Ikko Ikki Campaign Guides

[Pinky333]

Once the hattorii are gone its pretty easy up till RD. You get all the center and start making alot of money. Provinces convert fast. I just cant get past RD :| everyone declares war on me before I can build up.

[Ceorl84]

I just feel you're overlooking a potentially quite good and cheap assortment of units for the later game.

If you are referring to me, I was not talking about the Ash units but only your comparison of Monks to Ronin. Although your comment about Ronin spearmen's upkeep is something I mised in my playthrough.

Well right now my problem is getting to late game without getting rushed from 2-3 different clans. But it is a very interesting discussion, thank you.

It's tough to avoid and your best bet is to ally with a major clan because smaler clans seem more inclined to break the alliance. I had good luck with the Takeda and Oda in my games. You can ally with a smaller clan but it is best to consider such an alliance to be a stop-gap measure. Also don't forget that you can pay for clans to break their alliances with others; often for an absurdly cheap sum.

[Charsi]

In my game, Oda wiped out Tokugawa and are fighting/taking Imagawa lands. After taking Mino (Saito) and South Shinano (Kiso) I allied with them. It's interesting that you mention Hattori - in every game they are a huge problem for me. When I play something other than Ikki, the Hattori and Ikko Ikki always get into it very early on, and the Ikko Ikki pretty much always win. Maybe I should do the same.

Sakai died at the hands of Takaoka, who accepted a trade agreement and are keeping the peace.

[vurj]

Edit: to answer an above question, you get Samurai Retainers from your fort, everyone does. Ikko Ikko also gets Monk "retainers" from their temples.

You're missing the point, I'm very well aware of current game mechanics.

For all clans, except ikko-ikki, you can mouseover your fort and see the samurai retainers. Ikko-ikki is not supposed to have samurai, as their religious beliefs conflicts with the idea of an elite socialite class ruling the peasants, and hence get monks from temples instead. But for some reason, likely a bug, you currently get both.

As for units, beside what I've already stated about yari ronin, there's no point in recruiting masses of katana ronin, as naginata monks are much more versatile.

[Pinky333]

If you move your troops to kaga, the hattori will declare war on asia, so you can send your monk down and incite revolt once they take it. It pretty much cripples the hattori. but if you move to echizen, they ally with asia

[Snipafist]

Another small tidbit that should be obvious to some but maybe not so much to others is that as Ikko Ikki, it's imperative that you get high-level monks because Incite Revolt is quite a handy ability and because you're utterly lacking in Metsuke, so your monks will need to pull double duty in keeping cities happy and converting enemy agents. The problem is that holy site provinces DO NOT give your monks additional ranks upon recruitment (not sure if this was intentional or not on CA's part). The best way to level them is to find a rebel city and constantly attempt to demoralize the army inside. This costs nothing and is fairly safe, so just get your ring of monks to gather around and keep scolding those naughty rebels for their poor life decisions. It shouldn't take too long to get up to level 3 or 4, and with enough patience, you can get all the way up to 5 or 6. You can do the same thing to enemy armies, but they'll typically have better protection (ninjas and/or metsuke) that can throw a monkey wrench into your plans.

[Ashu-Siralis]

I'm doing an Ikko Ikki LP on legendary. I'm sure that can offer some tips and stuff

[grandtomatoe]

Hey Ceorl,

You said this:

"5. Vassals are unreliable until AFTER realm divide occurs. Then, with the entire island at war with you, it can be very beneficial to have access to an incompetent, unit spamming teamates who will be your only trade partners for the rest of the game. In my game I created three vassals, two of whom were destroyed thanks to stupid strategic decisions, while the other, Tokugawa, locked down the southern coastline for me. "

Does that mean that Ikko vassals actually stay with you AFTER realm divide? With other factions I believe that vassals always declare war on you AFTER realm divide. Is it different for Ikko?

Thanks man, your a beast by the way.

[Nergui]

I believe there's some kind of hidden flag "warwithhuman" set to on or off which is set to on for all extant clans when RD is triggered. Even with the no RD effects mod from http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=436082, all non-allied clans will declare war at RD. Even if your relationship is +100 or more.

As a result, any clan that reemerges after the RD event wont have this flag set and will remain at peace assuming no 'past grievances'.

[Snipafist]

Just finished my Ikko Ikki campaign, and had a couple more observations to add:

1) Your early game economy is terrible. Given that you will be struggling just to survive in the early game, it can be difficult to get reliable trading partners or to spend the money required to get up to a trading port early enough to grab a trade hub or two. You won't really have the finances or political comfort to finance a navy to kick others off trade nodes until much later, either. You also get no metsuke to help you get a leg up. With that said, you're going to need to get your economy going as quickly as possible with the relatively scant resources available. I found that just trying to get my two starting provinces off on solid footing before the inevitable war(s) came was a sound move. Diving straight into the blender is a surefire way to get war declared on you from every side.

2) Prioritizing tech is extremely important. Don't get me wrong, teching is always important, but as the Ikko Ikki it is vital. Because your economy is poor and you'll often be at war, a mistake could cost you dearly. For this reason it is important to single out what is unnecessary, and the simple answer is that the entire right half of the bushido tree is unnecessary. Given that your ronin are recruited from the simple first-tier recruitment buildings, you really shouldn't need to build more than the basic assortment available after you learn the first tech. Continuing to improve those buildings does not unlock any new units as it does for other factions, all it does it give the respective ronin +1XP and eventually (at tier 3) -1 to recruitment time. While this is nice, you don't have the luxury to really waste the time pursuing those paths for scant gains while most of mainland Japan hates your guts.

The exception to this is the spear tree, for several reasons. You will need the naginata dojo to recruit naginata monks later. Additionally, Yari Ronin are your advanced infantry of choice, costing only 100 upkeep and boasting some impressive stats, despite their lackluster numbers. Katana Ronin aren't awful, but when you consider you can get three units of Yari Ronin for the upkeep cost of two Katana Ronin, I choose the Yari every time. Finally, the spear tree gives your plentiful spear units XP bonuses, which helps keep your Yari Ronin great, makes your Yari Ashigaru worth considering, and keeps your melee monks at the top of the heap.

As far as the Chi tree goes, you'll want just about everything. The temple upgrades are the priority here, as they provide happiness, conversion rates, chi research bonuses, access to your top-notch warrior monk units, and warrior monk defenders. From there on, you'll need to balance your needs. You want better roads to get your armies around faster, better diplomatic relations to keep the pressure against you to a minimum, better agents to screw around with enemy factions to give you an edge, and a better economy because you desperately need the money and the game and your rivals are not going to be much help there. You need to prioritize, obviously.

3) Monks are vital, but the game does you no favors. By this I mean that because you have no Metsuke, your monks are going to be used for all kinds of tasks: inspiring unhappy towns, converting provinces to your religion, converting enemy agents to make them go away, demoralizing enemy armies, improving the morale of yours so that your ashigaru stick around, and inciting rebellions. It's a long list. Normally metsuke help lighten the load on town maintenance and happiness issues, but you're completely without them. The problem here is that the holy site provinces DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT give your monks free ranks when recruited there. Every last one of them starts at level 1 and needs to do his best to not die on his way to becoming useful. My favorite method of levelling up monks is to have them demoralize rebels. It's free and relatively safe and does not incur diplomatic penalties. Still, expect to have your monks constantly assassinated in the early game. It will be very important to get a good source of high-rank ninja (good news is you're right next to the ninja hot spots) to assassinate rival ninja who are gunning for your monks.

On the topic of monks, it can be quite skill-point-intensive to travel down the Ikko Ikki monk skill tree. If you want to get bonuses to converting provinces, you're waiting until you're at least a 4-star monk and will need to invest in several other skills just to get there. While playing as a Shinto Buddhist faction, you'll notice that you can pretty comfortably specialize a monk in one task while blazing down the chi research bonus tree. With the Ikko Ikki monks, this is much more difficult, and I rarely found myself with the skill points spare to even start getting chi research bonuses (which requires min 4 stars). On the whole, I found it helped to have 2 or 3 monks double down on Inspire Settlement because you'll find newly conquered provinces are often quite unhappy and if it's a choice between having a monk babysit the province or devoting one of your few armies to do it, the right choice should be obvious.

4) Food runs out fast. Given that you will need to be adding temples to many of your provinces and that all of your recruitment hubs DEMAND higher-level temples to recruit your best units, you'll find you're building many more temples than you usually do and that these temples are often consuming extra slots, which requires extra farms to build higher-level castles to hold all these buildings. This isn't all bad - with the castle defenders and the temple defenders, you can often defend a vital province with a few additional units and wind up with a competent defense force on the cheap, but it means that food production and maintenance is something you really need to keep an eye on.

5) Ashigaru need some work, but can be worthwhile. You get more ashigaru per unit than other clans and they get better morale too. The problem is that their other stats are often worse, sometimes moderately so instead of just slightly. You'll need to rely on the ashigaru throughout the game to bulk out your armies, however - a pure ronin force in the early game becomes quite expensive and a pure monk (and possible some ronin too) force in the mid to late game is also pushing it. Also given that you're unlikely to ever progress to the point where you can recruit ronin in one turn (exception: Yari Ronin if you've gone down the spear path as recommended), getting a sizeable number of ronin or monks is often quite time-consuming.

Anything that gives a flat stat bonus to troops helps your numerous ashigaru moreso than the ashigaru on the other side. In particular, high experience generals, particularly those with the Infantry commander skill maxed out, can make good use of ashigaru. The ashigaru commander trait isn't bad either, but I found the Religious Trait offered similar benefits to everyone for a similar investment (+2 morale for whole army instead of just +4 morale for ashigaru, plus a bonus to Inspire and a religious conversion bonus). In particular, you'll want to be recruiting your Yari Ashigaru from Kaga, preferably with a maxed out smith building and a jujustu school or armory encampment. In the early game when I was recruiting Ronin and Ashigaru, I found the Weaponmaster Smith and Armorer Encampment seemed to work best (augmented the Ronin to be quite fierce with +4 to melee and +2 to armor, and the Ashigaru became capable of killing things in melee and lived a little longer). Once you begin to replace/compliment your Ronin with Naginata Monks, you'll probably want to switch over the the Master Armorer for +5 armor - it will mean your already-fierce-in-melee monks have much better life expectancy (especially vs. arrows) and your ashigaru can just glut up the works while waiting for your ronin and monks to come save the day/warcry your foes away.

Obviously you'll want a maxed-out Fletcher building for recruiting ranged Ashigaru. Beyond that, it's up to you if you want +2 armor to keep them alive better in ranged duels with opposing archers or if you want the additional 5 accuracy because every little bit helps, especially with a poor reload speed. To be honest, I found Ashigaru Bowmen to be fairly poor and only moderately decent with +25 accuracy. I'd prefer Ronin or Monk bowmen any day of the week, and can cut corners/save cost by padding out my melee units with Ashigaru instead. Of course, beggars cannot be choosers and if you're in a desperate need for some firepower, the ashigaru bowmen will cut it. They're competent castle defenders as well because their lower reload speed is less of a hindrance when the enemy has to scale a few walls to get to them rather than just charge straight at them.

6) Your cavalry options are limited and quite extreme. By that I mean you get light cavalry from the stables and that's it. Light cavalry can be handy for running down archers or fleeing units, but it's fairly weak. The good news is that it is cheap. The only other cav unit available is the naginata monk cavalry, which is fairly fierce but is extremely expensive. They also require the third-tier temple building to be recruited (in addition to a basic stables), so getting to them is not fast or easy. They have a pathetic armor of 2 (like most monks) and so suffer extremely from ranged fire or protracted combat. If you're recruiting these guys, get them an armor bonus PRONTO.

7) Your relationship with Ikko Ikki rebels is complicated. While it's nice to take control of provinces that have Ikki revolts (and a great way to get back regions your foes take from you with nearly no work!), it can push you to Realm Divide before you're ready and can result in you picking up provinces you didn't want (either a relatively worthless province or one that's bordering factions who weren't at war with you but now might have cause to reconsider their tolerance for your religious extremism). It's also a great way to ruin alliances - if an Ikki revolt swipes a province from your friend and gives it to you, you can consider the alliance nullified whether you wanted those rebels there or not. This causes problems because you WANT to build temples, especially in strategic places (central provinces bordering many other provinces, front-line provinces for defense, etc.) and given that Ikko alliances are usually temporary at best, it is good long-term planning to convert some of your (temporary) ally's citizens to your religion for when you're forced to move in. It also forces a potentially combative AI to garrison troops instead of come after you, which can be a real lifesaver. Unfortunately, sometimes you succeed too hard, and this causes problems.

There are similar issues with Incite Revolt. With a Christian or Shinto Buddhist faction, you can Incite Revolts all over just to give provinces to rebels and cause trouble and/or pick them up when you get the opportunity. If you incite an Ikko revolt, you better be ready to pick up that province right now, which can be troublesome, especially in provinces with very low Ikko Ikki belief percentages. Furthermore, inciting revolts can be very expensive and uncertain of results, which hurts a lot with a cash-strapped faction like the Ikko Ikki. Speaking of cash-strapped, you'll often find a few warrior monks scattered amongst your rebels, and oh man do they ever demand a big paycheck. Disband them at your convenience.


Now I've mostly mentioned problems. Here are a few solutions, although I'm sure you can come up with some on your own too:

1) Use your two starting provinces to recruit like crazy. They're both great for grabbing high-quality melee or ranged units. Don't neglect them and try to get most of your ashigaru from them.

2) The ninja recruitment provinces are invaluable and should be obtained as soon as possible. You will need ninja to keep your monks and armies safe, and the burkamin village upgrades can produce a substantial amount of money to help with your financial problems.

3) Focus on choke points. You will be cash-strapped for some time and so it's important to maximize your ability to defend yourself on the cheap. Don't forget that temples provide warrior monk defenders, which can help you bring a substantial number of troops to a castle defense. As has been said before and bears repeating "Kaga is your Helm's Deep." You'll want a temple and a high-level castle there for recruitment purposes, so it's a great place to make a stand. The lands to the immediate east of it are lackluster and probably not worth conquering deliberately prior to Realm Divide (of course, your rebels may have other ideas).

4) Use vassals in the early-to-mid-game. If you can get a vassal or two created between you and your adversaries and support that vassal in some early conquests, you can keep foes busy for a while and keep a secure border. It also gives you +1 honor, which is handy for making your population happy and improving your diplomatic relations. These vassals will turn on you in a heartbeat once Realm Divide hits, though, so think of them as a temporary solution.

5) Learn to sail before Realm Divide. You'll find most of your pre-RD activity devoted to the mainland with little cash or attention to spare for the sea. Once you've carved out a reasonably stable land empire, you'll want to build up a competent navy stack or two and a good number of trade ships in order to camp nodes for some income. You'll also want to conquer Sado for the substantial income it produces.

6) Horse provinces don't mean anything to you. For most factions, having a cavalry specialized recruitment province is a definite perk. Given that your cavalry are either cheap and poor or expensive and fragile, you'll want to be recruiting yours from the same recruitment hub that gives you the armor bonus to keep these troops alive. You'll also be using relatively few cavalry, so dedicating an entire province to the task is relatively foolish.

6.5) Holy sites kind of don't mean anything to you. As mentioned above, holy sites DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU besides improve morale if you go down the pilgrim hostel branch. They do not improve monk agents' ranks and they do not provide your warrior monks with more experience. It may be worth taking these provinces regardless because they tend to be relatively well-off and because it allows you to stop your opponents from recruiting high ranked Buddhist monks to oppose the spread of your religion. While I much prefer recruiting troops from Kaga for the smith bonuses, the +3 (or +5) morale bonus on yari ashigaru combined with the armorer allows them to function as a poor man's +5 armor meat shields. Still, they're much preferable to plain vanilla yari ashigaru.

7) Try to come to some kind of understanding with the likely-Christian Kyushu faction(s). Everyone will hate both of you so you're unlikely to get competing alliances problems. You might as well try to work out some kind of equitable trading arrangement or perhaps even an alliance. Be warned they do start off absolutely hating your guts, but with a decent trade relationship, daimyo honor, +diplomacy techs, and perhaps an interclan marriage, they can be made pliable. The good news is that you're quite unlikely to ever really want anything that far to the west (on the campaign map, I know in real life it's to the southwest) and they're unlikely to get dragged into wars against you because nobody likes them either or wants to be their friend.

8) Use warrior monks to level the playing field. Not only are your warrior monks extremely capable fighters, they also have abilities that decrease enemy morale. Naginata monks can warcry in the middle of a combat, affecting several enemy units at once (try to position them away from one another in a battle line to maximize the benefit) and bow monks can shoot whistling arrows, which decrease morale for units they hit or fly over. I find it quite useful for bow monks to light up an approaching unit with fire arrows, doing substantial damage, and then firing over that unit at the enemy ranged or support units behind them with whistling arrows right before I have the monks retreat behind my melee infantry. This maximizes my morale disruption, and usually after that I just need a bit of grinding with my ashigaru, or a warcry and a solid beating from the warrior monks to send foes packing.

I hope this has been helpful!

[Ceorl84]

@ Grandtomatoe, what Nergui said.

@Snipafist, wall of text warning. You should edit the length. Second, what difficulty did you beat the game at? I ask because I found Incite Revolt to be too expensive on L. Third, I disagree with 7. The IK-IK suffers a -80! relationship hit with Christian factions (I guess because both offer differing salvation for the commoner). Christians start off disliking you and that's before the territorial expansion penalty is factored in. You're almost guaranteed a war from the start no matter what you do.

[Charsi]

Started over again, but I did tone it down to Normal difficulty since I was a bit tired of getting spanked on Hard. Had good results with a tactic that turtled at Kaga, befriended Sakai, moved south into Omi then Iga province with just a Monk and waited to see what Hattori would do. As soon as Hattori left his province to invade somebody else, I incited a revolt in Iga province (> 50% chance). The resulting Ikko Ikki rebels "destroyed" Hattori on turn 3, but I still had to hold out against the Hattori Rebels counterattack, which I managed easily.

Sakai (Wakasa province) allied with Asai (Omi province) so when I declared on Asai, Sakai threw themselves on the sacrificial pyre. I wiped both of them out with the army of Ashigaru i'd been building up in Echizen since turn 1.

It's now turn 10 or so, I control Kaga, Echizen, Wakasa, Omi and Iga. Saito died to Oda (who also killed Tokugawa) and I again formed an alliance with them. I'm busy selling military access and trade agreements to everyone else. I can pretty much turtle now... geographically there's only two ways into my lands: Kaga in the northeast and Wakasa along the northwest coast. Ashikaga form a western wall for me, and my new Oda allies hold provinces to the east of Omi so there's no way through. I burned the temple in Kaga and i'm building up both the fortification and men in that province so that neither Uesugi or Takeda get any bright ideas to invade. I plan to build new temples in Iga and Echizen.

I guess someone could invade me via Iga, but I should get plenty of warning.

I had a funny thought. What if I took Kyoto really early, and then simply vassalized every major clan I conquered from that point on? If you vassalize them after RD, they never get RD penalty, and vassals cannot declare on you (or presumably, eachother). Provinces you liberate with Ikko Ikki do not offer the vassal option, sadly. But I figure if I can just make Hattori and Oda post realm divide vassals and let THEM do all the conquest..

[Charsi]

Increasingly coming to realise the way to go with Ikko Ikki is *always* to push hard south early and hold off the Oda with an alliance. Wipe out Hattori and take all the ninja provinces for yourself. I have now wiped out Hatakeyama clan, but most importantly I own all the land in and around Kyoto, including all the ninja clan provinces. I'm shooting for Burakumin Village -> Smuggling Network and hopefully raking in the dough.

2) The ninja recruitment provinces are invaluable and should be obtained as soon as possible. You will need ninja to keep your monks and armies safe, and the burkamin village upgrades can produce a substantial amount of money to help with your financial problems.

This is gold. Actually, everything Snipafist says is very, very good and is being borne out in practice. The only nitpick I have is the 7th note about Christian clans. They hate my guts on sight.

Encampment -> Armor in both Echizen and Kaga. Blacksmith became Armorsmith so I can now crank out +5 armor Yari with 75 koku upkeep. Kaga is absolutely stocked with guys (10 Yari Ronin and 8 Bow Ronin) and nobody from the Kaga end of things has got the guts up to declare on me.

I've researched Encampments and Fire arrows, and dabbled in Chi as far as Essence of the Spirit. Now i'm teching through to Chonindo for Land Consolidation and to build a Master Bowmaker in Echizen.

[Snipafist]

I should amend #7. You are both correct that the Christians hate you, and I was mistaken in saying it was equal penalties to diplomacy as with shinto clans. I did, however, find that they were often on bad terms with the same peple I was on bad terms with and were usually on Kyushu, which is far from where I intended to be. Once I achieved an allieance with them (usually the shoni), it worked out well as we tended to stay out of one another's ways and had few competing alliances to complicate things. It definitely requires a little work to get there, but having a wealthy trade partner helps.

[Snipafist]

oh, and Charsi I am glad you found my post helpful! The Ikko have some definite differences from other factions, but they can be made to work.

[Crusader561]

I restarted an Ikko Ikki campaign around 5 times now (yeah I'm a slow learner). Based on my vast experience, here's my 2 cents..

1) Forget about navy and trade zones. Sea trade income is a poison pill for the Ikko Ikki. It's too easy to become dependent on sea trade income. When realm divide occurs you're sea trade income vanishes. Your navy then becomes a liability.

2) Upgrade farms everywhere. Prioritize upgrades by region fertility.

3) City specialization is especially important for Ikko Ikki. You don't need that many unit producing towns so spam markets and fully upgrade them in your fertile and very fertile regions. Which leads to...

4) Prioritize capturing and upgrading very fertile regions: Omi, Owari, Kii, and of course Kaga. Omi is a koku machine! Omi benefits from the ninja resource. (I keep the webpage at http://shogun.bitcrumbs.com up on my second monitor :-) ).

5) Yari ronin are your main unit. They are expensive to train but have the same upkeep cost as ashigaru. Once you have upgraded Kaga's blacksmith (don't forget an encampment) and have a decent economy. Train lots of these guys in Kaga.

6) Its somewhat liberating not to have to worry about producing and manage quality cavalry. All you get is cheap, light cavalry so not much planning goes into producing cavalry for Ikko Ikki.

7) It's surprising what one monk unit in an army will do. A naginata monk charging into the center of a battle shouting a battle cry produces results! It can completely change the tide of a battle. But monk units are expensive so use them sparingly. I only one or two of these guys in my main armies.

8) Only build temples in your central cities. You piss off your neighbors when you build temple adjacent to them. Conversely, build temples if you want to piss off your neighbor or cause a revolt in a territory. I keep the one in Kaga just for the monk retainers when Kaga is attacked.

[Charsi]

I finally won my Ikko Ikki campaign over the weekend. Notably, I never pushed north out of Kaga. I had to take Noto province out of necessity (Oda took it, then declared on me), but as soon as the castle was repaired I completely abandoned it. No improvements, no garrison, taxation turned off. Religious conversion was handled by the temple in Kaga, but if Takeda (or some other clan I didn't want to vassal) took it, I would have let them keep it.

With control of central japan (the ninja provinces) I had an incredible economy in the mid game, at one point nearly 5k koku per turn (~turn 50) and a solid 30k in savings. I ended up needing pretty much all of it after Realm Divide, and went around with two full stacks (one ashigaru, one monks) making vassals. I won by spreading westwards towards Shimazu island, whatever it's called, making new allies the whole way. Hojo was my final vassal and Kyoto was my final province. The RD phase was so short, Takeda had just declared on me as I took Kyoto; they walked a stack up to Kaga, saw the fully upgraded fortress stacked with men, and simply walked in another direction.

I completely ignored cavalry and mostly ignored trade nodes except the north (which remained unchallenged until RD). Capturing the centre ninja provinces and creating a strong economy is clutch. Trade is nice but too far to do dependably.

[kronpas]

Bought ikko ikki when its on sale last week, but couldnt get past early game - ended up wasted all my weekend. Honestly, I played a good amount of Strategy games over the years but never ever encountered a CAI as ridiculous as S2's AI. As soon as a faction's dip point to me lowered past a certain point, it landed an army on Echigo, despite whatever hostile faction around it and how long it took to reach my realm. Its as if I defended against the whole Japan! 0-0 (VH/VH). Diplomacy was trash. How the did my daimyo "gained" 'betrayed alliance -1" when it was AI who did it to backstab me? How the I was the one got -dip because my trade route to certain faction got broken due to a random war in God-know-where?

I just gave up -.-"

[razor1952]

II are IMHO the best strategy so far. Especially diplomacy. Thanks for all the tips.

Playing VH several ways, by far the best tip as above is to get break alliances or even dow on your enemy, in my game Hojo and Takeda had ~10 provinces and I had 7 or so but they both had the wood on me for economy and number of stacks. Takeda was allied to me but degrading, Hojo was already at war with me. I offered 500 x 5 to break alliance and dow on hojo to takeda, they came back with 2000 and dow which I very happily obliged. That changed everything and allowed me to fight off all the others including those pesky choko invasions while Takeda and Hojo beat each other up.

BTW can II convert to christian?, I have half a mind to quickly sail to shimazu territory and convert to get the unbeatable trade ships and those southern trade nodes.

I also find the nagi monks get slaughtered by arrows even with some armor, so prefer the ronin yaris with their cheap upkeep and awesome stats from a Kaga castle with armor upgrades. Any tips how to use nagi monks??

[GeoEng]

BTW can II convert to christian?, I have half a mind to quickly sail to shimazu territory and convert to get the unbeatable trade ships and those southern trade nodes.

You can't. The Ikko Ikki stay Ikko Ikki till the bitter end. Their religion and superior monks is what differentiates them from other clans. What's the point in converting?