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Captain Gars

Lead AI Programmer
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Oct 4, 2010
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  • Crusader Kings II
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For those who have played Europa Universalis III, combat will look familiar. The terrain of the battleground is picked from one of the terrain types available in the province. The more of the province a certain terrain type cover, the higher the chance of that terrain being picked. Each terrain type comes with a penalty towards the attacker, the worst being impassable mountains. Crossing a river when entering into battle gives an additional negative effect as well as the large negative effect you get when crossing a strait. Since there are no ships in Sengoku, this large penalty represents the difficulty of doing a naval landing and going straight into battle. This can be quite nasty to attack across, so holding and fortifying provinces at a strait can be a very effective strategy.

There are however some new features and changes in Sengoku. One of them is that the battlefield can have different combat width depending on terrain. So while a large army can use its full advantage in plains or in farmlands, it will be much harder to realize that potential in a narrow mountain pass where only a handful of its units can participate at any moment. This will give a small but qualitative army a better chance to withstand a large army of inferior quality.

There are three unit types in Sengoku: samurai cavalry, ashigaru spearmen, and arquebusiers. The last one only becomes available later in the game after westerners have arrived and brought the technology of manufacturing arquebuses with them. This can happen sometime after 1520, usually in the 1530's or 1540's. Once a province has gotten western technology, you can construct a gun manufactory that produces a number of these arquebuses each month. Once you have 250 of these saved up you can recruit a retinue unit. These units are weak during a battles shock phase, but to counter that they have a few useful abilities. A battle always start with a fire phase and during this first fire phase arquebusiers deliver a volley of double effect. After that, if you have enough cavalry and infantry to cover them, they withdraw to the protection of the second rank.

Once back in the front rank they are, as said above, vulnerable in the shock phase, but can still fire at normal rate during the fire phase. One plus is that they, like cavalry, can attack not only the unit in front of them but also the ones to the side, which makes them somewhat useful in flanking a numerically inferior enemy.

sengoku_warfare.jpg

To augment your personal retinue you can call up the levies from your and your vassals' provinces. But it is you as clan leader who pays for keeping them raised, and war is never cheap... If you as clan leader slip below zero gold, all sorts of bad things will start happening. The first thing that happens is that the maximum morale for the clan's units is lowered. For all units. Even those that belong to the vassals. Losing money when already in the negative will also increase the revolt risk in the clan's provinces. Again, this means even in the vassals' provinces. The vassals themselves will of course not be very happy about this and will get a negative opinion against the clan leader. This in turn leads to the clan leader being weaker when compared to any potential plotters which means that internal plots like breaking free or usurping the clan leader title are more likely to succeed...
 
Does that mean that the CK days of permanently waging war while in debt are over? Or does everyone just now hate you while you do it?

What I basically mean is are you able to afford your standing army (personal retinue) all the time like in EU3 and only have to call up vassals when in trouble, or do you keep your men at home for most of the game like CK and then call troops up when you need them?
 
Is it possible to take loans? Form other clans or maybe some local merchants?

In CK your treasury just went into the negative and kept on ticking down, no EU3 syle loans. From how he is describing it, it sounds like the same system.
 
To augment your personal retinue you can call up the levies from your and your vassals' provinces. But it is you as clan leader who pays for keeping them raised, and war is never cheap... If you as clan leader slip below zero gold, all sorts of bad things will start happening. The first thing that happens is that the maximum morale for the clan's units is lowered. For all units. Even those that belong to the vassals. Losing money when already in the negative will also increase the revolt risk in the clan's provinces. Again, this means even in the vassals' provinces. The vassals themselves will of course not be very happy about this and will get a negative opinion against the clan leader. This in turn leads to the clan leader being weaker when compared to any potential plotters which means that internal plots like breaking free or usurping the clan leader title are more likely to succeed...

Very, very good.
 
Sorry if this has been asked before: Why are there no archers as in EU Rome for example?

They in the second line could add more tactical depth before the arquebusiers come into play.
 
Does that mean that the CK days of permanently waging war while in debt are over? Or does everyone just now hate you while you do it?

The number of penalties connected to being in debt should really make you think twice about continue being at war. Basically, you need some down periods to stabilize and collect some honor before going to war again.

Is it possible to take loans? Form other clans or maybe some local merchants?

No, no loans. You have to make do with what you get.
 
To augment your personal retinue you can call up the levies from your and your vassals' provinces. But it is you as clan leader who pays for keeping them raised, and war is never cheap... If you as clan leader slip below zero gold, all sorts of bad things will start happening. The first thing that happens is that the maximum morale for the clan's units is lowered. For all units. Even those that belong to the vassals. Losing money when already in the negative will also increase the revolt risk in the clan's provinces. Again, this means even in the vassals' provinces. The vassals themselves will of course not be very happy about this and will get a negative opinion against the clan leader. This in turn leads to the clan leader being weaker when compared to any potential plotters which means that internal plots like breaking free or usurping the clan leader title are more likely to succeed...

I seriously hope you guys have worked on AI for this game. Economy management has never been one of Paradox AI's strong suites and this feature is just asking for trouble unless AI is prevented from going in the negative.
 
I seriously hope you guys have worked on AI for this game. Economy management has never been one of Paradox AI's strong suites and this feature is just asking for trouble unless AI is prevented from going in the negative.
I think in CK1 the AI couldn't go to debt, hope he can here and will be able to handle it.
 
The AI can go negative but Birken is working hard on teaching the AI to handle these things.
 
Sorry if this has been asked before: Why are there no archers as in EU Rome for example?

They in the second line could add more tactical depth before the arquebusiers come into play.

Archers are "built into" the ashigaru/samurai units...as I recall, every unit can take part in the fire phase. In fact, many of the samurai units, especially at the beginning of the game, would have been mounted archers historically. There really weren't separate archer units in samurai armies-they would be spread out among the spearmen and mounted units to provide support (and even were attached to arquebus units to provide support while the gunners were reloading).
 
No, no loans. You have to make do with what you get.

Awesome. I do like that element.

Makes sense also. The style of loaning coin in other games, such as EU III, appear to be (now I haven't been playing too long, still have to work our a few kinks) that you announce you require and random countries do so in there hope they're repaid a greater amount than they initially loaned (again, could be wrong). I would strongly doubt any clan during the Sengoku Jidai-era would risk "loaning" a portion of their coin to another clan.

So, yeah, I do like that element. :)

Also, awesome dev. diary you guys! Looking forward to owning this game (finally). :D
 
Archers are "built into" the ashigaru/samurai units...as I recall, every unit can take part in the fire phase. In fact, many of the samurai units, especially at the beginning of the game, would have been mounted archers historically. There really weren't separate archer units in samurai armies-they would be spread out among the spearmen and mounted units to provide support (and even were attached to arquebus units to provide support while the gunners were reloading).

Is that official? Because it would seem pointless to have a fire phase through the whole game purely for the benefit of late game gunpowder units.
 
But according to Tatsunoshi all units get a fire phase not just the gunpowder units, so it wouldn't be for just for their benifit.

That's why I was asking if what he said was official. I haven't seen any devs say what he said anywhere, so if it's not true then the fire phase wouldn't really make much sense.