Shogun 2 interview at NowGamer

Link



My own thoughts & observations:


1.) Sounds like the multiplayer campaign mode (including co-op) will be returning.

2.) It appears there's still confusion/uncertainty over exactly how many playable clans there is, as the article cites there are nine of them.

3.) He talks about the AI being "believable". I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "smart". As always, we'll just have to wait and see.

4.) I'm curious as to how the game will be able to accommodate up to 56,000 men onto a battlefield at a time. The battle maps are going to have to be pretty darned big, otherwise it's going to feel mighty cramped!

5.) The details on the MP side of the game are still maddeningly vague & sparse. CA is definitely holding its cards close its vest on this one.

I'm not particularly liking the RPG aspect of heroes. I'd rather have them fixed in one way instead of me "levelling them up" to become what I want. I want them to be like their historical counterparts, not guys like Oda Nobunaga being the most respected monk of all time.

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Originally Posted by Martok

3.) He talks about the AI being "believable".

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That's a novel way of describing it. Here's hoping that he means believable to a skilled player.

Well one of my favourite moments in Total War games was one of my first battles in Shogun and its specifically because of believable stupidity.

I didn't know what the AI could/would do yet & was well outnumbered plus was pretty sure I was out-qualitied by my enemy so couldn't just do a standard field battle.
I spotted a hill between two bits of forest & decided to try an ambush to get encirclement and take advantage of flanking bonus.
My forces were setup with a SA on the hill protected by a single thin stretched bait YA unit in the open, with YS/YA on each flank hidden in the forest.

As I'd hoped the AI made a beeline for the YA out in the open.
While I'd been hoping for a nice encirclement I was surprised & impressed to see the enemies morale crushed & a chain rout :)
From then I was completely hooked.

Unfortunately in a later patch CA made the AI count the number of units that were present in the battle, compare it with the number it could see and go hunting for any missing ones.
Any isolated units found would be defeated by superior numbers, often out of range of reinforcement or with their main force in the way.

Still, you could make use of a hidden 1/3 to 1/2 of your force because one of your separated forces would have numerical advantage (because battles were all max 16 vs 16) so could (hopefully!) win its battle in time to save the day by crashing into the rear of the other battle.
Or a decent unit or two could be sacrificed, diverting off a couple of units giving you local superiority in the main battle.

In the Rome engine (maybe even in MTW?) and on the AI doesn't even have to scout to find hidden units, AI just sends forces straight at them from Start Battle.

The older version is the more 'believable' AI (I don't go and count all the enemy units) and makes for better gameplay so if they are trying to bring back some of that sort of thing I'm pleased :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Martok

Link



My own thoughts & observations:


1.) Sounds like the multiplayer campaign mode (including co-op) will be returning.



5.) The details on the MP side of the game are still maddeningly vague & sparse. CA is definitely holding its cards close its vest on this one.

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1) That's always a good thing :yes:.
2) That may be good or bad. Good because maybe they might actually be working on MP good this time, bad because maybe they not. We shall see. :juggle2:

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Originally Posted by AntiKingWarmanCake88

1) That's always a good thing :yes:.
2) That may be good or bad. Good because maybe they might actually be working on MP good this time, bad because maybe they not. We shall see. :juggle2:

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Well it sounds like CA is working on something fairly huge for the MP side of the game. However, it also sounds like they want to make sure it'll work properly before they go public with....whatever it is. Better that, I suppose, than announce it prematurely and get everyone excited, only for it to turn out they can't pull it off after all.

Of course it makes it somewhat frustrating for those who want more info, but I can't really fault CA for its thinking.

welll it sounds like many things.... also teh same tone has in previous series.... :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Martok

3.) He talks about the AI being "believable". I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "smart". As always, we'll just have to wait and see.

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Good phrase, as it means nothing. Are we to go "I can believe that this is a CA created AI as it's strolling around the bottom of the cliff whilst my gunners slaughter them at leisure" or "I believe I'm playing against another human"?

~:smoking:

Ever since I started playing games on a grand scale like this the AI always became exploitable.

Starting with games like Shingen the Ruler on NES, Romance of the Three Kingdoms on Sega, Lords of the Realm II on PC, and my favorite STW...

I was always hooked on games like this and I was hoping for Lords of the Realm II to make a come back, but they really destroyed the series with LotR III, and after RTW that was it for me with TW... so the years of waiting began. :(

When I saw King Arthur the Role Playing Game it looked really nice and when I tried the demo I already saw the flaws in the battles. I downloaded the Full game to get a taste to make sure if I would get hooked or not before buying it and sure enough the balancing with units and spells was way off the charts. It's a shame to cause they had a really nice campaign map that was easy on the eyes and the battles looked nice. And waiting continued for something like TW on it's scale with good gameplay...

I don't mind Fantasy with TW, but I would prefer that it be left in a FTW when (if) the make one. STW didn't need fantasy with it to be good and I don't think STW2 should need fantasy, but in the end it's their game and sounds like they want to experiment with it to see how it plays out.

If they do a MP campaign for STW2, which I think they should... it should be at least 4 players max and not 1v1. Playing 1v1 isn't very mulitplayerish and epic at least not to me. Their is a lot they could do with it, but I don't think it should be a high on their list to spend a lot of time on. Time should be really spend on gameplay/balance and adding some features for MP for once.

As for how many soldiers on the battlefield I say bring as many as your pc can handle, but of course BIGGER MAPS! Myself would like to see more unit cards if they do that and not bigger clumps of units.

CA was always short on what they had to give on info and always made some promises they didn't keep, but they aren't the only ones out of the hundreds of games I've played... it's something you get use to sadly.

In the end it doesn't matter cause right now they got my money with NTW (which isn't to bad just a crap era for me) and will probably get my money with STW2. Until another company makes a game something like TW and better which won't happen anytime soon it looks like my money goes to the Total War games.

This stuff about the big mp idea worries me, theres so much left to get right in normal multiplayer. totalwar doesent take very well to "game modes" They need to fix buggy movement, having to recheck that your unit has accepted the run command like 3 times, having to redraw your unit about 3 times to get it to position right if its anywhere near a building or some bits of hills and even sometimes in normal woods, then theres the foyer that shows all online players and allows them all to chat in a centralised area that they auto login to when playing mp, then theres maps - the current selection in ntw is really poor we need tons of maps either from CA shoving every map in the campaign into mp or a campaign map area selector like magyarkhan posted here or a map editor which made shogun amazing and always able to play on varied maps, the user maps and standard maps in shogun have never been bettered for multiplay.

Then theres grouping controls - the current grouping controls can only be done on the UI and theyre very basic and clunky - previous totalwar titles could soft group units outwith the UI and had hotkeys to select and u could use in conjunction with the clunky ui grouping if you chose to.

They need to make the debug camera a standard camera available in options - the normal cameras are just too close in to the action (if they dont have the option for debug camera or a really far out zoom this will almost instantly ruin multiplayer, they said theyre using binary so i dunno if we can select debug cam so it should be added in the options menu).

Theres also a ton of improvements that can be made in the foyer and hosting, ability to choose your starting flank in your team or central - i get tired to host games and be on the same flank every game... , ability for the host to switch players from 1 team to the other at setup - currently u have to kick players if they join on the wrong teams and the game is full.

All these important details would make shogun 2 the best Multiplayer totalwar to date without even looking at new ideas. My fear is that they will try for something big and forget the essentials.

well written and clear post swoosh.... some new things for the wishlist as well....