Shogun: Total War 2 Catch All thread

SpyNavy wrote:

I didn't know we had a clan. Must have missed that.

Me either. I haven't played MP yet, but I'll join the clan when I get a chance.

Tkyl wrote:

Me either. I haven't played MP yet, but I'll join the clan when I get a chance.

Pretty much any steam group that you are a part of serves as a clan you can join, so regular GWJ steam group seemed like a good choice.

Are the MP armies on a point system, how do you set up your units you enter battle with or is it the drop in system from the campaign. Also want to kick the teeth in of an arrow heavy guy, light Calvary, one unit per archer group. Bring them from the rear or side. Tie up his spearmen with your infantry and then get some Calvary in. Also switch your infantry into dispersed and charge them into his archers. You can turtle up on a hilltop, but generally you can find a place to focus on his line and once that unit breaks, hit that gap hard.

You can do both, drop in to someone else campaign battle or set up 1v1, 2v2, ect. I so far been playing 1v1 where you start with 5000 points (I think you have to level up to certain point for that to increase) where you have all of the basic peasants units plus the first samurai unit from the faction you choose to start with when you create your avatar. As you fight battles your units will level up, where you get upgrade points to get some bonuses, however that makes the unit more expansive. Also to get more advanced units you need to win battles on a risk style map where each province will give you some kind of perk.

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There is a surprisingly lack of impressions and review on this game on this forum. Come on ladies and gentlemen, give me more details on your gameplay or even an AAR.

I trust you guys more than any professional reviewer out in the internet.

[lurk]

Downloaded the demo, and only fired it up to see if it ran properly.

Rome was so long ago, and this seems, again, daunting at first look. Where do you guys recommend I start with? Is the tutorial good (fun)?

I find the overly Japanese accented narrators so cheesy heheh. It's cool, though. The game just breathes its theme.

oMonarca wrote:

Downloaded the demo, and only fired it up to see if it ran properly.

Rome was so long ago, and this seems, again, daunting at first look. Where do you guys recommend I start with? Is the tutorial good (fun)?

I find the overly Japanese accented narrators so cheesy heheh. It's cool, though. The game just breathes its theme.

Do the campaign tutorial. It will also take you through the land and sea battle tutorials.

Maq wrote:

I rarely had to wait out the timer on fast forward due to an enemy that just didn't bother moving in Empire. I've had to do it numerous times in Shogun 2.

I've encountered that multiple times as well.

kazooka wrote:

I think the speed actually makes things a good deal less arcadey. Some of the previous Total War games were an exercise in maneuvering your troops just so in order to execute flank after flank. In Shogun 2, once your troops are committed, it's very difficult to reposition them, which I think is an improvement.

So you set your board, engage, and flank with cavalry. Whoopdie freakin' do. The manoeuvring to flank is basically the core tactical framework of Total War games and pretty much any formation army game. You can't even pull off a decent refused flank as most of the battles just turn into pigpiles.

As for the tactical AI, I'm not sure why people are singing its praises. So far I'm yet to see it do anything but charge straight up the guts at my army, regardless of my formation (on Normal and Hard difficulties). The AI's castle assault strategies are woeful as well. I rarely had to wait out the timer on fast forward due to an enemy that just didn't bother moving in Empire. I've had to do it numerous times in Shogun 2.

I'm also finding Naval Battles to be a complete clusterfrak as well. I'm sure that's mostly down to me having little to no idea of Japanese 16th century naval tactics, I'm just not sure whether there are such tactics.

oMonarca wrote:

I find the overly Japanese accented narrators so cheesy heheh.

Oh God, yes. I've started playing with my own music (which I almost always do in TW games) because hearing the same barks over and over was making me angry. Good thing that my keyboard has Mute button.
MY LORD, THE GLORIOUS VICT-

UCRC wrote:
oMonarca wrote:

I find the overly Japanese accented narrators so cheesy heheh.

Oh God, yes. I've started playing with my own music (which I almost always do in TW games) because hearing the same barks over and over was making me angry. Good thing that my keyboard has Mute button.
MY LORD, THE GLORIOUS VICT-

jeffsceu wrote:

[/lurk]

There is a surprisingly lack of impressions and review on this game on this forum. Come on ladies and gentlemen, give me more details on your gameplay or even an AAR.

I trust you guys more than any professional reviewer out in the internet.

[lurk]

I'd given up buying Total War games at release after the third degree burns I got from Empire, but I don't have any regrets about buying Shogun 2 at launch. If you like the series at all, it's worth the $50. Last night the AI actually BEAT me in a closely matched battle. This never happened in Empire or Napoleon, where the only time I lost was when I was hopelessly outgunned. The battle was pretty well matched and I had moved my general closer to my troops to inspire them and hopefully break the stalemate. Suddenly the enemy cavalry saw a break in the lines and overran my general's unit before I could react. Very cool - I haven't experienced that since at least Rome: Total War.

As others have pointed out, the strategic AI is also tough as you can get hit from multiple angles. I also like the new roleplaying system where you have talent trees to decide what traits your generals and agents get. Do you want to be a killing machine on the battlefield, or would you prefer to be more of a strategist giving bonuses on the campaign map? It's nice that you now have a lot more control over your character's abilities and even retainers.

Does anyone know if your Daimyo has to be at home in order to sire progeny? My Daimyo supposedly has a "fecund wife" but has still only managed to pop one sprog in 5 years.

Maq wrote:

Does anyone know if your Daimyo has to be at home in order to sire progeny? My Daimyo supposedly has a "fecund wife" but has still only managed to pop one sprog in 5 years.

I'm pretty sure my Daimyo had a son while he was out in the field.

Uh..."fecund wife"? That doesn't sound very good.

Also I have some breaking news about Shogun 2: CAVALRY SUCKS

That is all.

Is that a CAVALRY SUCKS as in:

"Their cavalry keep murdering me, I hate them I hate them I hate them?"

or as in:

"My cavalry are totally worthless, there is no reason to ever use them"?

Or as in:

"They all kneel and start munching samurai swords, the kind that don't cut through anything, you know, flesh swords" ?

(I just had to)

I have reached the point in my main game (a short length game) where I was given the objective to take over Kyoto in 9 turns or so. That's not going to happen. Everybody except one province is my enemy now (I guess the Shogun decided I was too much of a threat), so it's going to be really tough to expand now. They have some huge armies on my front. This game is tough when everyone turns on you.

I absolutely love the game. Now that I finished AC:B, I will devote more time to this game.

So, I installed the most recent Crossfire profile from AMD (11.2), and performance has improved significantly. At least it seems that way. They do make mention that it improves Shogun 2 performance. I sort of wonder if I hadn't been taking advantage of the second card before. I'm still using an older version of CCC because I can't get 11.2 to work right. At least I can use the updated crossfire profiles.

Finally won my first single player game! It was the short version where you have to take over Kyoto and 25 provinces. I was using the Date clan. Overall, things are fairly easy, but I struggled with a few things. First, I never felt like I had enough money. I barely got to upgrade anything to where I could get the awesome units. I was pretty much stuck using all lower level units throughout the whole game. Second, It's really hard to start/maintain alliances and trade routes. Everybody turned on me eventually. I'm surprised it was that difficult seeing as how I played it on normal.

Well, I only have 13 out of 69 achievements, so I can only get better at it.

Oh yeah, for anyone still wondering, the game is awesome.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Oh yeah, for anyone still wondering, the game is awesome.

I definitely agree. I've always liked the concept of the Total War games, but I've never been able to get into them. However, I'm loving this one.

I find that the more I play, it funner it gets...the campaign AI is better than I first realized...I have been working on a grand campaign using the Date clan...its interesting. The biggest hurdle for me was getting out of the empire type of fighting and getting back to the basics, lol.

The multiplayer is a lot of fun, I took 2 provinces for Clan GWJ last night, tried to grab another during lunch but lost. Playing a human opponent is very interesting, the battles are very fast, but for the most part you play a game of maneuvering before one side decides to start the fight. I have had a lot of success using a force of Asiguaru (2 bow and 3 yari) 2 katana samuari units, and then a unit of Yari Calvary. I try to hide the calvary in woods and get a flank/rear attack which usually will rout the enemy. One of my favorite games was when I faced an opponent comprised of entirely katana samuari, they charged my lines not seeing the calvary who was deployed in the woods. Right when they hit my spears the calvary swept around, hit them in the rear, and the katanas crumbled almost immediately.

Are the number of units in PvP pre-ordained? If not, how does balancing go? If so, can the opponent not count your units and know you're hiding some?

MoonDragon wrote:

Are the number of units in PvP pre-ordained? If not, how does balancing go? If so, can the opponent not count your units and know you're hiding some?

Each player gets the same amount of money to create an army. Better/more experienced units cost more Koku. So, you can have a huge army of weaker units or a small army of strong units or somewhere in the middle. Just starting out, I do wish I had the option of getting a few more units. Right now, I can't even get cavalry for example. With lots of weak units, you have to be extremely careful to do everything just right, because they can be destroyed super quickly by a strong unit in the right place at the right time. Anyways, those are my thoughts. Last night I played 4 games, lost 3 and won 1. All of the people I fought had much better units but less of them.

Also, the matchmaking is a bit wonky. I had a couple crashes while it was trying to find opponents. The 1v1 seems to be the best bet for getting a match.

Edit: I don't think you get to see your opponent's army beforehand. Theoretically, once the battle starts, you could make a good guess at what each unit would cost them and determine if they are hiding some.

I've been looking through the thread but haven't seen too many performance comparisons.

How's it running and what sort of hardware do you guys have?

Doug wrote:

I've been looking through the thread but haven't seen too many performance comparisons.

How's it running and what sort of hardware do you guys have?

A couple of us posted quite a bit of performance thoughts on the demo starting here in the thread. The regular game runs better than the demo. My guess is that this is because the demo was poorly optimized for CPU performance. I posted some stills of the CPU usage back a bit.

The game runs quite well with a i7 920 and 2 5870s for me. I have everything turned up that is possible right now, and I get good averages. Most of the time it is 50-90 or above, but I can get it to drop if I zoom in on particular things or there are a huge amount of units on screen. It's hard to pin down an overall average because you will always get drops here and there if you try hard enough zooming in on some things.

It is my opinion that the game must scale excellently because it runs fantastically on my Alienware m11x laptop with most settings on low. It is very very playable. As long as you have a desktop that isn't from the stone age that has a reasonable GPU, you should be able to run it just fine.

I haven't seen any sites doing intensive benchmarking of the game yet.

Has everyone figured out how to join the Gamers With Jobs Clan?

It took me quite a few minutes to figure it out and even then i'm not 100% sure that i did the right thing. Can someone post a mini walk-through to join the right clan just so i can make sure I'm in the right spot.

We should also setup a date/time to do some playing so we can team up and win provinces for the clan.

Cayne wrote:

Has everyone figured out how to join the Gamers With Jobs Clan?

It took me quite a few minutes to figure it out and even then i'm not 100% sure that i did the right thing. Can someone post a mini walk-through to join the right clan just so i can make sure I'm in the right spot.

We should also setup a date/time to do some playing so we can team up and win provinces for the clan.

i'd be down for that...just need to know where to join

ZellbrigeN26 wrote:
Cayne wrote:

Has everyone figured out how to join the Gamers With Jobs Clan?

It took me quite a few minutes to figure it out and even then i'm not 100% sure that i did the right thing. Can someone post a mini walk-through to join the right clan just so i can make sure I'm in the right spot.

We should also setup a date/time to do some playing so we can team up and win provinces for the clan.

i'd be down for that...just need to know where to join

Me too.