Oda: Part 01: 1444-1457: Sengoku

Playing Oda, with a twist. Fun and Balance obviously, but also:

• institutions all start in Europe and spread really slowly
• institution cheats (notably in Korea and East Africa) disabled
• dev pushing for institutions completely disabled
• ahead of time penalty is just 1%/year nont 10%/year, to let most advanced countries run ahead further
• and unrelated to that, "revanchism" reversed so it's actually bad, so losing wars screws you a bit (not that much)

So it will start like a normal game, but it will turn increasingly painful as it goes.

Oh and Fun and Balance makes daimyo phase specifically harder thanks to two extra relation slots.

Playing Japanese daimyo is fairly easy, except Ashikaga can declare war on you if you're 10+ provinces, so either some caution is required when crossing the threshold, or just going all in before Ashikaga figures out what's going on.

Oda starts with one 10dev province. So focus on paper, mana privileges, and go! There are three possible targets - but Toki has level 3 fort, and I don't have 9k troops, so that's really out. So just take the easier of the two others (Kitabatake and Tokugawa) and open Sengoku era!

Then Date-Nanbu war stared in March 1445, and it all went on. I got coalitioned in 1449, as I wasn't really paying attention. This stopped by expansion for a while, with just 7 provinces and 52dev total. I didn't particularly need bird mana at that point, so I dev pushed myself a bit to 59dev.

After a few years break, I went back to expanding, and by 1457 I had 16 provinces and 138dev. That makes me the strongest daimyo in Japan, but I'm definitely not strong enough to fight everybody else at once, and I'm out of manpower already.

Actually I was wondering why I'm out of manpower. After some experimentation, it turns out Japanese samurai units take twice as much manpower as they're supposed to take to reinforce due to a bug.

I guess I'll need to just not use the samurai, and in the mean time hire some mercs.

Looking back, here's a few ways I could have done better:

• avoid coalitions by not taking non-cobeligerent land that early
• don't hire samurai until they get fixed
• hire free company early

Starting in Owari east from Kyoto. In real life 1444 Oda was a vassal of Shiba clan, but EU4 doesn't do multi-level subjects, and in any case they got independent in 1452. IRL clan Oda very briefly held the shogunate under Oda Nobunaga.

Ashikaga was too slow, and Sengoku is pretty much over with one clear winner. This time I didn't make a mistake of letting anyone else become too big.