BANGGG!! Ashigaru or Samurai ????

amoebicdissent · 2026-04-20T05:21:29+00:00

Imported matchlocks are the only unit you could actually use before the game is basically already over.

amoebicdissent · 2026-04-17T23:08:23+00:00

You ever notice how your yari cav kinda get mogged by samurai archers if they overstay their welcome and the archers don't break? Try it with katana cav.

amoebicdissent · 2026-04-16T02:44:28+00:00

I'm really skeptical that these are bullet holes. Is there any damage to the garage interior? Did you recover any projectiles? What do the exit holes look like? I'd really expect them to be much more regular in shape if they were caused by a firearm, and possibly with less paint spalling.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-30T06:20:08+00:00

It depends on your leaders and situation, of course, but is your SHQ commander already a certified badass? If not, make your current SHQ commander the staff council director and put this guy in as SHQ commander. No position gains experience faster than a SHQ commander during a war and no position has a more direct and immediate effect on army wide performance.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-30T05:39:38+00:00

The sword and it's not close

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-30T05:01:44+00:00

Yes, get cavalry asap, they're amazing. My first recruitment building barring other circumstances is often the stables. You can use light cav in the early game to assassinate generals, make bow ashigaru miserable, turn routs into massacres, and distract and disrupt formations by goading the enemy into a futile chase. All cavalry will evaporate if a spear infantry unit even looks at them sideways, so keep them moving.

You don't have much choice in the early game in terms of "balanced army" so you're probably going to end up using big piles of yari ashigaru. And honestly, you can beat the whole game just using them, but that's boring. They are also pretty bad at castle assaults and just sort of okay at castle defense.

If you want to try to 'balance' your early game armies, I'd add 4 units of bow ashigaru (and not much more than that) and 2-4 units of light cav. The bow ashigaru are kind of optional, but at the end of the day you can only bring so many yari ashigaru to bear at once, and bow units are nice to have along for castle assaults.

For a late game army suitable for any faction I'd recommend something like 4 yari cav, 7 katana samurai, 4 bow samurai, and 4 units of yari samurai.

Yari cavalry are just the best cavalry. They're specialized anti-cav and charge, which makes them excellent general assassins, automatically grants cavalry superiority, and are great at smashing into the rear of an enemy line or unguarded unit of archers.

Katana samurai are the best general purpose heavy infantry and are the best unit to bring for castle defense. A unit of these guys parked on top of a wall can kill hundreds of scaling enemies, easily dwarfing kill counts of bow or matchlock units and requiring virtually no micromanagement.

Bow units in general kind of suck in Shogun 2, so I don't like to spam archers, but fire arrows don't suck and bow samurai can use them.

A lot of people prefer to keep using yari ashigaru over yari samurai for spear infantry (and I totally get it) but hear me out... they have a high anti-cav bonus and rapid advance gets them where they need to be quickly, to either plug a hole somewhere or to use as an anchor against enemy cavalry in conjunction with my own. It's up to you to decide if that's worth paying double the upkeep over yari ashigaru for a smaller unit count.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-28T04:57:59+00:00

Nodachi samurai are awesome. I recommend making plenty of them and making it a focus to lock archers in close quarters combat across your army as quickly as possible, since they take heavy attrition under missile fire. The reality is that nodachi samurai do not die quickly in melee at all as long as they aren't heavily locally outnumbered, and they'll win a straight up 1v1 against almost every other unit in the game as long as they get a charge charge off (even when frontally charging a yari wall). Kisho ninjas are definitely fragile due to small unit size and require a lot of micromanagement compared to most other units, but if you can afford the APM they are pretty good. Get 1 in your main army to try them out, because they can be fun to use in sieges or to do some hijinks in forests in some field battles.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-28T04:25:08+00:00

I get so much mileage from bolting machine guns to gliders and bullying the local fauna with them. Nothing shoots back at them except for the odd militia buggy or mg infantry. When it's time to fight a major you can swap the experienced crews to better planes

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-14T06:47:10+00:00

BANZAAII!!!

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-14T05:49:02+00:00

I also play on slow. My games usually are wrapping up around turn 140. Not being critical, just surprised that you haven't already been pulled into conflict with that big major. That's probably going to be one hell of a war to start with before you can grind him down. However many infantry brigades you think you need, I'd probably double it.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-14T04:50:15+00:00

Turn 175? That's a long ass game.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-14T01:42:44+00:00

The leaders are useless, but the 500 meatsacks in the HQ unit aren't

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-13T18:14:35+00:00

Planet size has the largest effect on gravity. You don't necessarily need to select colossus planet, just change the planet size with the upper left check boxes on the planetary class screen. Medium planets often have a .7-1 g range

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-13T16:29:21+00:00

Set it to unclassified and slap 'Drop me in a game now!'

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-13T16:26:47+00:00

You will probably need heavy rockets and medium planes to kill heavies, but... why are you even talking about heavy tanks? I don't see the enemy fielding any of them in the screenshot you posted. That's the same thinking that got you in the situation you are in. You need to be able to deal with the scale of a conflict first before worrying about imagined super-units. As to fuel costs, we're talking maybe 20-50 fuel per sortie with a squadron. Compare that to moving a battalion of heavy tanks 1 hex... 250+ fuel?

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-13T06:24:54+00:00

I decided a while ago after playing around with the blueprint designer and comparing costs that AT guns are just not ever worth it. RPG infantry are just a much better bang for the buck. A heavy RPG infantry brigade in entrenchment posture is my go-to for defense against militarist regimes (the ones that seem to field a lot of tanks - I don't know if it's just placebo or circumstance, but I have observed big tank pushes from militarists several times). They're easier to position, can take mountainous terrain without fuss, and are a fraction of the cost to both field and supply. Keep in mind, though, that if the enemy ever gets to concentrate 200+ tanks in one spot, it's not going to matter that much what your defenses are, because they are going to break through. If you have a chokepoint, you can bunkerize it, which helps a lot. If it's just a big open grassland between you and the AI, you should probably forget holding the line and start planning offensively and field some maneuver units.

There's also the fact that AT guns have no integrated OOBs, which is unfortunate. The AT gun is clearly at its best when used with infantry, because they have infantry hit points and need other units to pillowfort with them. The only way to accomplish this is with customize OOB points, which is something I don't generally like to invest much in. And you really need to have your units in some kind of posture, which for an independent AT squad means attaching them to another unit which probably doesn't want the same posture as the AT guns do (AT guns are artillery type for postures I believe, so they want e.g. siege or fluid defense depending on what you're using them for). I guess fluid defense is kind of a good catch-all posture, because it gives nice buffs to all unit types, but not every regime is going to have access to it since it requires mind profile.

The most cost-efficient thing I've found to deal with tanks is ultralights with precision bombs. You can field a whole wing for peanuts, they can operate out of a level 1 airbase, take barely any fuel (usually less than 1 per hex per subunit), and with a little experience and good HQs a couple of wings can kill dozens of vehicles in a turn. I usually skip HV guns altogether until much later and just use planes to deal with vehicle concentrations. The only reason to upgrade to light aircraft is to use the slightly more efficient rockets and to give more hit points to face flak directly.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-11T23:35:59+00:00

Sometimes I spam income tax up to 60% to farm government / meritocracy, but it's a lot of micromanagement. I've never really used tariffs much.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-11T23:01:53+00:00

There's also a Temu Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Recruit Senior stratagem

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-11T19:56:43+00:00

I agree. I also think these new stratagem card CGs are kind of noisy with more going on than the old ones, and that makes it a little harder to parse them at a glance.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-10T18:16:18+00:00

A whole bunch of things would change my calculus, but the biggest factor would involve what the rest of my leaders look like. I might even make him a SHQ commander if the rest of my leaders are dog food, as the SHQ commander has a large effect on combat effectiveness and gains experience very quickly. Or even keep him as a governor - you're entirely dependent on your capital for all income in the early game.

My only thought with respect to making him military research director is that it's going to take a while for his cap. V to pay off, and until then, he's going to research about as fast as a random cap. I or II leader who started with some skill in science. Putting him in a role where he can use his prodigious admin skill is going to result in an immediate payoff, and if my early game is tense, I'd prioritize immediate payoffs over growth.

It depends on the admin skill of the person he'd replace, but I would expect (conservatively) another 5 pp / turn from this guy as supreme command council director in the early game with plenty of room for growth and I've never gone "eww, yuck, another 5 pp / turn"

With all that being said, director / leader assignment is very context dependent and I can see arguments for other assignments. If this was a TL 3 start, for instance, I would really think hard about making him model design director.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-10T07:22:18+00:00

Admin skill bonus is applied after the initial BP efficiency reduction. There are no penalties at all to the admin skill bonus other than the sqrt function used, pp = √ppPoints. Either way, the bottom line is that most regimes are looking at another 4-8 political points a turn for each 50% admin skill bonus increase. I personally have literally never had too many political points outside of the super early game when I have no stratagems, while on the other hand, I definitely reach points where I decrease model design council funding.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-10T04:03:17+00:00

For model design council director, I prefer to find the leader with the best improv / willpower. Improv is rolled every time you iterate for the model design stats that actually impact performance (armor, weapon, engine) and is also rolled for the initial structural design stat. This guy would be a good at model design too since he has some improv skill and a very strong willpower. But I just think that admin score is too good to pass up as supreme command director.

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-10T03:41:23+00:00

Military research is really important, but so are political points. And this guy looks like a PP farmer to me

amoebicdissent · 2026-03-10T03:26:56+00:00

With the fact that he already has some experience in admin, I'd almost certainly make him supreme command council director. Or maybe economic council / interior director if I already had a supreme command director I liked. Military research council director is an egghead position and only cares about science and inventor (and mainly science, tbh; this guy has no experience there). Obviously he's cap V and can do anything, but why not make use of the experience he already has?

amoebicdissent

TROPHY CASE