Shogun!

[PershsNhpios]

Sitting here, with Ovicula, my rescued kitten sprawled over my lap - I was reading through the Gameplay vs Graphics thread.

I was going to reply and damage Tom0 for his terrible mistake in relating wrongly that Caius Caesar engaged in warfare with Sertorius of Iberia, (For honour's sake man, read the Parallel Lives of Plutarchus!),
however when I saw elsewhere that Shogun was in many regards superior to Mediaeval - I became rather interested.

So please, forgive Tom0 for his terrible sin - and honour my request;

What are the major differences between Shogun and Mediaeval?

[TosaInu]

Hello Glenn,

STW vs MTW you mean?

[Puzz3D]

What are the major differences between Shogun and Mediaeval?

Shogun

Seasonal turns, i.e. four seasons per year: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Income arrives once per year after the autumn turn when the crops are harvested. There is also fixed income from mines, trading posts and ports, and that also arrives at the same time. The harvest can be poor -25%, average or good +25%. I don't remember if there are very poor -50% and very good +50% harvests. If so, these don't happen very often. You have one tax rate with 5 settings for your whole kingdom, i. e. very low, low, average, high and punitive. The tax rate affects the loyalty level of each province. You'll get revolts if province loyalty drops too low for several consecutive turns. Some provinces have iron and sand deposits which allows the building of an armory for armor upgrading of units. You also have random storms and earthquakes which lower income and damage or destroy building in individual provinces.

In MTW, you have individual tax rates for each province. On the surface this seems like an improvement over STW, but is it? The basic idea of tax income is already there in STW, and all MTW seems to add is a lot of micromanagement. You also loose the randomly variable harvest that's in STW. MTW added loyalty for every unit leader, but this is also a lot of micromanagement since you have to check every unit for low loyalty on almost every turn. This becomes quite tedious when you have a lot of units. The province govenors in MTW is a nice idea with their variable accounting ability.

There are no ships, but stategic units and armies can be moved between ports. These are like two lane highways that both sides can use. However, the AI doesn't move armies via ports. This is a bug, but you can adjust to it by not invading through ports yourself, and in fact seaborn invasions weren't carried out during the Sengoku Jidai anyway.

In the original STW, some buildings and units took longer than 1 turn to build or train. This was changed in STW/MI to 1 turn for all building and training. Also in original STW, the AI clans have unlimited money. This is a cheat, and was removed from STW/MI. The cheat did make the campaign very challenging because you almost always ended up playing against a Hojo horde or somtimes a Mori horde where these clans would fill border provinces with as many as 20 to 30 full stack armies (20,000 to 30,000 men). Armies this size were very hard to defeat even on normal difficulty setting. You never see this in STW/MI because the AI can't spend into deficit. As a result, the STW/MI campaign is easier, but you can use the higher difficulty settings to make it harder. You get less money to start, and the AI troops get a 15% combat bonus on hard, and a 30% combat bonus and +4 morale bonus on expert.

Units do not have individual loyalty, piety or dread parameters, and there are no vices and virtues for generals. You can convert to Catholic to get guns from the Portuguese when they arrive, but your provinces are more likely to revolt as a result. You can ally with AI clans to reduce their tendency to attack you, but that's all the diplomacy there is in the game.

There is a geisha assassin at the top of the build tree that is very hard to stop. The geisha will relentlessly pursue your daimyo.

Castles have no gates, so castle battles end up being a huge melee at the castle entrance. Defenders inside the castle will not rout. Also, unlike MTW/VI there is no attrition for an army sieging a castle.

Each province has a unique battle map, and these are all the same size as small maps in MTW/VI. This is important because the fatigue rate, the timer and the reinforcement system are all optimized for the small mapsize. The attacker always enters the battle map from the top no matter from which direction he entered the province on the stategic map. The attacker has a limited choice of weather, and the available choices are affeced by the season. The weather is more atmospheric in STW especially the fog affect which can be very dense. Just as you can't see the AI army in the fog, it can't see your army either. Rain can be light, medium or heavy and this affects the misfire rate of guns, the bow accuracy and the fatifue rate to varying degree depending on the intensity of the weather. In MTW/VI, the weather became completely randomized, so you can no longer incorporate this into your strategic planning for an offensive. The weather effects also became less intense.

Bridges are narrower in STW making attacking across a bridge more difficult. The AI doesn't defend provinces with multiple bridges properly. Sometimes trees are too dense in certain places and a man can get stuck in the trees, so it's best to use the battle timer just in case. Trees have half the density in MTW/VI, but are larger in diameter. I've never had a man get stuck in the trees in MTW/VI. Unfortunately, a consequence of reducing the tree density in MTW/VI is that a unit can appear to be outside the tree line, but is still considered to be inside the trees for combat calculations. This is a minor bug.

The AI will set up ambushes when there are trees on the map. It will split it's forces to establish a hidden amushing force in trees off to the side. It will launch this ambush after your main force in engaged with its main force. I've seen the AI divide its force in two and set up a dual ambush when there are trees on both sides of the map. It will then attack your force simultaneously from both sides if you move down the middle of the map. There is a tendency for the AI taisho to engage recklessly. This was eliminated in MTW/VI. The STW AI also tends to make frontal attacks with cavalry while in MTW/VI this was changed so that the AI is more likely to try to flank with cavalry. In both STW and MTW/VI the AI tends to move its ranged units too much, and therefore doesn't get as much out of these units as it could. This moving works out ok for cavalry archers, but so very well for ranged units on foot since they get shot up while moving. One interesting thing however in STW is that ranged units retain all of their unused ammo even after suffering losses. In MTW/VI, dead men take their unused ammo with them.

STW has a very similar but less sophisticated morale system than does MTW/VI which has a sophisticated outnumbering penalty calculation. You also have the rank bonus for spears, shields and armor piercing weapons in MTW none of which is needed in STW. You can also disengage cavalry from melee much easier in MTW/VI.

The combat units in original STW are all very well balanced. In STW/MI some unbalanced units such as the kensai and battlefield ninja were introduced, and a questionable naginata cavalry unit since you can't really use a two handed weapon on horseback. These units are more fantasy based than the original STW unit set, although, that too has units that didn't really exist. The upgrade system is problematic because it changes the performance of a unit too much which breaks the combined arms tactical play. This is not only a problem in STW, but also MTW. The upgrade system and the effect of generals is too powerful.

There are FMV movies in STW, and the throne room. There are profound poems spoken when a diamyo dies. The music is great, and the battlefield sound effects are very good especially the storms. The intro movie is very good as is the victory movie.

In Shogun the emphasis is definitely on the battles which were in 2000 unlike anything ever seen before in a computer game. There was also a lot of attention paid to creating a nice atmospheric context for the battles. While I can handle more micromanagement than Shogun presents, MTW pushes the limits into tedium for me. I did however, finish one MTW campaign. With the Samurai Warlords mod for MTW/VI it's less tedious because there are only half the number of provinces, and there are some advantages to the MTW/VI engine over STW. We also got rid of the geisha, and adjusted the economics to so that you can't really accumulate lots of money.

[Martok]

Here's what I posted a couple weeks ago in the Sword Dojo about the main differences between STW and MTW:

Although the engine was tweaked so that MTW looks a little bit better, both games are still essentially the same from a visual/graphics standpoint. The main difference between the two is that MTW features more options (especially on the campaign map) and greater complexity at the cost of less-than-optimized balance and AI. I would also say Medieval's atmosphere isn't quite as superb as Shogun's (although it's still very good IMO).

MTW has more playable factions, more political/diplomatic intrigue (trying generals for treason, dynastic marriages/alliances, civil wars, etc.), and a more sophisticated & involved religious model/system (Crusade, Jihads, Inquisitions, ex-communications, etc.). Your dramatis personae -- kings, princes, generals/governors, etc. -- are more personalized now, as they have ratings for their Influence/Loyalty, Dread, Piety, Command, & Acumen, as well as possessing various Vices & Virtues which affect their abilities on & off the battlefield. Finally, Medieval includes a Glorious Achievements mode as an alternative to playing your standard Domination/conquest game, which -- while not perfect -- offers the player an alternative way to beat the game without having to conquer the whole bloody map.

All that said, there are a number of things in which MTW is noticably inferior to its predecessor. The AI (on both the campaign and battle level) isn't quite as good as in STW, probably due to the game's increased complexity. There are fewer "chokepoints" on Medieval's map -- which makes it harder for the AI to cope with the larger strategic situation -- plus the game has a lot more "hybrid" units (troops that are proficient in both ranged & melee combat), which the AI doesn't really know how to handle. In addition, Medieval's AI seems less able in its ability to decide when to go to war with other factions and/or backstab its allies; many of us MTW players talk about how our 20-province superpower was attacked by a 2-province kingdom.

Also, as Wasp already pointed out, Shogun is much better balanced that Medieval. There's no "uber" unit in STW -- pretty much every troop type can be countered by another -- nor is any clan unwinnable (although the Hojo & Uesugi nearly always do well, of course). MTW has quite a few units which are either over- or under-powered, and the same can be said of some of the game's factions -- the French & Egyptians nearly always become superpowers, for example, while the Turks & Aragonese are often eliminated inside of the game's first 50 turns.

Finally, while Medieval has a great atsmosphere, Shogun's is still unquestionably superior. The artwork, the sounds, the voicework, and the music/soundtrack all combine together to really draw the player into feudal Japan and the world of the Samurai. When I play STW, I really *feel* like I'm there leading my clan to greatness (or ignominy, if things aren't going so well ). MTW does a pretty good job of sucking me in as well, but to a lesser extent.



So to sum up: Medieval has deeper, richer, more complex, and more dynamic gameplay than Shogun does. It also has greater replayability, since it has "more" of everything: units, factions, etc. In conrast, Shogun is a relatively simple game, but its elegant simplicity is part of its charm & appeal: It has fewer factions & units, and is much better balanced. In addition, the game's AI and overall atmosphere IMHO remain unrivaled by any of the other Total War titles, MTW included.

In the end, you can't really go wrong either way. Both are excellent games in their own right, and both have their strong points & weaknesses.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Between the two, my personal favorite is Medieval (mostly because I really like that era in history). That said, Shogun is still the better game overall IMHO, and I still play it -- it'll always have a spot on my hard drive.

[The Wandering Scholar]

I was going to reply and damage Tom0 for his terrible mistake in relating wrongly that Caius Caesar engaged in warfare with Sertorius of Iberia, (For honour's sake man, read the Parallel Lives of Plutarchus!),
however when I saw elsewhere that Shogun was in many regards superior to Mediaeval - I became rather interested.

So please, forgive Tom0 for his terrible sin

I thank you Glenn. In my haste and seething anger with Caravel I did commit a terrible sin