New samurai series on Netflix

[Brent]

It is really good at putting the main characters/leaders in perspective.
It helped put the who's who in position.
martin

I agree. It's short on details about the composition and equipment of forces, but strong on the biographical focus. One thing I noticed, was that apparently all battles during the Sengoku period happened in forests :-P  I imagine that was for budgetary reasons. Reenacting battles with thousands of soldiers in open fields would have been prohibitively expensive, although CG could have been brought to bear. But, on the whole, I enjoyed it.
Cheers,
Brent

[martin goddard]

It is a great series I agree


martin

[sukhe_bator (Neil)]

Given the premium on land and space, battles were confined to a narrow portion of the year soon after harvest. Takeda Shingen routinely utilised the fact that one of the mountain passes out of his territory was lower than those of his neighbours. He staged several raids in winter when his neighbours were still snowed in.
Traversing difficult terrain was the norm and points to a more fluid unit structure than comparably armed and equipped forces of the late C16 in Europe.

[usagitsuki]

Sengoku military campaigns weren't particularly restricted by the farming season. It used to be believed that Sengoku armies couldn't mobilise troops from farmers during the farming season, but this was because there was an assumption that ashigaru were 'conscripted peasants.' More recent research has demonstrated that ashigaru were more equivalent to mercenaries, being hired as temporary soldiers for a specific campaign, often coming from outside the areas they were hired. Essentially, ashigaru were any troops existing outside permanent feudal structures. As such, daimyō could still carry out military operations without significantly impacting their own agricultural production.

Armies could and did fight at any time of the year, during the 2nd Kawanakajima campaign the Uesugi and Takeda kept armies in the field for 200 days through the whole of the farming season. The attached graph shows Sengoku battles plotted by month, with the farming season from 4th-5th month to 10th-11th month (there's obviously some regional variation for farming seasons in Japan). There is a reduction of activity during the planting time, but an increase during harvesting. This is because armies would usually try and fight in enemy territory during harvesting season, both to make it easier to feed their own troops and to deny food to the enemy. But there are plenty of battles across the whole year.

I guess the upshot is, don't be afraid of putting in that detailed random weather table in Battles In The Age of War 2 

[Colonel Kilgore]

That's fascinating insight, thank you, usagitsuki!

Simon