[Tapper]

The latest installment of the Total War series is here, one I remember with nostalgia - the original Shogun got me into strategy gaming and my memories of it are fond (and probably exaggerated). So get off my lawn!

So, Shogun 2 promises a return to that game, including the old specializations per clan, plus better graphics and better diplomacy. However... not all is well.

For one, there is the map.
First off, every single province is occupied by a clan, which builds its own castles, its own troops and forges its own treaties. This results in a totally quagmire of a clusterfuck of diplomatic ties, because everyone is allied to everyone and thus, your own alliances are totally worth jackshit all and will rapidly decrease your credibility as you are forced to choose when your allies attack one another.

When you start the game, you are just as big as they are (1 province only) - unless you play the Hojo, then you have two (including one containing a gold mine, which takes ages to develop but oh, the taxation it grants!!). This means that you are beset on all sides by guys who will attack everything in sight in a survival of the fittest.
If you have to fight two of these clans at the same time, you're screwed. At the same time, aggressive expansion leads to overextension... so you better ally with the majority of them to boost your position and go into MAD-mode. So, the game start is effing important - too important imho. You get your ass kicked if you squat and turtle, you'll get your ass kicked if you expand into a second province rapidly but are attacked by two or three others in that same turn you expand... peace negotiations are non-existent in that phase. As such, your game start is too much dependant on the AI being nice instead of nasty.

Secondly, unlike Rome, Medieval 2 and Empire/Napoleon, which offer nice open maps with room for surprise marches and attacks, Japan is mountaineous to the extreme, so many provinces have only two access points. Now, chokepoints are fun, but there are so many that it is no longer amusing.
Instead, you are more or less forced to twist your way through a string of provinces occupied by clans you have no interest in fighting. You have even less interest in fighting their allies, who may have been your own allies two seconds before, but at some point you will have to get to that juicy province with stone or iron deposits (which, make no mistake, you WILL need to grow your clan).

Now, this would all be fine and dandy if you could diplome your way through their neighbours or easily negotiate military access. You can't. You can only diplome with guys you've met (meaning you share borders OR both they and you have a port developed).
Often, one of your painfully acquired staunch one-province-allies/vassals is at war with another clan you haven't met yet and so can't threaten or placate or even know their size and armies, and they conquer your ally... and for the fun of it, are extremely hostile towards you or just march on straight away. This makes the game unpredictable to the extreme and basically reduces diplomacy from a safe guard to a hazard.

OK, so enough bitching about map. Let's talk buildings. Is that better? Yes. And no.
Each province contains a castle (containing your unit development buildings) and a rice field (varying degrees of fertility/income).
Almost every province also has a specialty of sorts (ports, horses, stone, iron, trade resources, naval buildings, ninja etc) that grant extra options/ buildings. These are without a doubt well chosen, interesting, diverse and strategically significant, forcing you to plan your conquest and developments very well. Hats off.


CA decided on tying the buildings you can construct in your castle to the size of your castle, which is tied to the development level of your farms, which is tied to one half of the research tree.
This presents two problems. One, training. To create a basic army containing swordsmen, bowmen and spearmen, you will have to rely either on ashigaru (splutter, this is a samurai game, dammit) or build three dojos. Which requires two or three provinces, or quite a lot of research (around 12 turns in the shortest path plus 4 turns of building time) to house them in one castle - and then you forego military research completely.

This means that you can't design one boomtown containing these three, at the least not in the early game. Is this bad? Yes.
Why? For starters, it negates the significant development advantage the Hojo clan had in the original game (who build castles cheaper) until the mid-game when they get a 300-500 koku discount on tier 4 fortresses, but hey, they are one clan only and they start with two provinces, so they're compensated.
The real headache here lies in reinforcement. A unit can only reinforce quickly in a castle containing a dojo of its own type (logical). This means that the strategy of medieval 2 of building specialized castles for ranged, melee and cavalry is no longer possible - at the least, not for easy reinforcement after battles/ sieges.

The second issue is with clan specialization. Takeda, Uesugi and Tokugawa have cavalry, monk and ninja specializations, requiring specialized buildings that do NOTHING by themselves (ok, they do very little, they grant a shitty undermanned cavalry unit, buddhist happiness and general province happiness bonuses): to train for example yari cavalry, you need a yari dojo plus moderately advanced stables. This means these clans are one step behind the others in utilizing castle size and their specialized armies will reinforce much slower in newly conquered provinces compared to clans that rely on, say, the much more common sword dojos (Shimazu, Date) or archery dojos (Chosokabe). This makes playing Takeda, Uesugi and Tokugawa tougher, also because the building slot they allocate to these buildings can be employed by other clans to build markets for example, giving a massive economic boost, or build more dojos, adding both recruitment versatility and reinforcement options. Thus, not only are there reinforcement headaches for these three clans, they are also lagging economically.

Not to mention that better temples (you need 2 tiers of temples to start recruiting monks) and better cav stables once again require a shitload of research, meaning you are once more slowed down compared to other clans: you need bigger castles AND specific military tech where other clans can choose some basic military research to get their required tech and can then research to their hearts content.

Finally, the low-quality-unit spam I hated in Medieval 2 (hordes upon hordes of city garrison units) persists so far in Shogun 2: you are swamped by stacks of ashigaru (who can be recruited for half the price, half the build time and half the upkeep compared to samurai units). Samurai are roughly twice as effective, more if they are of your clan specification, and far more effective with good dojo that grant experience to them, but early game, recruiting a whole lot of unexciting peasants to drown your opponents in is a much better but somewhat boring strategy, and one that is frequently employed by the AI. I think the first time I ran into a samurai army in both my Shimazu and Takeda campaigns, was just after turn 30.

So, is Shogun a bad game? No, not at all. It is infinately better than Empire, it is extremely challenging, it is deep and requires planning, battles are a joy to behold and once past the ashigaru spam battles become a gazillion rock-paper-scissor matches on the battlefield against a reasonably good AI - but I do feel that it is slightly too chaotic and extremely unpredictable, which does not mesh with the planning aspects... not to mention that diplomacy is still a frigging joke. Also, it is extremely shitty to see two main clans controlled by the AI(Oda and Shimazu) eliminated in turn 2 and turn 8 every single time I start a campaign (seven times so far). Especially in the case of the Oda, this is ridiculous (they get bonuses that allow them to profit the most from ashigaru spam).

And so, I currently find more joy playing DoW2 Retribution and Dragon Age 2.

[Gothos]

Nice to hear that it's better than Empire (I never really liked the setting peroid really, which killed the game for me - seriously, fuck muskets).

Is it worth 50 euros, though?

[Adjutant Stormy~]

I dunno. I feel like all of the aspects of faction specialization that were essentially absent in Empire manifest brilliantly in Shogun 2. Now, that being said, in order to overcome your shortcomings (like getting screwed with cavalry development, say) you need to plan and execute your battles AS EXPERTLY AS POSSIBLE. It's a similar situation to playing early game conscripts in the various games, if your units blow, you have to make damned sure each casualty counts.

This has led me to attempt and re-attempt battles. Which, being someone who enjoys the battles immensely more than the strict campaign-level micro, means that I still have a blast.

There have been a few times when I've been faced with literally impossible battles, due to the aforementioned hamstringing, but it's not be so bad as to make me abandon it. I've probably re-rolled 6 times today, just to explore the variance in tactics and map-strategic positioning (and, though it sucks, the luck factor).

EDIT: My gameplay style involves early game DIPLOMATIC BLITZ, make as many friends as possible, until the point at which it ceases to matter who your friends are, then kick ass. Shogun makes this really profitable, though the diplomacy mechanics hamstring you pretty hard (due to contact restrictions).

This post has been edited by Adjutant Stormy: 18 March 2011 - 11:36 AM

[Gothos]

Hm. What I always loved most in Total War games so far was the initial rise to power. In Medieval 1 I played as Poland a lot (duh), and it was something of an underdog with vast possibilities in the east. Usually once I got into the position of a major power I mostly lost interest. I don't think I've ever completed a Large campaign (50 provinces controlled or whatnot).
Right now I'm looking at starting with either Date or Shimazu, due to their extreme positions, as well as specializing in nodachi and katana samurai. How important is cavalry in this game? It was always my favourite in Medievals and Rome to go into cavalry heavy armies and flanking and charging home to devastate enemy morale in one giant sweep. Cavalry doesn't take castles though, and I read that sieges are very interesting in this game.

[Tapper]

Gothos, on 18 March 2011 - 11:40 AM, said:

Hm. What I always loved most in Total War games so far was the initial rise to power. In Medieval 1 I played as Poland a lot (duh), and it was something of an underdog with vast possibilities in the east. Usually once I got into the position of a major power I mostly lost interest. I don't think I've ever completed a Large campaign (50 provinces controlled or whatnot).
Right now I'm looking at starting with either Date or Shimazu, due to their extreme positions, as well as specializing in nodachi and katana samurai. How important is cavalry in this game? It was always my favourite in Medievals and Rome to go into cavalry heavy armies and flanking and charging home to devastate enemy morale in one giant sweep. Cavalry doesn't take castles though, and I read that sieges are very interesting in this game.

Sieges are a total headache for the attacker and require constant alertness by the defender because they are mousetraps. The defender wants the attacker to get into the castle to then destroy his units piecemeal, but miss one unit climbing your walls and the joke may be on you.

Cavalry: the Takeda are specialized in them, and so far, NOTHING I have seen can compete with their katana cavalry for destruction values. It is ridiculously expensive (nearly 900 koku, for ref, the obvious ashigaru spearmen counter costs 280 or something) but it has charging capability, melee capability, speed and insane armour value.

Bow cavalry and yari cavalry have their uses, but you have to be careful with them when and where you employ them. Bow infantry will decimate your bow cavalry in an archery duel, yari cav is purely for charge, retreat, charge set ups and even then they bleed men. Great Guard units (spear armed cavalry) I'm not certain about, haven't recruited/ battled with those yet, but I expect them to do better than yari cav as well as absolutely destroy enemy cavalry.

Cavalry is a good battlefield arm, not dominant but capable of doing nasty damage, doubly so if you can reinforce them after a battle and can thus take some risks with them. They're not just there to run down stragglers. However, the absolute workhorse of the samurai army is probably the katana infantry samurai, simply because they have a very good match up against all opposing infantry at the cost of not being devastating against cavalry.

[Gothos]

So the katana cavalry of the Takeda are kinda like Armored Elephants from Rome.
Is it hard to get strong cavalry in a reasonable timeframe? Do you need numerous special resources? Are horses a resource?

[Cyphon]

My resistance to getting this is slowly being washed away.

As I predicted the release seems to have it's problems, and I like seeing the reviews from the TWC community. The game looks amazing though.

And thankfully the modders are on the job, already making a mod to reduce the speeds of units by 20/30% to stop arcade like speed battles. Darth has also indicated that's he's going to mod the game too, which is excellent news.

I think I'm going to have to get it soon. Wondering whether to buy it off Steam on Sunday when I get back to my place, or order a hard copy for £2 less and get it delivered.

Decisions, decisions.

[Cyphon]

Gothos, on 18 March 2011 - 12:34 PM, said:

So the katana cavalry of the Takeda are kinda like Armored Elephants from Rome.

A ) Is it hard to get strong cavalry in a reasonable timeframe?
B ) Do you need numerous special resources?
C ) Are horses a resource?

A ) I would imagine so
B ) to develop your clan fully, I would imagine so.
C ) Yes

This post has been edited by Cyphon88: 18 March 2011 - 12:45 PM

[Ulrik]

I must say, that Im 100% happy for SII...well, 99%. OK, it has drawbacks, but deep style and atmosphere counters it. Yeah, some bonuses are stronger than other, but it didnt forced me to think about it as flaw. It was for me much spectacular (well, not right word)...satisfying than Empire. But one thing pissed me off...to have Oda destroyed in turn 3 and Tokugawa 6. This needs update...

And I know Im veeery brief, but Im sick of writing bout games...

[Tapper]

Gothos, on 18 March 2011 - 12:34 PM, said:

So the katana cavalry of the Takeda are kinda like Armored Elephants from Rome.
Is it hard to get strong cavalry in a reasonable timeframe? Do you need numerous special resources? Are horses a resource?

Not exactly elephants... think more like gothic knights or the french noble knights. Basically, they're a red wave of death (altho with the tsunami hitting Japan that might be a bit of a bad pun).

No research, and the stables you require are level 2 (meaning 2 turns construction of the basic version and another 4 for the level 2 type, but you can do the building during the 11 turns required for research for the much better Bajutsu Mastery Dojo, which lowers recruitment times by 1, giving your cavalry a 1 turn recruitment time).

It costs 900 (shitloads) and 200 to maintain (again, shitloads).

You will require numerous resources over the game (warhorses (required for the better types of stable) and stone (required for castles from level 4 onward, I think) are the two you absolutely want - but iron (armour or attack upgrades), incense (best temples), cotton/silk (for the best spear units including the spear hero) and ninja's are also very strategic resources.

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

Did I see somewhere that this is going to be out on the PS3 as well? I might check it out, if they managed to do it so the console controls are ok.

[Garak]

How much space does this game take up?

This post has been edited by Garak: 20 March 2011 - 10:04 AM

[Gothos]

Steam says 16,308.6MB
Approx 2 hour download

[RodeoRanch]

Picked this one up yesterday. I've not played much yet but it is very pretty and as per the course of TW games for me, totally addicting. The campaign AI seems a lot smarter. I've had my butt whooped a few times.

[Cyphon]

Gothos, on 20 March 2011 - 08:33 PM, said:

Steam says 16,308.6MB
Approx 2 hour download

You sod, spent 5 hours D/ling last night, only to get 33% done. So left it on today while I'm at work.

Reckon I'll start out with Shimazu to get a feel. Although I was thinking about starting straight at Legendary difficulty....

[Tapper]

Cyphon88, on 21 March 2011 - 10:25 AM, said:

Gothos, on 20 March 2011 - 08:33 PM, said:

Steam says 16,308.6MB
Approx 2 hour download

You sod, spent 5 hours D/ling last night, only to get 33% done. So left it on today while I'm at work.

Reckon I'll start out with Shimazu to get a feel. Although I was thinking about starting straight at Legendary difficulty....

Let us know how it goes - with screenshots. I'm playing at normal at the moment with the Takeda and while they have a much harder starting location with the Uesugi, Hojo and Satomi (who always get big FAST) nearby, two of whom will always attack you, I don't think I could win my battles convincingly enough to have any real armies left if I upgraded my campaign difficulty.

Shimazu has a much better starting location, 4 out of in total 6 trade notes sit at their doorstep, and the lacquerware/ fletcher holding in the top right province of their island is a really nice asset. The only problem is that you'll run either into conflict with the Chosokabe or the Mori or both once you decide to expand verseas - they both grow as rapidly as you do. However, that makes for a very nice extended military campaign of maneuver, naval battles and landings.

[Cyphon]

Will do. I suspect I will get my ass handed to me on a plate. AI stat bonus's aside, the Legendary tweaks look really good and innovative.

I'll probably combine it though with a speed reduction in units though, as the battles seem quite arcade-y, on speed, to me. You can speed up the game, why have it at such a fast pace as 'normal'?

[Tapper]

Cyphon88, on 21 March 2011 - 01:01 PM, said:

Will do. I suspect I will get my ass handed to me on a plate. AI stat bonus's aside, the Legendary tweaks look really good and innovative.

I'll probably combine it though with a speed reduction in units though, as the battles seem quite arcade-y, on speed, to me. You can speed up the game, why have it at such a fast pace as 'normal'?

There is a slow-motion mode, which is quite slow - I often use it to be able to zoom in on the action. Wish Dragon Age 2 had that, combo animations and facial expressions are quite awesome in that game.

[Cyphon]

Edit for clarity to my above post.

Speed Reduction mod.

There's also a morale boost mod to make the battles last longer, and a mod to make Realm Divide a bit better, so I may run all three to on the first campaign.

Not exactly in the spirit of getting a new game, but this is the advantage of getting it later and bitter experience of CA's previous releases.

[Cyphon]

Yeah I didn't go straight off the bat on Legendary.

The BAI hasn't been that impressive yet, and some bits of it are quite glitchy indeed.