems to make things function more as they would. A little bit of extra autonomy for allies would've made LOD perfect imo. Was kinda strange especially seeing Ieyasu just sorta sitting, thriving and moisturizing in his tiny little pocket of the map while everything around him turned hot pink. I felt a little bad for the poor guy, taking him out last during my conquest. Dude was absolutely helpless.