The enemy suddenly generates thousands of soldiers?

[autumnTwilight]

I agree mostly with SlyEcho with a few other points I have found.

1) Be careful with forming doomstacks with your levies in low support provinces. I once watched attrition bring a 50k Shiba doomstack to 35k over several months as it ran its merry way through Uesugi territory. Your retinue can counter attrition through reinforcements. Your levies cannot.

2) Once you get to a medium size (15 or more provinces), you can start doing a levy rotation to keep in a state of constant war/growth. Provinces that are at max levy are not generating more troops for the war effort unless they are being used as guards for border provinces.

3) If you are planning to go up against someone larger than yourself and cannot get allies but have plenty of cash, bring up a large amount of levies and allow the provinces to replenish while they are up. It will give you the extra troops that might make the difference of the war if you immediately need a second wave.

4) Do not be afraid to disband levies, but if at all possible, do it in friendly territory. If a levy has lost even half of its members but disbanding it will not result in any men being lost, go ahead and do it and bring them back up.

 

[Nefaro]

For your border territories, which you want to keep a defensive force in if the enemy is nearby, you should mobilize the troops and leave them in that province if affordable. If a larger enemy force is moving towards it, you can always demobilize and go back to the castle, losing only the extra troops that have regenerated there since you mobilized .. in essence, losing no troops. It can help boost your late war troop levels by regenerating more troops in that province, even while it's levy is still there defending it.


Also.. be stingy with your levies in the field (as mentioned in some ways already) because it's such a pain to reinforce them. I don't use the Assault button near as much as I do in EU or others, until I not only have a breach but the castle's soldiers are deserting and I have at least four times the garrison's number in ashigaru. Otherwise, the losses can cause you to get behind in Sengoku's attrition warfare. This is a great result of the new way Sengoku handles it's reinforcements and actually makes assaults much more painful for the player. No more Assault button spam!