Frogbeastegg's Guide to Total War: Shogun II

[frogbeastegg]

Credits.

This guide could not have been created without the community's many, many discussions on strategy, and tireless research into gameplay mechanics. The questions asked by new players on major game forums provided the best indication of what this guide needed to cover. Thank you to the hundreds of people on totalwar.org, totalwar.com, totalwarcentre.net, eurogamer.net's Shogun II topic, steam's Shogun II forums, gamefaqs.com's Shogun II forum and quartertothree.com's Shogun II topic.

Assisting me in making the guide were:
Andres, for general support and for raising awareness of the guide.
Crazed Rabbit, for creating the title image, and proof reading.
Econ21, for general guide feedback.
GeneralHankerchief, for taking screenshots for the unit section.
Gregoshi, for proof reading.
Hosakawa Tito, for proof reading.
Kagemusha, for creating various images.
Lord Preston, for proof reading.
Ludens, for acting as proof reading coordinator.
Monk, for helping with in-game research and creating the agent images.
Myddraal, for creating various images.
Peasant Phill, for editing the unit images.
Sigurd, for some technical forum fixes.
Tamur, for helping with in-game research.
Therother, for forum based support, and helping with in-game research.
Tincow, for loads of forum based support.
Voigtkampf, for proof reading.
Yaseikhaan, for taking screenshots for the unit section.

Thank you to CA, for creating such an excellent game, and for providing me with the occasional bit of information.

[Lord of Lent]

Thank you, Lady Frog, for creating an excellent TW guide once again!

[Jochi Khan]

Just what I have been waiting for.
Now perhaps the mysteries of the 'Campaign' part of the game will become clearer to me.

[LeftEyeNine]

Woot, this misses a price tag.

[Monk]

Woot, this misses a price tag.

Damn straight. The stats alone she shared with us are absurd. Over 50,000 words, 300,000 letters, 800 paragraphs. Now that's dedication.

Our thanks, froggy.. now get some rest. You deserve it.

[Gregoshi]

Our thanks, froggy.. now get some rest. You deserve it.

---( The words are written, the work is done. Now its time for the frog to have fun. )

[Marshall Louis-Nicolas Davout]

An excellent peice of work,CA should use thiS!
And Frogbeast,I thank you for creating this,it does take a long time to do this!
One thing,I'm stuck here,Let me show you.



Now,in your campagin section,it would work perfectly.

[Cash]

Well done. Explains a lot. Thank You for the time put into this guide.

[Populus Romanus]

Absolutely mind boggleingly incredible amount of work put into this truely massive guide!

Just one thing, are you going to do a guide for the new DLC with the Gempei War and the new agents?

[crzyrndm]

Well done on an Epic compilation of great strategies and tips.

Section "How to survive the first 4 turns", para 9, " If you forget to assign a choice the game will not prompt you";One of the patches changed it so the game will make a random choice if you do not choose on turn 1 and this dosen't appear to be noted.

TWC's Wealthmonger had this correction also

Good guide alot of work put into it, one small correction. Page #3 "If your Daimyo has low honour it will cause a happiness penalty. If he has 2 honour then there is a -1 penalty, if he has 1 honour then it's -2, and 0 honour gives a nasty -3 penalty."
I purposely ruined Oda Nobuhide's Honour to see the outcome and although his honour was technically -2 it was actually showing as 1, being the minimum Honour your Daimyo can have. So the -3 penalty can't happen because the game won't allow it. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a member of .org so I'll put it here and hope they see it.

[Andres]

froggy, you're fantastic

[frogbeastegg]

Thanks, everyone.

One thing,I'm stuck here

That's a touch situation! I think the main problem is the fact that your borders are quite sprawling. That means you need to maintain more troops than you would if you had compact borders, which means more expense and less funding for development, which makes bankruptcy easier.

It's hard to say what you can do. I'd say your first priority has to be reducing costs and/or increasing income. Check to see if you can safely disband some units. Since 90% of your provinces share a border with an enemy, you probably can't, but maybe you can disband some samurai and then buy cheap ashigaru instead as a temporary measure. That would save you approximately 100 koku per unit. If you have some ships, try and claim a trade node or two ASAP. Check to see if you can get trade agreements with anyone.

Or you could take drastic action: abandon some of those hard to defend, isolated provinces, bundle the units which garrisoned them up into an army, and go and take some of the provinces in areas which will give you shorter borders. For example, if you manage to take Ise, Owari and Iga, you won't need to garrison two of those provinces and can also remove garrisons from Echizen and Hida. Even if you manage to scrape through without abandoning provinces, you need to take action to shorten your borders.

Just one thing, are you going to do a guide for the new DLC with the Gempei War and the new agents?

Probably not, for two reasons. The first is time: I had to cut a lot of planned content in order to get the guide out, simply because the time I have available to work on it has decreased drastically. There should have been a battlefield strategy and tactics section, a battlefield controls section, a massive useful links section, a large navy section, skill development plans for the agents, a section on generals and their development, a clan management chapter, and more. All cut. The army template chapter should have been longer and far more useful.

Secondly, I have not played Shogun II for fun since I began work on the guide back in April. Everything has been about research, testing, more research, and more testing, to the point where the game feels like work. You wouldn't believe how badly that warps the way you play - using units, and tactics, and strategies that you dislike, repeating the same tedious actions over and over in order to record the results, watching the turn limit tick away as you spend time trying to figure out something which you don't actually care about knowing that you will have to rush later in order to catch up on the aspects you are being forced to neglect now. There's a reason I get a funny twitch every time someone mentions agent success chances ...

Section "How to survive the first 4 turns", para 9, " If you forget to assign a choice the game will not prompt you";One of the patches changed it so the game will make a random choice if you do not choose on turn 1 and this dosen't appear to be noted.

Ah, that's useful.

Page #3 "If your Daimyo has low honour it will cause a happiness penalty. If he has 2 honour then there is a -1 penalty, if he has 1 honour then it's -2, and 0 honour gives a nasty -3 penalty."
I purposely ruined Oda Nobuhide's Honour to see the outcome and although his honour was technically -2 it was actually showing as 1, being the minimum Honour your Daimyo can have. So the -3 penalty can't happen because the game won't allow it. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a member of .org so I'll put it here and hope they see it.

That must have changed in a patch. I observed that effect in one of my earliest games, the one where I went Christian as Shimazu. Can't remember if that was the release version or the first patch. I haven't tried it again since. Thanks for copying that over; I'll copy of my response over so he knows it's been seen.

I'll see if I can find time to edit both in.

[LestaT]

Any chance of getting this into .pdf form ?