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
- Kyoto’s fate
- 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

When I played the original game, I made sure to complete this move sequence after I had processed the moves to complete the Far Off Landing on the Japanese coast as well as the Coastal Thrust out to the northern Japanese coastal city of Fukushima. My feeling was that this sequence of moves was actually the most important game because it would be the most heavily reinforced element of the attack and I was hoping that it would lead to a climactic confrontation with whatever offensive military forces that Tokugawa might be able to put into the field against us.

The Importance of Roads and Passable Terrain
This main advance was planned to included workers moving forward as quickly as possible to link up roads and support the advancing units. Since almost all the military units were being ferried across the inland sea in galleys, we would have to begin the campaign with units disembarking in the Egyptian town of Port-o-Japan as the nearest port city to the objective and to our home empire. Units would then have to travel forward to the combat front along roads that either were built by our workers or captured from the Japanese.

Since we could not be sure to find roads and/or passable terrain that would allow our chariots to reach the major objective of capturing Kyoto, this advance was initially very risky. I attempted to mitigate some of this risk by implementing the coastal thrust toward Fukushima that could then be turned inland toward Kyoto as resources permitted.

The advancing workers who would build the support road would help us to reveal the positions of our enemies, and would also drive us to make choices as to which Japanese cities we eliminated first or second in order to open up terrain to build more roads.

As the war begins with Japan, we have advanced a small party of one spearman and two swordsmen forward through the forest that protected the northern advance to Toyama. In the image, shown above, the borders of the Japanese territory have just expanded and reached out to envelope this small force as it stood in the forest just north of the mountain north of Toyama. Rather than wait for Tokugawa to demand that we withdraw the troops, I advanced the units onto the mountain top and prepared to go to war.

The main axis of advance required us to think about the quickest possible way to get faster moving mobile wheeled units forward onto a position where they could eventual destroy the Japanese military and capture their main cities. Again in the image above, we can see that we have exposed mountains and more forest to the southwest of Toyamajust as we had originally guessed in our estimated map of the Japanese terrain.

The reason for choosing to aim the attack almost straight south from Port-o-Japan would be to make sure we could take the Japanese harbor town shown at the lower left the image and then link up that new harbor to bring in the remaining troops to either advance inland through Toyama or through towns to the south of Toyama that might be more directly connected to Kyoto by a road network.

The opening attack on Toyama
We had the choice of using a combination of war chariots and swordsmen to attack Toyama and this choice became very important because we uncovered Japanese horseman who had advanced to meet our attacking forces. We would need to conserve the mobile chariot units to reach a destroy the horsemen as quickly as possible since we could be sure that these horsemen would be the last major attack threats from the Japanese since we had already stumbled on their source of horses far off on the north coast.

Since we could not be sure to find roads and/or passable terrain that would allow our chariots to have a chance of reaching the major objective of capturing Kyoto, this advance was initially very risky. I attempted to mitigate some of this risk by implementing the coastal thrust toward Fukushima that could then be turned inland toward Kyoto as resources permitted.

The advancing workers who would build the support road would help us to reveal the positions of our enemies, and would also drive us to make choices as to which Japanese cities we captured or eliminated next in order to open up terrain to build more roads.

(Note: that the attack on Toyama reveals another program bug in CIV3 V1.12 or V1.29 where the cultural borders of the captured town or city will sometimes stay inflated beyond the 9 square base count for a town. This bug, known as the "Corona bug" is discussed in further detail in a separate article.)

The attack sequence that I used in to capture Toyama is summarized below:

There is nothing spectacular about this sequence except that I observed closely and saw that the first two War Chariot attacks won 2 strokes and lost 4 for a result right at the expected 67% but the retreat percentage was higher than the expected average. The expected chance that the next war chariot might retreat would be lower in the long run, so I chose to use a swordsman from the mountain to finish one of the weakened spearmen rather than risk loosing a war chariot that might not win its battles and then choose to continue attacking and die. The final attack by the veteran war chariot was more successful than expected.

When Toyama was captured we also captured the catapult and this would lead us to evaluate whether to keep the unit or disband it quickly to support rushing improvements or other units. This choice is discussed below.

Consolidating moves in Toyama included using our last mountain swordsman to capture a slave worker who was then set to work building road and another move that brought the mountain spearman into the town to increase the garrison.

If you would like to pick up and play your own moves forward from this scenario, you may click here to download a Civ3 V1.21 save file that will position you right at the end of the year 210AD. Remember: Your replay results will vary slightly from the original game because the impact of the Random Number Generator will alter the play sequence a little bit more for each movement sequence that progresses.

Addressing the horseman threat to the west
Toyama was captured using a total of three War Chariot units from the main thrust. With the two swordsmen and the spearman from the slower holding force, we had a total of 6 units tied up in garrisoning a captured city of one (1) Japanese citizen. The threat of further counter attacks from the direction of the Japanese core area was very high. We did not expect Tokugawa to go to his grave easily.

On the western flank of the main advance, our advancing road crew had exposed a Japanese horseman who posed an immediate threat to the success of our attack. This horseman was standing in the open and unfortified, so he would only be able to defend at a 1.10 strength while we could attack with 2.00 strength war chariots. If we just fortified and defended and waited for him to attack, then our chariots would defend at a 1.375 value versus the Japanese horseman’s attack strength of 2.00. I chose to attack because; this would extend the advance towards capturing the Japanese port town that would reduce our reinforcement length of travel. The first war chariot attack was successful, partially because the Japanese horseman could not use the retreat capability due to the war chariot also being classified as a fast unit. (See more info on understanding the retreat capability). The advance associated with this victory revealed another Japanese horseman who was standing in forests and poised to counterattack our forces. If we left the wounded war chariot exposed to the horseman, then it would probably be easily defeated by the next move because it would only have a weak two chances to defend at 1.10 strength.

The choice to complete roadwork as a part of the advance now came into play because we could select and advance more road crew workers and also select and advance almost all of the available war chariots in the reserve portion of the attack force. Bringing the advancing war chariots forward quickly helped to provide cover for the wounded chariot that had defeated the first Japanese horseman and also placed us with striking distance of port town for the next turn.

The next major sequence of moves was – Reinforcements and Ferry Boat Operations on the Inland Sea

Other related topics:
Cracker's unofficial CIV3 skills toolbox - some favorite tips and tricks
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