Absolutely Fantastic Mod! I've played over 10+ days, 100+ hours and have crashed about 20ish times. Despite the crashes I highly recommend checking this out. I do not run any gameplay mods at all so I probably crash a lot lesser than others who do.

The Artistic direction of the game is phenomenal. The field battle environments are incredible! Misty dawn forest battles like in "The Last Samurai"? Check! Siege environments can be improved but the siege mechanics are working great with destructible archer towers and battlements. There is a fair bit of strange jank with AI doing weird ♥♥♥♥♥ in sieges but AI does the same thing in vanilla. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ranged units are overpowered but fairly in-line with history.. what do you expect when samurai consider using shields to be dishonorable? Ranged units are still vulnerable to massed cav and infantry charges with well armored samurai and matchlock guns need direct line of sight and do not perform well behind a line of infantry so positioning and tactics do matter.

Archers are slightly better in sieges while Matchlock Guns are slightly better in open field battles. In defensive sieges Archers are stronger due to infinite arrows from conveniently placed arrow boxes, faster rate of fire and height advantage leading to easier headshots.



Most common crashes:

While trading in a city - Changing a piece of equipment on one of my characters can sometimes cause crashes

Loading a battle can randomly cause a crash especially battles involving larger armies.
I have encountered many many more crashes loading battles while serving as an enlisted soldier for a lord. Lord engages 5 looters.. Crash. 500 vs 500 Army battle? Crash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Misc Bugs and balance issues:

Quest NPCs sometimes do not trigger their dialogues correctly and you have to ALT+F4 or risk having your character stuck on a village map with no way to exit.

Hair on some characters are messed up with various helmets and hats.

Missionary sometimes doesn't wear pants and has invisible upper legs.

Some armors looks really weird with some parts missing (eg. missing skirt/leg covers)

Some banners are placed behind the soldier back instead of in his hands.. you can still see the soldier running into battle holding an imaginary banner. :P

Armorsmiths are stupidly overpowered... At clan level 5.. my 6 armorsmiths generate an average of 10k-12k per day. While my soy sauce workshop cranks out a measly 150-250 a day at best. Merchants don't really buy a lot of guns so my gunsmiths spend most of the time shutdown because of "poor sales in the market"... over time it lost money due to upkeep costs instead.

Caravans are terrible and dont make any money.. .they also often get stuck on the map and can't be disbanded. Workaround for stuck caravans is first to replace the caravan leader... after the new caravan leader arrives (he's still stuck) he can then be ordered to disband and it'll work this time.

Likewise AI companion party leaders can also sometimes get stuck on the map after they exit a city or village. It seems there are some bugs with the map's navigation mesh causing these issues.

Integrated Distinguished Service features are completely and utterly unbalanced (Just like in the original mod). Promoting a tier 6 unit to companion sounds cool.... but he comes along with 2 sets of gear (duplicated gear in battle as well as civilian outfit) worth 800k?!?!?! Not to mention breaking game balance by allowing the use of full combat armor, matchlock guns and noble bows in civilian attire.

Hatamotos are too common.. they are a high rank of the samurai class. The english equivalent would be "Liutenant"... just like you can't have an army full of generals.. it also shouldn't be possible to have an army full of hatamotos. I suggest spreading out their spawn locations so there will be different places you can hire them on each part of the map but would be impractical for the player to attempt to mass an entire army of them due to travel distances. They have elite stats and hiring costs but they should also be rare and treasured as prisoners. The XP required for Hatamotos to go from tier 5 to 6 is also too low... it takes only 1-2 battles to get them to tier 6 while it feels like it takes much longer for other tier 5 samurai to get to tier 6. Could be because the hatamotos starting equipment is so strong that they accumulate exp much quicker than other tier 5s.

Both Bows and Guns could use an accuracy reduction of -5 for game balance. Maybe even -10 for the top tier bows... 96 accuracy in a world without shields is just... obscenely broken.

Companions who are captured/imprisoned after a lost battle and then escaped/rescued can spawn super far away... for example I lost a battle as a mercenary against Uesugi and all my companions eventually escaped and ended up in Sadowara... which is 20+ days plus a ferry ride away from where they were imprisoned, how on earth did they end up that far? i guess the vanilla logic of respawning in a random town... except in this case the map is massive.

Even with Veterans Respect perk I was unable to upgrade "Man-Hunter" into any of the samurai classes that show up in their upgrade tree.

Upkeep costs for Ships is too high. For a clan tier 5 leader with 315 soldiers... I would have to maintain 6 troop ships costing a DAILY upkeep of 1200.... all for something which i will rarely use most of the time. The economics of maintaining ships just for travel convenience doesn't make sense at all. Cost of maintaining ships should be reduced by 90% IMHO... even then not everyone should own a fleet of ships.

Battlefield remains mission is poorly designed. It's a difficult mission with massive respawns of looters which you can only do successfully with top tier companions/elites. You have no chance of success when you are poorly geared in early game with a low level army. And then think carefully who are the kinds of people who are poor and dishonorable enough to loot a battlefield? Mission should be redesigned to incentivise doing it as a poor ronin starting out in the game with poor gear/army/companions.