I've always found it interesting how much heated discussion arises from games which are seen as played primarily by those who do not usually play games in the genre it belongs to. The main example that gets thrown around is Persona/SMT or even Pokemon as "JRPGS for people who don't play JRPGS".
On the one hand, I can see some validity to this if the game in question is a watered down, entry point friendly example of the genre but whose players are perceived to never move into the deeper, richer members of the category. There is also the fact that this unwillingness may arise from a perceived difference by those players which turns out to not be true, i.e I like X but not the rest of genre Y because those games have quality Z(X has Z too).
Whatever the case, I think its generally unhelpful and even weird to care about such things for the most part and these arguments are built on a hell of a lot of assumptions about player motivations and knowledge. Anyways, I'm not much of an RTS guy, but I love Total War. Specifically Shogun 2, Medieval 2, Rome 1, and to a lesser extent Three Kingdoms.
I should preface the rest of the review by saying that I have actually played other strategy games but could never really get into them. The closest I ever got was HOI4, but I made the mistake of trying out multiplayer whilst "only" having about 40 hours in the game (which is a rounding error in paradox grand strategy game terms) and was yelled at/forced out of playing as France by a very rude person for apparently picking the wrong focuses (getting factories is not optimal, apparently) which kinda soured me on the game for ever and by extension CK2, EU4 etc which I briefly tried but couldn't really figure out. I played a bit of CIV once but I found it kinda boring.
Total War, provides an experience that cannot really be had anywhere else save for the odd indie competitor, namely real time battles in formations between historical troops. Well, at least not in the way that Total War does it. The real time rendering of individual soldiers, the manual camera, dragging out lines of troops with the mouse, zooming into the enemy general's face as he's finally hit with a concentrated volley of arrows straight to his chest, well, I've yet to see another game that scratched that itch.
Importantly for me, the actual complexity of the non-battle stuff is low, especially this entry in the series. I'm sure the depth of management in EU4 is great, but I'd need 100 hours just to learn enough to comfortably play it. In Total War it boils down to keeping public order high and a steady income. Diplomacy and Tech are there, but they are not particularly complex. Its all about the battles. You and your units and wits against the enemies'.
If there is one major flaw in this and most total war games it would be the AI. Its pretty dumb. Its smarter here than in Medieval 2 at least, but that's not saying much. This is best illustrated by the difficulty settings (easy, normal, hard, very hard, legendary) which mainly give the AI cheats. There is a school of thought which says that this is "cheap" difficulty, but honestly its the only way of making the game interesting. The fact is, after getting to grips with the games' mechanics if you're not playing at least on normal, the enemy will not be able to build an army worthy of an interesting battle. On hard and above each faction will build around 3 stacks and throw them against you, necessesitating skillful use of agents, defensive sieges, ambushes and clever maneouvering to defeat them. Which is sort of the point of the game.
Notably, the Shogun 2 AI is quite competent for a secondary reason unrelated to the programming : this is one of the most streamlined total war games. Hence, not only does the player not have to deal with stuff like squalor, civil war mechanics, (religion plays a somewhat minor role compared to Medieval 2 or the Barbarian Invasions expansion) but by extension the AI has fewer things to juggle (and hence fewer things to fuck up).
There are trade offs when streamlining a game of course, and as mentioned in my Medieval 2 review, there are fewer RPG elements with generals having somewat boring skill trees, with the random traits feeling somewhat vestigial and underused. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about sending reinforcements to another province instantly rebelling because of your low authority faction leader, daimyo honour is fairly predictable and fair. Which does not necessarily mean better, but it is nicer in a way that doesn't feel to me as overly forgiving, mainly because loyalty management in Medieval 2 was just boring/tedious.
Agents are also much better, using a rock, paper, scissors type match up between the 3 main types of monks, ninja and metsuke (monk -> metsuke -> ninja -> monk). Loss aversion still makes their unfudged chance of failure annoying and encourages save scumming, but thankfully other agents have a chance to only put the your agent out of commission for a few turns rather than outright elimination, compared to medieval 2, where spies could scout enemy territory completely unmolested, but were all but guaranteed to die if they attempted any infiltration action unless they were max skill. Though by contrast, they made army sabotage incredibly broken (I once genuinely held an entire 3 death stack army which was 1 turn away from crossing into my undefended provinces using an entire squad of elite ninjas long enough for my forces to travel to the front and destroy them in detail).
The battle and campaign narrators are some of the best in the series. In particular the battle narrator does such a good job at bringing across (in his second language, no less) the character of the close advisor to the daimyo, an excitable but kind of kiss-ass aide-de-camp type. All of the lines are iconic, though their popular versions being commonly written in a phonetic engrish is unfortunate, though not surprising, given the depressingly common profile of the historical strategy game player being, well, a chud.
As much as I enjoy Shogun 2, it's the one total war game which I have played the least of in the vanilla form. This is also part of why I thought of writing a review for the game. Shogun 2 is set in the Sengoku Jidai, usually translated as the "warring states period" or alternatively as "the age of the country at war" by Shogun 2, which I kinda prefer, its more literal I think. In this period of around 100 years Japan fractured as the authority of the Ashikaga Shoguns diminished and many small feudal clans fought each other for control of the country. The introduction of guns by the portuguese transformed the way wars were fought, with masses of peasant troops (or ashigaru) equipped with this new weapon being used, as well as other innovations like bamboo palisades etc.
Total War as a series has never let historical accuracy get in the way of its game design philosophy, but in the case of a game like Shogun 2 it undermines the games' appeal, in my view. Matchlocks suck ass in shogun 2. Unlike Medieval 2 were certain techs were time gated, Shogun 2 has a player directed tech tree, hence in order for the timeline to make sense, getting firearms requires contact with christians (i.e the portuguese) or extremely heavy investment to get even the most basica matchlock arquebus troops. In theory, this could work, as the nanban trade port which provides access to guns also converts the population to christianity, which unless you convert your daimyo leads to unrest via religious differences (unless you recruit high level monks to station in the province to cancel out the christian influence). This would be a historically accurate and an interesting trade-off decision between getting power now and dealing with the consequences or waiting to develop them yourself. Unfortunately, matchlocks suck, the matchlock ashigaru are so inferior to their bow equivalents in almost every single battle scenario and take way more of an investment to recruit. Matchlock Samurai are better but not all that much more effective than bow samurai especially given that by the time you've unlocked the tech you're likely finishing the campaign unless you turtle!
Now, I'm no expert. But I do know that guns pretty much supplanted bows in Japan gradually after their introduction. From what I gather, its not that bows are "inferior", they can be fired over hills, they are more accurate, faster to 'reload' and probably have a higher effective range. But they take lots of time and resources to effectively train in their usage, compared to guns, which are slow and inaccurate, cannot be used in rain etc but which can be used to quickly and effectively outfit a massive amount of levies into a fighting force. Not the case in Shogun 2 vanilla, you can train as many bow ashigaru as you want and have a mass skirmishing force to rain death upon your foes for next to nothing. There are a couple gun units worth recruiting, mainly the inaccurately named Portuguese Terços (it means thirds, it was composed of 1/3rd Arquebusiers, 1/3rd Pikemen and 1/3rd Swordsmen, these are just arquebusiers outfitted with swords) but in general the opportunity cost compared to equivalent bow units is just too high. Hell, you're probably better off going full on offense with 0 skirmishers in some cases with armour and charge bonuses.
With all this said, I played most of shogun 2 with rebalancing packs to make arquebuses easier to get and more effective. Unfortunately the new mod loader has fucked with their compatibility and they haven't been worked on in years. For a while I always thought that the reason why the infamous Kisho Ninja bug was left unfixed to not make mods stop working, but apparently not. I also suspected that maybe there must be something more to it that I was not privy of, I mean, gamers as a whole have a habit of not fully grasping the complexities of game development at times. I can now say, after making a mod for shogun 2 to replace those that no longer work, that no, the fix took literally 5 seconds to fix, changing the 2 ammo into 20 ammo for the "superior" Hattori and Tokugawa Kisho Ninja (regular kisho ninja have 15 ammo). The experience of making a mod was a new one for me, but I'm kicking myself that I didn't start earlier because its pretty easy; at least for unit rebalancing packs and the like. I also learned a few things about the inner workings of the game, why random traits are picked up so rarely (the conditions are super long its like IF X and Y OR Z And W...), how historical battles are internally called NapoleonBattles presumably due to the the warscape engine being made for Empire and Napoleon total war and that effective range is determined by projectile type and not units.
My personal rebalancing is to make bow units have more expensive upkeep but lower upfront cost, take 2 turns instead of 1 to recruit, have fewer men than matchlock ashigaru which have had their range slightly increased and added effective range based armour penetration as well as made matchlocks available basically from turn 2. That way bows are still viable and useful, but there is a trade off versus matchlocks. It's not been the most elegant solution, I've found that whilst making the matchlock research available early, ideally I should have changed the priority that AI puts into research because they basically don't recruit matchlocks because seemingly they are following a script which obviously assumes that the node required to recruit firearm units is lower in the tree. It also might have been nice to implement the historically accurate link between guns and christianity and make converting to christianity actually worth it (and irl many daimyos converted to get access to gunpowder) but unless you play as a Kyushu clan you're basically really unlikely to get contact with christians until you've basically beaten the game. If I knew how, I might make homegrown matchlock samurai/ashigaru require not only the tech and buildings but previous contact with the portuguese, like IRL how Tanegashima got a blacksmith to reverse engineer a portuguese arquebus he had purchased.
Shogun 2 remains a highly replayable total war game. As mentioned previously, the AI is surprisingly competent compared to older entries and the Realm Divide mechanic ensures there is fun to be had even towards the end of the campaign, as all of Japan will essentially declare war on you and will even be clever enough to send a seaborne invasion force to catch you by surprise. I really enjoy the ending cutscene depicting your daimyo(and new shogun) having a statue made out of them and showing said statue in the modern day, still standing in testament of his glory and power; though depicting the future in which the shogunate has long since been abolished and most clans are merely ceremonial vestiges of said period might illustrate the opposite point (look upon my works ye mighty, and despair) lmao.
On the one hand, I can see some validity to this if the game in question is a watered down, entry point friendly example of the genre but whose players are perceived to never move into the deeper, richer members of the category. There is also the fact that this unwillingness may arise from a perceived difference by those players which turns out to not be true, i.e I like X but not the rest of genre Y because those games have quality Z(X has Z too).
Whatever the case, I think its generally unhelpful and even weird to care about such things for the most part and these arguments are built on a hell of a lot of assumptions about player motivations and knowledge. Anyways, I'm not much of an RTS guy, but I love Total War. Specifically Shogun 2, Medieval 2, Rome 1, and to a lesser extent Three Kingdoms.
I should preface the rest of the review by saying that I have actually played other strategy games but could never really get into them. The closest I ever got was HOI4, but I made the mistake of trying out multiplayer whilst "only" having about 40 hours in the game (which is a rounding error in paradox grand strategy game terms) and was yelled at/forced out of playing as France by a very rude person for apparently picking the wrong focuses (getting factories is not optimal, apparently) which kinda soured me on the game for ever and by extension CK2, EU4 etc which I briefly tried but couldn't really figure out. I played a bit of CIV once but I found it kinda boring.
Total War, provides an experience that cannot really be had anywhere else save for the odd indie competitor, namely real time battles in formations between historical troops. Well, at least not in the way that Total War does it. The real time rendering of individual soldiers, the manual camera, dragging out lines of troops with the mouse, zooming into the enemy general's face as he's finally hit with a concentrated volley of arrows straight to his chest, well, I've yet to see another game that scratched that itch.
Importantly for me, the actual complexity of the non-battle stuff is low, especially this entry in the series. I'm sure the depth of management in EU4 is great, but I'd need 100 hours just to learn enough to comfortably play it. In Total War it boils down to keeping public order high and a steady income. Diplomacy and Tech are there, but they are not particularly complex. Its all about the battles. You and your units and wits against the enemies'.
If there is one major flaw in this and most total war games it would be the AI. Its pretty dumb. Its smarter here than in Medieval 2 at least, but that's not saying much. This is best illustrated by the difficulty settings (easy, normal, hard, very hard, legendary) which mainly give the AI cheats. There is a school of thought which says that this is "cheap" difficulty, but honestly its the only way of making the game interesting. The fact is, after getting to grips with the games' mechanics if you're not playing at least on normal, the enemy will not be able to build an army worthy of an interesting battle. On hard and above each faction will build around 3 stacks and throw them against you, necessesitating skillful use of agents, defensive sieges, ambushes and clever maneouvering to defeat them. Which is sort of the point of the game.
Notably, the Shogun 2 AI is quite competent for a secondary reason unrelated to the programming : this is one of the most streamlined total war games. Hence, not only does the player not have to deal with stuff like squalor, civil war mechanics, (religion plays a somewhat minor role compared to Medieval 2 or the Barbarian Invasions expansion) but by extension the AI has fewer things to juggle (and hence fewer things to fuck up).
There are trade offs when streamlining a game of course, and as mentioned in my Medieval 2 review, there are fewer RPG elements with generals having somewat boring skill trees, with the random traits feeling somewhat vestigial and underused. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about sending reinforcements to another province instantly rebelling because of your low authority faction leader, daimyo honour is fairly predictable and fair. Which does not necessarily mean better, but it is nicer in a way that doesn't feel to me as overly forgiving, mainly because loyalty management in Medieval 2 was just boring/tedious.
Agents are also much better, using a rock, paper, scissors type match up between the 3 main types of monks, ninja and metsuke (monk -> metsuke -> ninja -> monk). Loss aversion still makes their unfudged chance of failure annoying and encourages save scumming, but thankfully other agents have a chance to only put the your agent out of commission for a few turns rather than outright elimination, compared to medieval 2, where spies could scout enemy territory completely unmolested, but were all but guaranteed to die if they attempted any infiltration action unless they were max skill. Though by contrast, they made army sabotage incredibly broken (I once genuinely held an entire 3 death stack army which was 1 turn away from crossing into my undefended provinces using an entire squad of elite ninjas long enough for my forces to travel to the front and destroy them in detail).
The battle and campaign narrators are some of the best in the series. In particular the battle narrator does such a good job at bringing across (in his second language, no less) the character of the close advisor to the daimyo, an excitable but kind of kiss-ass aide-de-camp type. All of the lines are iconic, though their popular versions being commonly written in a phonetic engrish is unfortunate, though not surprising, given the depressingly common profile of the historical strategy game player being, well, a chud.
As much as I enjoy Shogun 2, it's the one total war game which I have played the least of in the vanilla form. This is also part of why I thought of writing a review for the game. Shogun 2 is set in the Sengoku Jidai, usually translated as the "warring states period" or alternatively as "the age of the country at war" by Shogun 2, which I kinda prefer, its more literal I think. In this period of around 100 years Japan fractured as the authority of the Ashikaga Shoguns diminished and many small feudal clans fought each other for control of the country. The introduction of guns by the portuguese transformed the way wars were fought, with masses of peasant troops (or ashigaru) equipped with this new weapon being used, as well as other innovations like bamboo palisades etc.
Total War as a series has never let historical accuracy get in the way of its game design philosophy, but in the case of a game like Shogun 2 it undermines the games' appeal, in my view. Matchlocks suck ass in shogun 2. Unlike Medieval 2 were certain techs were time gated, Shogun 2 has a player directed tech tree, hence in order for the timeline to make sense, getting firearms requires contact with christians (i.e the portuguese) or extremely heavy investment to get even the most basica matchlock arquebus troops. In theory, this could work, as the nanban trade port which provides access to guns also converts the population to christianity, which unless you convert your daimyo leads to unrest via religious differences (unless you recruit high level monks to station in the province to cancel out the christian influence). This would be a historically accurate and an interesting trade-off decision between getting power now and dealing with the consequences or waiting to develop them yourself. Unfortunately, matchlocks suck, the matchlock ashigaru are so inferior to their bow equivalents in almost every single battle scenario and take way more of an investment to recruit. Matchlock Samurai are better but not all that much more effective than bow samurai especially given that by the time you've unlocked the tech you're likely finishing the campaign unless you turtle!
Now, I'm no expert. But I do know that guns pretty much supplanted bows in Japan gradually after their introduction. From what I gather, its not that bows are "inferior", they can be fired over hills, they are more accurate, faster to 'reload' and probably have a higher effective range. But they take lots of time and resources to effectively train in their usage, compared to guns, which are slow and inaccurate, cannot be used in rain etc but which can be used to quickly and effectively outfit a massive amount of levies into a fighting force. Not the case in Shogun 2 vanilla, you can train as many bow ashigaru as you want and have a mass skirmishing force to rain death upon your foes for next to nothing. There are a couple gun units worth recruiting, mainly the inaccurately named Portuguese Terços (it means thirds, it was composed of 1/3rd Arquebusiers, 1/3rd Pikemen and 1/3rd Swordsmen, these are just arquebusiers outfitted with swords) but in general the opportunity cost compared to equivalent bow units is just too high. Hell, you're probably better off going full on offense with 0 skirmishers in some cases with armour and charge bonuses.
With all this said, I played most of shogun 2 with rebalancing packs to make arquebuses easier to get and more effective. Unfortunately the new mod loader has fucked with their compatibility and they haven't been worked on in years. For a while I always thought that the reason why the infamous Kisho Ninja bug was left unfixed to not make mods stop working, but apparently not. I also suspected that maybe there must be something more to it that I was not privy of, I mean, gamers as a whole have a habit of not fully grasping the complexities of game development at times. I can now say, after making a mod for shogun 2 to replace those that no longer work, that no, the fix took literally 5 seconds to fix, changing the 2 ammo into 20 ammo for the "superior" Hattori and Tokugawa Kisho Ninja (regular kisho ninja have 15 ammo). The experience of making a mod was a new one for me, but I'm kicking myself that I didn't start earlier because its pretty easy; at least for unit rebalancing packs and the like. I also learned a few things about the inner workings of the game, why random traits are picked up so rarely (the conditions are super long its like IF X and Y OR Z And W...), how historical battles are internally called NapoleonBattles presumably due to the the warscape engine being made for Empire and Napoleon total war and that effective range is determined by projectile type and not units.
My personal rebalancing is to make bow units have more expensive upkeep but lower upfront cost, take 2 turns instead of 1 to recruit, have fewer men than matchlock ashigaru which have had their range slightly increased and added effective range based armour penetration as well as made matchlocks available basically from turn 2. That way bows are still viable and useful, but there is a trade off versus matchlocks. It's not been the most elegant solution, I've found that whilst making the matchlock research available early, ideally I should have changed the priority that AI puts into research because they basically don't recruit matchlocks because seemingly they are following a script which obviously assumes that the node required to recruit firearm units is lower in the tree. It also might have been nice to implement the historically accurate link between guns and christianity and make converting to christianity actually worth it (and irl many daimyos converted to get access to gunpowder) but unless you play as a Kyushu clan you're basically really unlikely to get contact with christians until you've basically beaten the game. If I knew how, I might make homegrown matchlock samurai/ashigaru require not only the tech and buildings but previous contact with the portuguese, like IRL how Tanegashima got a blacksmith to reverse engineer a portuguese arquebus he had purchased.
Shogun 2 remains a highly replayable total war game. As mentioned previously, the AI is surprisingly competent compared to older entries and the Realm Divide mechanic ensures there is fun to be had even towards the end of the campaign, as all of Japan will essentially declare war on you and will even be clever enough to send a seaborne invasion force to catch you by surprise. I really enjoy the ending cutscene depicting your daimyo(and new shogun) having a statue made out of them and showing said statue in the modern day, still standing in testament of his glory and power; though depicting the future in which the shogunate has long since been abolished and most clans are merely ceremonial vestiges of said period might illustrate the opposite point (look upon my works ye mighty, and despair) lmao.
molochthagod
3 months ago