Musings on ... Shogun 2: Total War

Shogun 2 isn’t my favourite Total War game; I should probably get that out of the way first. Empire is still my preferred choice, which is basically heresy to any Total War fan. Sure, Rome and Medieval II were brilliant, but Empire is just massive. This is to its detriment at some points, but that’s offset by the pretty fantastic representation of 19^th Century warfare. Anyway, this article is about Shogun 2 so let’s talk about that.

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Anyone who knows about or has played a Total War game will recognise the set-up. A large, turn-based grand map, where you move armies around as a group and upgrade your cities, and smaller real-time battles. It’s familiar, but it still works, and has been doing since the original Shogun. The real differences come from the alterations they’ve made to the way settlements work. Each province has a stronghold and some upgrades, such as farms and roads, and more unique things such as iron mines. Each stronghold has a certain building capacity, which can be upgraded by improving your stronghold. There are a bunch of buildings to choose from, varying from standard sword-schools to siege factories, to Buddhist temples (or, indeed, Christian.) Each building will give you some kind of bonus to that province, and many will let you build new units.

Some of these new units include the agents which are also familiar from older games, but this time in a different guise. Ninjas are still in, and act as both assassins and saboteurs. Metsuke are kind of like badass detectives, who go around detecting and executing ninjas, or occasionally arresting generals and even other Metsuke. They can even bribe whole settlements, but that’ll cost you a lot of money. Monks are the final agents, and are probably the best. They can do boring stuff like demoralising armies, and making Metsuke quit their jobs, but the best thing they can do is incite revolt within settlements. This, if successful, creates a small band of rebels who will probably have a crack at capturing their settlement. If you do this enough times, eventually the defenders will lose, allowing you to just waltz in with an awesome army, cripple the rebels and take the province, all without declaring war.

This, to me, is the first Total War game which has properly created an entirely new game in the meta-map. Prior to this the grand-scale stuff was great, but mostly focused around manoeuvring armies into the most advantageous positions without losing any provinces yourself. In Shogun 2, the agents are so powerful and so important that if you don’t use them, you’re going to have a tough time indeed.

Speaking of tough times, the AI is much improved over that of Empire. Despite all that was great about that game, the battle-AI was poor beyond belief. I once fought a battle where the entire enemy army managed to get stuck in one corner, so I just formed a wall around them and slowly decimated their ranks. That doesn’t tend to happen in Shogun. The AI does seem a bit too eager to get into a fight, and will often fall for the easiest of traps, but on the whole provides a solid job of making you think about potential threats, especially on the higher difficulties. The grand-scale AI is pretty good as well, and often presents you with difficult situations when you make a silly mistake.

Politicking is also not as easy in this version, as if you do dishonourable things, like making and then immediately breaking an alliance, people will be less likely to help you in the future. This is critical, as when you start to gain more power you attract more attention from the Shogun himself. At a certain point he claims you’re too powerful and everyone goes for you. This means that if, up until this point, you’ve had some good allies, you’ll probably have managed to gain some decent land or resources, and will probably have a decent infrastructure. If you don’t have these things, well, goodbye your chosen faction. The change in style after the Shogun declares war on you is mad. Up until that point you’ll probably have been rocking around with one or two armies, but if your faction is split up, or not wedged in a corner, you’re suddenly going to be being attacked from a lot of places, forcing you onto the defensive. Which isn’t good when you want to be conquering Kyoto, and that all important turn timer is clicking down every time you press the space-bar.

The game looks pretty fantastic, I should probably mention. With the graphics cranked all the way up, my game looks amazing, but runs awfully, so I usually have it hanging around the high end of the options. It still looks great, especially at a short distance to the ground, and runs relatively smoothly.

I’m not going to go into the multiplayer here, because I haven’t really played very much of it. Basically, there’s a weird map of Japan, with each person a member of a clan, which sets an area of as an objective and you need to win battles there against other clans and it’s really complicated. Much simpler is the multiplayer campaign, which is just the single-player with one other person. Also available is a drop-in option, which basically just lets other humans into your game for one battle. This is always a bad idea as those humans are usually quite clever, and will probably massacre you.

I would recommend people buy this game, but if you want a cheap alternative I would say get Rome instead, Many still claim it to be the best. I find it mostly comes down to which era of history you find most interesting, as you can be sure that whichever you buy it’s going to be high quality (except maybe the original Shogun and Medieval by this point).