Total War - Recommendations?

[Zevox]

If you just research the gunpowder techs you don't have to convert for gunpowder units. It just takes longer.

Converting for matchlocks is really only helpful if you're good at using matchlocks; as you can leverage that early advantage to snap up some huge gains early on.

You don't really have to go Christianity as Shimazu, its just that if you are planning to do it they're one of the best factions to do it with for several reasons. They're also one of the better factions to just go vanilla Samurai army with due to the fact that they gain a slight bonus to their Katana Samurai and that's probably the best unit to use to form the backbone of your army in the campaign.

Well, resisting converting is what I'm doing - although it looks like it might be difficult to beat the influence of that Nanban port in the city it's in, since it gives a pretty huge conversion bonus. And somewhat annoyingly it seems like the faction I'm fighting for control of northern Kyushu converted, so the cities I'm taking from them are mostly or entirely Christian already, which is making it harder for me to maintain order in them without keeping big chunks of my army back home or exempting them from taxes. That's making things slow going. I've got a monk going around to help conversions, but that only amounts to so much. Still, I'm already down to only two provinces left to take before I control Kyushu fully.

In general though, I'm liking the game so far - not necessarily for anything it does significantly differently than past games, but just in a "it's Total War in Japan, and that's fun" way. But I can definitely see what people meant by the factions looking pretty same-y, since my opponents are all fielding the same type of units I can recruit. I suspect that may make me substantially less likely to replay this game as much as I did Rome or Medieval 2 - though just having less free time these days already made that likely, so eh.

One minor thing that annoys me now though is that the tax rate is set for your entire nation, not on a city-by-city basis, aside from the ability to exempt individual cities from taxes completely. That makes it more difficult to strengthen my economy, since I can't bump taxes up on cities with higher happiness without also pushing those with lower happiness over the edge.

And I've had my first naval battles now, and uh, yeah, can see that's still a weak point of the series. The way the ships move in response to your commands feels awkward and strange - which I think I recall being one of my issues with naval combat in Empire too, though it's been so long it's hard to be sure. And the battles seem to move at a snail's pace except when I board enemy ships, which tends to significantly weaken mine even if they succeed. They're honestly kind of boring and just awkward all around. It's ironic, I remember being disappointed that you could only auto-resolve naval battles in the old games, but now that I can actually play them, auto-resolve is all I really want to do with them.