Best units for autoresolve?

[John]

Im trying to find which units are the best for autoresolving, and mostly which ones to avoid. I have tried to look at the data.pack but most I found is the table called "battle_autoresolver_balances_tables" which seems to have some bonuses, but it doesnt contain one of the most obvious one which is the spear cavalry vs any other cavalry. Also there arent anything about naval combat.

For example, if you have 1 stack of matchlock ashigaru vs 1 yari ashigaru, the yari will have more strength in the autoresolve indicator.

I hate naval combat and I would like to know which ships are the ones to go, like full stacks of medium bunes, sengoku, etc. (I know nanban are the best but i mean for other factions). Also I have noticed that a full stack of sengoku vs a full stack of sengoku (in legendary, dont know in normal) leaves me at a 60-40 disadvantage even when my sengokus are 3 exp and theirs are 0, pretty weird... However this doesnt happen with land battles, 1vs1 identical will be 50-50. Also I have noticed that experience influences the autoresolvemeter, exp units get bonuses, but not stats bonuses from armoury/weaponsmith/whatever.

I made a campaign army of 1 general, 4 naginatas, 9 shimazu katanas and 6 heavy gunners and Im always at disadvantage against full stacks (even when they have several ashigarus) so I guess that the heavy gunners are the ones that are handicapping me this much.

So the only thing left for me is to try each unit to see which is strong and which is weak but its a lot of work... And not easy since the AI wont give a ♥♥♥♥ about your tests.

So... Is there any place in the game where I can check this? Or if somebody has done this before? Cause I cant find anything about it.

[easytarget]

Short answer is numerical advantage is the easiest way to overwhelm the AI in auto resolve.

So recruit a ton of ash and take on one stack AI with 2 stack ash and you'll pretty much never lose regardless what the AI brings at you.

It's also not a very interesting way to play the game.

P.S. However, I agree about naval, has never intersted me at all, so I do routinely auto-resolve all naval batles and win through numbers. It's not something you have to over think, just bring stacks of medium bunes and auto it.

[Plok!]

I don't know about you, but playing the game just to autoresolve everything is exactly what made the game boring for me. After I got used to the game I never really bothered playing the game on easy or normal anymore. I found Hard to be the most balanced setting for my taste, even though that one feels too easy sometimes. If I was autoresolving my battles I would stop playing long time ago.

[Brave and Fearless Sir Shiba]

i just do fleets of like 2 medium bunes and the rest bow kobaya sure youll take some damage on the light ships but its cost effective from my experience as for how said fleet will fair in legendary idk probably a full medium bune or half medium half koboya will do it. seens how the ai doesnt do huge fleets from what i can tell

[easytarget]

Yep, it's just a matter of spamming them out and overwhelming the AI with numbers. Sure, there will be points where you lose because they cranked out more than you or you were out of position (this is often the case, you simply can't be everywhere at once).

Thing is about naval control, or lack thereof it, I've never lost or for that matter won a campaign thanks to the navy.

I only spend what little time I do on it because of two things:

1. early on I want uninterupted money from the trade nodes
2. late campaign I don't want a surprise stack showing up well behind the front lines taking out my back markers forcing me to either take a stack off the line and send it back or build a stack to deal with it. I rarely if ever have a campaign where at least a couple different clans don't make an attempt at this stunt, often more than once.

[WellMad]

Navals the best way I found to win navy is to make them take HUGE damage by going OUT to sea =].
what you do is Control the Main Choke points in the south, 3, one at lad crossing and 2 each side of coake(bad spelling) island. use 3 big shacks for this. then build a few shacks of ships and space them out in 5's*.

1) the first one place red area of defence Touches the land mass, so hostel ships must acttack it(which they won't because of (2), or go into the sea and take damage.

2) place 1 shack behind the first one RIGHT on the edge of the sea, but not in it so they dont take damage but still in the red circle of first shack.

3) place 5 ships at far range of the second group on the sea, and repeat 4 times, then leave the back open but with a good ships and boats in it.

4) when the hostel ships get to you, they have taken sooooo much sea damage you can Auto ALL ship battles =], then 1 sink them or send them to repair, I tend to SINK all crappy ships and repair all high level ones =], and Slowly make the sea line longer and longer untill they SINK themselfs trying to get around you.

p.s I seen a range 6 general and elite units on boats SINK in the sea, after getting it so long, was really funny

[WellMad]

if your a northern faction you can do this around homma island you block aroujnd the coast and they have a VERY long trip around the island taking lots of damage, with oda or factions in that area, you need to deside which side will most hostal ships come and block that way, then open the middle bit to your home lands, and block other way.

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by John:

Did you even read my post... I dont want to autoresolve all battles. I want to autoresolve all naval battles and not have to fight those massive battles where there are 3v2 armies and the autoresolve still ♥♥♥♥♥ me even having 3 full stacks against 2 full stacks.

As Easy Target posted, numbers are your best bet in naval battles.

Land battles are a little less clear cut, which I will explain below.

For naval units, 3 bow kobaya are stronger than 1 medium bune in auto-resolve, but will probably suffer one ship down and many casualties against 2 bune, to give some idea.

Try to build balanced fleets, and you should be fine. I tend to build 8 kobaya and 2 medium bune (or even all kobaya) for early fleets, 6 medium bune and 4 kobaya for an early-mid fleet, and then 4 medium bune, 4 kobaya, and 2 Sengoku bune for a fleet later in the campaign. And I auto-resolve 99% of naval battles.

I also build lots of bow kobaya for scouting and patrolling, so when I fix an enemy fleet's location, I'll have one of these fleets move on it, and then anywhere from 2 to 6 independent kobaya converge on it as well, so it's usually 12 to 16 of mine versus 4 to 10 of the enemy clan.

The medium bune and kobaya are fine for most of the work, and are cost effective. A few Sengoku bune gives a fleet an edge, but too many Sengoku bune are probably not a good approach because they are a sort of Jack of all trades ship that doesn't do any one thing exceptionally, whilst being more expensive.

The fire bomb and matchlock kobaya are nice, but again, you only need a few. They supplement a fleet, but are too specialized to be the main force.

I tend to not even build heavy, siege tower and cannon bune, because of the cost, both money and opportunity wise. But when you have the infrastructure and money later on, a couple heavy bune can help a lot. So a late game fleet for me might be 1 to 2 heavy bune, 4 to 5 medium bune, and the rest either Sengoku or bow kobaya.

The nanban trade ship, the "Black Ship," and such don't tend to work as well as you'd think for auto-resolve. The nanban trade ship requires human micro and exploiting of the AI to shine, and the Black Ship, while strong, can only be one place at any time, and can still get captured if the enemy has around 7 or 8 melee ships.

Anyway, like I said land battles are less simple because you have the interplay of sword, pole arms, missiles and cavalry, whereas naval is just ranged or melee. Next, you have to consider the effect that generals have on auto-resolve.

The game weighs how many "stars" the generals have, and their abilities. So if you are fighting a strong daimyo with rank 4, and your general is rank 1, the odds will generally display as about even on the pre-battle screen, even if you have 50% or so more men. Needless to say, if you have no general or daimyo leading your army at all, but just a captain, it gets even worse.

Keep in mind that some enemy daimyo can have particularly decisive traits. Takeda Shingen for example starts the game off with a personal trait where he "instills fear" in enemy troops because of his fearsome reputation. Other traits may increase melee skill of the troops, or keep morale high.

So just because you throw 3 of your stacks against 2 enemy and lose the auto-resolve doesn't mean you picked the wrong units or have a weak force; it may simply be that the enemy generals or daimyo are much stronger or more skilled than yours.

If your force structure is too unbalanced, that can cause problems too. If you bring 17 yari ashigaru and only 2 bow ashigaru to storm a fort, for example, and the enemy has like 9 bow samurai inside with melee troops, the game is going to calculate a lot of casualties for you, because you don't have the missile coverage to give covering fire.

On the same token, if you bring 6 light cav and 2 yari ashigaru against an enemy of 3 yari ashigaru, you will probably lose on the highest difficulty and get a bloody, costly victory on lower difficulties, because even though you have nearly a third more men, and more expensive/well equipped troops at that, the light cav aren't going to make an impression on spear men, not without big losses anyway.

Most people will just tell you to train up a ton of yari and bow ash for easy wins, and I'm inclined to agree, in general, especially if you are playing as Oda. If you play Oda, then get the relevant buffs, your ashigaru stacks are going to be very strong.

A good ratio for composing your stacks is 2-3 yari ash to every 1 bow ash.

The units like matchlock ashigaru and other gunners are not weighed heavily, because at least in my experience, the game's auto-resolve puts emphasis on "main line" units, not skirmishers, which makes some sense when you think about it.

Like you mentioned your single matchlock unit was beaten by the single enemy yari ash in auto-resolve: if a human was playing the enemy role, he'd have won too, unless he was incompetent. He'd just put them in loose formation, use trees, obstructions and dead ground as much as possible to get close, and then close ranks and bum rush you. Sure, you might take out as many as 30-40 guys, assuming some solid volleys, but as soon as he made contact, it's 160-170 men, getting a charge bonus, against 120 guys who absolutely suck in melee. Foregone conclusion.

Even in actual history, matchlocks in the Sengoku weren't decisive unless they had the proper tactics to employ them. Many daimyo had guns in their forces, but it was generally held that they were only really useful for sniping battle group leaders or from within fortifications, and interesting enough, there are more than a few Shogun 2 players who maintain the later as well. The Honganji and Nobunaga forces did well with guns not merely because they had them, because other clans did too and got beat: they made an impact with firearms because new ways of tactical usage were developed and exploited.

So similarly, in the game you make guns work for you by using them creatively, and the price you must unfortunately pay for auto-resolve is that the game can't calculate if your forces can do that or not; you have to do it by taking direct involvement. Like the game may know that you can deploy palisades to protect the gunners, for instance, but it can't auto calculate that your captain would actually emplace them effectively.

But anyway, to come back to the beginning, it's basically "have a ♥♥♥♥ ton of men, and you'll win."

But that means real numerical superiority, not just qualified superiority.

What I mean by this is, don't think that having 50% or so more men then the enemy is going to count for much, especially if the enemy stacks are mostly samurai and you're taking the ashigaru approach.

To pull off easy auto-resolve victories that are decisive, not 'close' or 'costly,' you need at least 2:1 advantage against other ashigaru stacks, and preferably 3 or 4:1, especially going against samurai.

If you are holding a bridge or fort, you can get away with less, like 2:1. But to attack decisively, and not suffer losses of men, go for as much numerical superiority as you can scrape. You can never have "too many" guys fighting, provided you got the funds of course :D

So the short answer in this long post (`-`) is that there really is no "best unit for auto-resolve." The best unit is the one you can afford to have tons of, and isn't a specialist, like Kisho ninja or cav.

That usually means ashigaru, because they're cheap, but any of the units can auto-resolve well if you get the ratio right.

Another thing to consider is that having 5 stacks of ashigaru is great, but if they're spread out all over the country, and you can't focus them for overwhelming numerical advantage, then they aren't doing you much good.

It might actually be more cost effective to raise a couple of balanced, mixed ashigaru-samurai stacks and use the surplus koku to bribe and harass/sabotage enemy stacks so you can achieve those 3:1 or 4:1 ratios.

Bribing enemy stacks is great because it lets you achieve that numerical superiority in the area where you need it, but you don't have the costs. Short term costs are generally cheaper, for example bribing an enemy light cav and yari ash costs 650 on Legendary with a totally inexperienced metsuke (no chi research accounted either), whereas recruiting them yourself would've cost 765, so you save 115.

Then you save on upkeep costs because you just use them for the critical battle or two, instead of spending koku the whole time they are traveling from your muster area to the battle, as well as down time. Assuming Legendary again, and even with Takeda (who have cheap cav upkeep) , that's 90 + 88 = 178. So say it would've otherwise taken 3 turns to get to the critical area, that's (178 x 3) + 115 = 649 koku saved, for the same two troops available, and still where you actually need them.

And, as a bonus, it makes the numerical superiority go even better for you, because if you had raised and brought them yourself, you'd have 260 more troops, sure, but the enemy still retained their equivalent as well. By bribing, you not only have the extra 260 men anyway, but the enemy is now 260 men fewer. It's a win-win for you.

So if you are going for the 3:2 advantage you talked about earlier, you can often achieve more by bribing. You have 1,000 men in a stack and enemy has 2,000 in two stacks: if you raised another 2,000 men you'd have 3,000 : 2,000, but if you bribed one of the enemy's stacks instead, you'd have 2,000 : 1,000 for less koku.

2:1 odds instead of 3:2 odds, for less koku, both upfront and in long term upkeep. Hard to argue with that ;)

So imo, going for the "golden ratios" in land battles, and using positioning, metsuke, ninja and diplomacy to achieve that, should be the objective more so than finding the right or "best" type of unit to muster for a particular enemy or war, or just training up tons of ashigaru to have on hand, just sitting there or marching and eating into your coffers with upkeep costs.