Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So I finally got around to playing Shogun 2. Just downloading it from Steam turned out to be harder than I expected due to the size of the game and all the associated DLC. That plus I’m still don’t have a reliable wired connection. It’s totally worth it though. I realized that as much as I like the Total War series, I rarely play a campaign to completion. I usually lose interest part way through either when the situation becomes too big and complicated or when things become too much of a straightforward grind. With that in mind, I opted to play a short campaign as the Chosokabe Clan, obviously the easiest of the clans available. It was more challenging than I expected, but it was fun and interesting enough that I had no trouble playing right up until I became Shogun.

Some thoughts:

• Shogun 2 has garnered a reputation as having the best AI, whether on the tactical or the strategic map, of any game in the Total War series. I think after Empire and Napoleon came under heavy criticism for their poor AI, Creative Assembly made especially sure that Shogun 2 would be a challenging game. Judging from the prevailing sentiment, this seems to have been largely a success. In my game, the AI never bothers to attack unless it has a competitive army. Similarly, their naval raiders are smart enough to hit my undefended trading ships and run away when my main fleet shows up.

• It also seems quite competent on the tactical map, knowing enough to back off its charging cavalry before they run into a spear wall for example. It seems a lot smarter about using cavalry to aggressively flank and likes to go for your general if you leave a path open for it. And I like how it knows to pick the right weather to its advantage. If I have more archers than it does for example, it likes to wait for the rain before attacking and vice versa.
• I really like the streamlined strategy map elements. Maybe they were in a previous version but I skipped Napoleon and didn’t really like Empire so I’m not sure if the features are new. But I like how the agents have a hard cap, so you don’t have dozens of them all over the map, how cities now have limited slots for buildings and how upgrading the castle in each province unlocks more slots. I like the new technology tree too which is a better way to gate higher tier units. And I like how unit replenishment is automatic, reducing micromanagement, even if it does open up a bit of an exploit: spreading lost men across many units is better than having a single unit take grievous losses.
• I never played the original Shogun so this setting is new to me. I find I really like it. The map is just the right size, whereas Medieval 2 and Empire were arguably so big that much of the map felt pointless most of the time. The shorter period of time covered also makes the game more plausible to my mind. Once the game starts covering hundreds of years rather than a more modest fifty years or so, I find myself wondering why I’m not playing Europa Universalis instead.

• The unit mix is pretty different from the other Total War games. Japan has both cheap peasant versions of your usual infantry types and elite samurai versions of them. Oddly, not one single unit uses shields so they’re all terribly vulnerable to missile weapons. Generals still come with cavalry bodyguards but they’re extremely weak now so you almost always want to keep him back like a real general and make use of his morale boosting abilities rather than charge straight into battle. I still remember how generals were unkillable in the first Medieval.
• Combat feels very fast. Hit a unit of ashigaru archers with any cavalry unit and they will pretty much melt instantly. Instantly! Basically you need to do things right the first time because you won’t have the time to send in reinforcements to save troops in trouble. I guess it does make battles go faster. Cavalry die quickly to spearmen of any kind but kill pretty much anything else include katana infantry, plus they’re so fast and agile that they can flit in to deal damage and run away when spearmen draw close. I don’t remember the combat in previous games being so fast paced.
• One oddity I found is that the auto-resolve feature now seems to give quite good results. I think it even gives better results than I could manage in assaulting castles and in large naval battles. I’m not ashamed to admit that I auto-resolved quite a few battles that I didn’t feel like fighting myself. This is also another reason why I could actually finish a campaign this time around. It was especially handy for me since I don’t really enjoy the naval battles however pretty they look.

• The game does rely on the Realm Divide mechanic to keep things interesting for the human player in the late game. Basically once you’re within shooting distance of the victory conditions, all the AIs always gang up on you. This is really bad if you rely on trade income. However, I have to admit, it’s crude but it does its stated job of preventing the human player from steamrollering everything just fine. Sadly, AI-controlled clans never trigger Realm Divide no matter how large an empire they acquire. They can attack the Ashikaga Shogunate with no consequences at all. This apart, the AIs seem to play the diplomatic game fairly so they’re much more dependable allies now. Unpredictable and unreliable AI was a common complaint about previous Total War games, rendering the diplomatic system largely pointless. This time around it seems like making friends with the right clans and making sure that they stay your friends is a key strategy to winning at the higher difficulty levels.

Playing a short campaign, I barely scratched the tip of the tech tree and didn’t really get to play around with the higher tier units or even high ranked agents at all, so I’ll be playing a long campaign with a harder clan. I’m currently thinking either a Christianized Hojo (castles and cannons!) or the Hattori (ninjas and more ninjas!) and writing a game diary about it. Needless to say, I find this to be the coolest of any of the recent Total War games and recommend it highly.