Overview
Gameplay tips based on the Holy Shrine / Holy Site specialty provinces for building a formidable military force that will completely eclipse your enemies’ most elite forces.
Building Your Holy Warriors
Spoiler Alert: this finding can potentially spoil your enjoyment of playing Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai (FOTS) by revealing an easy-to-follow strategy for building a formidable force!
Once you control one of the three provinces with a Holy Shrine / Site (Yamato, Izumo, Uzen) it makes sense to build ALL of your units within that province. Upgrading the Site to Buddhist Shrine > Buddhist Temple > Buddhist Temple Complex provides +5, +10 and +15 Charge bonus to your modern military units. This is very significant, as suddenly even your entry level modern units with +5 charge can have the cumulative bonus Charge of the most expensive and the most elite military units in the game!
Again, you can build ALL of you military units in one of these provinces to provide you with a formidable advantage – not just in attacking, but also for defense purposes: even AI will evaluate your province with 4-5 units without a General as weak and will try to attack, but will lose almost in all instances if those 4 units are elite to begin with, and have +15 Charge bonus – this is almost double the typical amount!
So, the strategy becomes very simple: 1. gain a province with a Holy Site as early in the game as possible; 2. place a Foreign Veteran within the castle of the said province to lower the cost of recruitment and to get training bonuses; 3. train all your modern military troops there, with main army and key (or all, if later in the game, as tax revenue increases substantially) provinces guarded by elite units (they will be substantially cheaper to recruit due to combination of Foreign Veteran and Buddhist Temple Complex discounts) with maximum charge promotion given by the Buddhist Temple Complex (the Modernization penalty given by the building barely registers compared to the advantage offered); 4. field your army with modern units, several generals (in case they defect or get assassinated – as the need to defense generals virtually disappears due to the strength of the very few yet effective elite defense units) and walk the map the way you want!
Again, I cannot emphasize the Charge bonus enough, and the numbers obscure their power. Had the game developer used terms like “Low” to “Excellent” for Charge characteristic, with regular elite units being “Excellent”, then a base unit recruited in a province with a Buddhist Temple Complex would be instantly elite in terms of Charge and Morale! But the most significant change would occur when you recruited elite units: their Charge is completely off the charts: +35 compared to “vanilla” elite unit with “merely” a +20 Charge!
Try this trick and once / if you did let me know how you fared in the Comments section. Happy playing!