[DragonRider]

I'll admit that I'm not very good at predicting troop movement to get the first attack. Under normal conditions, I do split up large blobs into multiple smaller squads to improve surface area, but I didn't do it this time because Bakemono Warriors have morale 9 and that means they rout like it's their job. The fewer of them you have in a squad, the more likely they are to do it, and having half of your army pack up and leave in the middle of a fight is a good way to put an end to your expansion plans. This is a problem I frequently had in my informal tests. I'd have a bunch of Dai Bakemono and 15-20 Bakemono Warriors behind them to cover their flanks or fill cracks in their formation, then three of the warriors would die, the rest would flip out and run away, and then the Dai Bakemono also panic and rout and then I would be screwed. Since routing is a very random thing I tried to minimize the odds of that happening for a more controlled environment, but maybe I'll try a few more runs with divided squads and see what happens. (Although this brings up another problem: like an idiot I created the map without max gold and production multipliers, so I had to wait a lot of turns to get enough gold and resources to set up all my armies, so my dominion is all over the place. That means I'm always fighting with 10 morale, instead of sometimes having to deal with 9 or even 8 like in a real game.)

One other potential wrinkle is that I only did endurance tests based on the path of least resistance. It may be that 80 Bakemono Warriors do better than 16 Dai Bakemono when their only job is to mass up and hit those individual provinces with 25 Cataphracts or whatever and attrition is less of a problem. That's another thing I should probably look at.