Preface
What this guide will do:
This guide will, hopefully, help you bully everyone who isn't you, or your friends. The primary focus here is on your skill set, as it is critical to your being a terrible human being.
If you pay more attention than you did in sixth grade, you will also pick up on useful tactics, personal and army troop types, multiplayer shenanigans, and nifty ways of bullying ronin, because f*ck ronin.
What this guide will not do:
This guide will not make you into an elite pro-tier tacticool Gekokujo mod player, it will instead get you Diamond rank in League of Legends. No one becomes a perfect player of Gekokujo mod, it's just not what the mod is, unless you've set it on easy mode, in which case you don't need this guide, why are you here. This guide will not help you get through the game, or do anything more than help you kill and kill quickly.
The Beginning Of The End
On your slow descent into madness
If you're new to this mod, that's alright. Begin by starting a new game once you load up the mod, and you'll know you have the right mod by the nifty looking drawings of samurai hatamoto and lords. Click on 'Start a New Game' and let's rock.
When creating your character, here are some helpful things to know:
1. If you create a male character, you immediately have privileges associated with a largely male power-structure, A.K.A. playing the game on easy mode. If you intend to be a total badass, select a female character now.
2. For those of you who have chosen to be badasses, select 'I do not mind encountering sexism' and get ready to gut each member of the nobility. If you want to play a character based on nobility, while retaining most of your strength, select all of the top-most options for your character background, ending with 'Personal Revenge.'
Note: This guide was witten when Director Dulles was still heading CIA, and the mod had since changed since he ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the Bay of Pigs. You may end up with a bow and a knife.
NOTE: Female characters appear to need to EITHER marry a noble to gain shared control of a fief, OR reach around 400 renown to gain a small village, and around 700 to become vassals and gain fiefs.
Additionally, if you wish to set all systems to f*** you then you can maximize strength as a female by having had a Ji-Samurai for a father, having been a Mountain Child, recently getting by as a Game Poacher in the Mountains, and leaving for PERSONAL. REVENGE. Also you start with a polearm, go shank people from six feet away.
Playing with these circumstances is extremely unfair. Therefore, I suggest joining an army to get armor and experience before becoming a mercenary captain and occasionally dueling with lords until they submit, and tying them up with rope if Gekokujo gives you these options.
----- Moving on for those who aren't playing badass female characters.
3. Of all the backgrounds you may select for your father, the route of the psychopath is to completely forego checking your privilege and select 'A powerless kuge noble.' Why? because immediate bonuses to relations, easier building of relations, greater initial bonus to how many troops you can have, without being born a samurai you'll enlist to ultimately become an elite spearman/gunner or something rather than a Hatamoto elite unit, and because why not.
4. Continuing with your story, select 'A daimyo's attendant.' because nobility, and then 'An armed retainer in the provinces.' because if you select the goods peddler I will personally come to your home or place of business. The capstone on this pyramid of daddy-issues is selecting 'Personal revenge.' for the reason you left home. In my experience, this back-story tends to be best for kill-awesome-kill-kill.
5. After you've selected your banner, (tri-force for intrinsic win) finish up by selecting 'Realistic! No quitting without saving!', ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Select your name and your skills. Here is where you need to think about your play-style, I prefer to put two points in STRENGTH so as to use certain polearms, and the last two in INTELLIGENCE because why would you not turn the initial 5 skill points into seven. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
6. When you get in, you're jumping into an intensely hilariously violent environment, and you're going to be in combat all the time so you need to get good S.C.R.U.B. and put points in a set of helpful skills.
Wound Treatment - Max this (two points) for +20% healing speed per point to get back in combat faster without waiting as long in a town when wounded.
Spotting - Max this (two points) to see groups of enemies on the world map before they see you. Gives +10% seeing range per point spent.
Path-finding - Max this (two points) to ensure you can out-maneuver any one party on the world-map when you first get in. Increases party move speed by +3% per point, and is more worth it than you think.
Power Strike - Place your final point into this skill, for +8% melee damage per point. Ironflesh helps, but you're not going into battle to get hit, and it's more worth it to immediately down some people in one strike, which will happen and will be hilarious.
7. Proficiencies are next, and in this intensely methodical process you will MAX POLEARMS because YOU WILL USE THOSE F*CKERS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS GAME.
The conventional wisdom here is that while you're spending time whacking off enemies with your Wakizashi, someone else is perfectly able to come up and shank you from six feet away. Don't be shanked from six feet away.
Once you've played this game a few times, or if you have already, you'll more than likely have a different initial set-up, and if you have you should totally message me what works better because RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT.
Using Violence As A Solution
Starting out
Now that you've created a character with the 'Eyelids' dial at full maximum to show your foes you're not f*cking around, you can begin your career p*ssing into an ocean of p*ss, and perpetuating violence.
Select your caravan, also known as your Cadavervan later in history, to what ever clan or ikki you want to land near, it doesn't matter to me, and we'll begin. I'll be landing near Niigata. Also when you land someone will try to kill you, have fun!
After you've killed a man in cold-blood, complete the tutorial with generic merchant guy #171 or you may pass him by like the pleb he is.
We're going to carefully train up your character now by gently easing him into the flow of combat by immediately and mercilessly slaughtering what ever bandit groups you find which is technically against the geneva suggestion but that doesn't even exist yet and we don't give a f*ck. Begin hunting now.
When you find the unsuspecting group of succulent suspects, you may engage them. They will be more than willing to fall on your sword, as they are not yet aware that you are a motherf*cker.
Multiple foe engagements on foot
It may at first seem difficult to slaughter a number of men at a time, here are some ways of handling the engagement.
1. Know yourself, your positioning. If you have a wakizashi, that will more than handle the incoming plebians. But don't forget to make use of any sort of cover from projectiles such as trees, or hills, so as to force the enemy to get closer without having time to hurl projectiles your way. Here is me doing none of these things:
2. Know your enemy, their positioning. If a line of men come at you as a singular group, treat it as a singular being and attack it's extension. If they stick an arm out, break it. Move in the same direction as they are, while facing them, if you do this properly then the first attacker will be a shield against all others for a short time.
3. It's wise to let that first man attack you, and when he does you'll block his attack and then cut into his head. Once the first man is dead, you will most likely have either two men in front of you, or a diagonal line of men coming at you. Attack the one closest, rotate around him if you are swarmed by two so as to repeat the process and kill them all one at a time.
Hint: Match their distance from you to the weapon that most occupies that space. If they're far, use polearms. If they're close, use a wakizashi. Closest weapon to closest foe.
4. If you absolutely have to take projectiles because all they're doing is throwing rocks, move toward them at an angle, as if to run past them. Once you're close enough that they are digging out an other rock and can't throw one at you, cut them down and go for their friends. Once you're too close they'll pull weapons, but if you do this properly they'll have no time to block your strike.
5. Get as much blood on yourself as possible, avoid getting hit, but if you get hit, yell at your computer screen like a madman and charge the next man while shouting 'YOU THINK YOU CAN ATTACK A SAMURAI AND LIVE! THIS IS MY JOB B*TCH I KILL PEOPLE FOR A LIVING.' Once you've done this, seek professional help from a therapist, and begin shouting 'I EXPRESS MYSELF USING VIOLENCE.'
6. No survivors. Often times you'll encounter a runner, especially in real life because people are tiny, scared little things but that's alright because you can run faster than they can because you put two points in path-finding like an intelligent person. Chase them across the map to save them from a life-time of a n x i e t y and nightmares of a man laughing maniacally while slaughtering their friends and appearing to be maintaining an erection while doing so that is visible through his f*cking armor.
7. If someone has escaped, you are now honor-bound to hunt them down. Ignore their cries for mercy and remember these people never gave mercy to hundreds of townspeople, and so it is socially acceptable to use that as an excuse to kill them for their beans. Begin hunting for your routed enemies (shown as a horseman on the world map for some reason), and don't forget to shout at them 'DON'T YOU RUN FROM ME NOT EVEN DEATH CAN SAVE YOU FROM ME B*TCH THIS IS MY JOB I GET PAID TO DO THIS TO YOU.'
8. Once you've found your foe and killed him while maintaining a boner the size of Manhattan and singing 'I'm a little teapot' at the top of your lungs with virtually no sign of tune nor appropriate rhythm, you may now take his stuff and sell it for blood money. Before you do, check to ensure he is bleeding from the face.
Now go sell the collective swag for great profit.
The First To Stop Is The First To Die
Or, "Why your black belt isn't bad*ss."
Embedded deep within the swirling maelstrom of violence brought to you by The Tokugawa Shogunate: When you need to stab a motherf*cker with an other motherf*cker™, there exists an important component to the in-game first and third-person battle mechanic that you ought to understand before you begin trying to cut heads off.
First, I want you to think about any of the martial training you may have received, in which you were asked to stand in one position, very still, and extend your arms very straight to punch the air. One. Two. One. Two. And I want you to run it under a hot tap. Then I want you to forcefully shove it ins-
This is not the look of a man who stands in the arena, very still, waits for an opponent to charge, and makes one downward chop as his opponent gets close. This is the look of a man riding on horseback with a very long sharp object, ready to use the full momentum of his horse, with the armored weight of himself on it, who will ready a cut that will move so swiftly that a man will lose his head.
This is not f*cking Slap Chop. You are going to die if you try that, and the rest of us will laugh.
But Merc. Scar, what will I do if my black belt won't save me you opinionated little sh**?
The arena is your friend, battle is your best friend. Notice that those who stop to fight one person on the field are the ones who do not come home, and their awful tactics die with that person. In the Arena, practice killing someone solely to get to the man behind him. In battle, kill a man solely to get to his brother and one day you will see the enemy commander and kill his friends in passing before you gut him.
If you're noticing a trend here, do not f*cking try exchanging blows with people. Follow the principle wherein the sound of your longest fight will be shhiinkk, splat. The first person to f*ck up is the first person to die, if they strike, block and gut them only because this game doesn't allow deflection. If you strike and your attack is blocked, you've f*cked up. Learn from your mistake and understand that is why we strike deceptively or from opportunity.
If you spend more than four seconds on any one individual once you've gotten the hang of this, expect someone on horseback to ride up and cut the head off of your opponent and yell at you for taking so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You cannot see your opponents as people, you can't kill one man and stop to feel badass, you kill one man so you can get to the next until there is no more blood to spill.
Your Career In Mass-Murder
Starting a career
Theoretically, you could begin a career as a bandit-slayer once you've gotten the hang of it, but that is far too little violence on far too small a scale. It is now time to select a lord to fight under, to see the benefit of specialized armor, income, and experience. This is the quickest route to becoming a monster.
In my play-through, good old Count Chocula has selected the Takeda Clan to fight with. So I've headed to the Town of Kofu in search of delicious blood money. Great Lord Takeda wasn't there, which became a good opportunity to teach how to hunt down a lord. Lesson one: Go ask his f*cking friends. Tell any of his subordinates you mean to ask them something > the location of a lord > Name of Great Lord.
Once you have a location, go and find the lord in that area, most likely between the location and your Great Lord's fief. Inform them you want to fight under their banner, and enjoy your money.
Now you are involved in blood money, which is one of the first steps on your road to causing so much violence, so efficiently, that you will break the conventional dynamics of Gekokujo Mod. You will now watch your Great Lord's party roam the map constantly, save for the short periods wherein they remain in their castle. You will watch years go by like this.
Going to work
Now that it is literally your job to kill people, just early on you need to be able to hold your own before you can aid your army effectively. When your lord comes upon an opposing lord, you will go through similar screens as when you encountered bandits alone, assuming you followed the damn plan.
Ideally you will always have more men than your opponent, because war. When you get into your first battle, you'll notice you're wearing that shiny new terrible armor they initially give you. That's alright, it'll help to a degree and it's better than the awful armor you had before. This is what you can expect to see.
Now the battlefield mosaic is slightly different in that it's a larger force with different unit types and you need to respond to your army as if it were a body and you are one of it's arms. That means extend with your army as part of the arm without being the fingertips because if you are the first man out with that terrible armor then you will die violently and it will be hilarious. Follow behind the more experienced men, one day you'll be one of them. That is how the Samurai do.
Useful tactics in war
Hopefully while you're keeping to the edges with your men close by, you'll be taking on stragglers on the rim of the two armies. Take advantage of local resources such as horses whose riders have perished, perform a feudal-hijacking and remember that your Jumanji Yari will now only stab as you pass, without sweeping with the weapon. Get ready to impale people. Here's what I mean:
If you keep to the edges and continue doing this while letting your army act as a canary to take the brunt of the enemy forces, you can best assist by moving quickly around the edges while avoiding enough gunfire to impale people. Remember -- even if you get knocked unconscious, you're still getting experience. Get those kills while staying safe to make the process of being promoted go a lot quicker.
If you do your job right, you may just survive, be sure to take screenshots of all the blood those nice men gave you to wear.
You will often level-up mid-battle, take advantage of this when you're in a safe place so as not to forget that hatamoto cavalry man who was coming at you when you paused.
At level three, go ahead and put your point in INTELLIGENCE (do you see a pattern yet?), and then put a single point in Wound Treatment and Ironflesh, to both ensure you live longer in battle and that you regenerate magically between battles.
Now it is time to chillax like a balla while you wait for your well deserved promotion, which can take several days after you're eligible, due to it's own time-frame. Once you are notified that you are being promoted from the rank of Ji-Samurai, you have options to become a gunner, or standard infantry of a higher rank. In this case, we'll select 'Takeda Retainer' and you can give yourself a pat on the back for no longer being the lowest of the low. Don't forget, you're still spare blood.
Going About War Like A Motherf*cker
Business as usual
Now that you have some awareness of meaningless violence of slightly greater complexity, you will be adapting to the usual situations you'll find yourself in during war time. Check your items and learn their strengths and weaknesses now that you've been given new armor, and ensure you're wearing what actually offers the best protection, as the game does not always apply new armor properly.
Your Jumanji Yari is still only moderately effective at best, but you are going to war anyway because this is your job. At this point, you will find yourself in more battles, sieging castles, bursting through the enemy line and directly attacking the enemy's capital city with every last man you have.
Siege tactics
Everyone has their own flavor in regard to tactics, but the best judge of tactics is what keeps you alive, and kills the enemy with the greatest efficiency. When you enter into an assault on a castle or town, you will appear in front of it and either cross a bridge to get in, or just walk through a gate that for some god-awful reason has never been closed. When this happens, allow some of your men to move ahead, and join into the middle of the stream.
This is helpful because now you have many, many human shields to act as blood-sacks covering your approach, which becomes important once your being alive is the one single factor that gives your clan a permanent advantage.
In some cases, you will cross under an archway with stairs leading upward. Such is the case in the hometown of the Tokugawa Clan. When you first climb those stairs, the main focal point is the huge welcoming party.
And here is what happens when you look just behind you from that position.
As your men rise, and fight what is literally an up-hill battle, they take fire from several gunners in that building. If that seems too difficult for you, then you've chosen the wrong game. To counter-act this, we will solve the issue both like we did in the beginning where we kept that line of looters in single-file formation, and also like the beginning of the siege where we used human shields.
If you can fight around the men who stand before you, then you can put your men between you and the gunners, and from there you can move toward their building to kill them. Keep in mind, you are always taking fire from somewhere in a castle unless properly covered, so don't stop moving for any reason, even while fighting.
Now you're in the building housing those pesky gunners, and if you keep a string of men around you, it will help you to shield yourself from those rounds. The gunners immediately inside are the greatest threat, you'll want to go in preferably behind a large force to overwhelm them so as to avoid instant and anti-climactic death.
These corners are your friends, to properly breach a room you enter and get to a corner, both to remain in cover and to allow more of your men in without blocking the door. If you run into a situation where you are being struck by an opponent with a very quick weapon, keep clicking the block button because it's easy as hell and it works with default settings on.
Allow your men to get behind the opponent while they are attacking you, and they'll down your attacker effortlessly. The best option in such small rooms is to just keep a quick weapon out such as a Katana, because once you're quick with them they will remind you of a circular-saw with how much blood they throw around.
Bonus points if you moonwalk in-transit.
Your arrival at a choke point is a decision of life or death, depending on how you handle it. When you press out, keep watch of the momentum of your army. By that I mean think to yourself about whether it seems they are about to be pushed back, or if they have siezed enough ground to maintain a hold of that area. If not, fall back before the choke-point is swarmed, otherwise you'll be displaced from your army at best, and killed effortlessly at worst.
Don't let the direction of the wind change and catch you off-guard.
Your men can easily allow themselves to fall into grid-lock, and I'm not talking about a useful phalanx formation, I mean less mobile than visiting the Department of Meaningless Violence. If that happens, your nifty Jumanji Yari will be blocked by your other men, and your other weapons won't reach the enemy as they all down your men one by one after your army divides itself.
The same thing can happen when you try to join the initial clash of two armies, getting in is the easy part. Would you really want to be in the dead center of this?
You'll see a victory through a siege now and then, and other times you'll see all of your effort completely obliterated. When that happens, you'll rot in a prison until somehow freed or your release has been paid for unless the fighting continues outside long enough for you to escape.
In the event that you've had the chance to realize that your lord makes asinine decisions and that you are actually better equipped at making many of these decisions, you'll have learned what is possibly the most valuable lesson in any of the mods related to Mount & Blade: Warband. When this happens, be sure to go back to your lord and ask them how the war is going with that clan that just wiped the floor with your army because of this dumbass.
At least you still get paid for being there.
Making The Best Of A Terrible Army
Improving your army as a whole
Once you've realized that the AI operates a certain way, shows certain patterns, and has a limited set of capabilities, you will be able to rise up the ranks knowing how to improve it. Continue with your responsibilites of spilling blood, the experience will come, like it or not. Gain more experience by killing and staying alive so as to give you the experience of the battle, plus that of the number of people who aren't going home because of you.
If you're just a couple hundred experience away from promotion and you don't want to go uneligible for the next promotion date, you can visit the Arena while your commander is situated in his town, provided it's daylight out, otherwise the Arena is closed. Because the mod isn't perfect, you'll sometimes need to ask to meet with your lord, and that will bring you into the town rather than just clicking the button to enter the town.
Make sure you're using at least the standard 102% difficulty so that you're having to earn your kills, that'll make sure that you are training to be able to handle any one unit in the game, and some groups of enemies in the game, while you're in the Arena. When you're skilled enough, switch to this in battle if you need time to improve. Remember -- it's a good thing to go in wounded, it'll help train you to both never rely on health, and to never shy away from battle just because you're about to die.
The Arena is terrific, because you have an endless sea of bodies to practice maiming. The standard practice is just like in battle, allow the enemy to prepare a good strike, block it, and carve them down. If they approach you while blocking, it's also possible to ready a strike and let them come close enough that they feel the need to stop blocking and to prepare a strike of their own. When you see their block animation change even slightly, it's time to strike.
Think of the arena similarly to a much easier battle where you're the last man of your side left alive, holding out against many more. You want to personally be able to take down every one, but that is immensely difficult, making it very good practice. It will also help you to remember not to duel any one opponent, they are just obstacles that need to be taken out quickly so you can move on to the next person.
This was a very common form of training in ancient times. Now go ask your family to beat the sh** out of you because training.
Once you've gained enough experience to be promoted again, you're going to want to select 'Takeda Mounted Retainer' as your next rank. You will prefer this because now instead of running around with a stick you will be riding around on a horse and impaling people with that stick, dodging gunfire much more quickly and effortlessly skimming the sides of the enemy army without being killed in the middle.
Now you have better equipment, as well as a horse. Not just that, you've moved on from the Jumanji Yari to the Yari. This is still a thrusting weapon on horseback, you won't be slashing effortlessly for a while, which is for the best because it'll help you practice maneuvering with precision and you'll see benefit from that when you are dealing with spearmen who want your horse downed from under you.
With the horse, don't forget to work the edges like you should be doing with any group of people, or army. You are now a more valuable part of the army than before, your life counts for more than many other soldiers. Intend to kill as many as you can without dying, and if you must die, take as many with you as possible so as to force the enemy to pay a certain amount of men each time they knock you out. This is arguably the most entertaining part of the mod once you learn to take out ten to twenty people rushing you before you go down, resulting in generations of nightmares of a lone, psychopathic warrior with a hard-on.
Large-Scale Derailment Of Battle Dynamics
Reaching the higher ranks
At this point I'm assuming you have more than a handle on your in-game situation, keep battling and leveling up to become an elite unit. All those points in Wound Treatment should be making that about a billion times easier. Just about everything from here becomes a dump stat in some way or an other.
I use very simple logic for my characters, I want skills such as Wound Treatment and Surgery to be a huge focus after the core build has begun, because we are going to make ourselves an army with which to bully everyone with. Level them both at the same rate so as to ensure you can actually take part in every possible battle while keeping as many of your units alive as possible. Here is an example of this character progressing through a few levels.
Derailing battle dynamics
Once you've had a chance to max Wound Treatment, and Surgery, it's also helpful to put points into Tactics, which if you're unfamiliar is explained well by the Wiki page:
"Every two levels of this skill increases your starting battle advantage by 1. Battle advantage determines how many soldiers you can have on the battlefield at the start of a battle and how large your reinforcements will be. This skill will also let you retreat from a battle with fewer casualties."
What all of this is intended to do is to put you into a battle with a large number of units, directly under a Great Lord, ideally, with enough Surgery to ensure you lose approximately 20 units for the enemy's 100 - 120, enough Tactics to keep the battle from ever being fair for your opponent, and enough Wound Treatment to make sure you regenerate so fast that you can continually come into battle with maximum health, and be able to sit on the sidelines of battle when you're heavily wounded so as to keep the computer from auto-calculating battles, causing greater losses.
Also helpful is the men and women in your party who are not killed but rather knocked unconscious should remain in the game, treated as a surviving unit, which leaves the possibility for them gaining experience from the battle anyway, and becoming a stronger unit. If all goes well, you'll be getting more units from your Lord's town than you'll be losing per battle and taking four hundred men into battle just because you can.
If done correctly, you will max all of these and drop remaining points in infantry skills such as Ironflesh and Powerstrike. By that point you should be more accustomed to roaming around the battlefield slaughtering people casually. That is where the more creative tactics come into play.
Psychopathic tendencies
Some of the most fun I have comes from going into battle, tearing through the field and outright killing off the enemy lord, especially when it's a Great Lord. It's extremely difficult to do, and amazingly worth it if you can get back alive. The opposing force will continue to act against you, but they will be robbed of their one unit which can perpetually run through your lines killing people.
The same thing can be done to take out cavalry in the tens, or just forcing them to be infantry by taking their horses out from under them. I like to circle around an army that is attacking mine and take out their lord, then their cavalry, then the gunners. If you know what you're doing and you can catch the opportunity when your men are charging, you can draw fire for them and have the enemy running at you, while your men cut them down. Experiment a little, you'll figure it out.
Covering Yourself With As Much Blood As Possible
Blood for the Blood God
An issue with Mount & Blade: Prepare to Why Edition is the severe lack of blood. If possible, one of you should come up with a mod to create a more bloody scene of a battlefield. Not unrealistically bloody, but to really drive home the number of arteries severed and men who have basically become human sprinkler systems.
If any of you make a mod designed for this purpose, it must be called 'Blood for the Blood Mod'.
Spraying as much blood as you can
You want to be on a horse in battle as a true psychopath, the best weapon I've found for this has been the Naginata. The most valuable attribute it offers is it's length, in that I can both distance myself from my opponent, while still running by and cutting their f*cking head off. What you want for that is a good fast horse. I don't prefer a slow armored thing because it basically asks to be shot at least once. What's better than having this to slash at people from afar with?
Certain considerations to keep in mind are that there are rooms wherein there is brilliantly not enough clearance to go about slashing downward with the weapon, it's slow against anything smaller while you're on foot, and it won't cover you with as much blood.
The importance of owning a giant sword
Apparently the katana was not big enough for the people in feudal Japan, so they invented the super-katana, and it's the Nodachi. This weapon actually makes sense when you look at how small a katana seems when you're in hatamoto armor. It is much quicker than the polearm's useful slash, and still delivers great damage.
This is a great counter to the polearm, but isn't as fast as the katana or tanto, so keep that in mind when dealing with some gunners and archers. It will also not get as much blood on you as something that strikes an opponent while closer to the body, which can be an issue when you're intending to look your enemies dead in the eye with the blood of their friends covering every inch of your body.
The use of a circular saw in combat
Now we've reached the katana, which at later stages in your career is basically a powertool because of how fast you'll be swinging it and how close you are when the blood starts flying. It deals very good damage for it's speed and that speed makes it fantastic against seemingly every other melee weapon.
The only apparent weakness with this weapon is it's range, anyone with a staff could strike at you twice in the time it takes for you to close enough range to make use of this vicious weapon. Because of that it's best used against just about anything but a staff or quick-moving mounted units. Leave cavalry to the naginata.
Throwing sharp, heavy hunks of metal at your foes
Why would you not do this if given the opportunity. You're ambushed in the city and they're all coming around the corner and you have nothing but time to waste. It's time to put that throwing weapon dump-stat to use and chuck sh*t at the enemy. This has absolutely no drawback that I'm aware of once you become proficient with them.
The reason that the heavy kunai are so useful is because while there aren't many of them to throw, they are heavy, sharp chunks of metal and you'll only throw around six of them before the enemy gets in range anyway. I've seen these kill people immediately when they strike the head, and the 20 - 25 damage I've seen them do is helpful anyway.
Traditional Violence
"We don't know where he came from, he wasn't even part of this battle."
Among the many ways of abusing other human beings, many methods have been developed for the purpose of derailing opposition force before it may take off. The next time you launch Mount & Blade: Prepare to Propaganda Edition, you'll want to have these advanced bull sh** techniques in mind so that when the few survivors make it back home, they'll tell their friends about the crazed samurai maintaining an erection while in combat.
The artificial intelligence in this videogame is lacking in that once focused on a group of foes, it is virtually blind to your advances. If you are on horseback, armed with the Naginata, to one side of the battleground, and behind cover, you are capable of waiting for the enemy to close distance with your army and lashing out at them as they do.
Remain unseen, once they begin losing men to your gunners, it's time to strike. Your priority is cavalry, do not strike at the men and women, strike at the horses underneath them. Horses cannot block, and if you focus on the outskirts of the cavalry you can continually pass by them and eventually take down entire groups of cavalry.
By tradition, you may not stop once you have begun with this strategy. Allow your men to fire on the enemy while you maim them, and once the horses all fall, focus on the Lord. Once the lord has fallen you will have most of the enemy army focused on you. Lead them away from their army, at and angle which allows your men to keep firing on them. Protip: It's easier for your men and women to fire on enemies who move toward, or away from them. Lead them around in a circle to maximize hilarity.
You will continue this part indefinitely, as you want to lead this half of the enemy army so far away as to render the other half f*cked. What happens next is that *your* cavalry rips into the few remaining infantry, while under fire, while outnumbered. This happens one final time once they all fall and your army turns on the group now following you. And all the while you've been leading them in circles and watching their men drop. This is why a fast horse with a careful rider is so dangerous.
Kick them while they're down
Streams are a hassle, and thus streams are weapons. If anyone must deal with such a battleground inconvenience, ensure it is an obstacle for your enemy to overcome. This ordinarily simple concept has applications worthy of detailing here, as there are a number of different possibilities that are not always obvious to those new to the game.
If a stream exists between you and your foe, you are both subject to the condition. If you force the enemy to come to you, your foe is forced to take the terrain disadvantage. Here are some ways to be a complete d*ck on the battlefield:
1. Allow the enemy to get inside the stream, as this will slow them, often giving them cover. This is not an advantage for them if you have cavalry waiting on the other side. The proper way of using this advantage is to keep your cavalry far enough away to ensure they are moving at full-speed by the time they connect with the enemy and to ensure that connection happens by the time the enemy reaches the crest of the incline. This technique is most advantageous in that it will render an enemy cavalry charge impossible and will be hilarious.
2. You will not always have time to lay an ambush to enemies leaving a stream, but if you control the ground on your side of the stream, you can use an advanced infantry-slow technique which is referred to as kick them while they're down. To do this properly, keep your men just outside the range where the enemy will start running again after they finish climbing the incline, so that your gunners can rip them to shreds while your infantry beats them back into the river as they struggle to fight what is now, literally, an up-hill battle.
3. If you just-so-happen to feel like a complete a**hole that day, use an infantry-interrupt technique to force the enemy to wage a half-hearted offensive against your men. There are a couple of ways this can happen and you will need a fast horse for this to do it properly. Hold your men a distance from the stream, move to the other side of the stream and aggro the entire enemy force including cavalry and allow the stragglers who disengage from you to engage your entire army. Once you see a fair number is running toward your army, give the charge command. If you are MLG enough, you can use a Naginata to personally take out the entire enemy cavalry group before you finally reach your standard, now very one-sided battle.
All of these techniques are best done designed for use with a fast horse. Armor on a horse is good, speed is better when you're being shot at.
Playing Monopoly To Fund An Army
Tanking the economy like it's 2008
This is extremely simple, take all of the money you've received for your services, provided you didn't spend it all on cigarettes and icecream, and go through your local towns. Find the guildsmen in those towns and inform them you want to buy land in these places for a productive enterprise. Once you do, open a dyeworks, these tend to yield high profit and it's worth the ten-thousand.
Read what the guildsmen are telling you, and watch for them telling you what your weekly profit will be. I don't buy anything that yields profit less than six hundred mon (at the time of purchase) and I specifically go on leave to travel the continent and open up Dyeworks everywhere. I open one up in one town, then I move two towns over and open one up there too, to ensure demand remains high.
If you've been good about taking the loot you get in battles and selling it, you're in a much better position to do this, and once you have done it you can let that profit snowball until you've filled nearly every town on the continent with a dyeworks. I make a profit of around five-thousand mon every week from this method alone, which allows me to keep incredible weapons and armor, even though I find masterwork items on the field.
This economic advantage can also assist with town prosperity in any fiefs you own, because you'll then have the ability to handle the cost of the land which gives you freedom to nearly forego taxing those in your fief which will both improve their economic condition, as well as keep them happy with you. Just ensure you keep them safe, and keep meeting with the village elder to complete specific tasks to build up the town slowly.
Do remember that in times of war, your busnesses will be under sequestration if located in hostile territory. This underlines the importance of a regional approach to generating bloodmoney.
Here is what Merc. Scar has to say on matters of sequestration and business expansion:
"Sequestration can have a brutal effect on your ability to wage war. I prefer to move to the corners of the land and work inward, so as to maximize peace-time income and retain those assets in the long-term. Ultimately, you will be so invested in all sides that peace and war will just be a game of Sengoku Roulette where your blood money is coming in constantly. This works very well in addition to any estate revenue you are generating. I want to stress the importance of getting blood on your money."
To this day, the reason for presenting this as a quote remains unknown.
Coming Back From The Dead
Call it advanced if you want, it's still just spamming Elite Units
In the event you find your clan declining in power, you may decide to become a lord yourself. Other lords will defect from your faction when their fiefs are lost because they struggle with the concept of defeat and that means you may eventually need to pull the weight that they failed to because apparently they couldn't f*cking cut it as lords in the first place.
Being a lord has benefits:
You will own land, take in revenue, enjoy hightened social status, lead your own men and women, decide if, when, and how you will engage with your team, and occasionally destroy your foe without the help of any of the other lords, and have the title of Lord in front of your name.
Being a lord has responsibilities:
You must defend your own land, your land can and will be under attack by bandits and enemy war parties, the people of your land will *need* favors done, you will no longer be paid to serve your faction, you will train your own men and women, you will have to become the kind of person who can say "We will die if we go in, and if we're dead we can't save anyone."
Worthy of note is being a lord is quite possibly the most aggravating, annoying, and stressful thing I've done in Gekokujo mod, but it is also The most intrinsically rewarding thing I've ever done in this game. Do so if you are feeling uniquely adventurous, or if you are going through acute psychosis.
Teaching your men to fear the word 'Training' more than any battle
The way I go about training is very vio- straight-forward, I either find a training field and personally beat them with a stick in groups of four, or I take them into battle, while keeping them out of the main area of the blood-violence. They need time to learn.
In any training event you hold at the Training Camp, you want your men and women to feel as safe, and comfortable as possible. At this point you want to very calmly grab your handy-dandy iaito, or in this case a wooden f*cking stick, and start beating them. Don't say anything, just go ahead and start beating them. Slowly they will learn they don't much like being beaten, and they will try to figure out how to stop being knocked unconscious and subsequently beaten some more while incapacitated.
In any battle, you want your men and women to feel as on-edge as possible while you describe how you expect them to march up and gut the enemy hatamoto cavalry using only the clubs and kama they came with. At this time, laugh maniacally to really drive home that 'I should never have enlisted' vibe. Now, order ONLY the recruits to hold position (You can modify groups in your party screen by pressing 'P' while out-of-battle) while the rest of you go up and gut the enemy. Your recruits have now completed orientation.
Rules of Thumb
Cutting your Thumb off while trying to draw your Sword
How to avoid Cutting your Thumb off while trying to draw your Sword
>Iaijutsu
1. Your men and women gain more experience at the Training Camp when you successfully knock them all out at once in groups of four.
2. Your men and women gain more experience in Horseback Training once they become Cavalry Units. This is more worth it than you think.
3. Keep your villagers as far from the battle as possible if you are training them by putting them in combat. It's a good idea to use this method against groups SMALLER in number than your own.
4. Make them all hatamoto cavalry in order to win any every open-field battle in the game.
5. Spamming the same hatamoto cavalry really does work when you're trying to take a Castle, Town, City, or Village. You will see why when you have to fight against that armor.
6. Reach the point where you have eighty hatamoto cavalry and tell me you can't win nearly any battle in this game and you can come over here and eat a mouth full of sand and I will personally come and kick you in the face.
The whole point of this is in essence to become a hatamoto cavalry factory, applying the same principle as before so that you will lose such a small number of people per battle that it becomes more cost-effective to just keep on stampeding on. Super süß, super sexy, super easy, supergeil.
You Can Win For Losing
The whole world is watching
Being on the map carries an intense advantage for people who actually put the points in to increase movement speed on the map. You can dictate the time, place, and circumstance of nearly any battle, here are a few reasons why.
1. Most of the time you know how to find your enemy, and thus how they can find you.
2. You have the opportunity to stay with your crowd, and leave when things aren't in your favor.
3. You can gain the help of friendly locations such as your clan's villages by pulling the enemy to that location before the engagement happens.
4. You can pull enemies toward friendly lords and put the enemy at a huge disadvantage.
5. You can derail enemy troop movements by entering and exiting the range at which they will follow you, keeping them from leaving that area. This can help keep larger armies from assisting in major battles and attacking villages, and can turn the tide of war.
6. If you have a large army, you can act as a body-guard for your men and women while they grow their forces.
7. Similarly to number six, you can use your bold, persuasive presence to keep the enemy from control points such as castles, villages, towns, and cities.
8. You can bolster your own garrison by entering contested castles and cities, which allows you to keep the game from autocalculating battles, which would put you at a disadvantage.
Experiment with your positioning on the map, as this is a major part of warfare both in reality and in-game.
Personally Engaging Entire Armies At A Time
"As far as we can tell, he no longer sees friend from foe."
Thousands of men and women take part in the bloodbath that is this mod, and because of this you are going to run into situations where, just like in the Arena, you are the last person standing. Most people hate this situation more than any other, I will teach you to love this circumstance more than any.
Let's ease you in to some scenarios and ingraine an understanding of what your options are:
1. You're cruising around the enemy like a balla and your horse is downed from under you, men and women are coming at you from just about every angle, your infantry line is about twenty meters back. Enemy cavalry is present.
The defensive option
Examining the problem, you know it is not that you are in danger, but rather that you won't kill as efficiently biting off such a large section of the enemy at one time. It will be a while before you are motherf*cker enough to handle this situation properly on instinct, so what you are going to do is scan the field.
If you are NOT in engagement range of infantry or cavalry (keeping in mind cavalry are faster than you) then you want to turn around and run toward your line so as to allow you all to engage their line at once. The reason for this is you are much faster running forward than backward. I know, I know, I thought moonwalking was faster. It isn't.
At this point your objective is finding personally killing someone for their horse and continuing on your merry way.
The motherf*cker option
Examining the problem, you know it is not that you are in danger, but that you haven't already killed off the entire army yet. Keep yourself alive and look for ways of halting the enemy advance toward you so that you can slow their movement while allowing them to follow you. If you're feeling déjà vu, it's because you're seeing the pattern of how we engage. Even when we're dodging, we're still attacking.
Know your environment, if you see dense trees, it's time to lead as many enemy bloodbags through their as you can so as to divide the enemy in two because war. While this happens, you want to use your f*ckmothering naginata to kill people from a distance unless they get too close, and that's okay because at close range you can still use your kat- circular saw to hilarious effect while your army destroys the remaining one-half of theirs.
2. You are alone, everyone is dead. Somehow you've survived, or you somehow went in alone against the entire enemy army. This is the greatest gift which can be bestowed upon you, and you will receive it with gratitude and you will tell your enemy thank you.
The only correct option, god d*mnit
You should be on horseback at this time. If you are not, engage the very same way you did when you hunted bandits. If you are following procedure, these are the methods of personally bullying entire clans at a time, keeping in mind this is your opportunity to make the very idea of your clan cause all other factions to immediately void their bowels.
1. Begin laughing maniacally, and do not stop.
2. Scan the field and note what your enemy is capable of, we will assume they are fully armed.
3. Move far from enemy gunners, engage closely only if you are behind cover.
4. Target cavalry, destroy all of them, (often including the enemy lord) they will charge first.
5. Next pull infantry, not the gunners, allow the infantry to charge and kill them far from the gunners. If you know how, you may also pull infantry and then attack the gunners while they are vulnerable.
6. Kill off stragglers, and remaining infantry while considering that some may be armed with spears which can gravely wound your horse.
7. Prepare for the next wave, and destroy them using the same method.
Even when we lose, we still win
In the event that your horse goes down in the middle of this, you will engage in the same way. Often times the gunners will take your horse down if the elite naginata monks do not. If you are taken down from afar, thank the enemy cavalry for charging you and then get into thick brush so as to immobilize them. Destroy them using your naginata, being careful to avoid gunfire which will pass between the brush.
From here, engage using conventional methods. run perpendicular to the enemy fire and keep your head only slightly above the crest of a hill for cover because you don't want the gunners advancing on your position. Allow the infantry to run toward you and engage in the way you always do.
Once the infantry is killed off, allow the gunners to advance. A useful geography for this is to force them to use an attack vector which only allows them to advance up-hill toward you, while you have cover behind trees. This is not always simple, as you want the forest to be on that very same hill, and thus this is most useful in a heavily wooded area.
This relies on them having to get close enough to force the AI to switch to melee weapons, similar to when you were having rocks thrown at you. Engaging in this mosaic has very specific considerations, you will want to either engage the line from the side (placing the gunners in single-file formation in front of you) or to make them bunch up before they come close enough over that hill to be engaged.
Doing this properly, and so long as the AI happens to want to advance toward you on that particular day, god d*mnit, you will have the opportunity to kill them all in melee. Keep in mind that you can bring the fight itself behind cover so as to attempt to keep yourself safe while the rest of the gunners take their sweet time to give up on using ranged weapons.
Dying a thousand times a night
Everyone has a different pattern while engaging, use what works for you, and trust only what works. Do not ingraine panic into your attempt at survival, you want to use the same proven method to engage, every time. If you are going to die, make the enemy regret the number of men and women who died to put you down, and horrify generations to come with stories passed down of your assault on the very idea of safety.
One effective way of weening down from the concept of human dignity is to live in the arena for a little while, a few days, most of your life. You want to stop seeing people as personal fights and more as brief obstacles between you and their friends. This works the same with enemy lords, don't attempt to savor the conflict or make it personal, the only correct way of killing them is to do so in as boring, routine, and anti-climactic way so as to ensure their descendants know their ancestor went down without a fight.
Conclusion
P*ssing into an ocean of p*ss
If what ever it is I've just typed here has had its intended effect, you should now be starting to see battles go by with almost solely blue and purple text telling you how many enemy units have been killed and how many of yours have been knocked out. I've gotten the Surgery skill to the point that 40% of the men who die on my side are instead knocked out, and we run around with four hundred men. Constantly.
With your understanding of the 'All-Horses All-The-Time' build, you will hopefully also be whipping around trees and gutting who ever happened to be in your way at the time. As you may have figured this is an intelligence build, because why wouldn't you want double the points. From here, strength can help you get much higher attack damage if you really want Power Strike to be so high that you're one-hitting Great Lords or put everything in Agility and up your proficiency to game-breaking levels.
Worthy of note is I've heard a story of someone who put so many points into Athletics that he seemed to outrun all infantry and mentioned something about hearing cries of angst from horsemen behind him. I've never experimented with Athletics to that degree, such experimentation is however definitely worth it if you plan to wear full cavalry armor.
Because of the nature of war, lessons often come from what is passed down by those who have survived and come home to train others. You can improve this guide greatly by posting anything you believe may be helpful in the comments section, I read every comment posted here once I see the notification.
You can train men and actually put the game into a full state of anarchy if you train an army of hatamoto cavalry who just can't seem to die. I wish you luck in your effort to change exactly nothing about how things work in feudal Japan. If anything everything I've written here is confusing, let me know and I'll help clarify it and probably implement it into this sh*tty guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. But Scar, how can I spray Hatamoto Cavalry all over Sengoku Era Japan?
To accelerate to maximum Hatamoto Cavalry, avoid Villages and
head to Towns and Castles where you may recruit Ji-Samurai. Take
those very same cannon fodd cannon fodder and
promote them from Ji-Samurai to Retainers, Mounted Retainers,
Mounted Officers, then Hatamoto Cavalry. Insert forgotten rank here.
2. Doesn't all this kiting sorcery ruin some of the fun of being a badass on your own?
Absolutely not. It ruins all the fun of playing the game
conventionally, and I'll tell you why. What is written up here, if it can
even be called a guide, is intended for the complete breaking of the
standard by which the game is played. The function of this entire
page is solely to take Gekokujo Mod from a bloody, violent mess,
to an organized sequence of human sprinkler systems which should
adequately cover the most square feet in blood while requiring the
least amount of effort. That has been the only purpose here.
3. Where can I find this mod? Not that I'm turned on by violence or anything.
You are turned on by violence. The mod can be found in the Steam Workshop,
or, at it's ModDB Page. Scroll down
one-third of the total length of the page to see the download buttons. Buy
the man a drink. You as*hole.
Guide Update 10/25/16
Some have experienced a polarm requirement of STR 13 instead of the initial advice of 12. As always, this guide remains committed to raising strength as high as possible, so as to completely ignore what armor the opposition brings in a misguided attempt at avoiding death.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230109417
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