Total War: Shogun 2 - Wasted Potential Edition Anonymous
03/23/26(Mon)10:20:03
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2366613
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Showing all 102 replies.
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>>2366613
shogun 2 is far from wasted potential
they somehow managed to make a game where every faction is basically the same into gold using the napoopan engine
then they fucked it up and every game since has been ass
i've long hold the belief that jeff van dyck is somehow the magic which makes total war work
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>decide to check out shogun 2 because histlets say its the best one
>every single faction has the same roster + 1 unique unit
>every single settlement is exactly the same
>every single settlement is 1 away from each other, game is just siege bowling
>the tier 1 starter spearmen and bowmen are the best units in the game, literally 0 reason to build anything else
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>>2366919
No, they aren't the best units, you stupid bastard. You'd know that if you played. They are just decent, despite being cheap, because it's a non-Western country prior to roughly 1850: low tech and with no real sense of military tactics
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I'll never understand why morons who make tier lists can't tell the difference between early, mid, and late game.
Yes, Yari Ashigaru are great units to use throughout the campaign.
No, you shouldn't actually use only Ashigaru, you'll get raped by Katana and Bow Samurai in mid game.
No, you shouldn't rush samurai either.
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>pay one billion sacks of rice to unlock ninjas at tier 3
>they are completely worthless
>"HI-YAH! SNOKE BOMBU!!!"
I could have had 5 stacks of spear niggas auto resolving vs the shogun himself. This has always been the issue with shogun. I really like what they were trying to do, its way better then the tec race doom stack gameplay. But the balance is not right at all, the cost to reward ratio is just not there for any of these samurai units
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>>2367766
This, balance is out of wack in S2. Naturally I have the entire map at war with me before 1560, not because RD has been triggered, but because I'm conquering land anyway and everyone hates that. But if I don't conquer land then another clan will and will become stronger than me. So I have to conquer all of the time and so I never have an opportunity to recruit / use special units because the campaign is finished before 1580.
But this time though I'm really going to try and not conquer land. If a clan declares on me then I will fight battles and that's it
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>>2367412
Ashigaru are the most cost effective units and they benefit the most from blacksmith upgrades and experience. Late game, max experience Ashigaru WILL beat the everliving shit out of low experience Samurai, even disregarding the AI's inability to deal with Yari Wall. Even worse, Ashigaru units are something like 25% larger than Samurai units, allowing them to trade extremely well with Bow Samurai due to weight of fire.
Seriously, just making Samurai units the same size as Ashigaru would probably go a long way to make them more useful.
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>>2367412
Yari ashigaru are relevant from early to endgame.
>No, you shouldn't actually use only Ashigaru, you'll get raped by Katana and Bow Samurai in mid game.
Yeah not only yari ashigaru, but you should still use yari ashigaru in the midgame.
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>use missile superiority to force enemy army to charge into my yari wall
>later in the game mix in a few elite units, especially on the flanks, and use a bit of cav for morale shocks
The above strategy has hard carried me in the campaigns so far. What's the next steps to improve?
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>>2367852
The whole Shogun 2 roster is perfect. Every unit has its use case and very few of them ever become obsolete. I don't disagree with what you said, that's just one way to play the game. Limiting yourself to only Ashigaru ignores many of the strengths of samurai units in key situations, like castle battles where yari wall can't be used offensively. A strong core of samurai, backed by ashigaru, wins.
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Personally I don't think a "Standard" unit being useful for an entire game is a balance issue. I play 1v1 campaigns with my uncle in this game and yeah there are a lot of Ashigaru used but the plays are made with other units.
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>>2368337
Ashigaru are your line holders, not your actual offensive units. They're extremely good at what they do, but they're not OP in any way. Ashigaru becoming obsolete would be against the historical reality, and really it's something I hope is repeated in Med 3 where your peasants levies never become obsolete and always have a place on the battlefield.
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>>2368337
I steamrolled a 1v1 campaign by just spamming economy buildings and farting out ashigaru stacks. I remember out most important battle happened in a tier 3 city neighboring Kyoto. He had a powerful stack of all samurai and I had 3 shit stacks of ashigaru. I wiped him and lost 50% of my men but had 3 more ashigaru shit stacks on the way, with more in production.
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>>2366906
>>play as Otomo and get completely addicted to converting all of Japan to Christianity
This one is pretty lame, imagine the roleplay you could have get if CA actually care about proper roleplay and not "muh faction unit diversity"
>be Portuguese missionary
>get to Japan
>Otomo clan, Shinto-Buddhist (polytheists)
>your god (Jesus Christ, "god of gunpowder") is the nanban / gaijin Hachiman (Shinto god of war, has a dove as his favorite animal)
>your Portuguese tercos get cool Hachiman's iconography
>creates a new entire religion based on gunpowder
>HACHIMAN HEIKA BANZAI
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>>2368337
Basic units remaining relevant in the campaign is fine. I dislike the tierfaggotry some of the games are doing. The problem with yari ashigaru though is that yari wall is broken. Broken in that it bypasses part of the game mechanics because it's cludge to make a spear wall work in a heavily matched combat game. You can counter it but it warps the game around it to the degree I do not believe it deserves and AI is too retarded to do it, so just knowing that means that not cheesing every battle is just sandbagging.
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>>2366613
My favorite clan is Date, they're kind of ""hard"" because i always use large Samurai armies do to the charge bonus (meaning i'm always out of money), but goddamit it's just really fun to be like a swiss warrior and GÅ PÅ on the enemy with huge stacks of No Dachi and Katana samurai and Ashigaru supported by bow samurai.
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Has anyone played rise of the samurai campaign? I feel like it tries to tackle the ashigaru spam by making peasants really, REALLY shit that even sword attendards cut them 4 to 1 easily, whilst making samurai and other Tier 3 units really REALLY hard to get, but its been a while since I played
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>>2375421
Might try and buy it, biggest problem with ROTS in my opinion is that on the surface (specifically) it just doesn't look as interesting or """varied""" as the base game and FOTS and afaik is way more focused on politics and diplomacy. Saying this as a big sucker for "smaller scale" eras like this, sort of like a dark age Total War mod set in dark age britain, again i might genuinely buy it because i think a game where you actually have to think about how to conquer the land is interesting.
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>>2375421
It's vanilla Shogun 2 but less interesting. Total War is very reliant on using a large variety of one-dimensional units for battle depth, but with CA's method of using vanilla as a base and then taking things away when designing "early era" DLCs, you're just left with the bare minimum and it makes the game boring.
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>>2378450
Depends, desu anon i played it for the first time back in 2019 and i still enjoyed it. It will depend heavily on whether you played other TWs recently because it was the first TW i played since Atilla.
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>>2366613
Currently replaying Rise of Samurai campaign on hard and want to try something.
Whenever I capture town I have to babysit it for some turns because resistance to invaders + different family support.
I liked this mechanic since it worked both ways, even if AI captured your towns, but left them undefended, they would rebel back to your side along with any surviving rebel giga strength stack given how easy it was to lose towns in Shogun and how many fronts you could have closer to end-game
I want to try to proc a rebellion with my army stack next to town so I can beat the army and get the "crushed rebellion" bonus to offset resistance to invaders temporarily.
Is it worth it? I have memories of rebellions being super hard in Shogun 2 last time I played it few years back.
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>>2378450
It's OK. The battles feel like your soldiers are running through molasses. The campaign map gameplay is very good and holds up to this day with the exception of diplomacy, which no Total War game does well.
>>2378657
>I liked this mechanic since it worked both ways, even if AI captured your towns, but left them undefended, they would rebel back to your side along with any surviving rebel giga strength stack given how easy it was to lose towns in Shogun and how many fronts you could have closer to end-game
That's interesting to hear. The AI gets a ton of public order cheats and can automatically spawn armies in Sengoku Jidai so this almost never happens.
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>>2378657
>>2378684
>they would rebel back to your side
This has never happened to me in any of my campaigns in any TW. Rebels stay rebelling (unless its the capital of a former faction, then it reappears), at least CA could have made them developed their own faction (give more deep and playability to the game), example:
>others' faction city or your own city
>gets rebels (its own citizens or slaves)
>conquer the city
>new faction that never exists gets the name of city it took
>become a faction give its own right
>if gets conquered and rebels again, both type of rebels could appear (the ones of the original faction they belonged and the ones of the new faction)
I think it would have been a cool detail that adds immersion and makes the world feel alive.
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>>2378684
I had it happen at least once which is why I remember it so well. I am assuming family bonuses/maluses outweigh AI bonuses which is why its easier for it to proc in RoS but again, it wasn't something regular either.I also had a lot of fun causing rebellions with monks back in the day.
>can automatically spawn armies in Sengoku Jidai
Devs confirmed it as false
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/137395-Frogbeastegg-s-Gu ide-to-Total-War-Shogun-II
>Campaign AI does not spawn additional forces except under the following four circumstances:
>Ashikaga faction
>Rebellions
>Wako pirates
>European Traders, Black Ship
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>>2379589
The secret to Shogun 2 is that spamming Ashigaru and rushing conquests to fuel your economy is the most efficient way to play the game. Oda is both well-situated to expand quickly and gets better/cheaper Ashigaru for more spam. It's a broken combination.
Otomo are a meme because gunpowder literally just isn't very good in S2 at all. When armour is paper and arrows are bullets, what's the point of guns?
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>Samurai take a special building to recruit, removing a potential building slot for more money
>Samurai take multiple turns to recruit, meaning that you lose 2 units of ashigaru for every samurai
>Samurai are 2-3x more expensive than ashigaru to recruit and maintain, meaning will be outnumbered on the field
>Samurai are huge jobbers that die to arrows and lose when surrounded by 2-3 units of ashigaru
This game has the worst balance of all time. The smallest total war unit roster and 90% of it is worthless garbage
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>>2383603
You don't need more than one or two military recruitment provinces. You should have three types of cities
>recruitment city, build as relevant to a provincial specialty, but in general you probably only need two or three the whole game, use encampments to stack bonuses
>defensive cities, towers are optional but upgrading castles are not, avoid economy buildings to avoid eye for the ladies trait malus, recruitment buildings optional if you want some extra defensive units, move up your defenses as you advance, replace with economic buildings
>economic, areas that are naturally safe or have been secured through further conquest, spam economic buildings here
The game's city management is dead simple. You have a bunch of tools but only three real use cases. You're encouraged to specialize provinces.
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>>2383563
>Otomo
>betray Buddha and the Kami (Shinto Gods) to get gunpowder from the nanban (foreigner) oni (demon) known as rabbi Yeshua
>me, Shimazu
>get gunpowder without betraying Lord Buddha nor the Kami
>help the Otomo regain their lost honor by exterminating them
Feels good to be loyal.
>>2383603
>1 turn everything mod
It helps turning the campaign into something fun instead a boring chore sim.
>>2383924
??
>>2384000
3k is bullshit.
>>2384176
No, sorry, anon.
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>>2374896
Were the Ainu involved in the warring states? Hell what were the Ainu doing before they were buttfucked by the Japanese? I've only ever heard about them as "those pure innocents/filthy barbarians on Hokkaido"
Genuinely curious as it's something I never really hear anything about.
>>2374899
>swiss warrior
>GÅ PÅ
You're a bit confused, but close enough.I love the frank warriors and their spirit of élan.
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Shogun 2 really is a masterpiece when you realize is the last total war to have all those amazing little details that we lost after Rome 2 like those mini movies for agents/unit recruitment, a soundtrack by Jeff van Dyck, trade nodes, black ships etc. Hell,is the only Total War outside of Napoleon with a dedicated entire historic battles campaign. Its really cool playing all those battles take take you from Kyoto all the way to Hokkaido, you even have a battle to protect the ship that is going to take you to the island. Seriously, I haven't see this kind of love from any of the new games
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I love Shogun 2 but I hate that modern games somehow got dumber than it mechanically despite the fact that it has outright flaws somehow games that should be improved just haven't learned from its failings or maintained its successes.
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>>2421293
Again: it doesn't matter what you do vs AI because they don't know how to use numbers properly. You can banzai charge your samurai into their lines and win because the AI is retarded. Trying this against a human player is suicide. They will use the yari wall ability and stop a samurai charge in its tracks, then flank the samurai with more yari ashigaru. Not even samurai morale will hold up to that. Between getting stiff-armed by the yari wall and getting flanked, they will probably route at around 50-60% casualties.
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>>2421675
Yari wall barely works against humans because you can just go around. You can disengage at will and pick better targets.
Yari ashigaru are only broken against the computer.
Wrt ashigaru breaking samurai on the charge, they'll get counter charged by reserves.
Again, the scenario is depicting a single samurai army going up against two armies (or more) of ashigaru, that do not spawn from the exact same location.
Not an uncommon occurrence in campaign.
Speed, decisiveness and elan will win out over superior numbers
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>>2367412
>No, you shouldn't actually use only Ashigaru, you'll get raped by Katana and Bow Samurai in mid game.
Not in my shift.
>I'll never understand why morons who make tier lists can't tell the difference between early, mid, and late gam
You should understand there no mid game. Only early and late, where you even no need armies since agents can delete any threat. As you see, game basically was done before 30th turn.
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>>2383563
>Otomo are a meme because gunpowder literally just isn't very good in S2 at all. When armour is paper and arrows are bullets, what's the point of guns?
Point in morale retard. Even samurai paint their flags in white while the close to Otomo triple lines. Castle def with matchlock ashigaru is most braindead thing in whole game.
And their monks have literally cheat tier chances to revolt.
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>>2421675
You seem to have things ass backwards. You can win against the AI either way because it's kinda dumb and has no idea what a yari wall is. It will run high tier units into your yari and die or you can smash their ashigaru with samurai because they won't use it. It's literally a broken mechanic.
As for MP I played a decent amount and I don't think it was ever a thing there though. Human player will easily recognise it and avoid it, flank it, shoot it. Maybe if you bring a whole doomstack you can catch someone not having good enough counter but it's debatable if going all in and winning an army comp rock paper scissors roll makes it "good" in some meaningful sense.
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>>2384242
>Were the Ainu involved in the warring states?
Hokkaido was basically irrelevant until Meiji to the point that it wasn't included on Japan maps of that period. The best you had during Sengoku was small attempts at colonization/exploration and trade at the closest there is to the northern part. The forcible assimilation had to wait until the Imperial period.
Okinawa/Ryukyu was actually important back then.
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>>2422264
Matchlocks are so good it's insane. IRL the reason Oda Nobunaga won in the Sengoku-sensou is because of matchlocks. I kid you not. In-game, most people think matchlocks suck because they don't realize the guard-mode button exists in the game. Matchlocks are the greatest I love matchlocks. Otomo are the best faction in the game. Oda is the most broken because it abuses the campaign meta of just Yari-ashigaru but in multiplayer I think Otomo with matchlocks or Takeda are probably the two best. Date is pretty good too, but you have to know how to use them which 99% of people who play Total War don't know and just use them as a worse Katana samurai.
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