SENGOKU: ROAD TO UNIFICATION 1.2.0 - PLAYER GUIDE Created by Heisenberg Unite Japan: hold all 38 provinces. You lose if your last province falls or a third succession breaks the clan. The desktop edition is for one player; the computer leads the other clans. Multi-Player games, with other people online, are played in the browser edition at https://games.theiguru.au/sengoku/ - both editions have the same rules, screens and music. STARTING A CAMPAIGN Continue the campaign as it was at the end of the last month played (shown when there is an autosave). New campaign choose a scenario, a clan and how fierce your rivals are, then confirm. Quick start Oda Nomura, 1560, rivals Normal. Load campaign one of your five save slots, or Import from a file. How to play the rules below, in the game. Scenarios 1560 The age of rivals: 28 clans, one province or more each. 1582 The late wars: the Oda hold the heart of Japan. Rivals Gentle rivals seldom march Easy rivals march now and then Normal rivals march when they are strong Hard rivals march often Ruthless rivals march at every chance THE MAIN SCREEN The four panels show the selected province (top left), your lord (middle left), the map (top right) and the governor of the selected province (bottom left). Click a province on the map, or use the arrow keys, to see it. Tab steps through your own provinces. Red is your clan; the gold outline is the province you are looking at; the white keep beside a province number marks your lord's seat. Press 1 to 9, or click an order: 1 Govern cultivate, flood control, town, castle, rewards, train politics, sell rice 2 Military hire, train, invade 3 Diplomacy alliance, incite uprising 4 Provinces a list of all 38 5 Chronicle the campaign's history 6 Settings music on or off, volume 7 Help how to play 8 Campaign save, load, new campaign, title screen, quit 9 End month Esc opens the campaign menu. Each order asks for an amount or a target when it needs one, and asks for confirmation before it runs. Alt+Enter switches to full screen. ORDERS Orders are given in your own provinces and cost the governor body points (BP); 10 BP are always kept for defence. BP return each month with the governor's politics. Cultivate land raises the rice harvest; flood control guards against typhoons; develop town raises trade and gold; reinforce castle helps in battle; give rewards raises support and loyalty; train politics makes a better governor; sell rice turns rice into gold at the market price. Hire soldiers costs 1 gold and 10 people per soldier; a province holds at most 100. Train soldiers raises their skill. Propose alliance: a clan that agrees will not attack you, nor you them, for 12 months. Incite uprising sends a ninja to lower a rival's support; it cannot be used against an ally. THE SEASONS In month 3 (spring) gold comes in from trade; in month 9 (autumn) the rice harvest. Soldiers eat into both. Typhoons strike in summer, and unhappy provinces rise up. YOUR LORD AND HIS SEAT Your lord governs from his seat. If the seat falls, he escapes to another of the clan's provinces. If he dies, an heir succeeds him; a third succession breaks the clan. A captured province gets a governor of its own. BATTLES Invade a bordering province from Military. Your three units (red banners) face the defenders. C is cavalry, I is infantry and R is rifles; the pennant (*) marks a commander. Click one of your units, then click an empty hex to move or a neighbouring enemy to attack. Keys: arrows move the cursor, Enter acts, Tab picks the next unit. 1 Attack, 2 Rifle fire, 3 Charge choose how the next attack is made. Rifles hit hard without being struck back, but must reload: move or wait before firing again. A charge hits twice as hard and is struck back twice as hard. W waits; infantry who wait lie in ambush and strike double. Cavalry move two clear hexes in a straight line. Forests protect, mountains block, and a weakened defender shelters in the castle. Destroy the enemy commander to win. Each side eats rice every three days; the defender wins after 90 days. X withdraws. SAVING Campaign > Save keeps up to five campaigns; the previous save of a slot is kept as .bak. The game also saves itself at the end of every month (autosave.sav), and Continue on the title screen picks up from there; the autosave is removed when a campaign is won or lost. You are asked to save before quitting, loading or starting anew. Every line of a save is checked when it is loaded, so a damaged or cut-short file is refused. Export to a file, the last item of the Save list, writes the campaign to a .sav file of your choice (offered as, for example, sengoku-oda-1560-04.sav). Import from a file, the last item of the Load list, opens one and plays it; as with Load, you are asked to save unsaved changes first. An export is a copy to keep or move; it does not count as a save of the campaign. Saves are kept in the "saves" folder of Linux: ~/.config/Sengoku - Road to Unification/ Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Sengoku - Road to Unification\ as slot1.sav to slot5.sav and autosave.sav. Music settings are kept in options.ini in the folder above. Saves are in format 3, the same text format as the browser edition. Saves from earlier releases (formats 1 and 2) still load. The browser edition has Export and Import too: a file exported there imports here, and the reverse, so a campaign can move between the browser and the desktop. MUSIC An original looping tune on the Japanese five-note "in" scale. Settings turns it off or sets its volume. On Linux it plays through pw-play, paplay or aplay, whichever is installed. GNU GPL version 2 or later. Copyright (C) 2026 Michael Slater. Provided WITHOUT WARRANTY. See COPYING and NOTICE.txt.