Overview
This is a short introduction to playing the Sendai in FOTS.
Why play the Sendai?
The Sendai are an interesting and rewarding clan to play. They have great perks, an interesting strategic situation, and they get to use railways as the makers of FOTS probably intended.
The Sendai have great perks
◾Tolerance (+3 reduction to unhappiness from differences in allegiance)
◾Tact (+10 to diplomatic relations)
◾Siegecraft (2 turn reduction to surrender time when besieging castles)
◾Respect (+1 reduction to resistance to occupation across all provinces)
Tact is excellent for teaming up with fellow Shogunites, and siegecraft is amazing – basically, it means you never have to fight a siege unless you want to.
The Sendai have an excellent strategic situation
1. Several of the neighbouring provinces are fertile, which means you can rack up income quickly from improving farms.
2. Your capital is on the railway which mean you can actually get some benefit from the rail mechanic.
3. You start at war with the Kubota, who sit on a smith site, which means you can quickly start producing improved troops, once you capture Ugo.
4. You have the best of both worlds, meaning that you can both play a Satsuma-style game by conquering the Matsumae up north, and an Obama-style game by going for the middle of Honshu.
5. You won’t get pestered too much by enemy fleets if you play it right.
Getting Started
This is not a walkthrough, but I’ll summarise the first few turns:
1. Scupper your navy as it’s useless for now.
2. Your enemy Kubota has a scheme to conquer your ally the Morioka. You want to let them do this as you will want to expand early into Iwate. So you march west rather than north, picking up a few troops as you pass Miyagi, and attack Ugo through the back door, Uzen.
3. You need to friend the Yonezawa to do this, but this is well worth the expense – see below.
4. Conquer Ugo, tidy up the Kubota army, racing back too late to save their base, and take Iwate, which they just conquered and is poorly defended.
5. Next, declare war on the Imperialist Hirosaki, and take Aomori.
6. You now have the whole top end of Honshu in you hands, can consolidate your gains, and can start building your railway to some useful purpose.
7. Note that you don’t want to friend the Aizu or the Nagaoka, because their strategic situations are problematic. In fact, the Yonezawa are really the only ally you need at this stage (in fact they are a good ally generally, very helpful against Matsumae because you can leave worthless Iburi and remote Sapporo in their hands, with careful play).
8. Plus, with just the one port on the North West of Honshu, there’s not much for thieving Imp fleets to attack. Upgrade farms, and start turning Ugo into a gold troop factory ( I had gold armour/accuracy before the end of 1867). It takes a few moves for them to reach the railhead, but once there you can defend your fiefdom easily.
And then?
That is up to you.
For the next step, you can pacify Hokkaido for the coal and iron, or pick off provinces on the railway to move southwards – or a combination of both. The Shinsengumi are your friend with revolting the Aizu and Nagaoka provinces in the way of your track-building without declaring war. However, a steady approach is merited as you don’t want to border the Jozai or Edo too early – let them destroy each other.
Because the railway runs along the southern side of Honshu, you can leave all those much-bombarded ports to the north under current management, and use cheaper and more concentrated fleets to protect your trading port at Miyagi (so the harbour in Ugo gets, bombarded, so what!). This means you can concentrate on improving your farms until you become an agricultural powerhouse.
In my game, Edo revolted quite early on and I was able to use my railway to dash in to collar the province. In retrospect, I should also have taken Mino then because it became virtually impossible later without declaring war on my staunch ally Nagoya. That’s the reason for the gap in the depicted track.