East Asia · 1543–1600

Sengoku Japan: The History Behind the Game

For over a century, Japan had no true central government — only dozens of daimyo clans grinding each other down for land, honor and survival. Era of Warlords lets you pick a clan and try to do what took three generations of real warlords to achieve.

A country without a center

The Sengoku ("Warring States") period began around 1467, when a succession dispute shattered the authority of the Ashikaga shogunate. Provincial governors who once answered to Kyoto started fighting each other outright, and within a generation Japan had fractured into dozens of independent domains, each ruled by a daimyo who owed loyalty to no one but himself.

By the mid-1500s — where most Era of Warlords scenarios begin — this fragmentation was total. Clans like the Takeda, Uesugi, Hojo, Mori and Shimazu controlled entire regions, built mountain and coastal fortresses, and fielded samurai armies increasingly equipped with the arquebus, a firearm the Portuguese had introduced in 1543.

Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu

The path to unification ran through three men. Oda Nobunaga, a minor daimyo from Owari, crushed a much larger army at Okehazama in 1560 and spent the next two decades breaking rival clans one by one, only to be betrayed by his own general Akechi Mitsuhide at Honno-ji in 1582.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, once a low-born sandal-bearer, avenged Nobunaga within days and inherited his campaign of unification, finally bringing all of Japan under one authority by 1590. After Hideyoshi's death, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, founding the shogunate that would rule a unified, peaceful Japan for the next two and a half centuries.

73 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.