So there it is friends,
I finally got around to playing Shogun 2. I played the tutorial for a little bit, then started a Legendary/Domination campaign with the Chosokibe clan. I chose them because they're isolated, archer friendly and an island nation - ie. they are S2's England, and I love me some England.
Since I haven't played Shogun before I decided to give the Tutorial a go, but i found nothing too impressive there. The campaign started promising, but I was soon forced to read froggy's guide to at least get an idea of what buildings to get when, since everything is so radically different from M2TW and reading anything in-game is murder on the eyes. That's the first negative thing I will say:
The in-game typeface is ridiculously small and illegible. At 1080p on my semi-pro design worthy monitor I can't read anything unless I want to bleed from my eye sockets. I only got trough because of froggy's excellent guide, otherwise I would not have bothered.
The second thing I noticed, and what had thrown me off the game before, was that the campaign map lags severely when one tries to scroll with the mouse. I had to go all Quake-like and use the WASD keys to navigate on my campaign map. What's next - hold Ctrl so your spies can sneak into cities? I also do not need a 3D campaign map, the isometric view from M2TW worked just fine for a turn-based strategy game. I have no great urge to rotate my map from all directions and to look up my Samurai's kimono as he slashes a katana at some rebels. All this rotating a camera and whoosh-ing up and down is slowing down gameplay. I also don't like the calipgraphy map. Don't get me wrong - it's good as far as design goes and it would have made one helluva loading screen or diplomatic screen map, but replacing the fog of war with this just breaks my immersion completely.
Now on to the game itself. Considering myself a solid TW player and one who has stomped the AI countless times, I decided that I see what this Legendary business is all about. First battle with some rebels. Everything is going as planned when suddenly.
"MY LAAAWD, OUR GENERAR IS IN GRAVU DANGERUI!"
At first I was like
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
but then
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
So obviously the battle mechanics take a little getting used to, mainly because my Samurai GB unit gives the false impression that he can take more hits than an eight year old armoured in cardboard. Anyway, I had to lead a grand total of two battles. The first rebel stack, and then the assault on Iwa province (I think), the one to the north. From there on, and since I recruited two full stacks i have never had to lead another battle again and the AR always won with 0 to 300 casualties per battle
I understand that they tried to make the autoresolve more balanced (unlike in M2TW where heavy infantry stomped archers and cav in AR) but the results it gives are so damn good I never bothered with a loading screen and then 5-10 minute battle. And on legendary, even if there is no save allowed, I've yet to blunder in any major way, except where AR cost me my first daimyo because I was impatient and assaulted with a depleted GB unit. I think AR in this game favors the number of units on the field way too much. I have two stacks to the enemy's one, but losing only 300 men across the board is too little. If 10 000 fight 20 000 you don't expect them to win but you don't expect the enemy to walk away with all but 0.5% of their army as casualites.
The replenishing system in S2TW is also quite unrealistic and IMO a downgrade of the classical retraining method. I can just camp on the edge of the border and those 300 men I lost will come back next turn, and I can march on and conquer.
The AI spends way too much gold on navies but it doesn't do amphibious assaults. So it sacrifices a good portion of its income to have the option of battling the (overpowered) wacky pirates or to go and harass my trade and resource nodes. In the mean time I've debarked with 2 and a half stacks and am raping my way across its lands, and even as the clan is losing provinces at a blistering pace, the AI still does not switch to land units nor does it disband the useless Japanese floating buckets.
Now, on to the buildings and city development. RTW had it right with population as a resource I think. Want to spam stacks off of that city? It better have sufficient growth otherwise you'd run out of men. M2TW simplified it and had armies appear magically because the army draft fairy said so. So Nottingham can spew longbowmen at three units per turn yet it still gains 800 population per season.
Here things are even worse. Not only is population not a resource, it doesn't even account for city growth or size! You like this here backwater hamlet that has a wooden outhouse and a dirt path for infrastructure? Good! Please provide us with sackloads of gold and you can turn it into a size 5 metropolis complete with a ton of military structures, academies, 3 slots per season of training and whatever else you can cram in there. In short, allowing the player to grow castle size just with gold is a bad way to change the system IMO.
The restricted space for building and the specialized cities I sort of like. You can make a cav or archer or infantry specific recruitment center, as well as one for warrior monks for example. But not allowing the retraining to gain smith/camp/whatever bonuses to be applied to one's existing stacks takes the joy of doing this. Since the economy was changed and gold actually matters in S2 (a good thing IMO, though it does restrict the epicness of having the option of moving 20 fullstacks at your enemy) even if you make all the best structures and can recruit max armour Naginata Samurai or max accuracy Bow Samurai, you don't actually get to play with your new toys all that much. Why?
Well because you already have 3 fullstacks of Ashigaru who have gained so much experience, you don't have the funds to make shiny new samurai stacks nor is there any great need to so so when the 3 Ashigaru armies splatter everything in autoresolve anyway.
Realm divide is coming soon, and I'm hoping some challenge will present itself and I'm forced to lead my battles or replace my dirt farmer armies with actual samurai for whose' training I've spent 30 thousand gold.
Oh, and naval battles are annoying since the AI spams so many ships and I'm thinking Christianity makes sense to splatter the enemy floating coffins if nothing else.
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