Improvement Suggestions for Shogun 2

[therother]

This thread is for collecting together suggestions, both big and small, for improving Total War: Shogun 2. I've divided the list in 4 categories:

Minor gameplay changes: small things that could make a big difference to enjoyment.
Significant gameplay changes: major changes to gameplay that could improve playability/roleplay etc.
Interface improvements: how could the TWS2 interface be improved.
Potential issues: possible inconsistencies/things potentially not working as we believe they are intended.

Post or PM me your suggestions and I'll incorporate them asap.

Minor gameplay changes

• Sending all imprisoned/injured/perplexed characters all the way back to your capital is perhaps too extreme. Perhaps a random town outwith a certain radius (if there is one) would do, similar to the repatriation due to changing diplomatic circumstances? --19 March 2011
• Given their subservient status, shouldn't we be able to see details of vassal armies/agents/settlements? --19 March 2011
• Can we gift provinces as part of diplomacy? --19 March 2011
• Repair ships in allied ports? You can replenish armies in their provinces. --19 March 2011
• Land/board troops in allied ports? --19 March 2011
• Indicator of the diplomatic results of your actions: I'm often perplexed as to why I'm now an "alliance breaker". Also, not sure if this happens, but just in case: if an ally attacks another of your allies, especially a vassal, you should receive no penalties for entering the war against the aggressor. After all, your ally should ask you to break the alliance prior to attacking. --19 March 2011
• More recruitment slots would be very handy. Difficult to queue up units for Kyoto, for instance, which has 5 recruitment slots. --19 March 2011
• Changeable capitals. --19 March 2011
• My Daimyo should surely be called "Shogun" after my clan becomes the Shogunate?! --19 March 2011
• The enemy moves at the end of your turn are awfully fast, particularly when the camera no longer points north. Perhaps we could have the space bar toggle slow/fast enemy moves? --30 March 2011
• Additionally, would be handy if there was a "Demand you make peace with..." diplomatic option. —1 April 2011
• The food limitations are generally a good leveller/check on progress, but by having the the 2nd level market building consume one food basically prices it out of the market until much later in the game (the percentage of the extra cash isn't worth an extra level of castle). I'd suggest the first two levels are free, then 1 and 2 for levels 3 and 4 respectively. Moving this to potential issues. —1 April 2011
• More variably with trading posts, ie contact with the trading partners affecting trade. --1 April 2011
• 'Masters of Warfare' clan trait - occurs once you'd mastered Spear, Bow, Sea and Sword. Provides +2 recruitment slots across all cities but lowers tax clan-wide tax rates, representing your focus on waging war without regard for administrative matters. --1 April 2011
• Castle courtyard need more shelter from arrows. --4 April 2011

Significant gameplay changes

• Would be very nice to be able to act as the peacemaker on behalf of your alliance, particularly if you joined the war in support of an ally. --19 March 2011
• More trading ports would be good, especially more evenly distributed. --19 March 2011
• More diplomatic options to curry favour other clans, eg troop exchanges and food sharing. See #1-3 here) --1 April 2011
• Food sharing between allies (see #2 here) --1 April 2011
• More tools to control religion, e.g. ability to outlaw a religion, increasing conversion but significantly impacting on public order. Diplomatic status with clan of the outlawed religion would also be adversely affected --1 April 2011
• Balancing of archers vs. unit movement speed. Make the battles a bit slower, but perhaps slow down the archer firing rate to compensate. --1 April 2011
• Make the AI siege the player instead of assault unless it has substantial superiority. --3 April 2011
• Reflect the various land fertilities affect the amount of food each province produces. --3 April 2011

Interface Improvements

• More explicit units/ships/agents limits (eg you have 2 of 5 possible monks)? --19 March 2011
• Along those lines, would be nice to have an indicator of, eg, number of current monks vs number of current temples. The maximum possible number of monks could be displayed here. --19 March 2011
• Would be useful to be able to inspect towns when occupation/dilemma box comes up. --19 March 2011
• Indicator for which provinces will have the make vassal option (I assume it's those home provinces of clans who are not currently in the game?) --19 March 2011
• Can we have a ETW-like building tree for each province? --19 March 2011
• Enemy army/agent/fleet overlay on radar map? --19 March 2011
• It would be nice if selecting a town from the building/recruitment notification selected the town itself, not just moved the map to its location. --19 March 2011
• Similarly, selecting an agent from the agent tab should select the agent, not the army/fleet it's embedded in. --19 March 2011
• Would also be nice if these notification lists didn't go back to the beginning (can be annoying if you've built/recruited a lot in one turn). --19 March 2011
• It would be useful to have the number of units in a stack (we get this indirectly for fleets). --19 March 2011
• Would be nice to have the option to remove event messages once they are read: by the mid game I'm often getting a couple of dozen or more per turn. --19 March 2011
• Mouse map scrolling is poor. This is especially true when the tabs are down. Keyboard scrolling seems better but could do with improvement. Scrolling in general is too slow. This is especially true of scrolling across the entire map. --19 March 2011
• Clicking minimap can zoom to a position quite far from the click. --4 April 2011
• Finding it harder than it should be to select ports, especially when there’s a fleet there. --19 March 2011
• Would be nice to have naval recruitment tab inside the town menu not just under the port menu. --19 March 2011
• Can be hard to tell the current range of your Line of Sight, especially when you've have multiple characters move through the region. --19 March 2011
• Clicking on an agent tab/radar map appears to go to/show where your agent was prior to movement. Minimising/maximising the map appears to cure this. --19 March 2011
• Sort by agent type in the agent tab? --19 March 2011
• Could we get details of the agent who's been imprisoned/executed/perplexed, rather than just the name? --19 March 2011
• Can we sink captured ships after the battle on the review screen rather than having to refind the fleet afterwards (especially true of inter-turn battles)?
• Tooltips can get in the way of seeing your town stats. --19 March 2011
• Game should direct you to start research into the arts on the first turn. --19 March 2011
• Can we get what the new art does on the notification (build this, recruit that), perhaps via mouse over? --19 March 2011
• Research complete notification should change if you change the next art to research. --19 March 2011
• Can we see the increased rank on those with enhanced field defence, rather than the base command? --19 March 2011
• Can we have an indicator that a town has potential construction, as with ETW? --19 March 2011
• Can we have a "orientate to the north" button? --19 March 2011
• Currently, the "come pick me up" option with fleets is sub-optimal: appears to want to get the ship to go to the nearest embarkation point, when sometimes its better to get the army to move to a point in between the fleet and army. --1 April 2011
• An indicator on the diplomatic screen of the clans with sons/daughters would be useful. --1 April 2011
• Sometimes, when I have the ship tab open, the map displays where my agents are instead of my fleets. - 1 April 2011
• Could you separate out the various armies on the Battle Details screen? This is especially important when you've fought an allied battle and don't know which troops are yours. --1 April 2011
• Notification boxes can overlap with each other, ie if two generals rank up from a battle, you can zoom to the first, but the 2nd level-up notification pops up before you are finished with the first general. --20 March 2011
• Ship repair costs should be proportional to damage. --20 March 2011
• Can be tricky to know which armies are reinforcing each other (edit: actually, seems better than previous TWs, with mouseover arrows been armies supporting each other). . --20 March 2011

Potential issues

• Armies/agents sometimes stop just short of a target even though they have the movement points to reach it. Case: moved 3 units of yaris from one town to the next, then decided to move a 4th, but it stopped short for some reason. Clicking on the town again doesn't seem to help. Although merging the 3 armies from the town into the 1 unit then retrying with all 4 appears to solve the problem. --19 March 2011
• Pathfinding shouldn't let fleets with weaker hullers shouldn't pass through Ocean waters on multi turn trips, although it's fine if you select the Ocean yourself. You currently have to manually check that the fleet will not suffer attrition, which can be annoying if you've set a long trip. --19 March 2011
• You can ask vassals for military access? Also, I've had vassals be reluctant to join my existing wars. Not sure if that is intended or not. --19 March 2011
• The food limitations are generally a good leveller/check on progress, but there is clearly a problem with how it is implemented in the market chain. It is not profitable under normal circumstances to build a Rice Exchange or above. This doesn't seem intentional. See this post and the rest of the thread for details. --19 March 2011
• Ships can get stuck on the campaign map: a ship merging with other ships on a trade route can become immobile. --20 March 2011
• Simialrly, units can get stuck on the battle map, especially on bridges. --20 March 2011

[Daveybaby]

Good list. I'd like to add a few.

* Just to reiterate the mouse scrolling thing - it's really abysmal.
- fix the inability to mouse scroll down if you have a large stack selected
- get rid of the delay between hitting the edge of the screen and starting to scroll (or at least make it configurable)

* Scrolling in general is far too slow for my tastes. Give us a few speed options in config.

* Clicking on the minimap should take us to that location instantly. Scrolling is, once again, way too slow if we're often going from one side of the map to the other.

* Is there a bug with battle map selection or are there only 2 maps in the entire game? They certainly all feel virtually identical, i.e. large flat plain with (generally) my units starting on a small hill and theirs on another. Havent seen any mountainous terrain yet despite being surrounded by them on the campaign map. And all of the castle battles seem to be the same map too. It's just the same 2 maps over and over again. Has nobody else noticed this? I feel like i'm taking crazy pills! Oh, apart from that one time i had a bridge crossing map. Seriously though, wtf?!?

* When the research complete popup occurs, you click on the autoselected tile to take you to the research screen and pick a different art to research. When you exit the research screen, the popup still states that youre going to learn the original autoselected tile. A bit confusing at first (thought it hadnt worked).

* Might be nice to have an advisor warn you that you arent actually researching anything at the beginning of the game. My first game i never actually did any research (granted it only lasted 5 turns before i lost...)

* The event popups at the start of each turn often have a magnifying glass 'goto' icon allowing you to goto that event's location and sort it out. Except often you just get the next popup in your way. Either get rid of the goto icon on the initial popup (keep it when youre clicking on icons in the event list), or handle it in some other way.

* Advisor keeps telling me to upgrade roads/farms in a province that cant upgrade them due to insufficient tech. Annoying. I only mention it because the advisor is actually pretty good otherwise.

* Managed to get a stuck ship once. A trade ship tried to join a full stack on a trade route, couldnt move it any more. Only thing i could do was scuttle it.

* Similarly, i got a light cavalry unit stuck on a bridge once when defending a siege. Wouldnt respond to orders until it eventually got routed by a passing yari.

* Surely ship repair costs should scale with amount of damage (well, number of crew to be replaced)?


And isnt it nice that these are all pretty petty nitpicks? Apart from that map thing. Seriously, is it just me?

[therother]

And isnt it nice that these are all pretty petty nitpicks? Apart from that map thing. Seriously, is it just me?

Nope, I agree entirely.

[therother]

Going to maintain a list in the first post. Feel free to post suggestions here and I'll incorporate them asap.

[Monk]

Here's my gameplay improvements. Most of these are features I'd like to see added.

More diplomatic options would be great, as would more ways to gain favor with a certain clan.
*Perhaps an option like "propose troop exchange". You send one of your samurai units to work for a clan and they send you one. Can only be proposed once you're friendly and can only be done once every 10-15 turns. It would provide an immediate boost to relations and demonstrate cooperation. I dunno if it makes sense historically, but I want more ways to make friends other than trade/money/marriage

*"Share food" option between allies. I have a rediculous food surplus, let me do something with it. A -2 food penalty to me for a base + to relations over the next x amount of turns. It would be important to not directly give the food to the AI, however, because the AI might then start building fortresses it can't support should the agreement end. Just take the food out of the game and replace with a relation boost. Deal is auto canceled should you reach 0 or negative food.

*'Benefactor' clan trait - sharing food with your countrymen has shown what an great guy you are and lowers your clan fame. The Shogun finds it harder to convince people you are a threat while you're helping to feed a nation.

*'Contact' with the outside - If you hold certain trade nodes for long enough, include some random events. Maybe one of your traders causes in international incident in a foreign court and hurts output for a while. Or maybe he corners the market and income improves!

*Outlaw religion - I want to make my people criminals if they don't adopt the clan religion, causing a huge penalty to public order in exchange for an increased conversion rate.

*'Enemy of Buddha/Christ' clan trait - Occurs once you've outlawed a certain religion. Clans who are that religion will suffer a huge relations hit with you until you've repealed your decision, at which they will get a relations boost to restore their view of you, slightly.

*'Masters of Warfare' clan trait - occurs once you'd mastered Spear, Bow, Sea and Sword. Provides +2 recruitment slots across all cities but lowers tax by 15%, representing your focus on waging war but your disregard for administration.

[Rothe]

Not sure if it belongs in this thread, but:

Re-balancing of archers vs. unit movement speed. Make the battles a bit slower, but perhaps slow down the archer firing rate to compensate.

Make the AI siege the player instead of assault unless it has serious superiority in troop amount and/or type.