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[Stush]

Mouri is pretty badass, and I liked some of the commanders you get from beating them.

Do you think you could hold off mouri? It'd sort of suck if having an open border with him made you spend all your time defending and unable to conquer any more of the other lands, Maybe you should clear out Asai-Asakura first.

[Doom]

Shucks, who are we to turn down a choice like Beautiful Daughter? We end turn 21.

Seems the Tenshi Sect noticed we're giving them a hard time.






This is the seventh Rance game, so there's a bit of history that follows Rance around. He knows this guy(vaguely) and it's fan knowledge that Genri is a Monk With A Huge Member. I'm sure we can guess how this was discovered. Genri will head back to Seigan with our default "No" answer.

Turn 22 starts and I am a man of the people, so I declare war on them. We send Old Man Asakura a diplomatic letter.




It's war! I'll finish my turn by attacking them.






Asai-Asakura is an average strength nation so they aren't going to be using 3 unit compositions of double-digit losers like Hara or Ashikaga. They also aren't too embarrassingly biased towards a particular unit type like Miko Nation, so their comp here could get off a strong Alpha and has a Foot Soldier to guard their Tactician. But we burst them down anyway with our Main Character Squad.

Mages are much like Archers. They can attack anyone on the field from the back row, don't counter-attack if melee'd and have paper-thin defenses. Their offense is above average and I'm pleased to see that Intelligence-based damage uses an enemy's Intelligence-based Defense instead of any actual Defense or Physical Bonus they had, making Rizna a unit that can punch through the vast majority of enemies with 100% damage. Her passive Absolute Spell Guard makes her immune to the magical attacks of Diviners and other Mages.

Turn 22 ends with 1/3 of Asakura land!

[Doom]

Ending my turn with a foot in Asakura land, a mysterious stranger appears before their Lord with an offer. It ain't easy having a beautiful daughter.







Reaching a secret agreement, Dasan summons an infinite horde of Pandas! They are actually not very powerful...




Maeda does nothing but build his Guard Meter and since the three in the back can't melee, the two in the front almost kill themselves off counter-attack damage alone. But the Horde is infinite(Dasan immediately redoes the same attack) and you have no choice but to eat a single loss.



Asakura's regular army attacks twice and I only have four units to send in an unflattering composition against the one. Ninjas can block the front row in a pinch and this only works because we burst down their archer, their shitty Warrior had a single Action Flag, and their strong Foot Soldier unit just builds guard the whole match. Out of units, we give them 1/3 of the Oil Fields which is no big deal as we'll immediately reclaim it when we conquer the Asakura province.

[Doom]

Promise fulfilled, Dasan returns to the Asakura Castle and is turned away again. Yuki follows him again.




Double-dared, Yuki agrees to become his wife.

We witness the truth of Dasan's mask...




Yuki's horror bugs Dasan and he will stop helping Asakura out, so the Panda loss is a one-time thing.

Back at the Oda House, we beautifully bump into the huge guy with the huge ear-lobes and Rance hangs a lamp-shade on it.





Seems Nobunaga is building a private army.

[Doom]

Asakura is back to 3/3, so let's attack twice and be prepared to defend once.






Offense on a budget, we have Maeda stack Guard so he intercepts over half of the enemy Archer attacks, blast through their front line and carve up the Archers before we run out of moves, leaving them to plink away at us ineffectively. Morale victory!




Yuki begs Dasan to fight, but he sends her away again.





I save Katsuie for defense and realize my army composition blows! I only have two Foot Soldiers! I'm risking Suzume's death here, but it pays off. Yoshikage himself is showing up in combat and is an above-average Monk unit with a high stack, but he often shows up in the reserved Monk position of the back-row as a Guard Cancel bot. With his Stack and stats he could serve better in the front dealing damage, although Monks are naturally slow and he probably wouldn't get many Alphas off before we weakened him.



Still keeping her meetings with Dasan a secret, Yoshikaga and Yuki simply assume that Oda will stop attacking or fall over and die because they're so evil. Yoshikage worries and considers abandoning the war if Yuki's safety can be guaranteed.

[Doom]

Asakura want their land back and attack. My last four guys head into battle, with Katsuie daring them to hit him. Check out how many buffs two Tacticians start us off with!





Come at us, bro!



Fuck, they did! That's right, average or better nations can attack more than once between turns. The strongest nations can attack up to five times.

We get a cutscene at the Asakura Castle, but it's not really related to it. These two show up randomly after Turn 20 to serve one of the people you happen to be at war with.



Ogawa Kentarou is an unlucky dork who is a talented swordsman. He tries his best.



Raisui Miki is his friend and traveling companion.




Promoted to Commander, Kentarou will randomly show up in Asakura's army. He'll go mercenary once I crush them.

Suddenly, Nobunaga.






BIRDS FLY, FISH SWIM, GRASS GROWS AND BROTHER, I SET MONKS ON FIRE!

Damnit, Nobunaga. The Tenshi Sect has small land(two provinces with 3 and 2 territories respectively) but they're incredibly annoying. Every territory you own gets a new command to Suppress mounting tensions before a riot breaks out, showing progression towards it. It raises a random amount each turn between 1-20% roughly, so at 80% you can consider wasting an Action Fan to reset it to 0... and it's a fan per province! If you let a Riot start, you can send troops to suppress it. I decided to save and waste a bunch of turns waiting for a riot to break out. It a very easy fight against Peasant troops, so as long as you don't Exhaust all your troops I wouldn't waste the fans.

You do need to end war with Tenshi Sect and keep a lid on any other Houses you're fighting with quickly, before things get out of hand.

[Doom]

Negotiating a surrender with Asakura is another super disappointing end. Can't levy a vassal, can't bang Yuki, can't capture Yoshikage, can't hear that awesome music. We sure as Hell ain't gonna do that! Entering Turn 24, we're going to do another 1-2 Punch Offense and defend with the left-overs if Tenshi attacks. You can see how if I was at war with more than two Houses right now, I'd be losing land left and right with my current army size.

Two attacks will capture Asakura House! ... I reload three times to stop Kenshin from showing up and swatting me with a newspaper.




Yoink. You know what's next.

Advance On (v2)







I have to retry this battle ten times. Asakura has an incredibly powerful defensive set-up here. He always spawns with two Foot Soldiers, a strong Tactician to spread 6 buffs around, an Archer, a Musket unit and Yoshikage himself in the front for once, to properly punch me in my impudent face. His Foot Soldiers range from 500 to 900 Stack and build Guard frequently. Yoshikage can either Alpha you freely or remove your own Guard. I annihilated that Archer unit earlier so he starts with half HP each time, but Yoshikage seems to spare no expense between turns in healing his own unit. The Musket unit is a red herring...

Muskets are front-line only, or have to be in the front row like a melee unit. They usually only have a single action flag, cannot counter-attack and have terrible defenses like an Archer or Ninja unit. To make up for all of this, their Offensive capabilities are out-standing. A Musket unit that fires on an Unguarded unit with less Stack will easily one-shot the entire unit! If we were using Muskets, a Musket with 2 Foot Soldiers or 2 Muskets with 1 Foot Soldier would be good front rows. I'm personally not a fan of them as they require baby-sitting to be used, are useless after the initial burst and are insanely expensive to increase Stack size, making it costly to actually have Musket units that one-shot. But they're an interesting consideration as a single unit investment for offense, and they're an exciting new threat in turn order. Having quick units that can whittle a Musket unit down to half HP before it fires is essential.

The 1400(!) strong Heirloom Musket unit here is a trap. If you clear Asakura's very defensive front row, they'll oblige you with a nearly guaranteed one-shot.




Experimenting with 40% worth of Miko Storms and a few failed attempts to get our own tacticians to toss us buffs, we're able to get a good turn order and whittle down a lot of Morale with Mikos and a few Shuriken. A great trick I use this battle is that when fighting two Foot Soldier units with 100% or more Guard Meter, I attack the one I don't want to damage. The other one will always intercept! Or, if you have a 900/900 120% and a 300/650 100%, you attack the first guy. The second guy has a 100% chance to intercept and you're trying to finish him off. If you wanted to attack the 900/900 guy to dent his stack in case he goes on the offense, target the second guy. Guard Meter percentages don't apply to intercepting attacks meant for yourself, only allies.

Using my clever, clever brain to whittle down one of the Guard units and beating the other down to 50% Guard, I unleash a lucky Rance Attack on Yoshikage and claim a hard-fought Morale victory.

[Doom]

We storm into the Asakura castle!








GAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! GAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!




Satisfaction 49! 50 is an important Satisfaction bonus so I'll do something about tagging that last point next turn. I'll also recruit Yoshikage. Somehow, despite what I can only assume is anger so fierce it has turned his jail cell into a sauna. Yoshikage has above-average stats and he starts off with an improved Monk Self-Heal, which will easily compensate him half of his HP in a single use! He'll be my first and probably only Monk unit. Check out the 8 Negotiate... dude really tried to do the whole "unification through Diplomacy" thing, eh?

[François]

You know, I really dig a pacifist point of view, but at that point, turtling up and waiting until this whole "warring states era" fad blew over was pretty much asking to get your shit kicked in by any number of straight-up ruthless military geniuses with unification ambitions, especially if that meant they could take you over more easily than they would any of their actual warlike rivals. Had I been in Yoshikage's shoes (and with the benefit of foreknowledge of course) I might have just submitted my domain to, say, Takeda (at least someone with no overt interest in boning my daughter against her will), and tried to work for peaceful solutions behind the scenes to minimize the carnage where I could. I guess it's a question of whether one values pride over principles. Though that's easy for me to say, I suppose.

Say, if you NG+ run the Asai-Asakura yourself, do you know if there any actual way to win through diplomacy or do you have to basically discard their ideals to have any chance at all?

[Doom]

Say, if you NG+ run the Asai-Asakura yourself, do you know if there any actual way to win through diplomacy or do you have to basically discard their ideals to have any chance at all?

NG+ is always done from Oda/Rance's viewpoint. The other option is the stand-alone Strategy Game element, which removes 90% of plot/dialogue interactions and just plays as straight-forward "Try To Conquer Japan." Yoshikage has a few unique bonuses(as every house does), but yes, you have to man up and conquer Japan by force.

Moving on and ending my turn...

Tenshi Sect is mad!




What do Blind Girls have to do with anything? We still don't know yet!




Yuki hides out in the Texas countryside. I think if I Character Clear Yoshikage, I can find her.



A Rance moment is interrupted by the announcement that 20% of my men have deserted. This has no actual effect on my HP, Max HP or National Power so I don't care. I use my first Fan to ask Zeth for their second unit with my 40 Satisfaction bonus and then...

I need 50 Satisfaction! I head over to Miko Institute land and click on a unique "Visit Miko Mansion with Sill" option.




Another turn over. Tenshi Sect attacks, but they're push-overs. The only reason they are an average threat is that they attack by a plot mandate and that can bite you in the ass if you're occupied in other wars, their Riots are irritating and require Fans or Commanders to handle, and they take awhile to completely conquer. Their unit comps tend to be jokes because as an Army of the People, they use a lot of...

Peasants suck. They tend to have really high Stack because there is a lot of them, but with terrible stats they take ridiculous amounts of damage, are so slow they tend to only attack once, and deal such horrible damage that they usually take more Counter-Attack damage than their original melee dealt! You can't recruit any and no tears are shed over it.





New assassins, one of them has a name and a portrait but a generic sprite, nothing to see here. A second attack from Tenshi Sect is repelled easily since I didn't really do anything last turn and have plenty of Commanders sitting around waiting to set Monks on fire.

[Doom]

A Tenshi Sect moment with Miss Kojika.






Stay strong, Miss Kojika!

Rance and Kou state the obvious.




Satisfaction Bonus 50 presents an option that we must take. In fact, I hear that if you skip it, it won't show up again at 60... so we grab another Action Fan! We can now do three things per turn for the rest of the game, though we don't get the extra action this time.

[Doom]

It's a free action to recruit from Prison, so let's talk Yoshikage into serving Rance. Should be a snap.








3G with the all-star performance!

Last Fan for the turn, let's turn Isoroku's 7/7 Affection into a unit bonus.






Rance convinces Isoroku to aim higher... so he can buy time to seduce her. And Isoroku's Affection gauge levels up so we can improve her abilities or teach her new ones. We change her default Archer Attack to Yanmato Sweeping Fire, an Isoroku only move! It functions like Chun Chun Shuriken: she attacks two units in a horizontal row for 90% damage, ignores Guarding Foot Soldiers and is all around really useful for pinging multiple targets and getting around defenses! With Suzume and Isoroku in the same army, you can Alpha two units at once and blow away vulnerable Tacticians, Archers, Diviners or Mikos. Really useful! Isoroku does Suzume one better and Sweeping Fire only costs 1 Action Flag to use.

Turn 26 ends.

[Doom]

Nobody attacks us, but we get more cutscenes.




Kojika tries to appeal to Rance and fails. Stay strong, Miss Kojika!










Rance and Sill meet Kentarou and Miki, Kentarou identifies himself as an enemy, Rance doesn't give a shit. We pay for their meal and as they leave, Chaos is like WOAHHH, THE DEMON KIIIING?????? You know, just walking around Japan as a goofy young couple, I guess.

[Doom]

We've been slowly building Rance's Max HP to 500, but we've also tossed Suzume a hefty investment to break 300 and we toss a little gold to Isoroku to do the same. Turn 27 starts with a need to end the Tenshi Sect war! Let's attack! ... Reload 4 times, God Damn Kenshin. They attacked me first! ... Justifiably!





An easy morale victory. One great tactic against enemy Monks is to have a Foot Soldier stack his Guard anyway: the enemy AI favors removing tactical buffs heavily and will waste their opportunities to Alpha you with a full HP Monk unit to remove 80% Guard from Maeda with the first available Monk unit, instead of waiting to do it with that Monk trapped in the back. Having Isoroku pop 100 Monks and 150 Peasants a turn inflates my Morale meter like no tomorrow, and Yoshikage's great stats and Maeda's occasional Guards make it easy for us to tear through the terrible Tenshi Sect army.

We get a Defense Textbook as random loot and bump Rance from 5 to 6 Defense. He's almost Textbook 1 capped!

Another attack!




Look at all of these terrible meat-wall units.



Check out this Peasant hitting Rance for maybe 100 damage while taking 300-400 itself. Cripes.



After pounding Tenshi's army, I seize half of their land and claim their first province to do some further pounding. With one fan left, I impose a levy over the former Tenshi land and grab another Defense Textbook. Turn 27 ends.




Disturbed by my progress, Seigan himself will begin entering battles.

[Doom]

Miki and Kentarou join Tokugawa's House. I hope they like tempura!



Tenshi Sect attacks with a peasant heavy force. I use my two Miko Storms and you can practically hear the slide whistle as I deal percentage damage to Stacks 1200 strong and my Morale soars.







Rengoku attacks Seigan, but withdraws! He seems to be more than mortal.



Woah, what the? Assuming a false name and becoming the mistress of a noble, Yuki wasn't this proactive in my first playthrough so I have a feeling this may be a second playthrough thing. Or extraordinarily bad luck! I am now at war with Uesugi!



A riot breaks out, but I forgot to keep somebody unexhausted. The Rioters... remove one National power from my cap. Truly I am undone. All the same I'm now in two wars against average or better opponents and I have frequent defensive needs due to the Riots, so I'm going to have to slow down my offense a little.

[Doom]

Turn 28! We impose a levy on Texas, messing with them without consequence, and claim another stat book. We give Ranmaru +1 Defense for a 4 to 5 move and Rizna another +Int to cap her at 6 Intelligence. Then we dump a shit-load of gold into Rance to bump him from 500 to 670 troops.





A unique unit comp with great names awaits us in the Tenshi Sect's first castle, which also drops us to a discouraging 0% morale. Rotten Priest and Consumer Creditor use a unique Tactician move called Advance Time to waste 3 turns instead of 1 instantly! Thus, we need to throw those three Peasant units into the meat-grinder and hopefully burst one of the two Tacticians down before they can cast. I swap Natori in for the win and claim 1/3 of Tenshi's province.





If you check out the former Asakura province, we can recruit Dasan. Or kill him for his mask, which isn't a usable item. His stats are fantastic(all 7s) and he joins with a huge starting Stack, but he has a ridiculous 6 unit cost. Probably to clean up after all those Pandas. We'll pass on him for now.

Animals are like Warriors but with below average everything except Attack, which is average. They show up very rarely but in Dasan's case they use overwhelming numbers to make up for their flaws.




If we visit Honnouji, the first time we're turned away and Rance kicks a tree, causing a Draft Paper to fall out. The second time, Rengoku gives us a Good Medicine to go away. Draft Papers are semi-rare and give +100 Max Troops. Good Medicine heals every unit in your army for 30% of it's Max HP.

Considering there were a lot of hypotheticals in this post, my actual commands are to Levy Texas, take 1/3 of Tenshi's land, and visit Honnouji once.

[Doom]

A brief scene in Houjou land!







Ran can't handle fighting this big guy, Souun saves the day, the big guy retreats for now.

Oh hey, a riot.



BACK TO YOUR TOIL, PEASANTS.

[Doom]

Alrighty, Turn 29. Toss 5 generic prisoners, level Rance to 47. Time for more Tenshi Sect land!



A Tanuki mercenary! Tanuki's aren't unique units or anything, just unique commanders. This guy's semi-unique and is an excellent Tactician knowing Battle Strategy 3, which lets him spread the maximum amount of Buffs around in battle.




Hiding behind Castle morale bonus and having a solid comp for once, bolstered by two semi-uniques, I eventually say...



Fuck it and bring in my main offense. We'll capture Tenshi Sect's last bit of land next turn.

Also YOU'RE NOT A TANUKIIIII



O.. oh! With 7s across the board and a 6 in Speed, Goemon also packs a 6 in Search and a mere 1 Cost for his full unit. WHAT A DEAL! We'll recruit him next turn. Let's end our turn with an easy +1 National Power off a Construction 6 in Miko Land, then end our turn by chatting with Mysterious Miko Fuuka.




Yahoo!

[Doom]

Kenshin attacks Texas! We'll scout it out...



NOPE. We let her have 1/3 of Texas. Emboldened, she attacks Texas again!



This was a small miracle of a win, not counting the lack of deaths on my side. I open with the 40% Double Miko Storm and have Maeda build Guard. We trade blows and I barely pull off the stall as we run out of turns right before they can just walk all over my undefended units. Texas is safe!

Some exposition over in Houjou. Since this is my second playthrough, we actually could do something about appointing an Emperor of Japan. ... We'll see later.






And then some quality time with Rance and Kou.

[Doom]

Turn 30. I guess the hypothesis from earlier was correct, that claiming Ashikaga's Gourd removes the Turn 30 event where the monkey will steal another Gourd. So we shouldn't see an automatic Monkey Theft until Turn 50? Excellent... LET'S TAKE DOWN THE TENSHI SECT! HELL YEAH!








Seigan runs a Monk unit, but he can cast a Miko-Stormesque spell called Death's Scythe with a Preparation period. If you can't burst him down, a Ninja may be mandatory for facing him, it's a huge morale loss to get hit by. Seigan's composition here is incredible. As the turn starts, a generic cutscene has him recruiting the Famous Liars, the Miyo Brothers, and their 4 digit Stacks here are hell to deal with. I repeat this nonsense no less than twenty times...



Just to eat losses like this. I begin to consider waiting until the next turn and searching for some Treasure to help, but...



I'm able to pull it off! This required Ranmaru and Rance opening with melees on Seigan without his 50% Guard(starting meter) blocking us, getting Natori's Miko Storm 2 out immediately, and the enemy spreading damage and not bursting somebody down. I had Suzume assassinate that colossal Archer stack to finish and Katsuie used the last turn to run down the Mikos for the winning morale boost. It would seem that Hard difficulty is Hard?

Speaking of hard...





We capture one of the Blind Sisters. By God, we'll cause the Apocalypse yet! Seigan and Co get away, but we're determined to find out where they went and threaten to torture the Blind Sister we caught. Rance intervenes...



And presses her repeatedly about Seigan's whereabouts!

To no avail, but we break 60 Satisfaction. I hear you can ally with the Tenshi Sect... by not defeating them until the 5th Gourd breaks. So you either rush down 4 Gourd holding houses as fast as you can, feed the Monkey in New Game+, or stay at war with the riot inciting assholes until Turn 90. NO THANKS.

Instead, I use my Satisfaction bonus to recruit...



Fuck Yes. 2s in every combat stat, but 8s in every bureaucrat stat. Isn't he Amazing? Isn't he Old? We impose a levy on the new Tenshi Sect province and end Turn 30.