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One thing I'd love to see change for the expansion pack is the queue for building dojos, farmland, watch towers and ports. I would like for you to be able to concurrently build any of these building which are supported by your current castle. Obviously you can only start building a particular thing if you have met the prerequisites for it (can't start work on that Buddist Temple until the Tranquil garden is done and you have a large castle). But why can't you be building a archer dojo, spear dojo, armoury and a port at the same time? As long as you have the koku to pay for building three things at the same time why should you build them one at a time. This will allow you to upgrade your provinces much quicker than you currently can. I find I rarely get arround to producing heavy cav in the campaign because I've beaten the game before I can get the proper buildings. At the very least allow for a farm upgrade queue, dojo/military queue, weapon/armor queue. I rarely upgrade farmland because it eats up too much time. I'd rather upgrade my troops honor, weapons or armor.
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that sounds like a pretty good idea. the only thing, and this is only me playing Devil's Advocate here, is that the enemy would be able to do it too, which on the surface sounds fair, but then remember there are five of them and only one of you.
imagine you've spent years fighting your neighbors only to see some other daimyo, who's been very quiet for some time, suddenly spring from nowhere with superior troops (he hasn't been wasting them in province skirmishes), you must remember that the AI controlled clans don't necessarily play with the best logic (ie. doing their best to prevent neighboring enemies from massing huge armies) so the recently-corrected Horde problem would be a regular occurance.
still, i wouldn't mind having the option to simultaneously build just to see how differently the game changes
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i think the game limits you to building one structure at a time to model the limit of manpower you have. as it is, the game is pretty unrealistic in terms of army recruitment, where number of soldiers recruited doesn't affect your agriculture output. i think the R&D in the game is decent. like soly said, if you allow multiple buildings being constructed, the AI will most certainly take advantage of that. expect being geisha rushed early heheh. just my opinion.
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I like the idea too. I've wanted to construct multiple buildings simultaneously for a long time.
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Eateng-san does have a point: historically, constructing castles and the like took a long time and required lots of manpower. Remember, the construction technology we're talking about here is basically at the level of the ancient Egypt (no wheel, mobs of semi-slaves dragging around multi-ton stones). Of course, it would be an improvement to be able to divide your resources to construct two buildings simultaneously (which would require twice the time for each), but that kind of thing would be useful only very rarely.
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"When you leave your gate act as though an enemy was in sight."
- Japanese proverb
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I'd imagine that most of the Dojo, though, would be of simple wooden construction. That's certainly the way they look. I'm sure that most of the lower-level dojo would be easily constructed in less than a single season, even without the benefit of modern machinery and techniques. Castles, of course, would take far longer.
Even still, the slowness of building doesn't bother me much at all. In fact, I'd say it's a rather important part of the gameplay that we can't build up to the highest development levels in only a matter of years.
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I kind of expect the AI to ramp up the tech tree pretty fast if the queues were implemented this way. But that would provide a greater challenge in the latter part of the game. If the Hojo horde is removed in the next iteration then the game could get outright boring at the end. But facing high honor, well armored samurai weilding superior weapons would make for a fun fight. Plus towards the end you tend to have a ton of koku and could actually use it on better dojos.
I also thought of manpower when I suggested these improved queues. What type of labor is needed to make each building. Improved farming probably involved improving the irrigation to the fields. Once the original engineering is thought out it is pure grunt work. A dojo probably takes some grunt work to transport the raw materials but then is almost all skilled carpenters. A port is probably similar. The larger castles would be very large undertakings involving alot of grunt labor to transport rock and lumber but then alot of engineering and skilled labor to assemble. But that is already reflected in long build times What I am trying to get at is each of the different queues probably pull on different pools of labor. So it is not unrealistic to be improving farmland and building a dojo at the same time. Maybe a good compromise is that when upgrading your castle, that is the only thing that can actively be under construction at that time.
Plus they are talking about adding new dojos to the game. I am not sure if I will ever get around to building a drill dojo if the queues remains the same.
Maybe this could be another option. Serial or parallel queues.
Has anyone here ever played "Lords of the Realm II". It has a very good model for dividing labor and assigning peasants to either food production, making weapons, mining raw materials or conscription into an army. Each province has a certain population of people which either goes up or down based on the happiness in the province. If you want to build a castle you need alot of wood and stone and peasants. Plus you need enough peasants left over to farm and manage livestock to keep the population feed. You can put as many peasants on the castle building as you want. The more you put on the faster the castle is built. But you will suffer in other areas. Plus to build armies you need to conscript peasants. This did two things it left few peasants to do the other tasks and it caused the happiness in the province to go down. This game also had maps similar to the strategic map which you used to invade and conquer other province. The tactical combat model wasn't that great, but the castle sieges were fun. I am not suggesting that Shogun go to this model but they might steal a few ideas from it for labor management. I am suspicious that they stole the strategic map from it, although some other game could have done that before LotR2. I read somewhere that LotR2 was on of the games Stephen Turnbull played.
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All your base are belong to us
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Multiple construction at the same time sounds like a good idea. But it would be a huge drain on kokus and delay troop production.
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A great warrior never reveal his true skills....
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Lords of the Realm 2 was an outstanding game. The strategy turns were more involved and the castle attacks and defenses more interesting than those in STW. That system allied with the tactical engine from Shogun would almost be ideal.
I wish a modern LotRealm3 would be done.
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My hope is that the next Total War is set in the same time period as LotR2. Then we could have cool castle attacks with all sorts of fun stuff. Boiling oil, catapults, battering rams, siege towers, cow chukas. That would give you something close to LotR3.
