(5) Japan (Daimyo or Emperor)
Japan is totally busted right now because while it's technically functional, the starting situation and the 1400 Sengoku event "work" in extremely busted ways that interact very poorly with how Clans work. Someone else touched on how busted it is for the Shogun but it's actually busted all the way down.
Clans at the start consist of a few buildings and a standing army of 1-2 regiments. They start in a situation that is a setup for a big civil war but the Shogun himself always intervenes with like 20k levies which easily flattens whatever clans are on the opposite side, so you as the player should just declare neutrality. In the meantime, you can try to build things (and run into the enormous shortages of weaponry from all the clans trying to build buildings that require weaponry). The funny thing is, clans can build almost anywhere despite what the Building Based Countries map mode implies and the game imposing some limits. (This is catastrophically bad.) You also have a CB that lets you beat up other clans and steal their buildings. There's a unique army interaction where you can raid other clan's buildings to get some of their money and manpower and warscore. It's actually pretty fun for the first 10-20 years murderhoboing everyone else.
There are a couple of clan buildings that are small versions of actual Burgher buildings that use Peasants instead, but the most important ones just generate flat manpower and flat cash with no upkeep. You can have multiple duplicates per province, by mugging the other clans. You won't get an absurdly large economy, but you have very little worthwhile to spend money on in practice, so you can get a large income with almost no expenses.. Combine that with robbing other rich clans, you'll be absurdly rich when you become landed. I had a cool 11.000 in the bank when 1400 hit. Also a lot of the internal management goes out the window if you have no land, so you can abuse and mistreat your estates while unlanded for no real penalty.
Of course interfacing with all this can be a bitch. Since a lot of clans are scattered to begin with and they can build everywhere, your Building Based mapmode will end up like below. So the terrible UI really ""shines"". Note all the provinces the selected clan has a bunch of tiny holdings in. In most wars to get to see where the clan was I had to use the name in the nested tooltip to reach the flag that highlights the country or try to find it in this map, which was miserable.
So, clans can build everywhere, and then you need to convert that vomit I just lied and told you was a map into something representive at the start of the actual bigboy civil war. How does it do this?
Code:
save_temporary_scope_as = target_clan
every_owned_foreign_building_location = {
if = {
limit = {
this != location:kyoto
can_clan_get_this_location_when_turning_into_normal_tag = yes
}
change_location_owner = prev
add_core = prev
change_integration_level = core
}
Oh dear. The only thing it checks is if a clan has A building. For reference, this is what most of these provinces look like....
And the event that fires that effect fires for every Clan Tag at once and immediately (ie as the event fires, not when you select the option) but certain tags go first when things happen simultaneously as a tiebreaker rule, so...
All hail the Arima clan, future Shogun of Japan!
China is also very dysfunctional because Estate civil wars keep wiping Yuan's nerfs so in half of games the Chinese kingdoms drown in 200k levies and become mongol slaves forever. All of my other games have been pretty good though.
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