I've played 244 hours of this game, according to Steam, and I have never once seen a geisha. In my current long campaign, I'm going to make an effort to develop geisha technology, but damn. AmIright?
:turtle:
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I've played 244 hours of this game, according to Steam, and I have never once seen a geisha. In my current long campaign, I'm going to make an effort to develop geisha technology, but damn. AmIright?
:turtle:
I've never seen one either, or a hero unit. Since the AI won't oblige I'll have to try for both of those for myself in my next campaign...
I don't think I'd want to see a geisha unless I created it.
Ive seen an enemy geisha in a long hard campaign..... they are overpowered.... the witch killed 2 of my gens and i think 6 metsukes!!! I had to completely destroy the enemy clan to get rid of that witch.
Werent geisha's prety power full in the orignal shogun?
they were even more overpowered in the original
They;re all hollywood style.Move over the Geishas,there were far more better agents than the Geisha.I do not like how CA added only Ninja's and Geisha's.The other thing is we never see them in the game.
an article on the geisha makes me feel that they should be not in game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha
Well, I just briefly browsed that Wikipedia article and found no mention of Geisha's acting as assessins.
And I assume they really weren't assassins in real history. That is probably a notion we got from the film industry, be it Holliwood or the Chinese/Japanese martial arts movies that became popular in the 70s (or was it later than that?).
In any case it is probably safe to assume that the geishas as we have them in the game are nowhere near to historically correct, but just a "gameplay feature" to have another ninja type character in the game - a "super ninja" so to speak.
And of course you probably just want to have a geisha in a game of feudal Japan somehow.....
Remember something about female shinobi (kunoichi) using geisha clothes as a disguise, so it's ok imo :)
Also I've seen them ingame few times, it requires the last tier building, so it happens very late in the campaign...
I've only seen them deployed once in the very late game, it was around 1590 i think. Having played the original shogun in its hey-day, i can safely say it was one of the scariest sights i've seen in S2. Thankfully, the lady had other appointments to keep, and disappeared out of my territory a few turns later never to be seen again.
In STW I used to recruit geisha purely for the cutscenes. They were awesome. The compilation is missing one of the funnier videos, which can be viewed separately here. There are no failure videos - geisha do not fail.
The geisha success videos in Shogun II are much less subtle and lack humour. She can also fail, usually because of that silly penchant for waving her weapons around so that everyone gets a good look at them. Gah! Send them back to assassin school. Although as I said in the guide, nothing says "Die, die, die! Just DIE!!" like a geisha, and death wears a gorgeous kimono. They are better at assassination than ninja.
I got a geisha mid-way in my Oda campaign but was a little underwhelmed. Unlike STW, she was not a game changer, although she was perfectly fine. I had a number of max rank ninjas specialising in assassination whereas she was only mid-ranked; I found they performed comparably in missions. No doubt at max rank, she would be better but it seemed harder to level her than the ninjas.
I wonder how geishas and ninjas differ defensively? Has anyone ever killed a geisha in STW2? I felt more secure with her - less threatened by other agents, but that maybe purely subjective.
As you say, the difference is mainly in experience. A newly recruited geisha is a better assassin and (I think!) harder to kill then a newly recruited ninja. Ditto for each agent at maximum level. This is because the geisha has higher base abilities than a ninja to make up for her being a less versatile agent type. A master assassin ninja would perform better than a newly recruited geisha as he will have collected skills and retinue members to aid his abilities. It would probably be as difficult or slightly harder to kill him than the geisha, depending on what self-protection and escape scores he has.Quote:
Originally Posted by Econ21
The secondary factor is that the geisha is not weak to any agent type in the rock, paper, scissors setup, whereas the ninja is vulnerable to the metsuke. She's a little bit safer due to this.
Levelling a geisha is harder than levelling a ninja, as you note. She can't access the easy, safe missions like sabotage. Killing people is harder than repeatedly fire-bombing a building.
In some ways it feels like the main use for a geisha is as a stop-gap or emergency replacement. Need to kill someone urgently but your master assassin ninja has had a bad day and died, or is on the wrong frontier? No problem, recruit a geisha and she's got a reasonable chance to perform the deed fresh from murder school. Getting a replacement assassin ninja would take longer as you would need to level him up a bit and/or walk him over from one of the dedicated ninja provinces.
u cant kill a geisha..... she killed my lvl 5 metsuke..... no... wait.... 2 lvl 5 metsukes!
I had a Geisha in my Tokugawa campaign, since I maxed out the ninja-tree absurdly quickly to capitalize on the conceptually awesome but disappointingly ineffective Kisho Ninja. She singlehandedly took out 16 generals/daimyos from the Shogunate clan before running over the Shoni Christians and their r5 generals/metsuke/ninja while I was busy with Date and Ikko. I had 4 ninja in the east and just her and a sabotage-ninja in the west and they were more effective at culling numbers than my 4 assassin-ninja.
Dont think Ill bother with one again, tho. The videos are a letdown and the path to getting Geisha is tedious and not that rewarding. Sure they're effective assassins, but you can only have 1 and they're hyper-specialized - its like the only purpose of a Geisha is to be the 6th ninja. Ninja are great spies, invisible, can sab armies (one of the most ridiculously powerful abilities in the game) and can also act as assassins. Geisha can assassinate... better. So if you have 5 ninja sabbing and stabbin' away but you just need more, then and only then would I consider getting Geisha. The biggest incitement is actually the Sake Den-endbuilding - this+a good metsuke can spit out 2 provinces worth of cash.
Or this. That might be the only real upside to relying on Geisha. They are effective from turn 1. The issue with this is that since you can only have 1 why would you *not* have one around already after all that work to get the tech? And Geisha rarely die.Quote:
Originally Posted by frogbeastegg
Well I hardly bother with them since I tend to not use assassinations too much. Well, yes, if I encounter a very high star general that would fight a low star general of mine I sometimes have a ninja take him out just to be safe but otherwise I prefer crushing the enemy general on the battlefield, it's just more fun to me. I RP my campaigns so I do sometimes use assassinations "storywise" but gameplaywise my ninja are of more use sabotaging armies most of the time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nigel
Yes, there are, or were, female ninjas. Geisha's being a "ninja" isn't technically accurate, though - Geisha's were "companions" (not necessarily prostitutes, but not uncommon either). Just think of them as someone you hired to accompany you and make you look better or more important, or just to have a good time (again - not necessarily involving sex, but more like playing music, singing, or being an all purpose socialite). But it would also be inaccurate to say that there weren't Geisha ninja's, as anyone can wear a disguise. I don't find it hard to believe that a woman would dress up as a Geisha to appeal to the people she was after. Also, historically, ninja's didn't dress all in black like they are commonly depicted. It's possible that they would wear dark clothes to blend in for certain situations, but the ninja outfit we see today is a, mostly movie, design for dramatic effect. You wouldn't want to wear something that makes you look suspicious or stand out, and the common outfit would be something to play the part of the infiltration process to get close to the target (a samurai, a peasant, a noble, whatever) or just look inconspicuous.Quote:
Originally Posted by Arjos
I'm suddenly reminded of the movie "Eastern Promises", and there's this one scene where Viggo gets attacked by two russian mobsters while in a sauna. These guys were carrying linoleum knives, which is a very common tool and is a preferred weapon since basically anyone could carry one and not look out of place, or it could easily be written off as a tool that was used to... well, cut linoleum recently (shocker), so they wouldn't be arrested for it either. This is what happened a lot in Japan, where "assassins" would often dress as farmers and carry farming utensils for their weapons, like a sickle, because it was a very common tool and wouldn't be considered strange to carry one, as well as being cheap, disposable and easy to handle (even a peasant could use it). Most assassinations would be done in this, rather plain and unexciting, fashion - rarely did it involve scaling castle walls or stalking from the shadows (though, this definitely could have happened, and probably did on a few occasions).
Actually the black outfit comes from an artistic (mainly theatrical) tradition where someone wearing black (especially on stage) was understood to be invisible. Funny how the symbol comes to be taken literally.Quote:
Originally Posted by Madae
Well, I said "mostly movie", implying that there were obviously other reasons why - there are paintings of ninjas dressed in black long before movies. Dramatic effect would also imply theatrics.
It wasn't so much that someone dressed in black was "invisible", though that's possible (it would make sense). In theatre, it was mainly for moving around props, or acting like one, without standing out or drawing attention to yourself. It wasn't that the person in black was a "ninja" or an actor in the play (still possible), more than it was just used to blend in to the backdrop and make it look like something was happening, albeit without a person being there. Most people just got used to it and learned to ignore it - hence being "invisible".
I've only played three campaigns, and Takeda recruited a Geisha in two of them. In the other one, I recruited some. She was actually less effective at assassinations than most of my ninjas though, so it was quite a waste of money. Plus, my geishas always get executed by enemy metsuke within a couple of turns of being recruited. :wall:
Guess I'll have to focus one of my campaigns in the future on certain specific trees, because thus far I've focused on what's most effective to win, which rarely gets me to the bottom of any tree, so I've yet to see in 300 hours one geisha or one hero.
I've seen a Christian clan, the most powerful one in the game, produce multiple Geisha. It made me chuckle.
they were even more overpowered in the original