u/Dull_Respect_8657

Recently, I did a campaign as Satsuma in FOTS, and I decided to put some spice on my first playthrough, after capturing hyuga, I'd flip shogunate, larp as the southern vanguard. (Which i couldn't do, somehow the shogunate AI locked in and I couldn't do that, the campaign ended anyway without me reaching realm divide because the last imperial holdout was gone.

Anyway the main thing of concern to me was: Why wasn't there any side switching? Overwhelmingly the only time a clan switched sides was to actually join the shogunate (in the case of the Tsu even if they did it too late), none of the major imperial clans like the Jozai, the Sendai, flipped Imperial.

However when I played as the Aizu, the exact opposite happened, everyone decided that the emperor was their new best friend, the Sendai, the Jozai, the Nagaoka, basically, I'm asking, was my satsuma campaign an isolated case of RNG working on my favor? Or is there just some AI magic behind the codes that hardcodes northern clans flip imperial if the player controls the Aizu Domain or the Sendai Domain.

Is this just a classic case of anti-player bias which I shouldn't think too deeply on?

Am I the only one who did this? I remember scouring through the internet while playing Total War Attila for the first time,, but I looked up a pdf of the Strategikon by Emperor Maurice to gain an understanding of "How to Roman post-Constantine,, , another time I bought a physical copy of Sun Tzu's art of war which is still in my room.

Did I try to read them? Yes. Did I get bored and not continue? Also yes. Anyone else who did this or something similar?

I have tension with myself for this for the most part, playing on normal doesn't seem "earned" because it's easy to snowball. Playing on hard campaign/normal battle is just tedious for me, it's not challenging it's just straight up tedious as hell for me. Especially with factions being buddy buddy then randomly going "I DECLARE WAR" on the next turn, I should have probably been used to this since I played alot of TW Attila as the WRE, but it's still an annoyance that I'll never get over with.