First impressions thread

[edyzmedieval]

For the lucky ones who are preloading (just started on mine, at a friends house), it's time to post your first impressions once you get your hands on the game. No need for reviews, just short impressions on how you found the game.

Preloading...preloading...




EDIT: For those who are still waiting, if you want to read a S2TW-inspired short story to spend your time while Steam downloads, click on my sig.
*shameless advertising over*

[Lemur]

Yup, got my preload conflicting with my kids watching streaming Netflix. Children! Sit in the dark and stare at the walls! Daddy's game needs to download!

-edit-

Preload completed. Children may resume watching Yo Gabba Gabba or whatever mindrot they like.

-edit of the edit-

Things to do while waiting for unlock: Drivers! Make sure all of your drivers are minty fresh before you try to run the game!

[CanCritter]

first impressions....."no"...you cant have it till 15th :O(

[edyzmedieval]

And so the fight begins! Preload almost finished, the waiting time is now over, time to become Shogun!

[Lemur]

Not in the USA, apparently, or at least not just yet.

[UglyJun]

nice shiney box instaling right now :)
ps: steam is one f... up thingy soo u might have to delete all local shogun content and then try install game from cd otherwise it will try and download even while your cd rom sitting in the comp lol

[Monk]

Not in the USA, apparently, or at least not just yet.

Steam doesn't unlock games until like 10 am EST. There's still 9 hours before Shogun 2 unlocks on steam, looking at the Store page.

For all those who love to stay up and play the new releases it must be torture! For me? I have a final tomorrow! No shogun for me until much later.

[Hosakawa Tito]

Not in the USA, apparently, or at least not just yet.

Mine is being delivered today, but first I must give my employer 8 hours of my precious time. Hopefully you boys will have it all figured out by then.

[foop]

I'd agree with people when they say that battles go very fast. I've only got as far as the tutorials and I'm already playing things on slow motion. I looked away for a moment and found my bow ashigaru underneath a lot of enemy cavalry, looking very sad.

To compound this, my troops have an incredible desire to run everywhere, unless I keep an iron grip on them. I assume this is some sort of idiocy on my part rather than a bug.

[Furunculus]

played a set piece battle, love it. first for a total war game since medieval.

odd bug:

when the battle finsihed and the notification pops up on screen my mouse pointer disappeared.

i could ctl+alt+del back to desktop, and go back into the game, but never get my mouse back to select the dialogue that would take me back to the main menu.

[Monk]

Shogun 2 is currently the most played game on Steam with 21,292 concurrent players. Which is the first time anything other than an FPS has held the top spot (even if temporarily) in a long time. Congratulations CA, looks like you hit a home-run in both numbers and fan reaction.

[Kagemusha]

I played more campaign play last evening as Mori and actually lost.It seems gone are the days where one can destroy full stacks with just few units. 1500 strong Ouchi army did short work from my pesky army and captured my home castle while i could do little to stop that from happening. Lovely!

[Gregoshi]

I'm playing a short Mori campaign on normal. I'm trying to take it slow as far as aggression goes other than taking the missions given. I have the mamoth (3 provinces to my 1) Amako clan on the ropes (I think) but now the "friendly" Kikkawa clan has declared war on me...and I'm stretched a little thin.

So far, the AI has done a respectable job. In a siege attack, it came at me from three directions, which kept me busy. After the Amako besiegers were defeated, their decimated army then did the only thing they could do - attacked and damaged the gold mine I was building. Quite annoying.

For this first campaign, I have the advisor on high and he/she have been very helpful. I am enjoying myself so far - seeing it is after 3am and I didn't really want to quit playing. I'm hoping tomorrow evening stays open to see if I can hold off the Kikkawa clan threat.

[gollum]

There should be an option in the files to slow down unit speed by home modding foop. I haven't got the game, but it was there in previous TWs.

[Daveybaby]

You could always just play the battles at half speed via the slider.

[gollum]

Originally posted by Gregoshi
After the Amako besiegers were defeated, their decimated army then did the only thing they could do - attacked and damaged the gold mine I was building. Quite annoying.

And quite encouraging too. If the AI does the right thing on normal, i mean :)

[Furunculus]

anyone know the full timeline yet?

i had heard 60 years, which means 240 turns and thus excellent, but some say only over fifty years which is 200+ turns and thus less awesome.

[Servius]

I'm not that impressed.

The Pros:
1) It has 4 seasons per year.
2) The agent movies are back in
3) Each region has 1 town/camp that gives each region something special. This could be a forest, which produces the Wood commodity and reduces the cost of ships built there, to a blacksmith, who can either upgrade the armor or melee weapons of the units produced there.
4) The diplomatic options to request a faction sever trade links or join a war are back.
5) It hasn't crashed yet.
6) If you've just captured the last region of a faction, you can choose to make them a vassal. No more having to negotiate whether someone becomes a Protectorate or not.

The Cons:
1) I feel like the engine is just an upgraded Rome: TW engine. I get this feeling because a) all the faction flags are circles again, b) the infantry accelleration speed and run speed seem really fast (just like in RTW, they moved WAY too fast), c) the hail of arrows still looks a screen of white filaments, just like in RTW, and d) there are no more towns on the camp map. Pre-battle speaches are back in too.
2) The campaign map is ugly. I have a Radeon 5700, Win 7 64-bit, and settings are on ultra, and no season looks particularly nice. I really miss Empire's bright colors. Green grass and blue oceans...Empire's campaign map was beautiful. S2's oceans are almost black and the land looks like the sun never really shines on it.
3) The units in the battle maps also look bad. You can't tell them apart by their armor/clothes anymore, only the flags distinguish them. And because all their armor is black, and the Anti-Aliasing is disabled, and I can't seem to turn off the bloody bloom, it looks like a black mass with way too many white jagged lines accenting everything.
4) The scale is SEVERELY reduced. There are 6 trade nodes in the entire game. There are no more towns, just region capitals (again, just like RTW).
5) After setting the last 4 games in Europe, a contintent with which I am well acquainted with, I'm having trouble caring about S2's campaign map. I know none of the regions by name. Each one seems like just another generic territory. In Empire, I knew almost every region in Europe and the Americas (though India was pretty foreign to me). In Empire, when England and France fought, it felt important, because the rivalry between those two nations is so old and well known, but now none of the factions in S2 carry that same weight.
6) The UI is HUGE, and wherever the UI touches the edge of the screen, you can't use your cursor to move the camera around.

I know several of these are based on my personal preferences, and so may not apply to everyone, but I feel the game is just much smaller and uglier than Empire. You make less money, you can have fewer trading partners, it takes longer to develop units (because you can build fewer in each region), There are only 2 religions, and 1 race, and 6 trade nodes, 10-ship max fleets, and 1 theater... I've already found it hard to get interested in it and have started going back to Empire. Now if I could just get that game to stop crashing before the 30th turn... :-)

[Liberator]

4) The scale is SEVERELY reduced. There are 6 trade nodes in the entire game. There are no more towns, just region capitals (again, just like RTW).

5) After setting the last 4 games in Europe, a contintent with which I am well acquainted with, I'm having trouble caring about S2's campaign map. I know none of the regions by name. Each one seems like just another generic territory. In Empire, I knew almost every region in Europe and the Americas (though India was pretty foreign to me). In Empire, when England and France fought, it felt important, because the rivalry between those two nations is so old and well known, but now none of the factions in S2 carry that same weight.

I know several of these are based on my personal preferences, and so may not apply to everyone, but I feel the game is just much smaller and uglier than Empire. You make less money, you can have fewer trading partners, it takes longer to develop units (because you can build fewer in each region), There are only 2 religions, and 1 race, and 6 trade nodes, 10-ship max fleets, and 1 theater... I've already found it hard to get interested in it and have started going back to Empire. Now if I could just get that game to stop crashing before the 30th turn... :-)

4.) I dont see that scale has be reduced at all. In Empire, there was just one building to recruit all land units except artillery. Now there a much more different recruitment buildings.
And the "towns" in empire didn't really matter so such, did say? In essence, they where just buildings outside the stronghold with a city name. Now there are still buildings outside the stronghold. They just have no name. Who can handle all these japanese names, anyway?
Japan didn't do much trade with the outside world back them, so 6 trade spts are quite justified.

5.) Well, I always enjoyed to learn something new while playing games, in strategy games that was often geografic or historic knowledge. You probably heard of "Fukushima" in the news recently. Well, this province actually exists in Shogun.

I guess it is quite likely that you run out of trading partners at a certain stage of the game, but I think that this just enhances the challenge in the later phases of the game, otherwise, once you would have conquered, say, 25 regions, it would be too easy.
I would have liked to see different buddhist sects, but I can live without them.


My one and only Con is *surprise* *surprise* the AI in battles so far.
1. The AI often does not deploy units reasonably in battles.
In ambushes, it often splits its army, giving the player the possibility to rush at one group, finishing it of, and than turn to the other.
When attacking in seiges, it often splits idiotic, too. Often seen some archers attacking from one side, while the rest of the attacking army attacks from another side. That gives the player the opportunity to kill the archers of with cavalry.

2. Also often in seiges, the attacking AI general does nothing until the battle is lost, than he starts attacking. He dismouts (!) and climbs up the castle walls. Kamikaze.
Eighter he dies fighting in the castle, or he flees. But if he flees, he doesn't mount his horse again. Easy kill for my cavalry.

[antisocialmunky]

On the legendary difficulty and with the hard RPS system, generals actually are really good at taking out defenders on castle walls.

[Daveybaby]

2) The campaign map is ugly. I have a Radeon 5700, Win 7 64-bit, and settings are on ultra, and no season looks particularly nice. I really miss Empire's bright colors. Green grass and blue oceans...Empire's campaign map was beautiful. S2's oceans are almost black and the land looks like the sun never really shines on it.
3) The units in the battle maps also look bad. You can't tell them apart by their armor/clothes anymore, only the flags distinguish them. And because all their armor is black, and the Anti-Aliasing is disabled, and I can't seem to turn off the bloody bloom, it looks like a black mass with way too many white jagged lines accenting everything.

I have to agree, especially on the battlemaps. All of the soldiers look like theyre made of polished metal. I'm assuming this is mostly down to the lack of AA, and will be better after the patch. It's not stopping me from enjoying the game, but i cant believe they released it looking like this.

As for everything else youve listed, i find it pretty interesting, because it amply demonstrates that you cant please all of the people all of the time. All of the things youve listed as good points i couldnt care less about (apart from the crashing of course) and the things youve listed as negatives (scale, setting) are the very reasons most of us are liking the game (and why some disliked empire). Some people just want different things from games, and i guess this one just isnt for you.

[al Roumi]

I'm only about half way through my first campaign and I'm firmly in the happy camp. Credit where credit is due, I applaud CA for the quality of S2. It still has some rough edges but this is leaps and bounds on from Empire's fuddle. I winged quite alot about Empire so I feel I should be vocal about my pleasure from S2.

[LeftEyeNine]

Most of Servius1234's con's are graphical or trivial, no ?