Ishin no Arashi: Slowly turning Japan blue

It was now "autumn" of 1858 in Ishin no Arashi terms (ie, July) so the music switched again. And once again, my lone han of Yodo was under constant enemy assault. 4484 enemy soldiers camped outside my castle and 166 of my own to defend with.

Look at the Training level of my solitary Yodo-1 soldier--165!

Taking a look at the local armies' stats, I saw why the fighting mini-game was seeming easier--with all the combats under his belt my lone Yodo super-soldier had an absolutely absurd Training level. Though with all these enemies it looked like it was going to go even higher.

In Edo, Ryoma made a discovery--Ii Naosuke (井伊直弼), the lord of Hikone han and a high-ranking bakufu official, was hanging out right outside the Shogun's residence.

Ii Naosuke was an enormously influential figure in late-Edo Japan. He was instrumental in getting the Harris Treaty signed, and was also the primary mover and shaker behind determining the succession of then-Shogun Tokugawa Iesada, who was in very poor health. At the time he was at loggerheads with Tokugawa Nariaki, the prominent sonno-joi lord of Mito han. Eventually the conflict came to a head and Ii Naosuke enacted the Ansei Purge, a massive purge of his political enemies in the bakufu and court. This unsurprisingly greatly angered the joi faction, and Ii was assassinated right in front of the Shogun's palace by several Mito Samurai in the famous Sakuradamon incident. Ii Naosuke was also accomplished at the tea ceremony. If you go to present-day Hikone castle, you can have some traditional tea ceremony tea there--it's the best I've ever had. Also Ii Naosuke's childhood home is close and turned into a really interesting museum, which contains a palanquin he used to be carried around in.

I alluded to this in the past post, but Ii Naosuke is important because at some point in 1858 he will enact the Ansei purge and a lot of in-game characters get killed or otherwise removed from the game. My goal was to attempt to convert and recruit him before this happened to see if the event would still occur. And Ii Naosuke is a great character too.

While I was visiting Ii's house, Tokugawa Iesada, the Shogun, died suddenly on July 4th. Odd, since in real life he died in August and this game is pretty faithful with its historical events.

Tokugawa Iesada's dead, long live Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi.

Ii Naosuke was much the same situation as Inaba Masakuni was last post--I was a slightly higher level than him but couldn't debate domestic policy without him getting huffy. However for whatever reason he was interested in debating me, which was easier. If I initiated the debate his Enthusiasm gauge would be replaced with the Blood Pressure gauge, but not if he did. It took a while since Naosuke's a good debater, but after a few days I successfully converted him to kogi. It wasn't enough to convert his han though, as none of his subordinates shared the philosophy.

Meanwhile Munemitsu and Masakuni were running around the Kyoto area converting all the hans they could. Hikone, Naosuke's han, is there too. And in a debate with the karo of Hikone, Okamoto Hansuke, Munemitsu successfully converted the han to kogi.

Hansuke wasn't kogi yet, but the aggregate with his kogi level was high enough to make Hikone's philosophy switch nonetheless.

This was a big deal--Hikone is a yuhan, one of the hans you have to convert to win the game. It's a small first step, but it's the first significant accomplishment I had made toward that goal. And unlike Yodo, Hikone is fairly strong, so should I recruit Naosuke, I'd have a decent army under my control. So recruit him was the next thing I did.

Only a sliver of Life left--Ii Naosuke is not a pushover in debate.

With Ii Naosuke on my team, I was really curious as to what would happen; normally when you pick him as your main character, you're given the option to enact the Ansei Purge. (If you do, you're essentially putting a time limit on your game until 1860, because you'll be auto-assassinated) In a sabaku game you just need to remain in control of Hikone and stay as tairo of the bakufu. But Naosuke's not the main character and he's also kogi now. I'd learn soon enough.

I decided to check the yuhan map--one more blue province in the center of the map that wasn't there before.

This isn't as big a win as could be though, as Saga, a starting kogi yuhan on Kyushu had already been converted to sonno.

The map was a little better but not great--at the very least, kogi provinces outnumbered the others. That is, until another historical event happened--the hanshu of Satsuma, Shimazu Nariakira, died of illness--Satsuma rapidly changed from kogi to sonno. Another historical event followed on its heels--the signing of several other trade treaties with European powers. Strange, since historically Ii Naosuke was responsible for those, and now he was traipsing along the countryside with me.

Speaking of which, because I had no idea where any of my would-be Kaientai teammembers were, I decided to send Naosuke and Ryoma back to Tosa, on the hunch that, being all Tosa samurai, they went back at some point.

The hunch proved to be right...sorta. Kondo Chojiro went back, but Nagaoka Kenkichi was nowhere to be found. At this point I suspected he managed to get himself killed somehow, though I was soon to find out that was wrong. Also, while there, I made a fortuitous discoverey--Shingu Umanosuke (新宮馬之助) was there. Another potential Kaientai member, I rapidly recruited him.

There's not much I can say about Shingu Umanosuke, as he was a relatively minor player in the scheme of things during the Bakumatsu. He was a friend of Sakamoto Ryoma's and joined the Kaientai, where he was a major figure. He went on to have a fairly distinguished career as a naval officer after the war.

Those are some bad stats.

Umanosuke is never, ever going to be a player with stats like that. Still, he might come in some minor use at some point in the future.

I had the idea at this point of going back and attempting to recruit Yamanouchi Yodo, the hanshu of Tosa, since Ryoma was at a pretty high level and Naosuke would be good backup. But even still, Yodo was just a little too high-level for me to recruit just yet.

I set my controllable characters into two parties, to look for more Kaientai members and convert lesser hans when possible. Ryoma and Naosuke was my A-team, and Masakuni and Munemitsu were my B-Team. I sent the A-Team to Nagasaki, while the B-team worked on hans in the Kyoto area.

Within two weeks I had converted a swath of central Japan to kogi and things were looking good. And then a really annoying historical event happened--Emperor Komei sent out an edict condemning the Harris Treaty. And a wave of sonno sentiment hit the nation.

The map went from this:

To this:

Frustratingly, it was mostly kogi provinces that got converted, including the yuhan of Owari. Having been beaten down enough, enemy armies had laid off my beleaguered han of Yodo--now I had new, formerly unfought hans to deal with.

The A-Team of Ryoma and Naosuke started staunching the bleeding immediately. Hizen (the province Nagasaki is in) was directly controlled by the Bakufu (and Ike Kurata wasn't in his brothel) so I couldn't couldn't do anything there, but I did manage to convert the adjacent han of Saga--which is also a yuhan. And it was much easier than converting Hikone since Naosuke was helping.

Also, I still had that nice blue blob in the center of the map. But there were some ugly pockets of green in them. Those pockets cannot be converted through debate because they're sub-hans of the bakufu, which will always be sabaku. Kawachi, Yamashiro, Izumi, Settsu, and Iga all fall under that umbrella. So I started to conquer them militarily, using the same tactics I used to defend Yodo castle--attack, then flee when necessary.

A lone soldier from Yodo killed the hundreds of soldiers in Kawachi castle

Even if I made a mistake and got my army wiped out (which happened a few times) it wasn't really a big deal, because when a Unit 2 from a han gets destroyed a new, very weak and untrained one with 150 soldiers or so gets automatically respawned at its home base. Since I was attacking hans close by it was pretty easy because they were garrisoned with skeleton crews, having gotten slaughtered trying to kill my "super soldier" back at Yodo castle.

Meanwhile, my B-Team of Masakuni and Munemitsu found Nagaoka Kenkichi wandering aimlessly between two screens in Ise province, near the center of the map. Someone had converted him to sonno which is why I lost him as a playable character. I've noticed that when the AI debates each other, the one with the higher Appeal, rather than level, tends to get heavily favored. That would explain why Kenkichi lost out.

So I had to move Ryoma and Naosuke all the way from Kyushu so that Ryoma could re-recruit him. The rest of the group debated him over and over again to reduce his life and convert him back to Kogi. Finally after chasing him back and forth for a week Ryoma finally re-recruited him, and I promptly turned on his AI and sent him back to Kochi to stay out of trouble.

While that was going on, the combined forces of Yodo and its new sub-hans were throwing themselves at Osaka castle.

Osaka Castle had a ton of soldiers in it--I lost several armies assaulting it.

After its conquest, the big blue blob in the center of the map was staring to look a lot nicer. Only Iga and Yamashiro remained, and they were tough nuts to crack. Yamashiro in particular houses the imperial palace, and with nearly 20,000 troops stationed there, is almost impregnable.

Japan after Yodo's mini-rampage.

Iga I didn't attack with Yodo--Naosuke's yuhan, Hikone had thousands of troops at its disposal.  I actually lost more troops than I would have expected but I did end up conquering it. I guess Iga historically was always a tough nut to crack.

While Yodo was throwing its troops around I split the A- and B-Teams apart again, sending the A to the west and the B to the east. And on September 8th I learned the mechanics of the Ansei Purge a little better, as I was asked whether or not I would enact it when Ii Naosuke's turn rolled around.

"Sir Ii Naosuke, will you arrest/execute the extremist shishi?" No, I will not.

I guess Ii Naosuke's philosophy doesn't matter in regards to the Ansei Purge; so long as he's in charge at the bakufu you can do it. I suspect you might even be able to enact it if he's been converted to sonno. Regardless, carrying out the purge is a bad idea--you kill off a couple of prominent sonno characters in exchange for Naosuke getting assassinated in 1860. And I'd like to keep him around.

While Team A was in Kyushu, I made two discoveries. First, the soldiers in Hikone spotted Ike Kurata, the last member of the Kaientai. Too bad Ryoma was halfway across the country. Second, Team A ran into Yamnouchi Yodo, the hanshu of Tosa. I still wasn't high enough level to recruit him without him running away mid-debate, so I had Ii Naosuke debate him over politics until both were exhausted. Then I had Ryoma debate him for Trust, until I finally had him recruited. Now I had two yuhans under my direct control.

His Military is a little low, but at Level 33 Yamanouchi Yodo is a powerhouse.

Yamanouchi Yodo's English Wikipedia entry is really small but he was a very important personage in late-Edo Japan. An important figure in both the Imperial Court and the Bakufu at different times in his life, he seemed to sway between sonno and sabaku to the point that the phrase "When he's drunk he's pro-Emperor, when he's sober he's pro-bakufu" was said about him. As hanshu of Tosa, he made great strides to modernize his domain. Possibly most importantly, he was also the one who advised the Shogun to adopt Sakamoto Ryoma's plan for returning power to the Emperor, which he learned of from their mutual acquaintance Goto Shojiro.

I decided to send Yamanouchi around Kyushu converting lesser hans while Team A went back to the mainland to look for Ike Kurata. Yamanouchi had a chance encounter with Kato Shisho (加藤司書), the karo of Fukuoka, who was very, very strongly joi and when I tried to persuade him to switch to kogi, attempted to kill me. However I killed him, which did exactly nothing to change Fukuoka's philosophy because his position was filled by an odd character named Kato Shi...yoshi? (加藤司吉) I don't really know because that's not a name. One odd thing about Ishin no Arashi is that if you ever kill an NPC, they immediately get replaced with an NPC that's identical in every way except for one character of their name getting changed. It makes killing NPCs utterly pointless.

Recruiting Yamanouchi Yodo had another side benefit--I could now control the ranks of anyone associated with Tosa. Fortunately for me, nearly all of my controllable PCs were from Tosa. I demoted all the current jushin and made space for Sakamoto Ryoma, Kondo Chojiro, Nagaoka Kenkichi, and Shingu Umanosuke, and promoted them from hanshi to jushin. You can only change one rank per month so I couldn't promote Ryoma straight to karo.

There are lots of hanshi in Tosa to choose from when promoting--three pages worth.

With a bevy of jushin under my control, things got a bit easier. Well, Chojiro and Umanosuke were still pretty worthless, but Kenkichi could take on low-level hans and Ryoma was becoming nigh-unstoppable in debate. So during the month of November I slowly worked my way across areas of the country in multiple groups, converting low-level hans. I avoided the yuhans, as only Ryoma had the ability to convert them, and solo that was tough.

Or so I thought. While taking a scenic walk eastward across Japan, Mutsu Munemitsu and Inaba Masakuni passed the castle of Owari, one of the yuhans.  And, for whatever reason, the lord of Owari, Tokugawa Yoshikatsu (徳川義勝), decided to charge out of the safe confines of his castle and convince Masakuni of the rightness of the sonno cause. In fact he chased Masakuni for several days and across multiple provinces. In doing so, he reduced his life so much that Masakuni was able to persuade him despite being a lower level. So Owari changed to kogi without my even trying.

Yoshikatsu gets converted in a debate he initiated. I was not expecting this to happen.

Though I had cleared out  most of the bakufu-controlled provinces in central Japan, there were still plenty more. However they were pretty well-defended so I sent Tosa's substantial army, 5000 men strong, after them. I conquered several with them--Awaji, Noto, and Hida--and though I fought really well in all three against small, untrained forces, I still lost 1000 men from the army from sheer attrition alone.

Incidentally, these kinds of losses is why it's almost impossible to win Ishin no Arashi through military conquest alone. A very prosperous province might be able to afford recruiting a few hundred soldiers per year--you can never replace soldiers faster than you lose them, and you won't be able to get enough to conquer the country without making use of crazy exploits.

Anyhow, between the efforts of Tosa's army and my A/B team, Japan was starting to look pretty good by the end of November.

There's a lot of blue on that map.

At the end of November I promoted Ryoma to karo. That gave him additional bodyguards as well--he now had over 300. This actually turned out to be a pretty substantial bug--the maximum number of bodyguards you can have is 200. The number of bodyguards also affects the Intimidate command during persuasion, but 300 guards caused an overflow and made it impossible for Ryoma to Intimidate at all. So I deliberately got him into a fight--this caused the game to "check" his number of Bodyguards and dropped it back down to the maximum of 200.

Meanwhile Tosa's army decided to head for some of the Bakufu's provinces on the Kanto plain, southeast of the big blue blob in the picture above. I gave up looking for Ike Kurata with my A team too and sent them to Kyushu, where I had Yamanouchi Yodo converting minor hans.

Before the end of the year I made one last push to convert and recruit a new yuhan. Specifically, the han of Satsuma, in the extreme southwest corner of the map. Satsuma is one of the most powerful hans in the game, and had 15,000 soldiers and a hefty income.  It was led by Shimazu Tadayoshi (島津忠義), who I had Ryoma, Yodo, and Naosuke triple-team to convert and recruit.

Despite being the nominal ruler of one of the most powerful hans in late-Edo Japan, Shimazu Tadayoshi didn't actually do much during his reign; he became hanshu at a young age and most of the actual administration came from his father Hisamitsu and his advisors Saigo Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi. One of his major contributions came post-bakufu, when he helped start the abolition of the han system by voluntarily returning control of his domain to the emperor.

Tadayoshi's stats are very low, but the power of his han makes up for it.

With the army of Satsuma under my command, more crazy things like attempting to conquer the Imperial palace or the Shogun's castle started becoming if not possible, then at least thinkable. Satsuma is also a yuhan, and its conversion brought the total number of kogi yuhans to 7--leaving only 6 more to convert. By the end of the year the country was starting to turn very blue.

White hans in this picture were those I directly controlled.

Still, some of the toughest hans remained unconverted. I had quite a few high-level characters on my team at this point, and Ryoma was approaching the level cap at 39 (42 is the max) so I could start thinking about going after the yuhans in earnest and finishing the game. At the very least, it was likely that I could win before the end of 1859.

Next post I'll start mobilizing the hanshu I control to start converting the remaining yuhans. Though not necessary to complete the game, I'll see if I can't turn the entire country blue, with the exception of the provinces that hold the Imperial Palace and Shogun's castle.