GOTM9 Index



The Japan Campaign
- Introduction
- Planning
- Military orders
- Initial engagements
- Far off landing
- Coastal thrust
- Main advance
- Inland sea
- Consolidate the opening
- Secure the horses
- Western port
- Moving inland
- Battle before Edo
- Combat tables
- Yokohama and Nara
- Osaka
- Kyoto’s fate
- The gambit
- The battle
- Combat tables
- Mopping up

List of updates to this article

Items below this point
are maintained seperately
from the Japan Campaign files
and may not always available.

Known Bugs and Glitches

- The Corona Bug
- The Scared2Death Bug

The second full turn of the war with Japan, opens with a minor counterattack by a Japanese horseman at the southwestern front of the advance into Japanese territory. The attacking regular horseman was barely defeated by our veteran war chariot covering the stack of war chariots that was in range of the Japanese port city of Nagoya.

Taking Nagoya
The failed Japanese counterattack left us with four, full strength, regular War Chariots to launch at taking Nagoya. The first war chariot defeated a defending regular spearman and with drew when the second regular spearman defender emerged. The second and third War Chariots failed to destroy the spearman but retreated after knocking him down to yellow. The fourth War Chariot defeated the weakened Japanese defender and captured the town plus two slave workers.

I immediately moved the workers back under the stack of wounded attackers to reach back toward linking up with the road crews advancing down from the north. I also reached back and moved the wounded War Chariots who had defeated the two horsemen in 210 AD into the town to serve as garrison while they healed. This garrison was still very weak from a defensive standpoint and we desperately needed to get either a spearman and/or a swordsman into the town to provide a larger defensive value in case the town was to be counterattacked from the south. None of the strong defensive units in the advancing land forces were in reach of reinforcing Nagoya in this turn.

Prioritizing road connections
After taking the Japanese port city the two key priorities would be reinforcing the captured territory to brace for a counterattack and establishing a continuous road link into the Japanese interior.

This map layout demonstrates another excellent example of the impact of orthogonal grid movement distances on the choices we might make in building roads or advancing units. The road crew workers under the spearman stack centered between Toyama and Nagoya could be routed directly in a line to Nagoya or they could move one tile straight south and build the same equivalent road connection in the same amount of time. This southern route pushed the road crew closer to the attacking Japanese warrior, but it also would potentially shorten the distance to Kyoto by one turn’s worth of road building if that route became necessary.

If you look carefully at the animated replay of the moves, you will see that I first completed the road link under the spearmen and then advanced enough road crew workers forward to guarantee completing the next link in the port road connection as a first priority in the next turn. The extra road crew worker was sent to begin the inland section of the link to Toyama. (Don’t worry; we did not leave the workers undefended.)

Landing reinforcements from the sea
In the previous turn, we ended military operations, by loading a horseman and a swordsman onto a galley near the coast of Suez. This galley full of units was still too far away from shore to possibly reach Nagoya. A second galley, closer to the eastern side of the inland sea and near the Egyptian town of Port-o-Japan was capable of reaching Nagoya in one turn, but this galley was empty at the beginning of the year 230 AD.

Fortunately, the orthogonal travel paths of the two galleys could cross in mid-turn and allow the suez galley to transfer its troops to the eastern galley for final transport on to Nagoya. This “Ferry Boating” skill is sometimes referred to as “ship hopping” in some discussion forums and it reflects a key transportation skill that can selectively increase the single turn reach of units that must use water borne transport.

The galley delivered the full health swordsman and horseman into Nagoya by unloading the units from one tile out to sea, just is if this had been a coastal landing with no port city present. The landing move used up the movement abilities of both these units for the turn but raised the garrison strength in Nagoya to five units and more than tripled the defensive strength.

The next major sequence of moves was –

Expanding the Nagoya Beachead

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