Just as the “Romance of The Three Kingdoms” and “Dynasty Warriors” series, both produced by Koei Tecmo, have sparked the interest of many gamers in the history of The Three Kingdoms period, a large proportion of Chinese players’ understanding of the history of the Japanese Warring States period also comes from various historical-themed games of Koei Tecmo. The protagonist Oda Nobunaga has also gained many fans through the “Nobunaga’s Ambition” series.
A man whose every scene of life is accompanied by a cutscene
The latest installment of the historical simulation game series, “Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth”, which focuses on the history of the late Warring States period in Japan, was released on July 21st. Is this game suitable for beginners to get? In every respect, is it fun? Let’s take a little look at what this game actually looks like!
This place is yours. Do a good job!
In “Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth”, as soon as players enter the game, they will see the following gameplay loop chart:
It’s not complete, but very intuitive
In this game, players always take on the role of a daimyo in the late Warring States period of Japan, developing their own territory, launching wars for expansion, and ultimately unifying the entire Japan to achieve victory in the game. This simulation system is the core gameplay of the game.
Just as shown in the above picture, players will constantly cycle through waging wars to expand their territory, appointing generals to New Territories, and developing territories to enhance their strength.
During the first few dozen hours I started playing, the gameplay cycle of Knowledge and Action – economy – War ran very smoothly. Players always needed to plan well between focusing on economic development and seizing the opportunity to strike, and always had to try to balance policy spending and domestic development. Whether it was long-term strategy or short-term consideration, it was very interesting.
But what does “knowledge and action” mean? If you are a player accustomed to Koei Tecmo’s past works, you may feel quite uncomfortable when you first come into contact with this system. In simple terms, you need to appoint a city Lord and a county Lord for each city and county under your jurisdiction.
This piece of land is left to you!
This is a very different point compared with the past. From the perspective of historical simulation, it is indeed closer to the reality of Japan at that time. Unlike modern states, daimyos did not command their armies at will and have complete control over their territories. Instead, they formed a very typical structure of successive enfeoffment.
This is reflected in the game as follows: apart from the city where the daimyo played by the player is located, all other cities need to be distributed to vassals, allowing them to develop their own territories on their own. This process of distributing territory in the game is called “knowledge and action”.
Besides, Zhi Xing doesn’t merely send the generals there to automatically develop the territory; you have truly granted him this piece of land. When you are about to go to war, you do not randomly choose the generals to go to battle, but rather select the cities where you want to send troops. At this time, the Lord of this city was the general leading the troops.
Develop the economy!
One of the most obvious benefits of the knowledge and action system for gameplay is that it reduces economic micro-operations.
The economic system of “Nobunaga’s Ambition” is not overly complicated. However, there are hundreds of castles in the game, each with four, five or six counties, and a large number of facilities beneath the castles. If you are a player who has played previous works, you might be trembling inside at this moment. Do you have to visit each city one by one to ask them to build something? No, it’s not necessary.
What a vassal of Zhi Xing should do is to voluntarily develop the economy of his territory.
The content about the construction of the territory economy in the game is divided into several parts. Among them, the most fundamental part is to control the settlement of the county. You have two basic resources: money and food, and a resource that is more like “capacity” : labor. Officials who are knowledgeable and proactive will automatically take control of these settlements in their own territories. Only advanced settlements with particularly powerful effects will pop up and ask players to make a decision. Economic operations suddenly became much easier.
Build buildings at the foot of the city!
The second level of the economic system is the underground facilities. Compared with the basic control of rural areas and cities, the construction of underground facilities requires more capital investment and also has stronger returns. There are a total of 10 types of facilities that can be built under the city walls, such as irrigation waterways that increase both grain output and military strength, arrow towers or turrets that enhance the durability of the city walls, and supply stations that increase the amount of food that can be carried. These facilities under the city walls require more money and also take up more labor capacity when constructed.
The AI generals who have been enfeoffed as city lords will also automatically build facilities based on the policies you have arranged for the city walls. However, this function can only be realized when the policy is enabled.
To establish policies under the city walls and replace the lords, the functions of the city lords need to be upgraded and reformed in terms of institutional policies
The policy system is a fiscal black hole, which effectively addresses the issue that the huge capital pool of players cannot be fully utilized after the game’s economic cycle reaches a certain scale.
From the previous economic system, it can be seen that players’ resources include money, military provisions and labor capacity. Among them, the labor capacity is a restriction on players being assigned multiple tasks simultaneously, while military provisions are directly linked to the number of troops you can supply. As your territory expands and develops better and better, you will have more and more money. By the end of the game, one can easily earn tens of thousands of yuan a month and save hundreds of thousands or even millions of yuan. The destination of this huge sum of money is precisely the policy system.
Although continuing to develop the territory also requires money, you are likely to find that the main limitation comes from the labor capacity, and then a large amount of monetary income is considered a waste. In fact, the system in the game that enables you to consume resources without limit is the policy. The policy can unlock many necessary functions. For instance, it enables the city lords under your command to build their own facilities under the city walls. It also allows the lowest-ranking team leader to automatically earn merits. Additionally, it increases the output of various facilities, directly enhancing your abilities in all aspects during battles, and so on.
Each policy, depending on the level of activation, will require an increasing amount of money to maintain. This is a bottomless pit for financial investment and can easily deplete your extra money. Throughout the entire game, you need to carefully strike a balance between increasing investment in economic development and unlocking new policies. You must avoid having your income unable to cover policy expenditures, as well as accumulating too much money without spending it, which could lead to an economic idleness.
An eternal all-out war
This was the Warring States period of Japan. Just as you might imagine, as a daimyo, by default, you were at war with any other force. Unless an alliance is formed through diplomatic means, you can send troops to attack your neighbor at any time. Similarly, your powerful neighbor can also attack you at any time.
A seesaw battle
Whether you like it or not, during the gameplay of “Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth”, you will always be under the pressure of facing war. First of all, this generation pays special attention to making the military generals have “self-awareness”. The city Lord you set up in the border city will decide on his own to send troops to occupy the nearby counties.
In most cases, this situation only occurs when the county under the jurisdiction of the city is occupied by the enemy or when a rebellion (a rebellion by the people) breaks out. However, there are also times when a hot-tempered city Lord will lead troops to attack the neighboring counties of the city. Although there were no defenders in each county, it still took some time to suppress them. Moreover, the opposing city Lord would often send troops to fight back. Even if you have no plan to wage war now, the city Lord you have sealed at the border might still leave alone.
When you want to deal with other aspects first to avoid unexpected incidents, you will avoid deploying all your troops at the very beginning. However, sometimes things can suddenly get out of control. Both sides keep increasing the number of troops sent to the middle ground, and eventually it naturally turns into a decisive battle. A setting like this, which requires players to constantly keep an eye on border disputes and prevent the game from simply developing steadily, can make the game full of excitement, but on the other hand, it may also make some players feel very tired.
The key to war is to reduce the number of enemies faced simultaneously
However, if you can master the entire war-centered system of this generation to play, you will find that there are many playable strategies for you to choose from, rather than simply pulling out troops to fight against the enemy.
For instance, you might want to form alliances with daimyos from other directions to prevent them from launching surprise attacks from behind when you attack a certain direction. In the early stage of the game, when the Ashikaga family (shogun) is still around, you can ask them for help to get a position and gain higher prestige, which can make small forces directly submit to you.
The strategy system has become extremely powerful. During the actual game process, you will often see your subordinate generals proposing various strategies, such as fire attacks on the opponent’s provisions, destruction of the opponent’s city walls, or spreading rumors to reduce the loyalty of the opponent’s generals and incite rural rebellion, etc.
The effects of these strategies are truly ridiculously powerful. Usually, two destructions are enough to completely tear down the city walls of a city, reducing its durability to zero. In contrast, a fire attack almost burns all the provisions, preventing the enemy from sending troops for several months.
You generally don’t need to manually click on the strategies to use them. The strategies proposed by the generals under your command who think independently all day long will be more cost-effective and labor-saving, and more powerful, giving you a strong feeling that all the generals are alive.
If you feel that everything is well planned but still lack a bit of a sense of ceremony, you can also mobilize the target for the attack, that is, assemble the military equipment. After determining the target cities you want to capture, the game will automatically select some cities for you to arm up. Cities that are in the process of equipping will stop the pace of continuing to develop internal affairs and focus on training soldiers and preparing military provisions. If you attack again after completing the equipping, you can obtain many buff effects.
Get ready for war!
There are also two scenarios for engaging in battle. One is to fight on a large map, where both sides line up along a pre-determined route. Due to the limited width of the road, it is impossible for all troops to pass through at once. So you will see tens of thousands of people fighting on the front line, while at the rear, there are over a hundred thousand troops slowly consuming food and going hungry.
Of course, you can also manually operate them to take a detour. This is very useful in some areas, but not all terrains can do so. If you don’t have some relevant policies or set up a supply station, the personal provisions of each unit will only be enough for 120 days of expenses. If the battle is not over after the provisions are exhausted, this unit will be disbanded on the spot.
Line up and come one by one
No one would like to see troops being wasted like this. So, at this point, it is necessary to enter another type of battle – the cooperative battle mode.
Cooperative battles are the most thrilling part, especially when you can defeat many opponents with fewer players through excellent operation, and it is also a place where players’ tactical literacy can be fully demonstrated. When the daimyo played by the player personally leads the team to engage in battle with the enemy, a joint battle can be launched. All the troops lined up behind can be deployed at once, and the battle can be launched on a dedicated tactical map.
The player’s name must be present to join the battle
Depending on the number of troops appearing on both sides and the surrounding terrain, you will arrive at a pre-set battlefield for joint battles. This battlefield features a net-like route and many key strongholds scattered across the map. Unlike ordinary battles, you don’t necessarily have to eliminate all the enemies to win a joint battle.
The conditions for achieving victory in a joint battle include: occupying all the enemy’s evacuation exits, completely overwhelming the opponent in the morale chart, and having all the opponent’s troops retreat or be wiped out. You can either crush the enemy head-on, flank and encircle them, or launch a long-distance surprise attack on their exit. Arrange various tactics according to different situations to achieve victory. How to correctly operate the battle manually to achieve the maximum outcome depends entirely on the player’s performance.
It’s time for players to showcase their tactical skills
On the other hand, many features that cannot be utilized in large-scale map battles also need to be put to good use in joint battles. For instance, the cannon skills and riding skills improved by building shooting ranges and stables, as well as the special combat skills possessed by each powerful general, can only be brought into play on the battlefield of joint battles. There are also many special strongstands on the battlefield that can be used to quickly eliminate the enemy, such as rockfalls and broken Bridges. By making good use of these features, players can carry out all kinds of beautiful annihilation battles, blocking battles, and sometimes even grand battles that can turn the situation around in one fell swoop.
A united war is the shortcut to resolving a war
Moreover, there is a particular advantage to engaging in a joint war, which should be discussed in conjunction with the economic system mentioned earlier. Generally speaking, when you capture a city through war, since you have just taken it, the buildings beneath the city will be destroyed during the siege, and the settlements outside the city also need to be brought under your control one by one by sending people. One by one, the cities that have just been captured, even if they were previously fully developed, if they have to go through a tough and arduous siege battle to take them, almost all their development achievements will be wiped out. You can’t simply capture the economic center of your opponent and become rich in one bite; you still need to start from scratch to develop the economy.
However, engaging in a joint battle is different. When you defeat multiple forces of the opponent through a joint battle, you may trigger the “Might” effect. This effect enables you to occupy a large area of territory at once. These areas will surrender to you voluntarily upon seeing the troops on the front line fall like mountains, and there is no need to go through the process of capturing a city. The land obtained in this form is directly in a state that has already been developed by the opponent. Even if the facilities beneath the city do not fully meet your needs and need to be renovated, the large and small settlements outside the city and so on can all avoid the time required for re-development. You can quickly make the newly occupied city combative as well.
Here, it is necessary to mention another problem brought about by the setting of the portable food, which is that the farther you project your military power, the more difficult it will be. All soldiers are bound to the city. Every time they go on an expedition, they send troops from this city. The 120-day personal provisions ensure that your troops cannot be too far from their own city. This will become increasingly obvious when you expand to a relatively large area. The well-developed cities in the rear cannot deploy their troops to the front line. You will be forced to use the newly captured cities to train new recruits to continue fighting the next enemy.
Under the dual incentives of the economic and war systems, players, in an attempt to expand rapidly through warfare, have no choice but to send their daimyos into battle.
The most important thing in the 16th century was talent
That is to say, you have to be a powerful big name.
Although this has been the case for a long time, when you delve into the pros and cons of “Nobunaga’s Ambition”, you will find that the historical simulation games under Koei Tecmo can never avoid the heroic history perspective, which is the biggest weakness of the entire simulation system.
Whether it is domestic development, diplomacy or war, when it comes to implementation, it all depends on yourself and your military generals to carry it out. Generals with high numerical values can build structures both economically and labor-saving, and control settlements more quickly, etc. Skilled generals can activate their abilities in battles, restore their physical strength in one go, or eliminate a large number of enemies.
A close-up of the character only available with Golden battle skills
This is particularly attractive to players who take figures from the Warring States Period as their idols. You will be very eager to lead all the famous historical bigwigs into battle. During the battle, the entire scene suddenly darkened, and then the camera focused on “that person’s troops”. After a series of passionate dynamic effects, powerful combat skills were released, making people feel extremely exhilarated.
However, on the other hand, when you try to face those powerful generals, the experience is very bad. Especially when you need to face him in multiple battles, and then watch your troops, which are several times larger than his, being lifted up and attacked by a powerful move… In conclusion, you will need to recruit stronger generals very much.
We warmly welcome your joining us!
It’s rather strange that I couldn’t find where I could manually log in the generals. When defeating the enemy’s troops or capturing their cities, you have a small chance of capturing the enemy’s generals. At this time, you can ask them if they want to defect. Conquering a daimyo is a great opportunity to capture a huge number of generals in one go. You can also use strategies to poach talents from other companies. First, use rumors to make the other party’s loyalty decline, and then carry out poaching. This way, not only will your strength increase, but your opponent will also become weaker.
A more common situation is that your subordinates propose that you can employ military generals. Sometimes it’s to visit friends in the territory of other forces, and sometimes it’s to recommend local people. And the children born to your generals will automatically enter the workforce when they grow up, which is also a major source of generals in the middle and later stages.
At this point, I have to bring up a serious issue. The generals under your command all have a lifespan. When the time comes, they will grow old and die. You have to rely on the new generation to fill the void. Of course, normally speaking, there is nothing wrong with this system. Birth, aging, illness and death are the normal course of life. However, considering the other aspects of the game’s Settings, it becomes quite unacceptable for generals to die of old age.
The brain trust is dead old!
In this game, the time required to wage war and expand territory has been significantly prolonged, and after the battle, you also need to accumulate troops and provisions again. I played Shimadzu House. Although it was due to the fact that I was not familiar with it at the beginning and needed time to figure it out, it took me nine years to unify Kyushu. Throughout the entire process of unifying Japan, your military generals will die of old age one by one. In this environment where the game progress has slowed down, the frequency of generals dying of old age is really too high.
The bigger problem is that those generals with relatively strong data often concentrate within a certain period of time, and their descendants are generally much weaker. As a result, you will face a situation where the quality of the talent gets lower and lower as you play, which is very disgusting. Often, useful generals have only been in your hands for a short time, and they might even die of old age before they have received enough honors to participate in battles. It’s simply speechless.
Although there are a few ways in the game to slightly enhance the attributes of generals, you don’t have a real means to make poor generals stronger. In the ever-growing game cycle, only the generals will become weaker and weaker as you play. Although this issue runs through almost every historical simulation game under Koei Tecmo, in “Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth”, it becomes even more prominent due to the lengthening of the in-game timeline.
Life is just like this: as you keep on living, it’s gone
On the other hand, a simulation system that is entirely built around the historical perspective of heroes is simply unable to restore historical development. “Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth” also does not offer a system where many historical events and legends can be brought into play. So, all these things are driven by historical events.
Animated GIF cover
Some historical event transitions also have dynamic effects
So you will see that those battles and events that are very famous in history all occurred at a certain point in time. You watched a cutscene and it told you what the outcome was. There are no variables in between and no actual gameplay process. Sometimes you just border with a certain force and then engage in a fierce battle with them to capture a city. In fact, you didn’t mobilize your troops at all and didn’t fight or anything like that. But because such an event occurred, you just managed to take a city.
This is still a selling point in Koei Tecmo’s view… Indeed, creating over three hundred historical events and arranging their trigger conditions and outcomes one by one is quite a complex project. I won’t make fun of the issue of reusing background materials that occurs countless times for now. There are many historical events. Honestly, are they worth your clicking on?
Hello everyone, I have something to announce. I’ve changed my name
The distribution of these historical events, of course, revolves around the protagonists of the Warring States period. For instance, every stage of Oda Nobunaga’s life has its corresponding historical events, and some of them are even animated films. The rest are becoming less and less important according to their significance. For players who are not very familiar with the history of the Japanese Warring States period, they might be completely at a loss. For instance, in the future, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who will eventually end the Warring States Period, when the plot of his childhood takes place, players only see a child being thrown around as a hostage. Due to numerical design issues, it’s very likely that the Matsuhira family will be defeated by the Imagawa family not long after, and then there’s nothing more. As a result, you have no idea what those early plots are all about.
These historical events sometimes deal a heavy blow to unprepared players and are completely unreasonable. For instance, the first game I saved was the Grand Neijia. However, due to the time limit, a historical event occurred and I was killed by my subordinates for no reason at all. Then, the alliance I had been working hard to maintain broke down, and I was caught in a situation where I was attacked from both sides.
Hello, you can pass away now. Goodbye
Perhaps this is indeed part of the game, but I have no means at all to deal with this “historical outcome”, which is still quite annoying.
The poorest general in the entire force is actually the daimyo?
Even so, in fact, until I completed the unified region ending with the Shimadzu family, my overall opinion of this game was still quite positive. However, as I continued my steps to unify the world, a seriously unreasonable game design emerged, making me feel more and more uncomfortable as I played – the daimyo couldn’t even control the funds of his subordinate legions.
The unified area can also end in the middle
The discomfort it brings stems from the superposition of the following several systems:
First, there is the jurisdiction distance system. You cannot govern a city that is too far from your residence. This jurisdiction not only means that it cannot be directly governed but needs to be granted to subordinates, but also that you can no longer collect taxes from such distant cities. You must divide these cities to form the second and third legions. These legions will calculate their revenue independently and then hand over the income to you in a certain proportion.
Then there is the issue of player initiative. This involves multiple systems. Only the daimyo can engage in a joint battle to subdue a large area of land in one go, and only the player will take very proactive economic measures to accelerate the development of the newly occupied land. Therefore, when sealing the legion, a reasonable strategy is to entrust the well-developed rear cities to the AI for management, and arrange the player’s base forward to facilitate the management of newly captured territories.
This policy is outrageously costly
Then there is the cost of policies. Each policy requires regular financial expenditure. The more advanced the policy, the higher the financial maintenance cost will be. The most advanced policy requires you to occupy half of Japan to have the financial capacity to maintain it. The policy maintenance fees are all paid by the first legion to which the player belongs.
Taking all the above-mentioned systems into account, some players are sure to notice something is amiss. In fact, in the economic balance of the middle and later stages of the game, most of the players’ monthly income will be used to pay for the monthly policy maintenance fees. Only a relatively small portion is used for strategic expenses and economic development.
But! The first legion that the player is in is often the newly acquired territory of the entire force and also the part with the least financial income. However, the legions at the rear do not need to continue investing in the economy but have a large amount of abundant funds. The player legion, on the other hand, is burdened with huge policy expenses.
As a result, the monthly income of the economy in the middle and later stages was all negative. In fact, in terms of the entire force, my income is undoubtedly positive. However, since the income of my first Legion only accounts for a small portion but bears the complete policy expenses, this has led to my income turning negative.
Set up the rear legion
Of course, there are still solutions to this. Although I couldn’t find any button to withdraw money from the legion, I can disband the legion so that I can get the balance and then re-establish the legion. Due to the aforementioned contradiction between income and expenditure, I have to come back every few months to disband the rear legion, re-establish it, set up the cities under its jurisdiction, and set the legion’s goals… This repetitive operation is simply fatal.
Whether this is a long-standing problem of “Nobunaga’s Ambition” or not, I believe it is undoubtedly an unreasonable design that must be corrected; otherwise, players will be completely unable to enjoy the game in the later stages.
Overall, “Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth” is a game with a very good early experience. The system is also simplified enough to be suitable for newcomers to get started. After introducing a large number of “generals’ self-judgments”, the feature of this game has become that players need to issue more tasks and control their subordinates rather than doing everything themselves.
This change can be regarded as a great liberation for players, sparing them from the annoyance of repetitive operations. Some people also complain that they have lost control over the details and it is not intuitive enough. Whether it is better or worse may vary from person to person. In my opinion, the game experience was very good before the need for legion division, but then it was dragged into a quagmire by seriously unreasonable design. The further you play, the more painful it will become. If you try to unify all of Japan, you will be infuriated by the various flaws within the game.
At present, the player reviews of this game are quite polarized. It’s unknown how the official will respond, after all, there will definitely be a more powerful enhanced version in the future. If you are worried that you may not be able to adapt to the changes of this new game, you might as well wait and see for the time being and make a decision after the official major update.