I feel like I should apologize for how long this took to actually post, but I should probably figure out some faster method to get all the posting out of the way over handling it all individually. It’s not so easy wit screenshot LPs, I guess. And I have been busy with no idea what my schedule is going to look like in these coming months. Hang in there, guys. 
P.S.
I added relevant characters to second post just so they’re easily available. Sticking with our three custom characters for now and sadly new ones cannot be introduced into the game while it’s ongoing. Just in case someone else felt like they wanted their own character.
[details=Update 01 - Overture]Here we go at last with our first proper update. I took my sweet time with it, I confess.
But before that let’s some basic rundown on our setup and scenario we’re going with for this particular game.
In case everyone forgot we’re rolling with Birth of Nobunaga scenario and will, in fact, be playing as the Oda clan. Main branch, mind you. There are couple of other branches in the game and I’ll talk about for a tiny bit when we start playing, but let’s just say this is the one where Kipposhi aka Nobunaga Oda was born into. If you don’t know about the guy yet he’s kinda famous.
But at the time clan Oda is headed by his father Nobuhide Oda. Here we can see some basic stats for the clan and while it’s definitely not among the weakest with three bases and smack dab on the top of the bay our addition of three custom officers will certainly help it by bumping the number to nine officers.
After we click on the icon of the clan we want to play as we can choose which officer to start with. Position is what matters as there are three main gameplay styles: Retainer, Chamberlain and Daimyo. We start as a retainer and may progress up in ranks if do well and gain more honor. Our options are rather limited to start with, though.
Here we have some game options as far as difficulty and scenarios go. And by “some” I mean quite a bit of them, actually. Fortunately I’m just rolling with NORMAL difficulty so it’s locked out for me. I wish obtained honor for myself was also normal, but I guess game is still willing to give us a crutch on this difficulty.
As far as scenario options go I’ve changed some things around. Primarily, I’ve locked out in-game editing so there can’t be any cheating by editing officer stats and such even if I wanted to and I’ve enabled fictional sons and maidens because those two translate to more characters and some leeway from what will be a rather rigid historical scenario. It’s not like Samurai-ko didn’t exist historically even if they were far and few in-between their make counterparts.
Game gives us one last check before we start playing… everything checks out. Let’s get rolling.
Oh, one nice little touch is how Nobunaga’s Ambition gives you a random character’s bio during loading. Shame they fly by so fast on PC.
Wait a second. What’s this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Aqhshag-0
That’s right – seeing as we picked an actually relevant clan that has a story we get this cinematic of sorts that sets the groundwork for what Oda clan will be doing for a while. Also, this is where we find out Nobuhide Oda has had a son. I’m not sure if I want to do these in a video format from now, but they’re not that numerous and you also get to hear some of the rather good soundtrack Nobunaga’s Ambition features. Not to mention I’m bootleg as hell and do all my editing natively on Youtube to save time.
Into the game finally.
No less than immediately getting addressed by our Daimyo himself. It seems we’ve been given governorship over Kiyosu. This is how a Retainer starts off in a new game.
Another staple that quickly follows is the monthly report where everything that’s happened in the previous month is tallied for your perusal. Not so much in this case considering we’re just starting off but I’ll talk more about how game’s phases work as we go on because that’s our bread and butter as far as gameplay segregation goes.
Considering we’ve just started our lord has a new order – clearing additional land for Kiyosu so we can build more stuff. It’s important to note that while only the main character aka the player can give the final word on mission completion, so our lord can give everyone a new order, other officers in the clan can contribute to individual objectives. You’ll see this in practice very soon I’m sure because there’s no way a new officer can do all of it on his own and orders will only get more and more complex.
Offer 1500 gold
Offer 1500 supplies
Offer 800 wood
Offer 500 iron
I’ve found gold to be tight early on because you’re always spending it on things and it’s the hardest to come by when you take into account you don’t make much from your tiny assigned domain. Supplies is a relatively easy on because you don’t have much use for them early on, something that will change once you start mustering conscripts, and wood and iron are situational depending on your domain.
Speaking of which…
We finally get our very first look at the game! And there’s a bunch to break down and talk about. Before we delve into all of that there’s couple of ways to check out some basic stats about your domain:
You can simply look to upper left corner and see it alongside your mug. It should be noted that this toolbar gives you a trio of values you don’t get in other two views: HONOR, INNOVATION and LABOR. All in due time about those.
You can hover over the settlement itself which will give you a nice tooltip.
Or you can actually click on the settlement which will give you a nice sidebar from you can use the magnifying glass to explore further about your character or domain.
Sidebar and hovering tooltip provide you with extra values you don’t see at the top left listing: POPULATION, PROFICIENCY and POPULARITY. You can see what your income all-around is for all the resources.
Let’s click on that magnifying glass and see more details about our domain aka just Kiyosu for now.
If you look into it we can see a lot of information at a glance. Naturally, we don’t really need this menu that much when we have only one area to control and we’re a retainer, but if we get promoted and control more than one territory it will be extremely useful.
So what can we read from this?
Well, game can trip you at first because SOLDIERS count is basically a combination of your max militia and max troops which can be misleading seeing as it doesn’t represent the real state of things. We’ll get back to the military side of things when they become pertinent seeing as we can’t really swing our weight around that much.
Green values are maxed out for the moment, and our wood/iron and iron incomes will change depending on whether we have production facilities for those. It also says under resources that our territory can be upgraded to exploit lumber and iron, one of each. Our monthly income is pretty bad at 59 and autumn harvest could be better, but 460 is respectable. Keep in mind when they say autumn harvest they mean it. Harvest for other three season are separate and require investment to profit from.
If we click on Kiyosu we get its specific details which would, once again, be useful if we held more than one territory.
Which tells us more-or-less the same information we already gleamed from the overall summary with the exception that Popularity and Proficiency tabs go into greater detail. Idea is that good old Nuri here isn’t that great of a steward and he doesn’t have any traits that would be benefit him, but provided he sticks around enough and politics a bit he may acquire them. Also, he’s a new governor so people need to get used to him before that will start generating a tiny bonus. I guess he’ll have to do for now.
That’s probably enough explanation of stats for now. Can’t imagine how tired this has to be for you the reader when I’m tired of it. Let’s move on to what we can actually do and I recall seeing some faces floating about eager to talk to me.
Just a quick breakdown.
These are suggestions your fellow officers or even daimyo will suggest to you about what to build where or develop next. You can dismiss them if you will but if you thing there’s even a possibility you’ll do what they’re suggesting there’s no need to do so because you won’t be able to claim whatever reward they have in mind. And seeing they stick around usually for couple of months there’s no harm involved. That’s what blue dialog bubbles do, at least.
Now white bubbles on the other hand are straight up gains for you and there’s no reason not to check them out. Sure, they usually result in friendship increase with the relevant person but why say no to that? Sometimes you’ll luck out and maybe get a gift from someone or they’ll ask you for a trade.
Basically, these are both good and you want to see as many as you can. Onto the three we got.
Aww crap, head honcho himself has graced us with a suggestion. And it’s a good one we want to get to ASAP seeing as we need iron of our own and we can’t buy any as a lowly retainer.
Masahide Hirate is a fellow county representative very much like we are and he has sound advice – lumber is a second resource and just as important, but also way more common. Taking into account we have a forest this is a chance we do not want to miss.
On the other hand Hidesada Hayashi is a retainer without rank, but he seems to sympathize with us so why not extend a hand? There’s no deeper meaning to his message, though. It’s just a generic line from retainer to retainer. Strange to see such a young retainer so conservative, but I guess it’s a good point of familiarity with older Nuri here.
Speaking of all these people we should check out the clan roster before doing anything on our end.
We get to it by checking the icon in the top right corner.
And that leads to a whole bunch of information. I’ll just jot down some basics for now.
Bases clan Oda controls. Keep in mind bases and not just small fiefs that individual retainers control and governor. Which is why names seem off. I think this will be much clearer when we see the bigger picture later on.
Feel free to look at and compare stats of these three bases, but do note that while Nobuhide Oda is nominally lord aka daimyo of the clan he’s given two of his three bases to two chamberlains. This is our ticket to becoming a chamberlain in case we conquer more territory in the future or one of these two get replaced. Which is highly unlikely considering they’re both Oda.
Now we’ll check out the officers just so you know who’s in the employ and what they can generally do.
It’s a me!
There’s someone familiar. 
And another familiar face.
All in all, clan Oda has a fair number of retainers with Substitute title. Which just means they don’t really have any official clan title. Catching up to Nobuhide with his Fame 6 is going to be rather difficult, but those with smaller values are within reach if newcomers apply themselves to orders and warfare. There’s even a retired acting chamberlain so perhaps that position will vacate soon? Who knows? I have no direct control over any of these officers and they do their own thing based on stats and personality so things should get interesting despite this being a historical scenario and following historical events.
One last thing I’d like to bring your attention in this list would be the treasures of which clan Oda has two.
They make for somewhat paradoxical descriptions considering they apparently come from the future and are property of Nobuhide’s son, but they’re clan heirlooms. These ones don’t bestow any influence bonuses, though.
Before we get down to building itself we can enable map info which will show us buildable plots very clearly. Is it nice to look at the landscape and budding town? Sure, but I prefer functionality and this is usually the mode I keep the game in.
Now onto building stuff. I’ve combined the tooltips from the same categories purely for convenience.
First up is trading.
Which is about as straightforward as it gets with the exception that you need to stimulate Commerce for it to become even usable. This particular trader doesn’t offer the option, but this is also where you can buy giftable items for a hefty sum.
Now stimulation is a bit trickier. This is basically research that unlocks new functions, buildings and affects the efficiency of certain things. Your daimyo’s aka country aptitude affects the cost of stimulation and you’ll notice that even with good discount it still costs an arm and a leg, and depending on the governing ability it will also usually take two months to finish. We want to do this at some point and it’s what people will keep suggesting to us based on their own ideas, but not exactly early on unless bankruptcy sounds appealing.
With that over with we move onto buildings.
We build stuff.
There are multiple categories here and I’ll talk about each as we get down to actual building, but for now it’s pertinent to say some production facilities require appropriately adjacent resource to be around.
While we’re at it let’s take the earlier advice to heart and build that Forge and Lumber Mill we were suggested to do. Starting with the Lumber Mill by choosing it from the list above and then we go and select placement
while paying attention to the bottom left corner where you can see couple of details like what the yield will be, what area facility will occupy and how well the services of the plot suit those of the facility. In the case of a Lumber Mill production increases with high WATER and MARTIAL ARTS as signified by a drop and crossed weapons, both of which are strong in this area making it a perfect spot. Regular yield is around 30 or so so this is really nice.
This gives us summary of the project. You’ll notice Labor cost. We have four available and building this will cost us two. As a retainer we get four labor points every month so we have to be careful about what we do with them.
Confirm and we get a, well confirmation. You go, me!
Facility pops up as work in progress and we can check it out. Sadly there is no undo button so we have to be careful not to screw up.
Now let’s do the same with a Forge.
We sadly cannot get ideal conditions for this one and if you look at diagram you’ll see neither of the highlighted areas is really emphasized. Still, we get a small boost in production over basic 22.
And with that we’re out of Labor points for the month.
There is still one last button we can use before ending our first gameplay month so let’s get to it. Good thing about is none of these functions available to a retainer cost any Labor points so you can do something with them every month.
Visit lets us, well, pay a social visit to any other officer.
I’m not sure but I think there’s some sort of boundary that’s applied to this seeing as you cannot visit literally ANY officer in Japan but perhaps those belonging to surrounding clans and such.
How much friendship we can get out of a single visit depends on couple of things, but primarily our Tenet and Ideals. As you may have surmised it helps to be in favor and have a network of friends. I’ve decided to pay visit to a fellow County Representative Masahide Hirate. Let’s hope we get along.
Grayed out button we cannot do anything with right now and hopefully never will is the Defect button. It’s pretty self-evident what that one does.
But you glorious bastard, some among you may be saying right now, there are two buttons you haven’t talked about yet – weird jigsaw pieces at the top and that vague C-shaped symbol at the bottom. Well, let’s check out the top one first. What it does? Well…
It takes us out to world map of Japan. As just a retainer this is way above our pay grade so I won’t get into it, but someday I may have to if our lord commands us to battle.
Let’s go back to our territory and press the bottom button now.
Which takes us into the second phase of the game. One of Military. Sadly, very much like global power plays and diplomacy this one is still beyond us seeing as we barely have a fighting force to begin with and we don’t a lift a finger without our daimyo’s says so. And I mean that quite seriously – we cannot do anything in this phase right now.
So let’s just advance time and let June run out.
First thing that happened was our visit to Masahide Hirate went splendidly.
Nothing like a backhanded compliment from your boss. Good to be noticed, I guess.
Matter a fact is best.
And after that I got surprised by the unlikeliest person.
It seems like young Ichijo Kesano needs some help with additional lumber. I don’t lack any right now, not to mention I built a very successful Lumber Mill this month, so I’ll give some to her.
She may be a progressive lass and I conservative old fart, but this could also be the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
But the best news in June was yet to befall me when Nobuhide Oda himself approached me.
Why, thank you lord. Nothing better than free Honor because that’s one thing you have to actually work for. Be it delivering on orders or exemplary performance in combat. Handing it out freely like this just for good governorship is a steal.
Just as June was running out I noticed a small child near the somewhat poorly placed Forge running in my direction.
Sounds reasonable and something I ought to consider. As facilities work and their work conditions are satisfactory they will level up to everyone’s benefit.
And so June ended with a council for July ahead of us.
Seeing as last month’s order is still active, one to clear additional land, our lord has not issued a new one yet.
Make no mistake, most of that lumber and iron income is from our two benefactors who were pleased we listened to their sound advice about building. Our monetary income IS what we have to get used to, though. Meager.
We did nothing of note directly so Report remains empty.
Log is where all the stuff from lats month will be listed, Be it buildings, alliances or friendships it all finds its way here as long as its relevant to us somehow. That sweet sweet free honor.[/details]
This has been another explanation heavy update just like the last one and only covered a SINGLE month but now I’m confident I can move on much faster and explain only new things. As a retainer we’ll be going through quite some time doing repetitive activities, but such is life for now.
I just hope this update made a bit of sense because it’s kinda difficult to break people into these games.
