I gave Japan a test ride in BtS yesterday and I was pleased. Like many I HATE stability because it is never explained even the threads here and the wiki make no sense. I guess I'll just have to figure out how to game the system which is what all the more experienced people have done I'm sure.
As for my thoughts, I thought the Japanese were VERY strong. Island nations are really benefited by this mod I would imagine.
I have spent most of my turns at Shaky, but I have my island occupied with four cities (see below) and took Seoul. I have taken Gangzhou on the Chinese mainland three times and three times it has revolted so I'm just going to turtle until 1850 because nobody is going to be coming for me.
As for four cities on the island.
Wow, 4 cities on that tiny little Island of Japan? As far as I can tell there's only room for 2 good cities. The north side doesn't even seem worth over-extending myself to build a city there... at least not early on. 2 cities can tap all but one of the resources. Maybe my desire to keep all fat crosses from overlapping is a bit irrational?
You HAVE to overlap fat crosses in this one. It is a good skill to learn on micromanagement so you know which city needs what tile.
For Japan I plop down the first city at the spawn point (Kyoto). I move one settler to the hills to the SW and one SE and NE towards the spot north of the river tile.
I put the southern settler between the spice and gold resources (Nagasaki) and the northeast settler on the north side of the river (Tokyo).
I also send one swordsman north to explore the rest of the island and fort the other in my capitol (the archers go with the settlers).
When I return to stable (next time I play not this last game where I rushed this guy out) and build a few improvements in my cities, I will make another settler and put him just NW of the Dye resource in the north. This will make for four cities with good locations. I only have keep my capitol from two squares on the Nagasaki side (an ocean tile and windmilled hill SW of Kyoto) since Nagasaki has a food deficiency), and the eastern rice tile and the one north of it since Kyoto has a food surplus.
What I don't understand about the challenges of the Japanese civ (and really this is for the entire mod) is what to do about civics.
Should I wait for a golden age before switching? Part of how I won (I'm in the mid 1700's now and each of my cities could take a nuke hit .... except Nagasaki) was I switched my civics at the start to pick up hereditary rule and slavery and just kept popping my population which grew so fast. I put more units in the cities to keep happiness up and by 1500 was almost 500 points ahead of any other civ (one mistake I made was to sail around and meet EVERYBODY which means I took the "you know too many names" hit on whatever category).
This, however, paired with the swaps to various civics throughout before I knew about the PERMANENT penalty you face when you switch civics. Means I win the game, but have to sit on shaky? Horse hockey if you ask me. Especially with Nationhood when it is known that I'm the biggest kid on the block, my nation should be more stable.
Anyway, I enjoyed the mod and being a Marathon player I was very worried about the score UHV criteria, but through fast improvement of my lands as well as general exploring (to meet far flung civs with different techs) I was able to put a stranglehold on the tech lead which typically leads to point victories.
