It's not a big number, but every little bit helps.
Men will actually die just from trying to climb the walls (never tried climbing a wall with onna bushi, so I can't confirm if women die from this), unless they are ninjas, so take advantage of that. Those walls are there to protect you, use em. The only time would be once I have routed all their melee units, if they still have arhcers left still firing, I might go out and get them. I almost never leave the castle in a siege.
When that happens, you just take the nearest 2 half stacks and converge on the city being attacked, now you got a full stack defending it (or taking it back, depending on how early you spotted that ship.) You also wanna have some half stack fleets spread out around, maybe at every 3rd or 4th port, to try to stop those ships from even landing in the first place, then you don't even have to worry about castle defense. well they do, but not usually until they are out of melee troops, and even then, they're not exactly a big threat as long as you have some melee troops left.Īfter the divide, I throw some half stacks of ashigaru throughout the realm, like every 3rd city or so, which is to prevent enemies who like to surprise you by sailing all the way behind your armies with a full stack. If they bring only archers to one side of the castle, just ignore em until you kill all the melee troops (the castle walls and higher elevation protect your men a bit from arrows, and it's not like the enemy is gonna be storming the gates and climbing the walls of the castle with archers. The defensive strategy is put your archers against the enemy melee troops. On a more serious note, early game, I usually just leave 2 ashigaru in each castle, 1 yari and 1 bow, with the castle at level 3. Just watch out for archers since they will out range your guns, as well as bulletproof samurai if you have that dlc. They will waste melee troops approaching the wall. If you have em, matchlocks are super super deadly when they are on a castle wall, even matchlock ashigaru. This is of course ignoring the extra hero units from dlc packs, in which case you want every hero unit, lol. Best: probably something like 12 units of bow monks, all 3 hero units, and 5 katana samurai.