Totalwar: Shogun2 Battle report number 2

[Swoosh So]

New battle report a 15 minute siege battle report vs the ai.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CItS...ayer_embedded#!

[Magyar Khan]

tx swoosh has stated elsewhere banners are about 30% too big.....

and the AI's army too strong and the defender a tactical noob :o)

[AggonyReborn]

I agree those banners are huge. if its a hidden unit how are they gonna hide those super long poles with the banners :D :D

The Ai had a full 20 unit army where the defender had only 10 units. great display, and gg :) also i got to say the snow just looks great in a sunny day! :)

[Seyavash]

Anyone else think it seems a bit too easy to scale the walls?

the other interesting thing I noticed is that everytime the cursor passed over a wall it seems that you could line your unit against it like in ETW/NTW I am curious how that might affect the performance of archer units. In Medieval they had trouble shooting down from a wall.

[Phog_of_War]

Anyone else think it seems a bit too easy to scale the walls?

the other interesting thing I noticed is that everytime the cursor passed over a wall it seems that you could line your unit against it like in ETW/NTW I am curious how that might affect the performance of archer units. In Medieval they had trouble shooting down from a wall.

I thought the same thing about the scaling the walls bit. Also it seems that the guard towers need to be "manned". I see a circle around each one of the guard towers as Kierian passes over them.

[drunkeneagle]

I agree those banners are huge. if its a hidden unit how are they gonna hide those super long poles with the banners :D :D

The Ai had a full 20 unit army where the defender had only 10 units. great display, and gg :) also i got to say the snow just looks great in a sunny day! :)

Looking at this pic http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...ll=1#post53890 the banners and pole do appear to be a little smaller.
I'm glad they are back though also with the Uma-jirushi.I guess its a nod back to the original:)

[drunkeneagle]

Opps!
https://i51.tinypic.com/2vk0tj6.jpg

[pevergreen]

I thought the same thing about the scaling the walls bit. Also it seems that the guard towers need to be "manned". I see a circle around each one of the guard towers as Kierian passes over them.

I saw the capture region, I didn't see a 'unit must be in this region' though. Would make sense but.

[antisocialmunky]

So.... build box of archers and infantry around keep, win game...?

[Revolting Friendship]

Nice to see an honest battle-preview.

Scaling walls should definately take much longer, by the very minimum doubled, prefferably trippled. And having ranged units at the walls should allow them to fire down on the climbing men. These two things are absolute nessecities imo. Also I believe having put a unit at the wall, it would be preferable if they do not target a single unit but instead just fire on whatever target is most urgent at the time, to save the AI from making stupid mistakes and the player from tedious micromanagement.

I see some retarded running back and forth by fleeing units, causing them to be cut down needlessly. I seriously expect CA to fix this, because from the gamers perspective it will be utterly frustrating in a battle like this to lose his precious soldiers in such a way. If this is a problem about them being caught between closed gates, refused to open due to proximity of enemies, then have the cut off unit make a last stand with their back to the gate, or allow them to rout over the walls. Surely if the enemy can climb them, so can the defender right.

Overall I feel hopeful, the AI seem agressive and strategic enough to make a siege interesting, and I'm very happy about the visual side of the units, the buildings and the landscape. Props to CA for the awesome research on arms and armour. Now I just want to see a bigger emphasis on spears and pikes, and a down-tuning of swords to the status of a sidearm rather than main-weapon.

Another wish is for the units to be more loosely grouped, and I would love if they were internally divided into smaller contingents, each marked by a nobori and headed by a lieutenant; i.e. more organic look of units and more banners. Even if this would just be an aesthetic touch rather than practical, it would do much to improve my gaming-experience.

[Magyar Khan]

climbing seems a bit ok IF the defender can shoot them down and the enemy unit climbing has reduced armourvalue or such...... climbing could not be much slower since there must be a way to surprise the defender as well when he is unaware of it..... also should depend perhaps on the steepness..... if i remember well the walls weren't that high

[Revolting Friendship]

It seems now that scaling a wall takes like, what, 10 seconds? At most. That's 2 or 3 volleys while climbing, it's rediculous. Remember that once the attacker is over the wall, ranged units aren't much for melee.
If you want to surprise, you should scale a piece of unguarded wall somewhere, it's the only way you CAN surprise. So I think it should take at least 30 seconds to scale a wall, all the attacker have to do is to find a piece of unguarded wall that the defender cannot reach within 30 seconds. He could further this goal by locking down the defenders forces with simultaneous attacks elsewere.

I don't see your point tbh. It shouldn't be that easy to surprise a defender. It would make defending castles death-traps without exception.

[hoom]

Distinctly underwhelmed with the combat. Pretty graphics.

Really a damned if you do damned if you don't but:
Dev team getting slaughtered vs a superior army while playing retardedly isn't exactly promising.

AI losing vs clearly inferior army would be seen as AI that couldn't fight its way into a paper bag but fighting stupidly like that either means that Kieran is a dunce (quite possible, he is in Marketing after all ) or the AI is so bad that they had to play like that to make sure it won.


That was supposedly a top end castle but its walls didn't seem to actually have any notable delaying effect on the attackers (at least as played).

We should have been allowed to see the effectiveness of archers/melee at the walls, allowing that weak garrison to at least inflict decent hurt on part of the attacking force before being ultimately defeated.
As played the walls provided about the same defensive bonus as the Empire star forts ie sweet F.A.

[Husar]

Hmm, yes, the speed with which the AI soldiers climb the walls makes them seem utterly useless, might as well park your archers on open ground with the rest of the army in front of them instead of positioning them on the walls to get slaughtered by only slightly delayed enemies.

[Nelson]

Castle! Castle?

The walls were hardly an impediment much less a defensive feature.

This was more like storming a barnyard! Just hop the fence! No need to bother taking a gatehouse.

As for everyone climbing the walls, I’m not buying it. Climbing is not for everyone. Men fear both heights and falling. These are serious phobias. Mighty warriors can flinch at the thought of looking over a shear drop. It would be like expecting just any soldier to go into an airborne unit.

I realize that the defender probably wasn’t very skilled but the attacks still raced over the walls way too quickly and in great numbers.

[Barkhorn1x]

Castle! Castle?

The walls were hardly an impediment much less a defensive feature.

Sums it up succinctly for me.

[Tellos Athenaios]

For me:

The good: the AI appears to be more engaging than it's ever been (I don't count running around in parallel lines miles away from the action as “engaging”). But my perception might be heavily “conditioned” by RTW here.
The mixed: the AI seems to depend on there being a fairly easy way in, i.e. those walls. Granted there wasn't any proper siege works for the attacking army to use.
The bad: the battle was decided by a fairly random fluke of the general getting killed during the charge.
The baffling: how on earth did the game decide this was only a “close defeat” instead of the complete, total and utter annihilation it actually was?

[hoom]

AI has always been very attacking when its got easy superiority in numbers and quality like in this battle.
Its when the AI thinks things are about even that it gets all dithery.

I disagree that the battle was over due to general getting killed.
It was over when Kieran failed to attempt to defend the walls or even in the basic battle setup with the AI commanding more & better troops.
That melee fight was already being lost because his troops were inferior.

They might have done better at the walls like how light troops on the walls in eg Rome vs ladders.

[al Roumi]

Yep, this video doesn't really tell me anything. The player made some pretty basic mistakes -ignoring half battelfield at a time and letting his general get involved that early -never mind trying to defend a massive area with hardly any troops. The narrators also seem far more interested in showing pretty things that are irrelevant to the issues at hand -notably: do things work.

The AI just rushed the fort, nothing else. If the fact that it sent flanking forces and envelopped the defenders is worthy of note, then I think that kind of speaks for itself. Flanking and envelopping should be the minimum the AI can do. To top it all off, the way it rushed its poorly prepared units piecemeal at the very end was not at all encouraging.

And then why on earth did the player not use the walls? At no point did he garrison/station his troops on them -for me that speaks volumes as to the use of the cover mecahnic -i.e that it still doesnt work. I also agree that the walls seem to easy to climb, they should at very least provide a defensive advantage and from that video i'm not at all convinced they do.

/grumble. I really do want to like this game and get excited about it but there's just so much in the way of me doing so, all this marketing is such dross. The one thing Total war games have been since (and including) Rome is pretty - and Shogun 2 looks pretty too, but that really shouldn't be the main marketing feature of a STRATEGY game.

[Magyar Khan]

and now we need a CA employee looking at these comments

[al Roumi]

and now we need a CA employee looking at these comments

Absolutely. The vitriol people have for CA and the recent TW games is not becasue they are uninterested in the genre. People moan becasue they care.

[hoom]

If the fact that it sent flanking forces and envelopped the defenders is worthy of note, then I think that kind of speaks for itself

Did it flank though? 3 enemy armies on the campaign map would surround similarly & if the campaign AI still doesn't concentrate its forces properly then it can't have been very much improved.