Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong

[KissBlade]

Graeme puts out a lot of good tips you should probably follow. Also with Jomon, try to prioritize taking mountain and forest provinces around your capital first. Remember castles take resources from neighboring provinces and mountains and forest produces the most resources. Also I literally build almost nothing but samurai archers with jomon. They are pretty much the superior unit compared to the rest of samurai line.

[st.patrik]

If you have lots of gold and resources are your problem, you should definitely be recruiting some of the higher end troops. For example, instead of recruiting the regular katana-wielding Samurai, recruit Aka-oni Samurai for 5 more gold each (but the same resources) and get more attack and defence skill, greater strength, and more HPs. If you have any kind of bless you can also recruit the sacred troops, which again cost no more resources than regular samurai.

I have to disagree with KissBlade: If you're recruiting Samurai archers, personally I wouldn't bother - you can get 10% more Aka-oni Samurai than regular archer Samurai for the same resource cost, and they do much better in combat. Of course this would be different if you were short on gold rather than resources.

[Sencha]

Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely take it into account. I guess I was overestimating the importance of taxing and temples. So I'll ease back on them. I'll also increase my research staff, hire mercs more regularly and try to capture more provinces per turn.

I'll also try to use my Pretender more directly. I could have guessed that holding him up in the castle probably wasn't making the best use of him, but I was afraid he'd get killed in battle. (I've seen it happen, probably b/c I didn't design and/or equip him to be a SC).

As for my game settings, I didn't touch the scales much, (don't remember my exact settings), used a medium map and I believe the AI level was default.

[Taqwus]

Early on: yes on mercenaries, not temples.

Being able to recruit a priest with fire/holy leading 100 pikemen for in the whereabouts of 600 gold (AIs are not generally aggressive bidders) in one turn even in the lowest-resource province can jump-start your expansion. Sure, you're renting them. Renting troops to take the initial charge of independent knights, however, might end up being cheaper than sacrificing national troops.

It should also be noted that some Late Era nations will have large armies full of low-quality troops -- don't bother trying to match the Ashen Empire or the Dreamlands (Late Ermor and R'lyeh, respectively) in quantity. Crush them with quality. The AI in general will also pay much less attention to research and mage support... or supply... then you might, too.