Fall of the Samurai: Holy War: a winning strategy

Gameplay tips based on the Holy Shrine / Holy Site specialty provinces for building a formidable military force that will completely eclipse your enemies' most elite forces.

Building Your Holy Warriors

Spoiler Alert: this finding can potentially spoil your enjoyment of playing Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai (FOTS) by revealing an easy-to-follow strategy for building a formidable force!

Once you control one of the three provinces with a Holy Shrine / Site (Yamato, Izumo, Uzen) it makes sense to build ALL of your units within that province. Upgrading the Site to Buddhist Shrine > Buddhist Temple > Buddhist Temple Complex provides +5, +10 and +15 Charge bonus to your modern military units. This is very significant, as suddenly even your entry level modern units with +5 charge can have the cumulative bonus Charge of the most expensive and the most elite military units in the game!

Again, you can build ALL of you military units in one of these provinces to provide you with a formidable advantage - not just in attacking, but also for defense purposes: even AI will evaluate your province with 4-5 units without a General as weak and will try to attack, but will lose almost in all instances if those 4 units are elite to begin with, and have +15 Charge bonus - this is almost double the typical amount!

So, the strategy becomes very simple: 1. gain a province with a Holy Site as early in the game as possible; 2. place a Foreign Veteran within the castle of the said province to lower the cost of recruitment and to get training bonuses; 3. train all your modern military troops there, with main army and key (or all, if later in the game, as tax revenue increases substantially) provinces guarded by elite units (they will be substantially cheaper to recruit due to combination of Foreign Veteran and Buddhist Temple Complex discounts) with maximum charge promotion given by the Buddhist Temple Complex (the Modernization penalty given by the building barely registers compared to the advantage offered); 4. field your army with modern units, several generals (in case they defect or get assassinated - as the need to defense generals virtually disappears due to the strength of the very few yet effective elite defense units) and walk the map the way you want!

Again, I cannot emphasize the Charge bonus enough, and the numbers obscure their power. Had the game developer used terms like "Low" to "Excellent" for Charge characteristic, with regular elite units being "Excellent", then a base unit recruited in a province with a Buddhist Temple Complex would be instantly elite in terms of Charge and Morale! But the most significant change would occur when you recruited elite units: their Charge is completely off the charts: +35 compared to "vanilla" elite unit with "merely" a +20 Charge!

Try this trick and once / if you did let me know how you fared in the Comments section. Happy playing!

[Copernicus713]

And like the author of this guide already mention, use the foreign veterans to train the troops to reduce the cost and additional skill bonuses.

[Copernicus713]

For traditional melee units upgrade the blacksmith to,
Iron Works: +10 Accuracy / +2 Armour
Armourer +10 Accuracy / +4 Armour
Then through the Training Camp building in that province get the,
Jujutsu Hall building for +4 melee attack
You'll end up with silver-superior-melee/gold-exceptional-armor for traditional melee units. Increasing melee attack and the armor will give traditional units a defensive and offensive advantage against their counter parts. They'll shred through other units of the same class without those upgrades.

Like I have said, Satsuma Clan starts with a Blacksmith. I always use that blacksmith to upgrade the modern day rifle/cannon units first. Then I make it a priority to take another province with a blacksmith and then build the traditional melee units in that province.

[Wayne]

lmao I like your attitude to the shit people put on your guide and although I see you took a while to see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, I gotta say the same for you to keep making guides in the future :D

My recommendation for YOU is that you should actually try out MULTIPLE strategies IN ADDITION to the one you want to publish before doing them

[seashell]

write a steel division 2 guide

[vladyslav.solodovnyk]

Thanks for all your comments, folks! Now it's clear that I don't fully get all the nuances of the game, but the only thing I'd recommend is that you create mini-guides yourself. I know, writing things down feels like a chore, but your insights are super useful and will serve the community for years! (Thanks for pointing out the uselessness of Charge attribute for modern units).

[Wayne]

noob

[seashell]

buddist temple only give discount to traditional units

[Kalkara]

If you charging you can't shoot. Did you even try this "strategy"? A better way is to focus on gunsmith and firing ranges for the accuracy.

[Fonzy]

I don't get it. So you only melee then why not just use guns?

[vladyslav.solodovnyk]

@InnocentBabies: I am no pro at Shogun, but having scouted the forums I think that the Charge bonus may be more advantageous for elite (longest Range) units compared to most other stats - "Charge bonus boosts a unit's Melee Attack AND Weapon Damage for thirty seconds" - since most elite units have the maximum 150 Range, it is enough to mow down the majority of 125 Range units before they get within firing / melee range.