So as I mentioned in the Musou thread, I had a longtime curiosity for that title (since the 3 Moves Ahead podcast covered it I guess) and finally gave in a few weeks ago.
Nobunaga's Ambition on NES in 1983 was one of Koei's first acclaimed title and Koei had so many sequels and other games in that mould (famously Romance of the Three Kingdoms but also some covering the American Revolution or the Age of Exploration) that they ended up creating the "historical simulation series" label for it. Sphere of Influence is not the latest Nobunaga game (one was released in 2017) but I only have a PS3 so sue me.
Anyway I had a blast with it (including two sleepless nights
) so here's my thoughts.
To state the obvious, the game is set in the late Sengoku era, when Nobunaga Oda get the ball rolling on his effort to unify a country stuck in constant low intensity conflicts between warlords and their clans all while gunpowder and Christian faith starts seeping in. As you would expect, while it's being "historical", the period and main characters gets a major rose tinted glamour update. I mean you'll learn quite a bit on the popular perception on some of the major figures of those times (you get treated to dialogue cutscenes of the key and / or symbolic & meaningful moments of what's going on all over Japan) but it's more often than not drama soap rather than Kagemusha.
You have a variety of different start points to choose and can pick any clan to play, with historical quests on or off. It plays in pausable "real time", with infrastructure and economic decisions being made at the start of each month and war and unit orders available at any time. Most of the game revolves around improving your cities/castles, managing your retainers (most tasks requires you allocate someone to oversee it) and of course levying troops and move them around all in order to become powerful enough to be nominated as Shogun and enact a War Ban.
If this sounds slightly reminiscent of a Paradox game, you would be right. There's shades of Crusader Kings here though the systems are not as complex and more mechanistic. I'm curious how much of this was already in place in the older games... One thing NA does that won't find in Paradox games is the option to direct battles in a tactical mode but honestly I stopped fiddling with that past my first game as it was clear I did a less competent job than the AI. My impression is that it's more about your strategic planning, positioning and choosing the best generals to lead troops than this though there's a cool mechanic of "decisive battle" triggering when a great many number of units for each faction are in the same region, prompting a tactical battle with all of them tossed in. I found the enemy IA to be fairly decent in its own right, a neighboring clan will absolutely punish you by going for your cities if you levied all troops and sent them far away and it knows when to attack or just let a sizeable cover force at a crossroad nearby to try to dissuade you and deny movement (it works the other way around too, which makes for better strategic thinking on your part). The AI is also good at managing your far away provinces (you'll have to create some because bases too distant from your capital you can't control as fully).
It does feature some of the usual flaws of strategy games : the late game is not immune to steamrolling. I was so drenched in money and supplies at that point that I could cheese the diplomacy a bit, though I must say that in my one successful game so far I was cautious to never go head to head with powerful clans even by the end, instead mopping up the small ones I kept as vassals. Despite the fact you can automate a lot of of the city management (and you absolutely should, unless you're doing something very specific in one city) there's still some busywork here. Moving retainers from one castle to the next can get tedious. There's some UI jank too, like the fact that everytime you buy or sell something to the merchant, the game sends you back to the general menu and you have to re-enter the trade interface to conduct a second operation.
I started another scenario selecting a stronger AI (there's a separate setting for aggresavity) and reducing the distance at which you can retain direct control on castles, so I'll see if the late game gets more heated that way.
