Shogun 2 Realism + | Main Thread: Feedback & Discussion

[DaVinci]

I got back into S2R+ after a break so there have been a lot of changes done to the game than I last remembered. I have some issues with how the units are balanced but I believe that is a moot issue. This is realism, after all, and I don't want to launch into a debate over playability and historicity. What really has put me off in the latest version is that aside from the first 30-40 turns, no one seems to want to fight. And I don't just mean me, but anyone for that matter. Periodically I would check the diplomacy tab for relations with other clans and there would be total peace instead of total war. All the clans would possess no more than 3 provinces and most possessed 1 or 2. Huge stacks would sit in their respective castles and just do nothing at all. Right now I am perhaps 100 turns into the campaign and have not been aggressed upon by any clan throughout the whole game.

Is this because I did not include hedge knights AI mod?

Your observation of total peace/no war is unknown, no clue why you are experiencing a peaceful campaign (for 100 turns ... lol, c'mon), maybe you are playing it with Easy or Normal camp difficulty, might be the culprit?
What's your faction?

Hedge's AI mod is implemented/customised in S2R+, as described in the release post.

Do you use any other mods with S2R+, if yes, which?

However, as already mentioned i'll look into the diplomacy file, for an update-version - that will change something in regard of AI behaviour.

[sakuraoni]

Your observation of total peace/no war is unknown, no clue why you are experiencing a peaceful campaign (for 100 turns ... lol, c'mon), maybe you are playing it with Easy or Normal camp difficulty, might be the culprit?
What's your faction?

Hedge's AI mod is implemented/customised in S2R+, as described in the release post.

Do you use any other mods with S2R+, if yes, which?

However, as already mentioned i'll look into the diplomacy file, for an update-version - that will change something in regard of AI behaviour.

Oda, on Hard. I'll give you my save file if you don't believe me. Go ahead and scroll through the diplomacy tab and see that there is not a single clan in the game that is at war with anyone. Even if I was on Easy, would other clans do that? No other mods were included except for the extended campaign and a cosmetic mod that removes the gloss on armor.

I installed hedge knights UI just to see what would happen and started a new Takeda/Hard campaign and took a much more aggressive stance than in the Oda campaign and even there I am seeing little changeover of provinces that do not involve me. I have been attacked unprovoked once so that by itself was different.

[DaVinci]

Oda, on Hard. I'll give you my save file if you don't believe me. Go ahead and scroll through the diplomacy tab and see that there is not a single clan in the game that is at war with anyone. Even if I was on Easy, would other clans do that? No other mods were included except for the extended campaign and a cosmetic mod that removes the gloss on armor.

I installed hedge knights UI just to see what would happen and started a new Takeda/Hard campaign and took a much more aggressive stance than in the Oda campaign and even there I am seeing little changeover of provinces that do not involve me. I have been attacked unprovoked once so that by itself was different.

You can view the AI steps per year in the Record tab.

The observation of the AI behaviour during the campaign was a focus while the whole development/internal testing. As said, such an outcome of no war is unknown, as of yet at least (means, until you reported it).
I suggest you playtest the mod without the Extended Campaign mod, as it might have a trigger on AI behaviour (i do not know the files which come with this mod). Edit: The mod is also balanced in a way, that you as player (or possibly a strong AI) is able to fulfill the victory conditions in time (1600), and if 1600 is reached, the player will be asked anyway to play further.
Another point is that Oda and also Takeda are the most strong factions unit-wise, and the AI knows this, ie. Oda got support that if he survives as AI, secured its position, has good chances to expand successful - but, this wouldn't explain that all other regions / AI factions are complete calm in your experience, and that never happened in our internal testing, so i'm still puzzled about your experience.

However, there might be something in the diplomacy file (some last changes by me, will check this soon), that needs revisions anyway to increase the aggression vs. at least the human player (who is just mostly the most successful faction, if not chosen a defensive playstyle) but also between AI's, and that revision will be done next - afterwards i'll playtest myself again to see what goes on.

Btw., the separate UAI (Hedge's AI mod) makes less sense as Addon, as said the mod is implemented in a customised fitting way.

[sakuraoni]

You can view the AI steps per year in the Record tab.

The observation of the AI behaviour during the campaign was a focus while the whole development/internal testing. As said, such an outcome of no war is unknown, as of yet at least (means, until you reported it).
I suggest you playtest the mod without the Extended Campaign mod, as it might have a trigger on AI behaviour (i do not know the files which come with this mod). Edit: The mod is also balanced in a way, that you as player (or possibly a strong AI) is able to fulfill the victory conditions in time (1600), and if 1600 is reached, the player will be asked anyway to play further.
Another point is that Oda and also Takeda are the most strong factions unit-wise, and the AI knows this, ie. Oda got support that if he survives as AI, secured its position, has good chances to expand successful - but, this wouldn't explain that all other regions / AI factions are complete calm in your experience, and that never happened in our internal testing, so i'm still puzzled about your experience.

However, there might be something in the diplomacy file (some last changes by me, will check this soon), that needs revisions anyway to increase the aggression vs. at least the human player (who is just mostly the most successful faction, if not chosen a defensive playstyle) but also between AI's, and that revision will be done next - afterwards i'll playtest myself again to see what goes on.

Btw., the separate UAI (Hedge's AI mod) makes less sense as Addon, as said the mod is implemented in a customised fitting way.

I agree with you, it is strange and I have never experienced this problem in S2R+ until now. After I get home from work, I'll gather some screenshots and post the records. Maybe it's just a freak occurence but if it isn't, it can make a campaign a game of knocking down bowling pins - clans standing around not consolidating power making them ripe for the picking.

Your mod has definitely created an environment where the player and the AI are encouraged to recruit and use ashigaru units and because of this game has a much more authentic feel than either vanilla or in Darth Mod. On that note, however, the samurai units feel remarkably unstoppable against any ashigaru unit. Typically (and this is anecdotal) in a 1 to 1 fight, a Sakunin Yari (600 strong) unit would inflict perhaps 10 casualties yet sagainst a samurai unit before being routed.

There's also an issue about archers, the ashigaru variety in particular. They don't seem to inflict any casualties against the well armored samurai and against the poorly armored ashigaru they only do moderate amount of damage.

Personally, using archers is not part of my play style so this doesnt mean much to me. In terms of the AI, however, they don't have the same impression that I have on their effectiveness. It makes fighting the AI less of a challenge (though there havent been any archer spam thank goodness).

Also, are the AI's directed in any particular way regarding the bushido and chi arts?

[DaVinci]

@ asinkering

Thank you for your indepth-investigations. I'll without doubt come back to this, will belong to the diplo file changes. If you find out more, don't hold it back

[Dainagon]

After trying out all the major mods out there, including the Darthmod and TROM3, I must say that Realism+ is the mod that takes the approach that I like the most: limited number of samurai units per faction, battles that don't always result in more than half of the men being slaughtered.

I'm only into a few turns in the campaign and can't comment on the campaign experience yet (so far I'm liking what I'm seeing), but here's a couple of things that made me wonder:


1. Japanese-derived unit names: while this feature may add immersion factor to those not familiar with the language, the downside of it is that, unless it is perfected, it actually kills immersion factor for native speakers, including myself. There are basically two factors that bring forth this sort of oddity:

a. artificial use of language/overkill - Words like Inaka, Shosen, and Shiro, while correct words, sound rather excessive; it's like writing "Ich am ein city fellow" - there's nothing like this that drives natives speakers crazy!)

b. anachronistic word usage - Use of terms like Han and Chugen became only popular in the later Edo period (in the case of "Han," it was coined by a particular school of thought that didn't look the Tokugawa's rule with favor, IIRC), nor they are commonly used in contemporary literature on the Sengoku era.
(and there are of course simple errors like "Ko Ju" ("Kojo" is the word for "siege) or words that simply didn't exist at the time like "Roketto")


2. Ronin: I'm sure that DaVinci is knowledgeable enough to realize that unit variety based on weapon is a necessary "fantasy" that you just have to work with in Total War games; in reality, of course, as he wrote in the unit description thread, men with different weapons would be fighting side by side.
Still, Ronin as a unit name doesn't sound right on two levels, one obviously being that you would not see these "samurai class" people fighting as one group, but the same goes for any other samurai unit in the mod so I'm not really concerned about it. The other problem is what actually matters to me: the fact that there's a group of "samurai-for-hire". I have no idea why the word "Ronin" came to be so popular in samurai literature/media in the West, but in a mod that depicts the reality of the time so well, I think their presence in the mod as a unit is unwarranted.
I think there are much better alternatives out there, like Jizamurai, whose leading figures would have been in general rich enough to afford weapons and armors that we often associate with samurai.


3. Chugen/Gesakunin/Sakunin: Besides Chugen being an anachronistic term, dividing the peasant class neatly like this gives someone the impression that the Sengoku era was a strictly hierarchical society to the extent that the Edo era was. While that is true to some extent, the thing about the Sengoku era is that there was no strong legal enforcing factor like that which maintained the Edo system of hierarchy; social hierarchy during the Sengoku era would have been much more dependent on economic background especially for those with no clear samurai lineage.
I think what I'm trying to say is that unit names for the "peasant" units need not be as strictly divided as they are now but can rather be left ambiguous to reflect the ambiguity of class lines among the non-samurai people.


4. "shogun_extralong_pike": I'm not sure if that's the exact name, but I realized that there's only one unit that uses the "extralong" pike weapon type in the mod, and almost all of the peasant and Ashigaru units use the short or medium yari. Is that intended, possibly for gameplay reason? Extra long yari for Ashigaru is of course historically more appropriate, certainly from 1545 onward, but if AI has problem dealing with units with this kind of pikes, I would understand why you opted not to use it.
I just converted all of Ashigaru and peasant yari units to use the extra long pikes on my end. Because the yari are so long, the men actually look like they are wielding the weapon in any way they could so that they can hit the enemy's body, which is totally appropriate.


5. More use of yari & less use of cavalry?: Once again, I'm certain that DaVinci knows that yari was the preferred hand-to-hand weapon of the day, as "collective" warfare became more common and extra long yari was easy to kill someone with without much training. Do you plan to reduce the number of katana units for the sake of historical accuracy? The same goes for cavalry: there's now more voice being raised in the academia that the use of cavalry as depicted in various media dealing with the Sengoku era is a myth. But there's always someone who likes to see katana-wielding samurai in the game, so maybe this is too extreme an option for the fan base.


6. Samurai unit limit: Somebody raised this question in the last page, but I'd love to see this aspect of the mod improve: i.e., the limit goes up as you conquer more provinces. I think DaVinci mentioned that the only way to get around it is by tying clan-specific units to specific provinces, so that you have "unique" units with recruitment limit in each province. Don't know how the unit list in the custom battle would look like if you do that, though.


That was a long list, but that's how much hope I have in this mod. This mod really delivers already, and with some more polishing the mod could be even more amazing! I don't have much time to play the game at this point, but I'll be sure to lurk around in two weeks or so, I'll have more time to spare by then.

[sakuraoni]

That was a long list, but that's how much hope I have in this mod. This mod really delivers already, and with some more polishing the mod could be even more amazing! I don't have much time to play the game at this point, but I'll be sure to lurk around in two weeks or so, I'll have more time to spare by then.

Meh. That's splitting hairs when it comes to names. Winnowing down the weapon variety to pikes, bows and guns would make the game less enjoyable and reducing the prevalence of cavalry will make battles much less dynamic.

[Dainagon]

Meh. That's splitting hairs when it comes to names. Winnowing down the weapon variety to pikes, bows and guns would make the game less enjoyable and reducing the prevalence of cavalry will make battles much less dynamic.

I understand that, of course, hence the concession at the end of that paragraph.

Regarding unit names, I think what you are saying is exactly what the mod is doing right now (like I said earlier, it's an overkill).

[Hister]

@Dainagon:

Regarding the unit names and use of Japanese words: Such a result was expected. Naturally us Westerners find all this OK but to the native like yourself things can get messy. We were resorting to online dictionary so you can imagine. We could have been much worst off don't you think?
I'm not sure if DV will will be willing to change the names and the like again (it's quite a lot of work) but if you are into it I encourage you to provide proper words. Suggest the names/naming.

On your point 3. while I can only agree with you we still have to denote the differences for the player. Having all different ashigaru units under rhe same or very similar name would not be very good from the gameplay perspective.

On point 4. you gave a nice suggestion - DV might expand the rooster of units holding this longer spaer/pike.

On point 5., later on in the campaign the shift is made towards less samurai and more ashigaru units wileding yari. You'll see that when you play campaign long enough. As for cavalry DV himself will have to answer that question.

On point 6. tha twas debated a lot also inetrnally but a development span of a t least half a year of non stop work would need to be invested in order to provide such a system. Not a viable option for DV.

... and thank you for all the nice words - much appreciated!