GameSpot Designer Diary: Mission Design

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I confess I reload Imperialism II (and Civ games) to get a starting position I like. I think your starting position is even more important in Imp2 than in Civ. You can tell which factions are going to be serious just by looking at their starting provinces. Not having enough wood or hills etc just hamstrings you.

Aha. Naughty. Very naughty

I have a completely different approach. I generally start with a difficulty level of somewhere between 360 and 400 (400 being the hardest of all settings). I don't often play at 400 though because it means having to set your opening military strength at the lowest level, and I find that trying to win from that position is usually just too much of a struggle.

But once I've set the diff. level, I take a very opposite tack to you. I pick the weakest faction, and often I will keep reloading the game until I get a particularly weak position. Basically what I look for is a faction that is critically lacking in one or more resources. (The hardest to recover from, I find, are usually countries with no wool).

So instead of looking for a good setup like you, I look for the worst possible setup and try to recover from it. Which I guess goes a long way to explaining why I find the game so much tougher to beat!

Shogun I never really mastered. I found starting in the east too cut throat - whoever won early there, won big and I prefer slower boiling games. So I tended to choose more leisurely western expansion or even better the challenge of Oda. But I was not skilled enough to avoid encountering a late game Hojo horde and endless battles which exhausted me.

I've beaten Shogun with every faction, and quite frankly, I've never really encountered the "Hojo factor" that so many people talk about. They're all much of a muchness to me. Generally the hardest bits I find in Shogun are not the other factions at all, but those darned rebel provinces. Some of them are diabolically difficult to subdue.

Mind you, I use the pause button a lot which makes things easier. I've played it the other way plenty too, but I just prefer to savour my battles rather than have to rush around trying to turn the tide.

I refuse to divulge my record on MTW however!

All this talk of Imp2 is making me want to fire it up again.

Actually, I was planning to fire up a new game just as you started to talk about it. But I ended up replying to a bunch of posts here instead.