But Japan was not united under a collective of city-states, it was won through control of all areas, and the only way to become powerful enough to start taking over areas is to develop the home base. In our case, we went with Nobunaga ('cause he's pimp like that), and set to task developing Nagoya Castle. The sheer scale of the game is insane: after more than 10 hours, we still hadn't progressed to the point where we commanded any reasonable part of Japan.

The reason is a careful set of guidelines. Developing an area through everything from religion to agriculture to militaristic and especially merchant and political means requires a decisive set of actions. These actions are limited due to rank, which increases as all parts of a fief are developed. Build an army, cultivate crops, encourage merchants to sell wares, basically anything that furthers the progress of your little slice of Japan and it'll cost you a turn. Even with Nobunaga's less-than-popular reputation in the eyes of other retainers and warlords, we were still allowed for major actions each turn.

Balance, then, becomes the key. Do you spend the money to have all of your officers attend a poetry reading to help them grow as people and boost their stats, or do you develop an existing farm so that it produces more food next season or do you build a new barracks to thicken up the ranks [/i]or[/i] do you send out ninja to spy or sabotage or incite confusion and dissent in another part of the country? These (and more than could be listed here without sending you into a coma) are all possible, but they must be executed wisely, as any officers involved in the task will be unavailable for others until at a minimum a turn or two and at most full seasons.

Luckily, the game demonstrates just how well it hovers between being too much of a numbers juggle and not offering enough information. In most situations where you have to tap one of your officers to carry out a task -- from bestowing your merchants with a cash break to collecting taxes to drafting villagers to the army in preparation for a military strike to just visiting other fief's representatives (called Daimyo) to broker a deal for marriage, a bribe, a threat or to ally with them -- the most fitting person based on their stats will appear at the top of the list.

Though Rise to Power is very much a strategy game, eventually the time to go to war will come, either because of an invasion or the inevitable march by Nobunaga (or whatever ruler you end up going with) to unify all of Japan. Actually jumping into battles exposes the other part of the game's stunning depth: the pre-skirmish layouts allow you to pick officers (again, stats default to the best players at the top, though we sometimes picked others to see just how quickly they were killed off -- not a good idea), then load them up with a particular kind of unit from your reserves.

Through a rather elaborate rock/paper/scissors system, everything from musketmen to archers to horses (and believe us, this is the lower end of the militaristic scale) can be rolled out in groups led by your officers. Some units do better against structures, some against other unit types, so pre-planning, as always, is important.

Actually launching into the battle is handled in one of two ways; either an attack can be headed off in the area surrounding your fief, in a more open squabble where capturing any and all bases on the map will help boost morale and raise attack (as well as provide a place where units can resupply on troops provided they aren't too low), or the fight can be handled at the gate, but then if the main structures of a fief are captured or razed, the entire territory will fall.