Total War: Shogun 2 (2011)

A very interesting strategy game where every decision counts. The player has at his disposal several clans to play where each one has its own difficulty.

The real battle mode is a feature that I really liked, where sometimes the probability of success that the PC shows does not mean anything.

Throughout the turns the player can have several units depending on what he chooses in each province, where each one has its advantage and disadvantage, as well agents. The player can also do dipolomacy and alliances with other clans, being able to help or not when they have in war.

This game contains a skill tree for agents and generals whenever level up, where the player can customize at his will.

However there are some bugs that in life did not occur as for example the Spear Infantry units in the castle do not attack through the holes when the enemy is climbing the wall and sometimes the units are stopped without any action even if the player has given.

But even though I never won one time, I loved playing this game. For those who are curious and never played I invite you to play this game.

This ties for my favorite Total War Game with Warhammer.

Shogun has the art style, music, and mechanics to make the game have basically limitless replay.

I own only the base game, and have put 180 hours into it, beating 3 different long campaigns.

One interesting thing this campaign added, that previous Total War Games did not include was the ability of every unit (minus Cav) during a siege to climb the walls of the castle. This came with the constant danger of a deadly fall, and I found it extremely entertaining to lure the CPU into killzones of my castle, where the poor soldiers climbed up thru a deadly hail of arrows.

The flavor of each different Samurai group felt just right, while also helping each faction feel unique.

The sea battles were great, and protecting trade routes was essential to continued economic success of your empire. The plethora of ships, with varying strengths and weaknesses, made sea battles really fun to explore.

For example, some ships are fast, and so have strong range damage, as they can stay out of combat. Others hold a lot of soldiers, and so are great if they get in combat. Others are a nice blend.

The biggest complaint I have of this game is you reach a midpoint, where the remaining samurai families join up vs. you, almost guaranteed, even if you have worked extensively with them up to that point. Makes the diplomatic side lack long term reward.

FOTS Naval battles

I was eventually able to achieve good results in naval battles. The enemy would generally sit back and wait for me to come to them. This made things difficult because the enemy could keep their cannons trained on my ships, which had to face the enemy, meaning the enemy always got off the first broadside. Initially I advanced in a line astern formation, however while getting the line into a position to attack, you get hit by enough broadsides to destroy the leading ships. Instead I advance in line abreast until just before entering range:

Then I ungroup the ships and make them all simultaneously turn in a direction, or have half turn to the left and the other half turn to the right. It is difficult to do it right because each ship has a different speed, and if the ships overlap, then there will be friendly fire. Therefore it's best to turn the ships one-by-one.

In this case I turn them all at once, and you can see they don't care too much about friendly fire. This situation is complicated because the enemy has two navies. In this case line abreast is good because you can split ships off from one side to deal with them.

After this you need to achieve some spacing to prevent friendly fire. With practice it could be a very good tactic. There's probably some real-life example of this tactic but I know bugger-all about naval battles honestly.

Anyway that's a quick overview of strategy for FOTS.

Playtime notes

Here's my steam stats at time of completion. 285 hours is not too bad. I believe a lot of people can put over 500 hours into this game, and some people go into the thousands. But since I work and study and whatnot I'm a bit limited with that. Considering I only finished the three campaigns once each, it's pretty understandable that a person would definitely hit the thousands of hours if they wanted to try a lot of different factions. The Total War games are definitely one of the biggest time-sinks out there.

Basic campaign strategies

Getting generals killed is pretty bad when you're new, however I learned that you can actually overcome this in two ways. One way is by winning a few battles with an army without a general. On multiple occasions I was then offered a chance to recruit a general for 1000 gold. Another option is stealing another faction's general with an agent. Therefore losing a general might not necessarily be critical if you know these strategies.

Sometimes it is best to simply let a province rebel. Rebels can rarely overpower an organised army, and your general can grind experience this way. I'm not sure whether this can be considered an exploit or just part of the game. They should make it so that rebellions will cripple a town's economy for a while, which will discourage this grinding.

FOTS field battles

FOTS field battles were way too easy. There was one strategy that just worked way too well: Line up your units 2-3 soldiers deep in 2-3 lines. Have the formation facing a hill. When the enemy walks over the hill and down the slope, all ranks of infantry will be able to fire at once. This is enough to annihilate even a full stack.

Here's the basic defensive formation:

And a view of all three lines getting shots off:

Too easy. It's understandable that developing a good AI is difficult, but the AI seems to have no concept of positioning before the battle. It should avoid climbing hills, but rather march around them.

Okay cool, I just finished a hard/hard campaign of Fall of the Samurai. It took a bit longer than expected but oh well. I have now finished Rise of the Samurai, the main campaign, and Fall of the Samurai. ROTS was kinda boring IMO, but the main campaign and FOTS were both enjoyable. I think the main campaign was probably the best overall because it had a mix of everything... You had the early game with ashigaru, the mid game with samurai and some cavalry, and then the late game with gunpowder. FOTS mostly starts and finishes with similar units. However FOTS had the Empire interface which was great... Unless my memory is crap and the main campaign also had the Empire interface...

My son & heir died because I was dumb and forgot about enemy reinforcements ;_;. Very sad because he was one of my best generals. He was the only son so I had to designate a new heir. I decided on that one traditional general I bribed. He was a pretty good general so it felt like the right choice.

Anyways the Obama put up a fight for a few years. They just kept sending damn stacks at my border and trying to reform the healthcare system. Eventually they stopped and then I basically was able to steamroll them like normal. The other clans didn't really do much except annoy my navy.

As the game progressed it eventually reached the typical "realm divide" point. This one was much less stressful compared to the main campaign... It was one half of Japan versus the other half, pretty much. Wasn't too hard because by that point I already had a good position. The interesting thing was that you can basically take three paths. The first two are obvious: Emperor or Shogun... But there was also a third option to take power for yourself. Now that is an interesting option. I wasn't up for that crazy challenge though, but maybe in the future I will try it.

Anyways, with my campaigns I get pretty sick of the constant battles near the end, and I was really lazy with my final siege. I got my first army wiped out by trying to just rush the victory point, but then the second army arrived with marines and whatnot and was able to finish the job. It didn't matter at that point, I just needed the castle. I got it and won the game.

Overall Shogun 2 is a great game. The main problem is obviously the bad AI. Campaign AI is passable, but the battle AI does the same thing every time. I won too many battles by just putting soldiers in lines facing a slope and letting them unload as enemies walked up to them. Oh well it was still satisfying watching the cannons pound them. The cannons are so OP though... Much more deadly than Empire which doesn't make much sense. The cannons would typically get 300 kills each.

Some minor problems are pacing in the AI turn. Some of the animations are annoyingly slow, like when an agent is trying to fuck you over. But there's probably some way to fix that if I looked around. Oh speaking of which, the font is terrible for my 1920x1080 monitor. I had to mod in a bigger font, it was that bad. Even though the bigger font sometimes gets cut off, it's preferable to the terrible default font... Which is really strange because I would've expected the devs to be using 1920x1080 at least... So why did nobody notice this problem?

One thing I really like about the Shogun 2 games is the rarity and importance of cavalry. Other Total War games tend to involve pinning a unit with soldiers, then charging cavalry into the rear. It works so well that it's pretty much how most battles are fought. In Shogun 2 that is a much rarer thing to happen... Partly because cavalry are just hard to get, and partly because charging is not as effective. I think this is a great improvement to game balancing. Oh and same for horse archers. They require actual work to be effective now.

But why the hell are we still having battles where you have to spend the last 5 minutes running your cavalry around mopping up the units? That shit is boring. There needs to be like a 1 minute timer to mop up any units you want to destroy. Or even make it so that a soldier disappears if they escape a certain distance from your army. It destroys some of the realism for me because real battles almost never have such high casualty rates. Anyway that's my suggestion to make Total War better.

Cool beans. Now I am free again until I find another game to give me headaches.

Oh I forgot... Here are notable achievements I got:

So only about 5% of players ever finish a game on hard? Scrubs. 25% finish a game on easy and 15% on normal. Only 1.3% finish a legendary game tho. The other stuff isn't that interesting. Lots of random achievements I don't care about.

Whew, my long Fall of the Samurai campaign is taking a while. I think I'm almost 2 weeks into it, and finally near the end. Only about 6 provinces left to capture. My Steam says I've played 52 hours of Shogun 2 these past 2 weeks...

Hopefully I'll get this done tonight or tomorrow and then I can spend the weekend getting into something else. It's been quite an enjoyable ride though. I just managed to max level my Daimyo and heir, am getting competent at naval battles, and am hoping to get armstrong guns unlocked and into the field before victory. Also need to mess around with torpedos. Gotta admit I've gotten attached to several of my generals, especially one general who I bribed from a traditional faction, complete with his own set of unique soldiers who have campaigned with him. At first I was worried about his loyalty but he has proven himself in several battles. I also recently had a huuuuge castle defence battle where my Daimyo and heir with an army of 3600 high-level soldiers defended against about 10,000 invaders. Crazy huge battle with multiple waves. A small reinforcing army led by my heir tore through multiple reinforcing armies himself until there was almost no-one left.

Anyway, that's what I like about this game. The AI and some of the mechanics might be flawed to hell, but just the journey itself of picking up generals and building an army, then campaigning them through Japan... That's what I like about the Total War series.

Garo's Notes:

How I got into this: Been a Total War fan since Medieval. I just saw it randomly at a game shop and bought it. Lucky choice lol.

Plan for completion: Win all three campaigns on normal or hard. Campaign length doesn't matter.

My definition of 100%: Kinda difficult for this game. Winning as every faction would take a huge amount of time, so personally I would define it as winning as 3 different factions for every campaign. Of course other people would be more strict with the definition. I'm not planning on 100%ing this game anyways.

Current goal: Win a Fall of the Samurai campaign on hard/hard.

My first campaign win was as the Hojo on the normal campaign after multiple attempts on normal difficulty. (Yeah I know... I'm not great at this game).

I found this game to be surprisingly difficult compared to earlier Total Wars. In the earlier Total Wars, I generally found that I would never be in a position where I had to face the prospect of losing a campaign, even if I was at war with multiple civs. In this game, if you aren't prepared for the endgame, you will end up losing.

Just finished Rise of the Samurai on hard/hard. Took several attempts ;^_^. This game is very easy to mess up if you don't have your early game planned out properly. A bit stressful but I made it with 1 year to spare. I was about to abandon this campaign because I was nearing the deadline, everyone had declared war on me, and I was nowhere near having enough provinces. It's lucky I held out, because after a few key victories I gained superiority over my neighbours, and was able to steamroll them. The ending was not hugely satisfying, but I don't mind too much because most of the satisfaction is just beating the challenge. I played on hard/hard. I don't like playing very hard on Total War games because the AI cheating is too noticeable.

I find Shogun 2 difficult because there are a set of things you need to do which can make the game very difficult if you aren't aware of them. Keeping your Daimyo's honour high is very important otherwise your provinces will rebel. That means avoid looting, even at the endgame. If your navy is too weak, it will be cornered and you won't be able to break out. This happened to me but fortunately I did not get any naval invasions in the endgame. Losing a general is a pretty big deal, which is a problem because a single tactical or strategic error can have a general killed or an entire army annihilated. You only get a handful of generals in the game. Having friends is also very important to delay the time before everyone turns against you.

ROTS was definitely the least entertaining of the two campaigns I've played so far. There's just too much of a lack of unit variety, so it becomes the same battle over and over. However it was still a good game, and the simplified sieges for towns were welcome.

The main problem I have with Total War games is they kinda kinda grind you down in the endgame because you're just constantly fighting huge stacks. I usually get bored and start autoresolving.

Having finished the first two campaigns, I am honestly looking forward to playing the Fall of the Samurai... Looking forward to getting my gunpowder and unit variety back. The setting will be interesting too.

Fall of the Samurai

I decided to play as the Satsuma because it's my first campaign in FOTS. There are several new features in this game... Firstly the old Empire interface seems to be back. Amazing that they were able to put that code into this game. I enjoy empire's interface systems so that's great. Naval units are quite expensive, which I am fine with because I hate being inundated with naval battles. Speaking of which, auto resolve is competent in this campaign. In fact, it is often superior to playing the battles yourself. I am fine with this. Nothing is more frustrating than auto-resolving an easy battle and losing a critical unit.

There are a bunch of turns in a year now, and unit movement seems to be greatly reduced. Moving armies around is a bit frustrating, but the game overall is less stressful because you have more time to react to unexpected situations. Navies are now very helpful for moving your armies long distances, which is important because the map is split into 2 factions who are on opposite sides of the map.

The AI is pretty crap in this campaign. They seem to have no grasp on how to combine gunpowder and melee units, which is not unexpected because I can barely manage it. Also they always insist on attacking, even if they are defending and have gunpowder and cannons. Who even writes this AI?

Naval bombardment is OP. Seriously, I encircled a large army, dropped a focused bombardments, and the army was gone. The reinforcing army ran away instantly. It was of course pretty awesome, but makes things a bit too easy.

Before bombardment:

After bombardment:

Naval battles confuse the hell out of me. I think line astern is what I'm supposed to be doing but naval stuff was never my strength. At least there's no wind stuff I guess.

Geishas are babes but they will fuck your army movement if you leave them around other characters, goddammit (Edit: Actually I think it's just if you keep your generals sitting around in a city). Foreign veterans are also OP because you just put them in your main army and bam, bunch of elite units.

Like many Total War games, it's fun to play around with and pretend you are a general unifying Japan or whatever, but so many exploits...

One other issue I have is the unit stats balancing. I just don't understand why Creative Assembly balances the unit stats in the way they do. Why are the matchlock samurai just plain inferior to infantry? Every unit should have something useful about it. The snipers should have long range but slow reload, the samurai should be bad at shooting, but good in melee, the line infantry should be good at shooting, but bad at melee, etc, etc.

Same with the levelling up. In FOTS, there is rarely any reason to not just go down one side of the tree and specialise your agents and generals as much as possible.

Anyways I will finish the campaign and then get back to this review.