Simplicity

[Tamur]

First, apologies if this is old ground. I did a forum search and didn't find anything. But keywords may not be very useful on this topic.

Anyway...

A lot has been made by press &c about CA going back to basics with S2. I thought it was just marketing drivel until I was finally able to pick up the game a couple of weeks ago.

Simplified building tree, simplified unit choices, simplified campaign interface, simplified agent options, and a lot more (a lot less?). This game feels completely different from everything since the original Shogun.

Now that the game has been out a while, and you've had the chance to play around with it a fair bit, I'm curious what you think of this newfound freedom from complexity.

Do you find S2's simplicity refreshing? Too constraining? Not enough camels?

[econ21]

First time I tried to play STW2 (Shimazu, N/N), I rebelled against the simplicity. It reminded me of everything I disliked about STW: an unrelenting slugfest across medieval Japan. (I know it says Total War on the tin, so I can't sue under the Trade Descriptions act).

Second time (Oda, H/N), I appreciated it a lot - especially that it allows the AI to be more competitive. In fact, looking at the campaign map, it seems that the mountains and roads often constrain strategic movements to be rather like the Risk map of STW/MTW. From any one province, there's often only one or two ways you can (or should) move. I think this simplicity - compared to the mindblowing freedom of the ETW campaign map - could be another factor behind the challenge. But I also liked some of the new complexity - the skill point system for generals and agents; the province specialisations; and the interesting research tree. And once you get to the mid-game in STW2, you have a fair amount of freedom of action or even inaction, if - like me - you enjoy turtling for a while and enjoying the scenery.

Third time around (Takeda, VH/N), I might be going negative again. The new complexities actually don't seem that complex (my generals and agents typically all have the same builds; I have got my mind around province specialisation etc). After vainly struggling to break out of the tough Takeda starting position, I took a break and went back to ETW as England. There you have so much freedom and complexity, it was quite refreshing. However, I will not be beaten and will get back to STW2. But I do find the lack of "shinies" and "stuff" a little off putting though, and can't wait until CA apply the same back-to-basics philosophy to the much bigger canvas of a RTW2 or MTW3.

[HopAlongBunny]

Overall I like it.

The battles mean something again. RTW/MTW2 you could fight double digits worth of battles in a turn that meant absolutely nothing (at highest difficulty you were well advised to manually fight them all)

The tech tree is pretty straight forward. Good.
It lays bear the useless fluff that "longer/complex" trees abound with. Face it, they all boil down (in the end) to a few "must-haves" and a layer of annoyance needed to get there.

I repeat: Battles mean something again.

[gollum]

Originally posted by HopAlongBunny
Face it, they all boil down (in the end) to a few "must-haves" and a layer of annoyance needed to get there.

heh, yes absolutely. The difference is that historical wargamers want complexity of choices but they often run off from complexity of interactions, which is why they don't prefer strategy games but historical "sandbox" simulators that allow a large margin of complexity in choices and so for potential reverie scenarios. In actuality complexity of choices is useless if the AI can't use them, and i can't remember when he could use a vast number of them from STW already, and if you are playing versus other people, they often boil down to few must haves indeed and then its a rush on rush who'll get them first.

Of course this did not need to be the case - but for TW its unavoidable.

Complex wargames that aim for good strategy undergo many many incarnations and usually they have groups of fans that refine the rules and mechanics (the engine and mechanics in terms of a pc game) throughout the years. One such game is A World at War, that you can play by email due to the excellent pc tool warplanner they have made for it. The game is designed by Bruce Harper and is an intellectual heir to "Rise and Decline of the Third reich" and a direct heir to "Advanced Third Reich" and "Empire of the Rising Sun". That game (and other old board games, like Empires of the Middle Ages, that seems the boardgame precursor of MTW) are very difficult to balance due to having very complex rules and lots of complexity - just like where TW went. However those games are often played by niche audiences that refine as said the rules over (litterally for AWAW) decades in order to have a better game.

TW on the other hand is like an amnesiac - CA forgets with every new release what they did right in the previous ones. They re-invent the game every time for 99.9% commercial purposes and little else, unfortunately. Screenshots and new mechanics/choices you are given are plasmatic if they are not integrated within a meaningful strategical interaction exchange with the opponent - be it human or AI. Unsurprisingly, Empire was the peak of weak AI and easy gameplay. And yes, they told us that it would have been so much better if only person x did not leave them in the cold of the shower, but other than that i think they went the wrong way is also part of it. S2 seems to remedy some of that - i cannot know how much as i haven;t bought yet the game, but its clear that this is the case.

[frogbeastegg]

(With the proviso that this is all based on my gameplay preferences and opinions, and so I know most of my points will either strike true or false according to the reader's own tastes)

I find that it's focused, not simple.

I want complex decisions and meaningful decisions in my strategy games, two different categories which are cousins and which aren't always found together. I require them, in fact. If I don't feel like I am making them then I lose interest fast. With that said, Shogun 2 is the most complex game in the series IMO. That's due to the way I view complexity and meaningful decisions. To me it isn't about a big menu of choice. It's about every possible choice being significant, and about them all having an impact on the game I am playing, and with the absolute minimum of busy work or tasks which do not feel like they present a decision or are meaningful. Better 3 significant choices than 6 lightweight ones.

For me, focused is perfect. All the campaigns in the series I have liked? They have been the focused ones. Shogun 1, Viking Invasion's Britain map, the smaller campaigns from the Kingdoms expansion. I've finished at least one game of each of those, in most cases multiple games.

The campaigns I haven't liked? The sprawling ones. I can't remember finishing a single game in any of those, not in MTW, RTW, BI, ETW, NTW, or M2TW. Typically I've had enough after around 30-50 turns, and I'll have been going through the motions for a time before that.

Focused maps feel more realistic and engaging to play on for me. Conquering Bingo in a single battle feels plausible. Conquering half of France with a single siege is absurd. Geographically, those focused maps tend to offer more details I find strategically enjoyable. Europe is just a big annoying mass and it's so zoomed out that there's no personality to the terrain.

Same principle applies to units and that's been true since MTW. Back then I used to get the feudal family of units available and I did not want to go any further, no interest whatsoever. I made nice armies with those units and wanted some upgrades to boost their stats, but the chivalric and gothic families felt like plodding on a treadmill in order to gain access to units which would cause me to disband and rebuild all of my existing armies. Later games made it worse by making all the different varieties of a unit available more easily. I'd like a spearman, thanks. It works, I know what it does and so does the AI. I don't want to sit through a menu of 5 fractionally different types of spearman like I'm picking curtain colours. That's not an interesting decision to me. The interest is in paying for that unit, getting it available, getting it where I need it, and using it.

Research? Same again. S2TW feels like each advance is meaningful. In ETW some were nice, others felt like fluff I had to sit through to get to the good stuff. For the most part I didn't care about research in ETW and it was yet another part of the slog. I love that I can't have everything too! I have to choose which unit types to advance, and how to balance civilian versus military. I'm a research nut; it's not many strategy games which force me to choose like this. Normally I get everything and the only decision comes from which order I collect in. Sometimes it's harder for me to pick my next tech in shogun 2 than it is in civilisation and I find that deeply impressive.

Trade and economy. Oh thank heavens the fat has been trimmed away! I make some decisions, can see clearly and easily what impacts what where and how, and move a few bits or make some diplo deals. Job done. Then I can give attention to the important part: spending the money. Economy in games shouldn't be about slapping in 1 copy of the same building in every province you own on the turn you research it, or shuffling tens of units around. It should be about thinking "I have 2000 to spend. Where will it do the most good and how am I defining 'good'?"

Traits. I prefer the new system once again. I'd rather give my people traits by hand then have them turn into a generic mass of corrupt drunk inbred wonders as happened in all of the games where traits where dished out according to chance.

Buildings? Now I'm making meaningful choices between a decent number of buildings, and once I have made my choice I don't have much follow up busy work because it's easy to know when to go back. Before I was trotting around all my provinces building the same big list of the same buildings, most of which offered similar things. When I wasn't doing that I was trotting around to see if I could issue new build orders yet. Some of the bad still survives in shogun 2: upgrading all of my farms when I research an upgrade gets painful after a certain point. Still, it's progress.

Agents? I practically cried for joy when the series got rid of walking diplomats around. At long last diplomacy was about negotiating and not shuffling a unit for 15 turns to open talks, only to have the AI or old age kill him as soon as he arrived. Shogun 2 is notable for being the first game in which I have used agents on more than a disinterested scale; this is the first time where they have felt sufficiently worthwhile and have been sufficiently painless to manage. In all of the prior games I started to get fed up when I had more than a couple in total.

Setting? All of that atmosphere I love comes from the game needing to show a single culture and being free to show it in depth. Shogun is the only other TW game which managed to have atmosphere IMO. If you add a second culture to shogun 2 then you need to double everything related to atmosphere in order to preserve that feeling: art, speech, sound, UI, movies, loads of additional minor things. Or you split the same resources used to cover 1 culture and make them cover 2, which is far more likely to happen given the nature of game funding.

Most important of all for me is the net result of all of this on the AI. After so many problems at every level from RTW onwards, I'd call shogun 2's very good, and on both maps too. Sure it has flaws and is not perfect; that is true of any game AI and will remain so for a long time to come. In terms of what it has to do and what it manages to do, I find it hard to complain. It's capable of making me work hard, of catching me out, of nailing my weak points, and of pulling the occasional move I'd be faintly smug about if I did it myself. Oh, and when it's not making me work then it has the great advantage of not being obnoxious. No more playing whack a mole with 5 stacks of 2 units each. Instead I face a 10 unit stack and have a proper battle.

Speaking entirely IMO, from the moment you figured out the basics of how to play the 3d campaign map part of the series has been a wallpaper catalogue. Loads of light variations on the same few choices, most of which had no significant impact or which existed to get in the way, or fill up my time, or to make life look busy, all taking place against an opponent which practically forgot to turn up to play. M2TW did manage to scrape the lower rungs of complexity and meaningful decision with its castle versus city mechanic and a few other things.

In Shogun 2 I find plenty of occasions where I sit and stare at my monitor for minutes at a time, weighing up my options. There have been tough times where I have gone to make a cup of tea as I mulled over the possibilities. I've had more angst over how to approach a single diplomatic deal in shogun 2 than I did in my entire time with games like RTW. To me that will always be real strategic complexity.

CA have taken every aspect I liked from the prior games and brought them into shogun 2, and thrown out nearly all of the aspects I hated. From very minor stuff like UI details, to huge things like focus. To me, this game is the formula matured after many growing pains. Only wish they would boot the naval battles! Of course the next game will be some sprawling beast, and I shall once again be a sad froggy. Don't want to conquer Europe with 300 varieties of spearmen! :pouts:

[Gregoshi]

Your analysis is top notch froggy. You've managed to describe my thoughts without me realizing them (just gut feelings, no precise thoughts like you spelled out). I agree with every point you made.

[HopAlongBunny]

Thank you gollum for reminding me of one of my all time favorite gaming experiences.

Empires of the Middle Ages is/was a classic. Hard to put together a full slate of players for, but we managed it a couple of times. Face to Face diplomacy and back-stabbing /sigh

I think frogbeastegg's post should be forwarded to CA and nailed to their memo board as required reading.

[gollum]

CA knows all this better than anyone. Just CA is a (major) games company and like every such is intend on making money first. They don't make bad games because they can't make good ones. They make bad games (with lots but meaningless choices and flashy graphics and many "my nation and your nation" that result in large maps and large periods covered that dont really suit the TW format, and little disney-like animated features and faces and voices all over) because they know it will sell more.

RTW is considered the peak and blueprint of the series by many although it was way too easy, incredibly buggy, full of endless and meaningless chores, with clueless AI and very unbalanced. It had however, as one CA employee of the time put it "genious". Marketing genious, that is ;) Empire was a worthy heir of it, and we await indeed with anticipation a new R2 and eventually M3 to see the same faults play out all over again and the sales soar; yet more "genious" ;)

But anyway, thank you for S2 CA, a needed and appreciated change of pace for TW.

[Tamur]

Thanks all for your thoughts. I framed my question (hopefully) without too much bias. But I am loving the return of atmosphere and meaning. frogbeastegg, you said it perfectly and with great perspective. I totally agree that the game is complex due to nuanced and meaningful choices rather than due to a billion meaningless actions every turn. As HopAlongBunny said, the battles mean something again. So do many other things.

The one campaign I've had time for had me boxed up in the north as the Date. In previous games, it would have just been a matter of "treadmill units up, train loads of them, mow down the two dozen mini-stacks to the south, and onwards to victory". Whee...

Instead, I sat back and sipped something, and thought, "What if I simply parked good-sized military at border choke points, let my southern neighbour soak up all the damage spilling over from a Takeda/Hojo dispute, and hacked away at everyone's economy via trade & diplomacy?"

So I disbanded half my units, cemented an alliance to my neighbour via marriage, started building fleets and shinobi (one or two, not 15 thank heavens), and have been having a lovely time being subversive, trade-heavy, very rich, very diplomatic, and totally insulated from attack. I kind of feel like Crassus must have in Rome in the 50s BC.

That long pause to consider two paths is a testament to how much the game changed from ETW to S2.