Hello,
I'm a new PON player and I just started a GC as Japan. I'm currently in the year 1856 : I have a healthy economy (major exports are rice, silk, tea, fish and textiles while i'm importing coffee, sugar, opium, steel and industrial parts ), the people are very happy (although they have high militancy), I've built all the commerce fleets available in my pool ( plus I received a bonus one from the shipyards) as well as several industries ( mainly textile, luxury goods, canned food, furnitures and manufactured goods) and finally I've nearly finished covering the whole territory with railways. I also unlocked a lot of new units after discovering some techs.
Now, before going any further into my game, I have several questions I'd like to ask :
1) Upgrading the Japanese army :
I just received new units in my pool but I have very little conscripts available. In fact I can barely build a modern infantry corp while in theory I have a lot of them available by now. Is there a way to increase the rate at which I receive new conscripts ? (technologies or decisions for exemple ).
I thought about disbanding some of the now obsolete samourai brigades but I'm not sure I will gain back some conscripts doing this. Furthermore, I noticed that disbanding those units would cost me a hefty amount of prestige ! Just disbanding one brigade cost 61 PP !! : How am I to modernize the Japanese army since the cost of disbanding all my feudal units would result in the loss of nearly 1500 PP, while I only accumulated 2000 PP since the beginning of the campaign ? Is there a way to upgrade these units rather than disband them ?
2) What to do next ?
I actually had some fun at the beginning while learning the economic side of the game as Japan. However, it's been over a game year now that I have run out of things to do and just hit end turn after reading the report of the past turn. I 'm starting to get very bored, especially since, on my PC, turns are extremely slow to process ( from 5 minutes at best up to nearly 15 min during major AI wars ). Problem is that I have nearly no diplomatic actions available, no decisions worth taking available, and pretty useless colonial action cards ( I did use some at the beginning though ). Of course, I know that things should change for japan in the future but I shudder at the prospect of just waiting for another 4 or 5 years doing nothing while waiting for the Meiji events to fire :
Any advice from veteran japanese players ? Are there interesting things to do, that I'm not aware of, while I wait for the next events to fire ?
3) Militancy :
As I wrote earlier, my population is very content (they gain 0.6 per turn ) but their militancy is stuck at 100. I tried to play some of the decision cards to reduce militancy ( martial law, etc..) but, while it works, it only reduces militancy by a few points. After just about a few turns the population's militancy is back at 100. So, since I can only play those cards once a year and their effect is very short lived, it is quite a waste of state funds for no results ! Am I missing something here ? Is there another way to reduce militancy ? Is it hopeless ?
Thank you all for your help,
Jean-Christophe.