Am I The Only One ?

[LeftEyeNine]

Back in MTW days too, I used to prefer campaign-map play over a hybrid style in SP. Yeah, the TW merchandise has been the pioneer in proving out that mass battles in realistic proportions was possible in PC gaming and actually were quite revolutionary in strategy genre. However, blame the board game nerd living inside of me who used to prepare his own board games as a child or my battle-inexperienced and impatient-in-game nature, I have played and am playing all TW games with as less battlefield experience as possible, if not none at all.

How about you ? Am I the only one ?

[Hamata]

No it will be to much paradox then

[Gregoshi]

I don't like to auto-resolve unless the odds are too stacked for/against me, however I am usually pretty bad fighting the battles, so I usually dread fighting them. I enjoy the campaign part of the game more these days.

[Arjos]

Campaign-map is by far the best part, I love the traits and roleplay possibilities it gives...
I wish they'll add more strategy and supply features to it...
But at the same time I really like the battles aswell, not when it turns to endless wars against mini armies though :P

[Nowake]

As an old STW player, I used to love battles.

However, Shogun 2 changed the dinamic so much, they've become a chore. I still have to go through 80% of them by myself because I cannot afford losing on Legendary, yet there's little joy to it.
What happens is: maneuvers are simply dead.
Yes, you can change the outcome of a battle a lot if you march for thirty minutes to obtain the best direction of attack prior to engaging in melee. That's actually quite nice.
Yes, you get to outflank the enemy line with a few troops and turn it into a rout.
Yet, the big, pivotal maneuvers during the actual fray are very rare. Three reasons: the first is the least important to be honest, but ya, the AI is smarter; that is good. The second is the absolute ineptitude of cavalry in Shogun 2 -- you could have used a unit or two sometimes, but 90% of the time it won't do you much good, so they're not part of my standard army corps (which goes for eight Katana Samurai, 10 Yari Ashigaru and 1 Bow Ashigaru, plus the general of course, against anything the enemy can throw against me, including couples of stacks of very well experienced all samurai armies; this low cost mix will win it). The third, and the most important, is the speed at which the units die -- by the time I turn a flank, the melee in the center is almost over as well, so the maneuver did not prove crucial anyway.
I tried everything really, I am now playing a Legendary Hojo with Ultra unit sizes -- I hoped that, eventhough it just means more units kill more units, so the difference should be small, it would still have an effect on the speed with which lines of battle tear through each other.
It's just a pity, battles are now simply huge charges decided by timing and Stand and Fight. You'll occasionally envelop somewhere but in that time the other sectors have won or lost their fight aswell sigh.
So ya, I still play the large majority of the battles in single player, but only because I have to.

[econ21]

I need both the campaign and the manually fought battles for TW to be much fun.

For me, it's the battles that are what are distinctive and impressive about the TW series. I remember reading that the whole thing started off as a demo of an engine that showed hundreds of little men charging around in battle and that was how STW was born.

If I just wanted a campaign without battles, I would play Civ4 or maybe try the Paradox games many Orgah's love.

However, battles without the thread of a campaign to hook them together would be completely uninteresting to me (I've never played one historical battles ever, in a TW game). I'd rather play a campaign with autoresolved battles than battles without a campaign.

I agree with Nowake about STW2 battles though - they are a little too fast paced to be that enjoyable. (In that respect, the sieges feel better paced - despite the flawed AI - just because things happen more slowly). I should try that slower speed mod, I guess, although it will make archers even more powerful than they already are.

In my only full length STW2 campaign, I did end up autoresolving right at the end, when it was obvious I would win. It was not that fun (and not that fast - it was like playing whack a mole with one rebellious province or vassal after another). The most fun battles tend to be the early ones where you are just establishing dominance by superior generalship or the backs to the walls one where you are holding onto a province you should really be losing.

The autoresolve in STW2 is very tempting though - it seems far more favorable to the player than the punitive ones in previous titles.

[Peasant Phill]

I purely play for the battles. I'll quit far faster because I'm sure I'll win the campaign than because the battles become to tedious.

[Gregoshi]

I'm with you econ - the campaign gives the battles meaning. Now that you mention it, I should try that slow mod too. The too-fast combat has been my major gripe with the TW series since RTW. TWS2 seems not as fast as I remember RTW, but still to fast for my taste. I'll have to load that slow mod and see if the enjoyment of the battles returns.

[Nowake]

The autoresolve in STW2 is very tempting though - it seems far more favorable to the player than the punitive ones in previous titles.

Mmm, it's so so really. The calculator weighs the value of samurai over ashigaru very well. And there are no penalties for assaulting a fortress. Thus, you're safe to autoresolve mere garrisons and you'll be much better off than if you'd have gone to the field personally -- or at least you save a TON of time by skipping the shooting of the garrison into the ground with archers in case of a small one. However, against samurai, the army setup does not matter, you will take heavy losses or even lose, even if he has nineteen units of samurai archers which would be scattered away before routing even one of your Yari Ashigaru units from your half Ashigaru half Katana Samurai force. Also, against an all Yari Ashigaru corps (more or less) equal in numbers to yours (say 3000 against 3000), without a general, your six star general with the above mentioned half Ashigaru half Katana setup will still take about 700-800 losses before winning, though it will inflict more casualties (unless you use your general's cavalry unit really well in the chase yourself). I believe it is because the AI calculates the point of rout a bit farther down the timeline than it would happen on the field. So, unless you don't care to keep your army more or less intact, even those engagements must be fought manually.

I should try that slower speed mod, I guess, although it will make archers even more powerful than they already are.
(...)
Now that you mention it, I should try that slow mod too.

You two must know better, but I thought "the slow mod" only affects movement speed, not killing rates? It would be quite great if it would be as you say though, as much as I dislike mods in general.

[TheLastDays]

You two must know better, but I thought "the slow mod" only affects movement speed, not killing rates? It would be quite great if it would be as you say though, as much as I dislike mods in general.

Afaik there is one that is dealing with the animations and would thus slow down the kill rates. I could be wrong though.

I agree that campaing map play is more important for me than the battles but I still play most of the battles myself. Both together make the TW experience for me.

[Nowake]

Hmm, I got off my ass and searched for it.
The mod I had read about was THIS one I believe. But if you chaps know of any other, do point a fellow taisho in the right direction please

[xploring]

Hmm, I got off my ass and searched for it.
The mod I had read about was THIS one I believe. But if you chaps know of any other, do point a fellow taisho in the right direction please

You can use mods which bump up units' defense and armour stats to make battles last longer. Radious allows player to pick and choose so you can choose only the ones you like. There are other ones for unit stats but they are usually lumped with a lot of other changes.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=440856

[Madae]

It really depends for me, and is entirely situational.

If I'm marching around some gigantic army and I happen across a pitiful group of units, mostly small armies or a collection of crap, I tend to auto-resolve the fight because I know it will be a victory, and it's likely auto-resolve will keep me from losing more units than necessary (it just feels like it does sometimes, though thats not always the case), and more often than not, I won't lose anything at all.

Alternatively, if it's a large group of units, either with a bunch of annoying units (like a dozen archers) or somewhat (or straight) threatening (with experience or a variety that will cause issues), I like to fight the battles. Where auto-resolve works on small groups, it tends to fail (for me) in large battles, or causes far to many losses for my liking.

Even battles I like to fight, small or large, because that could go either way, and I would prefer that it be a win. I will also occassionally fight battles where I will certainly lose the fight. I like to rack up enough kills to have made their victory not really worth the effort/money/men spent to get it. And sometimes, and surprisingly, I'll actually win those fights even though I was grossly outnumbered. Valiant defeats are also very satisfying, regardless of the outcome.

Most of the time when I'm fighting really difficult battles, I lose a lot of the "experience" for the sake of doing it right. I'm not really paying attention to how cool the battle looks - I'm focusing directly on how my units are standing up and whether or not they need reinforcements. A lot of the times, I will fight these battles on half-speed, just so I can react quickly enough to holes in my defense or to reinforce a morale-failing unit. This is probably the only time that my enjoyment of battles starts to waver, because it's becoming more of a chore/job than it is just cool to watch. Winning is simply the priority. Still, some of these battles can be fun, especially when it's so close you just know you barely pulled it off.

I'm split on preference, overall. I like the campaign map more for the gameplay, but battles are sometimes really fun, and I like setting my gigantic army in formation, having them walk towards the enemy and just looking at all of them moving in unison or slowly popping out of a forest for dramatic effect. Seeing the screen shake because 2000 men are all walking together is pretty neat, and its really cool to move down the line close up and see them all marching.

[frogbeastegg]

Since S2's auto-calc is a lot fairer than the tool in prior TW games, I'm happier to use it. No more 600 casualties in my elite army because I auto-calced a battle against a unit of peasants, huzzah! This means that for the first time in the series I am manually controlling the battles I want to fight and no others - it's a breath of fresh air.

I auto-calc all battles where I face a much smaller force. I tend to auto-calc sieges, both offensive and defensive, as I don't enjoy the castle battles much. Battles which are plainly a lost cause also get auto-calced; I'm happy to accept losing the chance to do more damage to the enemy in order to save my time.

If my army is equally matched in numbers but far superior in quality, I will sometimes auto-calc it. That one depends on my mood and how matters stand in the grand scheme of my campaign. These are the battles where I have time to zoom the camera in for a short time so that I can enjoy the visuals.

I will manually control all important battles, all battles where my army is outclassed to some degree, and all closely matched battles.

The campaign map section of the game gets a lot right. It's the first time I have truly enjoyed the strategic portion of the game, instead of suffering through a lot of irritations in order to access the wider game. I suppose I could play and enjoy Shogun II without fighting any of the battles, I expect it would feel as though part of the experience was missing.

I do use a speed mod, and it makes the battles a lot more enjoyable for me. The only thing it changes is movement speed. I did not want unit stats or combat balance altering as I always feel that damages far more than it fixes. The mod is similar to the one Nowake linked to, except a bit more drastic. Infantry is 20% slower and cavalry 30% - no more rocket-powered racehorse cavalry. This way they are still significantly faster than infantry without being able to run from one side of my screen to the other in the blink of an eye. The mod was custom made for me; I've asked the maker about making it publicly available.

[frogbeastegg]

This is the speed mod I am using. No changes to the game except for movement speed.

[Ignoramus]

I agre with the kill rate speeds - they're too fast. One of the main reasons I really enjoyed MTW was that it actually took time for units to die. You had to watch your flanks, because there was time for the enemy to swing around and hit you in the rear. Similarly, I really enjoy the very slowly kill rates in EB - it may make the average battle take half an hour, but there's so much more satisfaction.

[feelotraveller]

I am firmly in the 'Gah' camp... and here I will stand and fight.

Sad to say but I have a compromised relationship with the battle map. Generally I'm a campaign player and that part of S2TW is to my mind undoubtedly the best of the series. (Yes, I have been seeing that 'other woman' recently.) I find the battle map an improvement over all the more recent TW games but I am still tossing up whether I like it more that the original STW - you gotta love those monks hiding in the trees and maps where you really could march around all day. I play on half speed as otherwise it's all over before I know what's happened.

My problem is that I feel compelled to fight the battles myself. Yes, I have experimented with autocalc and it is much improved. But if I was going to play autocalc I'd be spamming horse archers since they just get crazy results. The only time I will autocalc is with massive sieges, and only after I've got my sorry, um, self whipped by the AI. While this is all well and good I find that since I am a slow player, both on the battle and campaign maps, my campaigns tend to taper off unfinished.

p.s. What really gets my goat is that when you reload (as I do fairly often, finding that after a battle or two my time is up for the day) you lose all the XP you have accumulated towards the next level. Anyone know of a mod which gets around this?

[knoddy]

Ive always been a campaign map fan from day 1.

i never played the original shogun, i started with medieval, and i never ever fought a battle. I auto calcd everyone, but the auto calc in Med 1 was quite balanced. i would usually only lose when severely outnumbered or outgunned.

I loved the campaign gameplay in the original medieval. it remains to this day my most played total war title. there was just something about it that made it so challenging. Just watching the Alomahads (sp?) get bigger and bigger and knowing there was 20 full stacks coming into central europe where i was quietly building my forces was a fantastic challenge.

I remember playing a Danish campaign and i actually rushed longboats and vikings so i cud raid the spanish coastline and slow their advance. i wud send in half a stack of vikings destroy all buildings except the port and leg it back out again haha.

It was a real challenge and i completed Medieval 1 on every single faction, including those who had to be modded to be playable, conquering every province on the map.

Rome, im a roman history nut so i loved the campaign play BUT i hated the auto calc it was incredibly bad especially when fighting against the Romans which forced me to fight battles which i didnt mind to be honest i won most of them and they were enjoyable enough.

Medieval 2, i found i enjoyed the camp but got bored. fast. again the auto calc was baddddddd which made re playability low for me cos i had to fight everything.

Empire, dont like gunpowder so i never really enjoyed it. again i think the auto calc was terrible which meant i had to fight battles which i really didnt like because i hate gunpowder battles.

Shogun 2, love the camp auto calc much fairer which offers greater re playability. i dont want to have to fight every single battle in every single campaign i play.

Short Answer =

Love the campaigns love the historical settings even if they can get the history itself a bit wrong :S dont mind the occasional battles but glad to have a working Auto calculator again, which allows in my mind greater re playability because u dont have to fight every one of the 500 or so battles you probably have per game.

Cheers Knoddy

[Vladimir]

The battles are really the weak part of S2. I prefer to autoresolve whenever possible and only fight the close battles.

[Madae]

That's a weird opinion. I would have thought that most people played TW for the battles. There are far better games (IMO) when it comes to strategy and diplomacy, such as Europa Universalis. I hear that new Sengoku game is pretty interesting when it comes to that, as well.

[Andres]

It depends. I don't know what it depends from though, might depend on what kind of hairday I'm having or the weather outside, but sometimes, I play almost every single battle and sometimes, I autocalc the entire game. The latter only with MTW because those campaignmaps give that real Risk feeling.

With Shogun II, I mostly follow froggy's approach: only fight the battles that matter myself; autocalc the rest. But I certainly can appreciate playing a MTW game without fighting a single battle myself.

[Cash]

I enjoy the battles but do not like having to rush the trade nodes. I would rather see the use of local markets, farms, mines and factories for the loot and food needed to support the towns, armies and castles. By the way can anyone tell me what changes I may find in SP only of SG2 in the latest patch? I don't go into Steam any more than I have to. I have had almost every one of the total war games including the first Shogun.

[Shigemasa Oyamada]

The Battles In S2 aren't that bad, although I do think they could lessen the killing rate. I agree as well that cavalry is too weak, not to mention their pretty rare too since there's only 5 warhorse provinces (The Chosokabe don't even use Awa's). Naginata cavalry like in S1 would be nice, another hybrid between the Yari and Katana cavalry. At any rate, I really do like the campaign, but I too auto-resolve most of the trivial battles. I actually like sieges defenses since they seem almost too easy even when massively outnumbered (Battles you'd normally lose auto-resolving, anyways the heroic last stand in a castle always appeals to me). The RPG element of the characters is good change ( I wish there were more traits line in RTW and MTW2, they give the characters a lot more personality, although they use a bit more depth and variety- I feel like I'm always using the same things every general and the right tree regarding the Bodyguard unit is not very useful since I'm not charging my general into battle constantly.

[Kurisu]

For those looking to slow the game down in multiple aspects (movement and mortality, as well as campaign pace) I'd recommend giving The Rights of Man (TRoM) a whirl. It's here: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=455308

There's a lengthy description, but one of the key concepts is slightly longer recruitment times (basic ashigaru are 2 turns) and slower army travel; that has the effect of thinning the field and making individual battles more decisive. You can't just hurl bodies against the AI without prior planning (the AI also cannot spam stacks of ashigaru). AI Army composition is pretty well balanced. There's a cap on various unit types that's mitigated by the Bushido tree and the availability of AOR units. In general, the roster is expanded with many new types, but they are in limited supply.

For the battles themselves, the rock, paper, scissors relationships are maintained but normalized (so mortality rate is slowed). Along with slightly slower unit speed, that renders battles a more cerebral experience where you have time to actually execute tactical maneuvers and monitor the results. There's several options for movement speed; the default is 30/30 reduction for inf/cav. I like relatively faster cavalry, so I go 20/10. I believe there's a 30/15 along with some others. Battles last longer and chain routing is uncommon except where armies are outclassed.

The rest of the modifications are focused on historical interest and building choices. There's a Bushido tree for ashigaru development to go along with an expanded ashigaru roster (they start as conscripts and evolve towards professional army). A Zen branch is added (along with buildings) to contrast the standard Buddhist line and gives different benefits focused on samurai and Bushido. Also, some of the building chains now have interesting splits that foster more strategic decision making (e.g. markets and stealth chain are mutually exclusive). Small amounts of trade goods are available via farm, market and port options at the cost of reduced static wealth. These all tie in with the Chi tree as well.

That's a bit more involved than just lower mortality rates and such, but the whole thing ties together pretty well IMHO and addresses the desire for a slower, more thoughtful game with greater variety expressed in a number of posts. The mod is continuously developed and very well done. I'm having a great time with it, so I thought I'd recommend

[Kurisu]

By the way can anyone tell me what changes I may find in SP only of SG2 in the latest patch? I don't go into Steam any more than I have to. I have had almost every one of the total war games including the first Shogun.

If you mean the big patch of Sept 23rd, new castles, custom maps and bug fixes mostly.

An expandable list is here. SP things are mainly under bug fixes.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=483809

[Cash]

Ahh, thank You Kurisu. I had seen that before but I thought it was for MP. It would have helped these old eyes if CraigTW had separated the SP from the MP. Just saying. :)

[Vladimir]

I like how you talk.

[BADDERS]

Have you ever took a gander at the Paradox Interactive library?

I lover the Total War series specifically because of the inclusion of a battle system into the strategic nation building elements of gameplay. Without that... Paradox wins hands down, because the complexity and detail of their strategic elements of gameplay sort of destroys Total War on every level. I mean you almost have to call Total War childish when it comes to the over simplified political and economical elements CA portrays in every one of their games. Which isn't a bad thing, most of the criticism of Paradox has been that they're "too realistic" or not simplistic enough to provide satisfying gameplay but if you really don't like the fighting aspect of TW games you seriously should give some Paradox demos a try.

[easytarget]

The trouble with paradox games is as you described, they struggle a bit w/ too much minutia to the point it stops being a game and starts being work. And it's as if paradox took a learning curve, made it vertical, and called that the game.

And of course, this comes w/ the huge caveat that I know some like this level of detail and love the paradox games for it, so don't get me wrong. My bothering to respond is more to call out that what you characterize as simplistic in TW games, is in reality a rather smart effort to keep the level of detail where the game is still immensely fun and the player feels agency in the decisions they make w/o being taxed with making a thousand decisions per game hour and sacrificing fun at the alter of realism.

If you want an example of a game that in my opinion models realism quite well, check out any demo of combat mission. Yes, it's WW2, yes it's a sim, but hey, you know what, all the sim part calculations that make this an ultra realistic platoon level simulation occur "under the hood" w/o the player being required to do or even be aware of it. So the game models weather, morale, ballistic physics, cover, armor, command and control, communication, the list goes on and on. And you know what you see as the commander? An interface that simply asks that you tell your troops what to do next.

[easytarget]

Oh, and for my 2 cents on the speed of S2, I agree, the unit speed and kill rate are too fast.

Robs the user of strategic and tactical options that make battles more engaging, and instead leaves me with a mad scrum at the center of any engagement, I get fewer meaningful opportunities to flank (short of mounted units who are the only ones fastest enough to get somewhere to do something before the rugby match at the middle is over), fewer opportunities to use the unique capabilities of units, again, because everyone is busy mugging each other at the middle in force, and generally forces me to pause the whole affair about a hundred times in huge engagements to avoid being mugged by an AI that has no such problem.

It's not that it's hard to stay ahead of the AI, it has the usual flaws, it's more than this speed just wasn't necessary, it feels like it wasn't for lack of a better way to describe it, user tested sufficiently to check to see if the feel was right.

All this being said, I like this TW better than my love of all the others combined. The gestalt of the entire package to me is frankly, sublime. It's GOTY for me this year, doesn't matter what else releases or how good it is. This, for me, is simply, one of those games that just don't come along every day.