Good/Recommended Settings (Game Difficulty)

[Vincent]

So I played about 13 hours on Normal Difficulty, but was finding it a little too easy to expand.

So I started a new game, same Scenario (Birth of Nobunaga) on Hard.
Couldn't tell too much difference and I could still expand easily. (played another 8 hours or so)

So I went back to the drawing board and was like 'screw it' I want to make the most realistic, and relatively difficult (within reason) experience possible.

So I did Custom settings and this is what I came up with:
(Edited after suggestions and started a new game)
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/393300247866940760/1927DAC6B3EC23802494A617449DD642058D71BB/

Basically allows for a more drawn out game, where you have to be more tactical and strategic with things like your troop count, so you don't just 'waste' soldiers as they will take awhile to come back, which is more realistic in my opinion.

Also lower income, labor and gold.
I thougth labor would make it too hard, but playing with it actually is good.
The larger nations have like 30% less labor or so, and the smaller nations still keep their minimum 2 labor from what I've seen, which is the same as default.
So actually helps balance a lot.

And with the labor lower I have to be more tactical/strategic about what I use it for,
and also causes your clans land growth (and other clans) to be slower overall for a better game pacing.
(Since quests seem to assume you will expand quite slowly anyways.)

Also during the early quest where you have to take over Ansho.
I found much better resistance, and was quite pleased with the result.
I staged an attack on Ansho by fortifying an adjacent post.
But that clan wouldn't have it and launched several assaults on my defended post, as they outnumbered me.
It was a standstill at the time, I didn't have the troops to attack, and they had just enough troops to defend.

Then just as we were having our standoff, another nation from the east (forget the names haha) jumped on the opportunity that I had depleted my troops and had next to nobody defending my castles.
They headed for Shobata castle (if I spelled that right).

I mustered what troops I could and headed for Shobata to defend their onslaught.
They sent 5500 troops vs my approx 3000.
But I was able to take on about half of them at a time so I barely came out on top in this defense, and they damaged about 50% of Shobata's HP.

So I survived that, and my troops are now replenishing over time, an I can prepare for my next attempt at Ansho.

Now when playing I actually feel the need to upgrade castles, as before, on Normal difficulty I believe after 15 years game time I was attacked once.. and on Hard maybe 2-3 times if that.

So having the AI attack me knowing I'm vulnerable makes me have to plan much more carefully.

This, to me, is how I originally intended to play the game, when I first picked it up and before I started finding it too easy.
So I am quite happy it's playing out like this on these settings.

[Motrini]

AI Aggression Level and AI Level aside (which both need to be set on max if you want some challenge), difficulty is more about the scenario and clan you've picked up than settings (unless you or the enemy are "cheating" with them).
Low incomes, recovery rates, morale and troop losses could influence the speed at which some major clans are going to get HUGE, but they are more likely going to be even a bigger hinder to minor clans since the major ones don't have to care about resources anymore after a few years and they can also overcome every other limitation with the superior officers and abilities.
In the Birth of Nobunaga scenario the Imagawa (or sometimes the Hojo) can be quite a chore if you're starting with a small faction in a remote region of Japan...
They are going to absorb all the AAA Oda, Takeda and Matsudaira officers getting them both the best officers and territories in the game.
From what I get though you're playing with the Oda and you have also done some of the historical quests in beginning, you shouldn't have any problem with keeping everyone in check.

As for the personal difficulty preferences, I keep incurred damage and moral loss on low, I think that the game gets slower and more tactical that way, battles and sieges take their time and supplies can actually become a problem (you could end up razing a lot of castles just to move on).

Small tip:
it's okay to be at war with everyone if you're playing as the Oda and the likes, but with minor clans its crucial to begin diplomacy immediately with all the neighbours you don't want fight from the start, there's nothing worse than trying to expand while having crappy officers and territories and being surrounded by an allied "coalition" of clans.

[mrdragonrider]

As far as I can tell, your setting slows the game pace but not necessarily make it harder. If you want a real challenge, you should try to play a single fortress Daimyo with 3 mediocre retainers in hard or extreme mode and see if you can win the game outright. To win, you will probably have to expliot every finer points of the game and micro-manage every aspect of game play.

One of the major problems of playing a small daimyo is that you quickly run out of retainers to man a fortress even if you expand. I am not sure how many people know this but who and how many samurai you capture when you capture a foretress is pre-set by the point in the game clock it happens. Also who and how many samurai willing to become your retainers when you enter a fortress with prisoners is pre-set in a similar way. So I find myself let the pre-set interval pass, save the game, and enter the fortress. If I don't like the result, I reloed and do the same thing over. I think I went whole 2 months doing this in one case. I am fairly certain that the game designers never intended it to be exploited this way. But when you don't have any retainers and desperate to get some, you have no choice but to work the system.

The primary reason I started to play SOI from the original Creation version is I can play a single fortress daimyo in SOI which was impossible in Creation. From Creation, only real challenging campaigns I can remeber are Murakami (a single castle daimyo sandwiched between Uesugi and Takeda) in the earlier scenarios and Akizuki (2 fortress daimyo in Chikuzen surrounded by Otomo and Ryuzoji) in one of the later scenarios.

[Vincent]

Thanks for both of your responses.

I actually wasn't sure what 'Incurred Damage' did which is why I kept it on Medium.
What does it do exactly? What is incurring the damage?

Also, Motrini, for Morale Loss, isn't that how much your populations morale drops from nearby battles/sieges?
If so wouldn't it be more difficult on a higher settings since you'd have to deal with more discontent?
Or is morale loss how quickly the fortress falls? If so I definitely want to restart with it on Low haha.

Thanks again guys, appreciate the input.

I'm a newbie to this series of games and so far it's been pretty close to my 'dream game' haha.
In terms of strategy games anyways. (Aside from no Multiplayer which is a huge bummer)

Normally I get burned out on games after between 10-20 hours of continuous play.
So far I'm nearing 30 hours on this game, and though my restarts have slightly disheartened me, I'm not getting bored yet and still want to play :)

EDIT:
Almost forgot to add about starting clans.
I prefer the idea of being able to choose any clan to start with, with a fair but of realism and difficulty, as opposed to choosing a particularly small clan just for challenge lol.

[Motrini]

Originally posted by Vince:

Thanks for both of your responses.

I actually wasn't sure what 'Incurred Damage' did which is why I kept it on Medium.
What does it do exactly? What is incurring the damage?

Also, Motrini, for Morale Loss, isn't that how much your populations morale drops from nearby battles/sieges?
If so wouldn't it be more difficult on a higher settings since you'd have to deal with more discontent?
Or is morale loss how quickly the fortress falls? If so I definitely want to restart with it on Low haha.

Morale Loss is how quickly a fortress falls whe surrounded.
Incurred Damage is the speed at which you and the enemy lose troops if I got it right (it could also be related to the fortress HP though, I'm not sure).

[goodpoints]

Originally posted by Motrini:

Originally posted by Vince:

Thanks for both of your responses.

I actually wasn't sure what 'Incurred Damage' did which is why I kept it on Medium.
What does it do exactly? What is incurring the damage?

Also, Motrini, for Morale Loss, isn't that how much your populations morale drops from nearby battles/sieges?
If so wouldn't it be more difficult on a higher settings since you'd have to deal with more discontent?
Or is morale loss how quickly the fortress falls? If so I definitely want to restart with it on Low haha.

Morale Loss is how quickly a fortress falls whe surrounded.
Incurred Damage is the speed at which you and the enemy lose troops if I got it right (it could also be related to the fortress HP though, I'm not sure).

Yeah I'll be trying Morale Loss on Low as well as sieges seem to generally last at least 3 months on Medium. Most sieges of the period I'm aware of rarely lasted more than 2 or 3 months as pre-Edo fortifications were designed as defenses in depth to inflict high attrition on assaults rather than being immediately impenetrable like European castles. Is there any setting that affects the amount of besieging troops required to actually lower the defender's morale? In my games in the 1550s & 60s, any fairly built upcastle/fortress with stone walls seem to require an army of at least 15k, though most field armies (let alone siege detachments) rarely exceed 15-20k until the Coalition period and after.

Regarding Incurred Damage though...if it just affects battle losses as Motrini suggests I'm not sure the battles being slower and more tactical is necessarily a good thing. There's really a mismatch in the timescale between the army movement (which seems plausible) and the battles. The battles should hardly ever last longer than a day, yet even if you take command it seems battles take at least 1/8th of the military phase (1/8 month = 3+ days). Of course, I don't think the area scale of the tactical battle maps is defined anywhere but considering the physical size of units and how castles take up a large part of the maps, it couldn't be more than a few square km. So it's not as if the long time period is meant to represent pre-battle maneuvering, even when formations get into contact (on Med setting) it definitely takes at least what would amount to a whole day for one to rout. I'll experiment with the High level though and see what I think.

How do either of those settings affect supply though? (as Motrini suggested) The default carrying capacity of 4 months seems reasonable, armies can't stay indefinitely in the field, but I think anything smaller might be too restrictive. From my understanding, army logistics was comparatively more organized than that of European armies before the Thirty Years War and didn't rely as much on forage/looting. In friendly territory I believe magazines were created (as apposed to just relying on merchants/sutlers) and landowners were required to provide men & animals for portage. Considering the amount of time some of the large armies of the later period were on campaign, I would think they would have had to have some kind of train system. The only things I think really could be improved with supply would be having rice stocks actually be stored in castles/fortresses as apposed to a general pool so that logistical preparation would be required and particular regions could become exhausted by armies. Though that sort of stuff is probably beyond the scope of possibility with this game.