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Man, the Ikko Ikki are pretty unfun to play as in vanilla Shogun 2. The difficulty in getting trading partners early on is really irksome, as is the typical annoyances of having to convert conquered provinces. Warrior monks are decent but they're pricy as hell and have a pretty nasty weakness to missile fire in a game where bow samurai are horrifying enough. By the time I was running around with three of them and some loanswords and ashigaru/ronin archers, I had no income whatsoever and I was being accosted by stacks of samurai armies, and 4 out of my 5 neighbors had declared war on me out of spite. I figured I'd try again with a more explosive expansionist opening followed by a ton of trade ships to keep up income, but the -20 relations is bad enough without the expansionism penalty and the poor starting position is pretty nasty altogether. That or just go back to Normal campaign for them.
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Apr 7, 2013 11:36
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Man, I don't know what the gently caress I'm doing wrong then. Had a game where it ended up with everyone at war with me in turn 37. And I mean literally everyone. There was no realm divide, just a -74 diplo penalty for "territorial expansion" which was partially my own drat fault for not letting things cool off, but its also that I kept losing/retaking provinces since I couldn't afford enough troops to guard my provinces real well and I got declared on by my neighbors. I tried repeatedly making peace with people, but they'd either just refuse to listen or they'd take peace and then break it two turns later (gently caress you imagawa). Highlight was when I withdrew my frontier defenses to consolidate my army and had about a stack and a half of ashigaru, when Takeda, with 6 provinces, wanders into my mainland with three stacks of mostly ashigaru, but a lot of light cavalry and bow samurai as well, lead by Mr. Shingen himself with 4 stars. Beat him, but still lost a lot of territory because I'm surrounded by people that hate me. Which meant my vassals recovered it, causing my "territorial expansion" penalty to soar to new heights. I'm going to try again and this time just get a fuckoff trade fleet navy to send north so I can get some income, but I wonder if I'll manage to get enough cash to even support that. Hm hm hm. I am bad at total war. Still not going to change the difficulty down from hard, but gently caress, I had an aborted legendary run that went smoother than this.
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Apr 8, 2013 22:21
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I won my Republic of Edo campaign pretty loving handily by doing something like that. Grabbed as many railroad provinces as I could, then stalled my campaign right before RD to build my economy and got it to some insane 20,000 koku a month monstrosity with no trading. Then I recruited all my Republican Infantry from a level 3 gunsmith, hooked them up with armstrong guns and yari cavalry, and send them to the front lines with the train lines. I think there was only about two fights where it wasn't an outright massacre. My new Ikko campaign is going... oddly. I've been moderating my conquests and got the +diplo bonus techs, so I'm no longer having any problems with the wrong people hating me and my territory is pretty secure. Income is still lacking, though, and meanwhile, my next door ally, Oda, is running rampant with 16 provinces, and is deadlocked against Hojo, who has 11. I'm dreading the day that deadlock breaks and Oda becomes an absolute monster; I'm basically now expanding west quickly to secure a big enough economic base before that happens, and hope I can build up enough forces on my western bases for when RD hits and Oda turns to
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Apr 12, 2013 03:59
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E: ^^^ depends. You want to put off realm divide, and the diplo loss from expansion can wreck your trade. Snag quality places over just getting pretty borders. Ikko Ikki I remember having to restart several times before I got a decent start going. If I remember correctly, you need to grab some early space (otherwise some jackass will blob around you and you want your early wars to end asap) and then proceed to hunker down a bit so you can get some defenses up, fire most of your army, and go hard on economic development. Spread the faith aggressively, so you can respond to hostility by making their cites revolt. Spread south so you eventually have only two fonts to deal with, and try to ally with someone on one border and help them so you can focus on the other front. I don't remember the exact details of how I went about things, but I do remember the biggest pains came from being broke. Unit upkeep hurts and getting reliable trading buddies as the ikko is tough. Being at war with some rear end that keeps puking samurai stacks while you're in the red with one ashigaru stack is... aggravating. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jul 26, 2013 |
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Jul 26, 2013 22:56
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Ronin are a luxury. And the correct kind to get are Bow ronin. On that note, naginata monks are also a luxury and they don't like being shot but drat if they can't tear it up on a good day. They're reserve troops: hang them back until the enemy is fully engaged with your ashigaru, then charge them in their weakest point and warcry those mofos.
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Jul 26, 2013 23:06
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I hated in Rome 1 when you ran or of things to build. You either made giant stacks of war elephants out twiddling their thumbs and sucking up paychecks or you just accumulate cash and watch your generals build up horrible traits.
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Jul 27, 2013 01:45
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In regards to wall climbing in shogun 2, just a fun thing to note is that ninja units are fast climbers and never slip off the walls.
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Sep 2, 2013 05:20
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So I went back to play Ikko Ikki in Shogun 2 for a third time, since I lost my save game for my second attempt. Tried to play slow, got attacked by everyone, ran out of time. Fourth attempt has been throwing diplomacy straight out the window alongside any sort of clever attempt to do things like rush guns and just had me spam the poo poo out of loan swords. Holy poo poo I knew loan swords were good but when you get enough bonuses thrown on them they punch ridiculously above their weight. Had a fight where they took on katana and nodachi samurai in a straight fight and won. 
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Apr 24, 2014 00:09
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Rogue 7 posted:Well, I think I've figured this out. The Chosokabe are sweeping all before them and I should win in a couple of turns. I find the trick to really kicking rear end in Shogun 2 is finding a unit that you can just stack as many crazy bonuses on. Agents are very useful for this if they give any sort of bonus for the fighting ability of dudes. For instance, in Fall of the Samurai, having riflemen with +15 accuracy and 3 foreign advisors giving bonuses to accuracy and firing rate pretty much trivialized the entire thing. I should play a Chosokabe campaign. When I was Ikko Ikki, their bow samurai were one hell of a counter to my masses of loan swords, if I couldn't engage them quickly. It is alarming just how fast they murder people at range.
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May 4, 2014 09:28
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I think all the problems in Rome 2 can be summed up with the fact that you have to pay 1500 to maybe assassinate a general from a different political faction. A general that you control fully, and in fact, you can simply have walk, by themselves, right up to an enemy stack, and have him die, at no cost at all. And you can do this with every member of the rival factions. And there is no downside for doing this. A lot of the mechanics in the game feel similar, in that they were not just poorly thought out, but really just feel like the development team did not give a gently caress at all.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:24
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its not going to be warhammer, because that would be a good thing, and good things never happen
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Sep 9, 2014 20:32
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Rabhadh posted:The only interesting idea on this page is the Wars of the Three Kingdoms guys. Also China. The Total War gameplay, as it is, wouldn't do a very good job of replicating any of the stuff that people remember from the Three Kingdoms era.
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Sep 10, 2014 10:48
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Rabhadh posted:You've confused this with this. I did! Fuckers need to sort out their civil war names.
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Sep 10, 2014 11:14
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Honestly I don't hold any hope for CA being able to really make a convincing game around the decline of a empire. Even Paradox games are garbage about dealing with the intractable law that, in map games, he who is the blob reigns supreme. The climate-change / plague stuff sounds like a good way to abstract some of the factors, but I'm going to bet that the WRE is going "in decline" by just being horribly set up, like it was done in Barbarian Invasion. Playing that was like being told I'd have to fix the most busted up car in the world, and being given a perfectly fine car with no gas, no oil, full of cinderblocks, and tires made of wood and duct tape. Takes a while to get to work, but not really broken in any sense of the word. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 08:30
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I will eat a tiny hat if Rome in the Attila game doesn't start off with slums in it, is all I am saying.
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Sep 26, 2014 12:05
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I am going to say what I said before, there will not be a Warhammer TW, because CA is not cool enough to do something that fun, and I already used up my last genie wish getting an xcom remake.
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Sep 27, 2014 12:49
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How the hell can you stand having 15k income? I run out of things to spend cash on immediately, you might as well get around six more armies up and running at that point.
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Oct 3, 2014 09:10
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They're really useful if you're going Independent. You'll be able to get your Republican Line troops up and on the front lines a lot faster than loving around with boats would do, and the seas get to be a huge loving pain in the rear end to deal with even if you out-tech everyone, since you've got around eight navies gunning for you. You don't want your navies having to run a taxi service, you want them on the front lines as well to do bombardments and kill transports. Gunboats will work but you're just asking to get hosed by a random navy showing up.
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Oct 11, 2014 07:18
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Well, there's nothing stopping you from just killing your allies. Not like they'll make good use of those provinces, anyways. 
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Oct 11, 2014 08:53
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Speaking of Med 2 mods, I've been playing that Hyrule: Total War mod that got mentioned a while back in this thread and, well, its something. It is pretty fun, but dear lord, they need to get someone on their team who can write a loading screen quote that doesn't make me roll my eyes. A lot of the stuff in the mod is pretty dumb and I got the impression that the people involved in the mod might be taking their zelda fan-lore a little too seriously (surprise surprise). Their wiki is a hoot, with some hero units having around 8+ paragraphs of insane fan lore and around a single sentence on what they actually do ingame. There's also a lot of idiosyncratic things about its design that I guess work out, sort of. Unit recruitment is slow, but units are also cheap, so the main limitation to army size is just how long it takes units to replenish when recruiting them. Their campaign map movement range is ridiculously huge as well, which is honestly not a change I really mind at all. Upkeep is ridiculously low, with most falling at 25/50 and the top tier costing 100 a turn. Early game your army is limited as hell due to the slow replenishment and how long building barracks takes, but by around turn 75 you can have absurdly huge forces running around. The AI isn't that bright in abusing this but they can end up with pretty big armies as well. If you don't feel like waiting you can also just hire mercenaries, which are also cheap, and you can hire around 10 - 25 units at a time because why the gently caress not I guess. There's also no limit on upgrading building chains in terms of population, so you can pretty much go hog wild in that department as well. A lot of interesting gameplay ideas went into the factions, though. Each faction gets unique generals that have special abilities (although there is no longer any sort of family tree. Generals don't ever change traits, there is no faction leader. I don't know why they did this aside from guessing  reasons), and I don't think any factions share units at all. A lot of the unit rosters are kind of homogenous past appearances, in having their core units being some variety of 7-9ish attack / 7-9ish defense infantry, some ranged unit, and then maybe some weak (compared to vanilla ME2) cavalry. There's exceptions to this, like the Darknuts, who are both nigh unkillable and incapable of running, and each faction generally has a handful of truly unique or absurd units. The writeups the other guy did explain that a lot better, but there is a bit of a gulf in ideas in how the faction plays, and how they actually play in game. I don't think the AI can deal with handling some of the more esoteric factions that well.Its also kind of unstable. It likes to crash after battles, which is really annoying. Its also pretty, with nice models, music, and such, although it helps that much of it was taken from other sources. The stuff they made themselves tends to stand out in a bad way. Kind of adds to the comical absurdity, in a way. But yeah, worth playing, imo. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Mar 7, 2015 |
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Mar 7, 2015 11:05
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I, for one, recommend going for railways at the expense of dumb AI buddies, especially if you want a republic victory.
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Mar 28, 2015 13:36
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you go republic because yankee pig go home
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Apr 5, 2015 07:14
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I imagined the lack of bayonets was a balance decision to preserve a niche for kachi units
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May 12, 2015 00:18
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Darth's Gettysburg game looks really good and I'm going to buy it so thanks Apple for bringing that back to my attention I guess. The gameplay video on Steam really sells it; its an AARP of an engagement that does a lot to spell out what the capabilities of the AI are. It definitely is a spiritual successor to Gettysburg, and it looks like it does the slow burn sort of battle a lot better than trying to modify TW games did.
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Jun 28, 2015 12:43
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FotS is also fun when you decide "gently caress guns gently caress everything" and go full kachi stacks (with supplemental armstrong guns anyways because they're fun). It lets you play around with some of the other mechanics that you usually neglect like line of sight and creeping along forests, since if you don't you'll get shot to death and that is bad. I was doing a coop campaign with a buddy and my happiest memory is winding up as reinforcements and arriving at basically the same exact spot that a larger nontraditional enemy force showed up and massacring them.
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Jul 9, 2015 08:09
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its a lot less hassle to keep coordinated marching in a column vs marching in a line. less obstructions/different ground to cover. like if you had a line of 50 normal people across and tried to walk across a field youd have problems if there was something like a mound/depression in it or if there was a patch of muddy/rough ground or whatever. plus just keeping lined up with everyone would be sort of a pain and it wouldn't take much for coordination to fall apart. now imagine if you were trying to get people to run; the whole thing would just dissolve in confusion unless everyone is on the exact same page at all times which is a lot to ask unless you practiced it a lot. a column is a lot simpler for people to cope with in terms of maintaining coordination and its a lot harder for various sections to gently caress up and easier for people to get back in order if it happens. having a run would be easier since there's less people that can get away from the group by going too fast/too slow, and any disorganization can be sorted out by having the people in front slow down a bit to let everyone catch up; the fewer people you have in front, the easier that is to carry out. when charging something scary, a column helps since there's fewer people that have to actually run themselves face first into scary stuff; everyone else is more or less blind to the scary stuff and thus more manageable. basically a bunch of poo poo thatd be a pain to emulate ingame so just abstracting some bonus movement for having a column would be better.
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Jul 18, 2015 07:15
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the gently caress are you people on about, shut up. everyone who knows grand strategy should know the inherent superiority of the bulgarian above all others anyways
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Sep 27, 2015 06:35
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I tried playing empire again and the main obstacle is that it's honest to god kind of boring Playing as the Martha and going "gently caress guns" and conquering England with Sikhs was kind of neat though.
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Sep 27, 2015 17:34
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I don't really feel the "open" map that is used from Rome 1 onwards adds much to the game, and this is from someone who has not played shogun or medieval 1. Even with the stuff put into the game in empire / shogun 2, there's really not much of a sense anything in the countryside matters at all. You're mostly just beelining towards their cities, and trying to do any sort of raiding is a waste of time. You can try to pick terrain to fight on, but you're really not going to know what terrain you'll get until the fight starts and it's usually out of your hands how screwed you might be, especially when withdrawing from an enemy force just makes you move randomly instead of allowing you to withdraw to a defensible position. About the only clever thing you can do are ambushes, which while neat, are kind of underwhelming in variety; doing something like teutoburg or okehazama is rather out of the question. The only other thing it let's you do is stand on bridges and be an rear end, which is about the only time I can think of where you can really pick an advantaged spot to fight with confidence. I don't think the AI does much of anything smart with the map either. They don't seem to understand ambushes on either a tactical or strategic level, which had always stuck me as rather inexcusable. They also have kind of a love affair of sending armies off in insane, useless directions, and don't have a grasp of knowing which direction an enemy might approach from, aside from keeping garrisons on their borders. A more constrained map would just be easier to cope with for an AI, I'd imagine. I could go on but generally I don't feel like the map mechanics do much to create interesting battles or add a sense of greater dynamism to the game. Very wide, not very deep, as the saying goes.
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Sep 28, 2015 11:03
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Koramei posted:There are ways to alleviate the army chasing without going all the way back to the risk style- better designed maps, for a start. Shogun 2's worked pretty well for the most part 'cause there were only so many places to run away to. that isn't as easy as waving a magic wand and going "AI be good!!" total war's open-world maps are just a thing that AI's are fundamentally bad at. even as something as simple as "put army on some boats and attack a dude you don't like" is the sort of problem that causes things to start making GBS threads bloody chunks on everything. Whenever you see a game with good AI, its often made possible by the devs doing whatever it takes to minimize the amount of challenges in the system that AI doesn't like.
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Sep 29, 2015 12:33
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I'm hoping Total Warhammer let's them really get into characters and making characters cool and fun again.
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Oct 3, 2015 08:50
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so I got that ultimate general: gettysburg game and uh well it's mechanically sound and the AI is good but I have not had total war AI piss me off as much as my units AI. mainly, stuff like artillery just deciding they're not going to fire today, with absolutely no visual clues or otherwise indicating what the problem is. this happens constantly - and there's a similar problem for nearly all of the game mechanics. Why are your men refusing to charge those guns in lieu of being shot in the face three times? dunno. Why are your skirmishers nearly constantly bottomed out in morale, regardless of casualties? dunno. reinforcements tend to dominate the battle tactics; they're scripted in number, timing, and location, and boy loving howdy it's real great when three fresh enemy units appear on your flank because you did too well in driving back the enemy. it really feels like a punch in the dick when that happens, which is basically always, the first time you play an encounter. in short, it's okay, but gently caress Darth anyways
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Dec 28, 2015 17:08
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I'm being harsh on it since it's actually better than TW in quite a few regards; the pacing of the battle is much better, and tactical considerations are pretty paramount; fights are not won on a single flanking move, positioning and terrain are relevant, you really can get over extended and using reserves well is actually important, etc. The use of capture points avoids the nonsense of TW "no you advance on MY hill" bullshit. And while some things are lacking (it often feels like what you accomplished earlier ends up being irrelevant since the number of reinforcements is so large), the real big drain for me is that the UI and documentation is so awful.
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Dec 28, 2015 17:53
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the documentation is less "spare" and more "absent". Darth or one of the devs did write a steam guide that detailed some things, but man, hes got a real patronizing tone, like he genuinely believes his game is such an approximation of reality that any confusion on a players part is a lack of "common sense" or somesuch. im going to guess the inability to completely switch off the "helpful" ai assistance meant to mitigate babysitting by having your units do things like wander out of high cover, into other units, is bourne from a similar sort of "how could you not understand my perfect logic" sentiment. the ability to disable it would mean acknowledging it's limitations. I've kind of given up trying to like it. But people generally enjoy it so w/e.
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Jan 11, 2016 05:04
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well complexity is one thing. Rome 2 was overwrought, fiddly, anal retentive, micromanagement. i have no clue how they decided it was a good system compared to their simple-but-conductive management in prior games. the whole building chain / constant upgrades and unlocks style of development is a pretty uninteresting thing to somehow gently caress up as is.
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Jan 16, 2016 16:52
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i thought fire by rank was already present with some dudes also it probably did not have to be reverse engineered that much; i remember medieval 2 had a some residual stuff lurking in the scripting language from rome 1 that could be flipped back on again
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Apr 28, 2016 10:16
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Mordja posted:Total Warhammer coming out made me finally decide to start playing MTW2, the only Total War game I own (I'm waiting for more factions to come out in Warhams) and while I'm mostly liking it, man, the strategy layer has a bunch of obtuse bullshit to it. Squalor is nothing but a chore, and I had to restart twice before I figured out my economy. Now the black plague's hit and I'm just losing men and money thanks to something I can't control. Well, actually I just read online that ports AKA a major source of income spread the disease but there's no way of knowing otherwise. Some combat problems too. The enemy ai keeps sending annoying microstacks at my capital that don't actually accomplish anything but waste my time, and I have to savescum if I load into a river crossing since pathfinding seems to be completely hosed up in those maps; my melee units just stand there when I tell them to attack. I mean, pathfinding in general is...problematic but it's especially bad on that terrain type for some reason. You'll be happy to know that squalor stopped being a thing after MTW2, along with plagues. The economy stuff is still there and important, and in later games there's even more emphasis on what you decide to build in a place since building slots are limited. Microstacks are less of a thing as well due to improved AI, and limits on the number of armies (Hard in RTW2, soft in TWW). Shogun 2 is very good and might be a better entry point for someone new to the series than TWW, since all factions operate the same and have the same units, and the combat in the games is more rock-paper-scissors esque with counters being fairly obvious and effective and the strategic elements being fairly straightforwards to understand. If you'd prefer TWW, then get it and don't worry about it. Stay away from Rome 2 since that has a lot more fiddly map poo poo going on than either TWW or S2 does.
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Jun 12, 2016 11:41
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sounds bad
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Jul 3, 2016 21:32
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ikko ikki live and die by the fact their loan swords are bullshit monks cost too much. ronin cost too much. just need more peasants with swords.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:14
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 07:34 |
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HOLE LEFT BY THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES
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Apr 17, 2017 14:04
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