You're trying to rule Japan. You start out as a minor retainer of a minor lord within your clan. Over time you will increase your power until you become Daimyo of your clan and then work to conquer enough of Japan to declare yourself Shogun. Your overall worth and power are a combination of your skills as a warrior and general, your personal honor, and the size of your lands and number of your soldiers. There is a wide variety (especially for a game that came out when this one did) of actions you can take to increase your power. There are also actions you can take to sabotage or even assassinate your enemies and actions they will take to sabotage and kill you. In the end, there can only be one Shogun in Japan.

Before we go further a few definitions of terms:
There are five main stats your character has. Here are the words I will refer to them as and their matching symbol and general meaning.
Personal honor (rising sun symbol)
Skills as a general for use in army battles (general's fan symbol)
Swordsmanship skill for duels (sheathed sword symbol)
Size of lands/province (rice bush/plant/shrubbery? symbol).
Current size of army (pyramid symbol, I think it's supposed to be a hat/helmet.)


Duels: This refer to the times your character is facing another character in 3rd person perspective.
Overhead combat: This refers to when you are looking down on your solo character from an overhead two dimensional view. You move around firing your bow or swinging your sword once the enemy is close enough.
Battles: This refers to when you are commanding your troops in a battle and use your general's fan/cursor to issue commands to them.
Vassal: this is the rank you start out with in the game
Hatamoto: the next rank up
Daimyo: your final rank wherein you now fight to conquer Japan.

Also, if you don't know the keyboard command to do something, check out my guide on that subject here on Steam.

When you begin a new game you will need to pick your starting province. There are two things I consider here: the location of that province for the final part of the game when you're trying to conquer Japan, and the starting out stats for that region. As you move your cursor around you'll see that different areas have different balances between your various stats. These will affect what you start with in each of those areas. You might think these stats will affect you at the end of the game when you're in control of your clan but they don't. These province statistics just reflect what your stats will be at the beginning of the game. So ask yourself:

1) which stat(s) are hardest or most tedious for me to improve? In a game on easier settings it can be a bit tedious to improve my sword skill with duel after duel after duel so I might pick a province where I start out with a high level of this. On the other hand if I'm going to be playing on No-Dachi difficulty I can easily win practice duels to increase my sword skill but it might be hard to increase the size of my fief so I might pick a starting region that has a lot of land.

2) once I am Daimyo and am on the road to conquering Japan where do I want my starting position to be? Do I want to have my back against the wall and only have to face one or two enemy provinces at the beginning of things? If so then Satsuma province in the bottom left corner might be a good choice or Dewa province in the upper right hand corner. On the other hand if I want to be in the middle of things and have lots of people to fight then pick one in the center of Japan and scream "Come at me bro!"

Difficulty setting:
I don't find there to be a big increase in difficulty between Tanto and Wakizashi but going from Wakizashi to Katana there seems to be a big increase in difficulty in the overhead combat missions. There's a lot more enemies and they're a lot quicker to fire or stab you. No-Dachi is the hardest and I'll confess I rarely win a full overhead combat mission on that setting. I can run into an enemy castle and grab a hostage sometimes but trying to fight until the enemies stop coming is a suicide mission for me and my humble skills. So I have to rely on doing duels to increase my honor on that setting. On harder settings your enemies will also start out with higher stats and be more aggressive in attempting to sabotage you or take hostages. You'll also have to work harder to gain a wife.

Family advantage:
Just a little boost to a stat of your choice. Not even positive if it carries over to your heirs or just a one-time boost to your starting stats.

There are many ways to get ahead in life and many ways to fail. For a Samurai to be respected by his peers he must have many virtues and few faults. Or... his enemies must have a lot of faults! In the initial stages of the game you can succeed both by increasing your standings and by sabotaging others. In the end of the game when conquering Japan other stats aren't as important as the size of your lands, your army, and your skills with it. In this section I'm not really going to try and cover concepts that should be easy enough to pick up on your own. You'll quickly realize how to gain and lose honor.

You start out as a lowly vassal to a hatamoto. You have stats based on your starting province. Your first goal should be to increase all your stats in general. Practice Kenjutsu and drill your troops to increase those two stats. Wait for missions to show up at the hatamoto's castle. By pressing F3 you can see if there are "bold deeds" which reward honor or "campaign actions" available to increase your lands. You'll get a little screen that will pop up when a new one becomes available letting you know what is available and what the nature of it is. You'll also occasionally get chances to help out other vassals of your rank with some problem they are having. Making allies of them won't increase your rank per se but it'll mean they won't attempt to attack you.

Or, instead of waiting, you can go looking for a fight. Travel disguised to go sabotage or assassinate someone. But if you encounter an opportunity to gain honor while traveling in disguise you will gain little or no honor from completing that mission. Travel alone if you're looking for more honor but don't wish to do any black ops missions. Travel with your army if you'd like to do a campaign action. Each mode has its pros and cons. One nice thing is when traveling alone you can stop at a location and change your mode of travel when you leave to traveling in disguise (or no longer in disguise). But when you're out with your army you're with your army until you go back home with it.

Here's something you might not realize tho: you can also go into neighboring provinces and do a few things. Walk over to the little arrow with the name of the other province on it and hit "enter" to go into that province. Mostly you can do two things. The first is look for a symbol of two tents and go over to it and move around a little and it'll tell you that you've found the fortified lair of some bandits. You can go into it and kill them all for some honor. The other thing you can do once you're a hatamoto and have a decent army (you can't seem to do this when you're just a vassal) you can go into the neighboring province and go to their daimyo's house and fight his army. They generally have a army that is a little bigger than yours but if you use some good tactics you can win and get a nice piece of land for the reward. This can be helpful to do when you want more land but there's no challenges for it coming up.

How to win at duels:
Simple. Keep attacking. I've never seen any benefit to blocking. This game has a lot of good things going for it but the duel system isn't its strongest point and the way to win is to just keep swinging. Something else you can do of course is to wait until your opponent steps back, or back up yourself, and then pull back on your sword (by using 1, 2, or 3 on the keypad) until it is fully charged and then when they step into range nail them with it. They can't block against a fully charged attack like that and it'll also do two points of damage instead of one.

Battles:
Hit them from the sides or from behind. Again for all its strengths this game is a bit older and its AI just isn't the best. The enemy units will tend to turn to face the nearest threat so it isn't too hard to get some or all of their army to face towards one direction and then rush them from behind with a second unit. Cavalry units are your strongest and fastest troops and you can defeat an army twice your size with just a single group of spearmen and a group of cavalry. And hiding some troops in the trees can definitely work to your advantage. Also if one of your groups has lost and is running away you can get them to stop running and return to the battle by selecting them. If they're still being chased you can keep selecting them repeatedly (by pressing their number on the keyboard) and they won't return to the fight but will slow down and slow down the enemy group that is chasing them. Helps occasionally.

Overhead combat:
This is the best of the mini-games with the best AI and variety to it. How you go about it depends on what you're trying to do. Sometimes the goal is just to kill all enemies (scaring them away also counts). If that is the goal then your bow is definitely your best weapon as it allows you to kill enemies without really being in danger. Enemy archers are slow to fire (faster at higher difficulty) and usually their animation changes slightly before they fire as they draw back on their bow. So what I like to do is find a good 'alley' to hole up in and shoot them as they come at me. The only problem with this is that the AI is a little bit too smart for this to work 100%. After you kill a half dozen soldiers the enemy will notice the pile of corpses and they'll start to wait for you around the corner. Time is on the enemy's side and if you don't move quickly there will be five or six of them waiting for you. They'll also try and sneak around behind you if possible. In any case once they stop stepping out you're going to need to run up there and kill the ones waiting and reposition, or if you're a bit smarter, make sure you have a back way out and go that way. You gotta admit tho, that's pretty good AI for a game this old! The enemy looks at those bodies and goes, "Nope... I'm not stepping out."

If you're invading an enemy castle here's some tips: depending on the level of difficulty and your rank the enemy castle will have multiple levels to it and your target will almost always be on the last floor. If you walk into the bedroom of the lord whose castle you are in and the alarm has been sounded then you will have to fight and kill them regardless of what your goal was in coming in. If you want to assassinate the lord and the account hasn't been sounded he will still be asleep and you can kill him without a duel. But then you have to fight your way back out :( so sometimes it's easier just to duel. If the alarm has sounded and you DON'T want to fight the lord one trick is to remember that guards will never open the door that leads into the lord's bedroom. So you can sit there and just kill all the guards and then walk around looking for the hostage you're there for, or the item you're stealing or whatever.

Another trick to castle invasions is that guards won't sound unless they see you or see a dead body and even then they wait a few seconds. Also if you've killed a few guards and then go upstairs before the alarm is sounded the guards will only react to events on the next floor (i.e. they don't continue to look around downstairs and panic over dead bodies down there). So if you're stealthy enough you can kill quite a few guards and sometimes even completely get in and out before you are spotted. You can also decide that the situation has gotten too bad and run back to the main door and exit through it by pressing against it for a few seconds. BUT! If a guard has seen you, you have to kill him before running away or everyone will know who did it and you'll either lose a lot of honor or have to commit seppuku or be executed for it. If you're trying to kill your superior lord you're toast if you fail.

Also, if you do the mission that involves killing the enemy tax collector to make the peasants revolt keep in mind that the mission is to kill that guy, not to kill everyone else. Even on the hardest difficulty this is a fairly easy battle to just run north and whack the guy.

And finally if you are at home and get attacked... oh man those ninjas suck! I wish you could hire them :( but you gotta be quick to kill them before they get you. Also after you fight them for a minute or two you'll see the enemy lord show up. Make sure he doesn't kidnap your family members or steal an item. Sometimes you can't just wait in your bedroom for him, you've got to go stop him. If you get lucky you can kill him with your bow and avoid a duel so use your head.

The two things that will reliably get me killed when doing the overhead battles are spearmen and getting shot while trying to swordfight. Trying to go sword vs. spear with spearman especially on higher difficulty is suicide. Unless you get lucky and block their attack they'll kill you before you get in range. And nothing sucks more than when a swordsman pops up next to you just as an archer is drawing a bead on you. You can't choose to shoot the archer first because you're automatically using your sword now and before you know it you're a pincushion. Overhead battles are all about positioning.

Diplomacy:
It's a dog eat dog world that we live in and that's definitely true with this game. You win not just by being strong but by making your enemies weak. That being said there can be some benefit to having an ally. I like to hurry through the first stages of the game and quickly become hatamoto before my character is very old and then marry the daughter of the strongest of the hatamotos so that he is an ally. (Of course you've got to convince him you're worth it). You can also use marriage during the daimyo phase to the same effect. That's what people did back in those days anyways so it's traditional! You can also just marry a normal bride from a good family but when you do that make sure it's the best one available. The better the bride the further to the left her picture will be on the screen. It'll show a screen like this for the best:
On higher difficulties she tends to get kidnapped and you have to rescue her but I think that's a cool idea and leads to a good story to tell the grandkids.

And that leads us to my favorite dirty trick. Well there's lots of dirty tricks built into it but there's a one big thing you can do to make the game easier on yourself and take the fast track: insulting and then killing people. This is a surprisingly easy way to take out an opponent. Go to their castle or your lord's castle while they are there and then insult them. They either lose honor or fight you and die. Either way they or their heir will be much weaker for it.

And finally my last word of advice is... try and kill an enemy in an overhead battle by getting an enemy archer to fire at you and then side-step the arrow and watch it nail an enemy soldier behind you! That's when you know you're hardcore!

When you're all done and victory is yours and you become Shogun you'll even get a final score. Here's a mediocre one I got for purposes of getting this screenshot (I can do much better than this of course! I think highest score possible is 12,600 or something like that).