...but you're not fantastic at the game. That's okay, neither am I. But I did it, and you can too.

Ultimately, there are a bunch of different ways to get this achievement, because all it actually requires of you is to win the scenario normally on hard difficulty. That is (of course) possible with any of the six factions. People have done it. People have done it in ways that make it seem trivial.

But you're not people, are you?

As a point of clarification, when I say "kind of bad at the game" I am talking about a rather particular kind of ability level and attitude. The ideal user of this guide conforms to the following criteria:

• Aware they're not fantastic at the game, but not completely hopeless either and absolutely trying to slowly improve.
  
• Able to reasonably consistently beat large numbers of Moderate AI (and maybe comfortable facing 1-2 Hard AI in a game) but completely daunted by the Shogun achievement's requirement to defeat 4 of 5 hard AI opponents.
  
• Has either never played online or has ended up at around about 750-850 ELO.
  
• Knows what a build order is and has experimented with them once or twice, but isn't a religious user and in normal play is a little bit slower than properly following one would permit.
  
• Is ok with slightly cheesy strategies and things like savescumming and issuing commands while paused to get the job done on scenario completions and achievement hunting.

Even if this sounds higher than your skill level, there is a lot of slack in this method. When I did it I actually did one of the steps wrong and had to correct mid-strategy, and I still finished with over twenty minutes remaining on the scenario clock. There is a lot of flexibility here for screwing up and being slow.

Nobunaga gives us a choice of six factions around Japan to play. The one that we want to pick is the Otomo (Blue). This is for a number of reasons:

• The Otomo live on an island, and barring one very lackluster early attempt are never attacked there. This is also true of the Chosokabe (Green), but a Green start is more complicated as they also have a TC on Honshu itself that is almost immediately attacked and would likely need to be hurriedly abandoned. By playing as the Chosokabe's enemies the Otomo we can take advantage of this attack, rather than fall victim to it.
  
• The Otomo get access to Feitorias in the Castle age, AND a unique tech that supercharges their output; so a passable economy is exceedingly easy to set up.
  
• The Otomo get immediate access to Cannon Galleons, which will be critical to our strategy.
  
• By playing a nautical faction, we can collapse a lot of the scenario's complexity by just refusing to engage with the land war on Honshu. This is particularly helpful since one of our enemies is the Mori (Orange) who have access to the exceedingly broken technology of "explosive traps" - undetectable buildings that explode powerfully enough to kill a full control group of units marching over them. With the nautical Otomo strategy we avoid a lot of problems like that. The only landgoing unit we will ever be landing on the island of Honshu in this strategy are trebuchets. Everything else? Pure navy.
  
• The Otomo's secondary objective reward is the Arquebus technology, which does not factor into our strategy at all and can be safely ignored, thereby avoiding the stress of having to complete the secondary objective of converting 20 units to have a viable faction. Our gunpowder units will never be required to hit anything capable of movement, so a technology improving their accuracy in specifically that situation is largely irrelevant.
  
• The "downside" that the Otomo cannot collect relics is laughably irrelevant. We have one-age-early access to Feitorias, a huge amount of gold on and near our island, and not even Purple ever comes to collect the relic that is on the southern tip of our home.

So, we have our faction, now onto the walkthrough.

Setting up an economy with the Otomo is so easy it should be illegal. When the game starts, task half of your starting villagers to mine gold and half to mine stone. You can play around with this ratio a little bit, as long as you're moving along promptly. Move your hero Otomo Sorin over to your eastern dock in order to anticipate the one and only attack you will suffer at home. Feel free to delete your western dock as a memory aid not to use it - ships it makes are required to circumnavigate our island since our land stretches off the bottom of the map blocking them from travelling east, so it's a non-starter as far as building navy is concerned.

Once you have 350 gold and 300 stone, immediately build a feitoria. It doesn't matter where as long as it's not right slap bang on the shoreline because (as mentioned) you will not get visitors, the house does not need to be tidy. Put the villagers back on gold and stone afterwards.

Keep doing this until you have 5 feitorias. You will need to break off a few villagers during this process in order to build houses after you've accumulated a bit of wood to accommodate the pop space requirements of the feitorias, but keep mining gold and stone, and use your market to balance your stockpiles of each. Also build a university, which you will need later. If you have an excess of stone you might build a castle next to the bay where your eastern dock is, but this is not necessary and houses are usually easier since they aren't competing for resources with the feitorias.

You can sell a lot of your food at the market for gold early on while prices are high to make this process go faster since our naval strategy won't need much of it, but don't do this too aggressively as we will need a total of 6030 food over time for technologies we need to research before going on the offensive.

At some point during this process you will be attacked by Orange's watergoing hero Mori Yoshinari, plus a galleon and later a fire ship. They will try and destroy your eastern dock. Either let them do this (the strategy has more than enough slack in both time and resources to rebuild it later) or use your hero to convert each of the non-hero ships as they arrive and make them attack Orange's hero (if you do it right they should exactly destroy each other). Either way, you will never be attacked at home again. Delete your hero now; he has outlived his usefulness and an economy made of five feitorias means you will need all the pop space you can get.

While all this is happening and whenever you have the resources available (this may take you until the middle of the navy building section downpage, don't worry), research the following technologies in priority order from top to bottom:

• Portuguese Traders (Town Center) - this turbocharges our feitoria eco, so you want to research it as soon as possible, not least to get the resources for the other techs.
  
• Imperial Age (Town Center)
  
• Shipwright (Dock)
  
• War Galley, Galleon and Elite Cannon Galleon (Dock)
  
• Siege Engineers (University) - this one is very important, don't forget it!
  
• Kataparuto (Castle)
  
• Careening and Dry Dock (Dock)
  
• Bodkin arrow and Bracer (Blacksmith)
  
• Devotion (Monastery)

When you have your max pop space capped out at 200 and your feitorias and university built, task your villagers to construct docks in the bay your eastern dock is (or was) in until you have 6-10. Then task them to chop wood. You are now done thinking about your economy.

Our strategy is as follows:

1. Build a bunch of trebuchets, and a navy containing a bunch of cannon galleons.
2. Kill one of our two enemies (specifically, the Chosokabe (Green)).
3. Position our cannon galleons and trebs such that when our allies the Oda (Yellow) and the Takeda (Red) betray us, we can instantly kill them.
4. Kill the second of our two enemies (either the Mori (Orange) or the Uesugi (Purple))
5. Kill both of our allies the moment they betray us. This will cause us to win the scenario.

The strategy is contingent on the following facts:
1. Each AI player resigns (and insta-destroys all their units and buildings as if hit with the torpedo cheat) when they have 0 completed castles and 0 completed town centers (what I will call their "critical buildings") standing. It doesn't matter if they have foundations laid for these buildings, if they still have army, if they have high score or loads of villagers, nothing. The only defeat condition the AI is looking for is "Do I have 0 fully built TCs and 0 fully built Castles right now?". If the answer is "No", then they instantly die.
2. Green and Purple both have all the initial positions of their critical buildings within fully upgraded cannon galleon range of the shoreline. Orange and Yellow only have one building that isn't, and Red has two buildings that aren't, but which are very close together.
3. The Japanese get access to Kataparuto technology, which lets trebuchets unpack and fire almost instantly.
4. Red and Yellow won't attack us until we've defeated two of our three other enemies, making both of them them juicier targets to kill than the remaining enemy.

So let's move on to step 1: Killing green.

Now that we have some eco and some docks to make our navy out of, train the following units:

• 15-20 Elite Cannon Galleons.
  
• 30-40 Galleons.
  
• 18 Trebuchets. (Or 24 if you intend to kill Orange)
  
• 2-3 transport ships.

The trebuchets and transport ships are for later. If you want to overegg the CGs and Galleons at this point to be sure you can kill green, you can hold off on making the other parts, but this isn't necessary.

Green's island is directly southeast of yours. Take your new navy of Galleons and Cannon Galleons and first track south until you're directly west of Green's island. You should see one of green's TCs, protected by a tower or two.

Do NOT attack the TC yet! Our strategy only works because of how many of the other players' critical buildings' starting positions are within reach of the shore. If a critical building is destroyed but its owner isn't immediately defeated, their villagers will rebuild it somewhere else, quite probably out of our reach, and we don't want that! So our strategy is to set up our units in the right positions to kill ALL of a player's critical buildings at once or in quick succession, before they have any time to rebuild anything. (This is also one of the reasons we picked Green as our first victim- one of their TCs gets destroyed reasonably early on by Red or Yellow, and we don't want it popping up somewhere else we can't reach).

Once you're sure this area is safe for your cannon galleons, put a third of them on no attack stance and leave them just out of the range of the tower. Track back north with the rest of your navy and into the bay on the north side of green's island. This is the only place our cannon galleons can snipe green's central castle from- it seems like this should be possible from the south side too, but it's just too far. Thankfully the north side is much quieter, but you will experience some harassment from green and orange here or in the next step - this is why we brought the galleons as protection for our CGs.

As before, leave a third of our cannon galleons here on no attack stance, with a couple of galleons to defend them as we're closer to a major shipping lane here. Now take the remainder of our navy and track clockwise around the island again until you reach the straight between the east of green's island and Honshu proper. You will likely be attacked a lot here, so keep the Galleons around. Take note of the castle to your west AND the TC to your east - though depending on how quickly you got all this done yellow and/or red may already be attacking or even have destroyed the latter.

Now it's time to pounce! Pause the game to issue orders if you need to, and get your first group of CGs to attack the western TC, your second group to attack the central castle, and your last group to attack the eastern castle and the Honshu TC (in either order). Green should be defeated once all these buildings are destroyed, and their buildings and units will all be deleted.

If you have 45-40 minutes left on the timer once you've done this, you're on good pace!

Instead of attacking our second enemy, we will now set up the means to, when the time comes, attack both of our allies. Yellow and Red don't mind at all if we move military into their territory (for now) and they mostly manage to keep the east coast of Honshu free of interlopers from Orange or Purple, so with Green out of the way this is the perfect opportunity to set up the mechanism of their instant destruction once we eventually all betray each other.

Pile the trebs you made in Part 1 into the transport ships. If you intend to kill Orange as your second victim, you will need to put 4-6 trebs in one ship and the rest into any number of other ships. Otherwise, you might be able to do it all with a single transport ship, but these trebs have three different destinations up the east coast of Honshu, so splitting the trebs into three groups and three separate transports may be convenient.

I recommend 6 trebuchets per critical building. A castle needs eleven fully upgraded treb shots to destroy it. TCs need less, but the TCs we're aiming at here are often further inland where there's less chance of being able to fire twice with the whole group before our trebs are destroyed. You could make a small distracting army to protect them, but this isn't necessary. With Kataparuto we're practically guaranteed a second shot with at least five of the six each time.

Send off the three groups of trebs intended for our allies in their ships, along with some extra cannon galleons. I've included some diagrams of where to send your units and which buildings require which solution. It may be helpful to save your game, reveal the map (either with the Marco and Polo cheats or by resigning) to get your bearings and then reload.

Assign 3-4 elite cannon galleons per snipeable building. In the case of red, I'd recommend 4 in the river, positioned so that they can hit both the castle and the TC without needing to move, as they will be almost immediately attacked by galleys when the betrayal comes.

Unpack your trebuchets and position your elite cannon galleons in No Attack stance. You may wish to order your units to attack ground on their targets if you're unsure if they're in range. Be very careful when doing this - trebuchets can't harm allied buildings this way, but cannon galleons can, so be sure to order they stop before they destroy the building or it will be rebuilt somewhere else!

Yellow:
Red:

Now it's time to kill our second enemy in order to trigger the betrayal. We have a choice of two here. Orange is a more accessible foe, but one of their TCs requires the trebuchet method. All four of purple's buildings are snipeable from the water, but getting there requires fighting through orange's navy and circling the map clockwise. Select your second victim as according to your taste. As before, diagrams are provided.

Orange (image 2 is to the north of image 1, accessible via travelling first west and then north round the island)

Purple (accessible by going even further east from Orange's image 2)

As before, it's important to destroy all four critical buildings at the same time, or they will be rebuilt elsewhere. Use protective Galleons to shield your CGs from any of Orange's navy they encounter along the way.

If attacking orange, position your transport of trebs, a few protective Galleons and some CGs in the bay to the south of their base. Destroy orange's dock there. Keep the CGs on No Attack stance until everything is ready- you get a notification if they were attacked, you don't get one if they were naughty while you were distracted! Send the rest of your navy up the coast to find Orange's other castle, and then when you are ready, destroy both castles and the snipeable TC, then as quick as you can make landfall in the bay with the transport and send the trebs to destroy the final TC.

If attacking purple, the transport of trebuchets is not necessary, so just make sufficient CGs to get all four buildings at once from the sea or river, and enough Galleons to protect them as they travel up the coast from Orange and Purple's navies.

When your second enemy is killed, quickly snap over to your allies' bases (you may wish to pause the game here) and prepare for the final part of the strategy.

As your second enemy dies, both your allies will set you to enemy and some narration will play. Order each of your groups of trebuchets and elite cannon galleons to attack its assigned building. They should all go down within a few seconds of one another if you've set everything up right, before your former allies' units have much of a chance to respond at all. Once both of them are dead, you complete the primary objective and win the scenario, and thus, the achievement!