Turns out there's more to managing an empire than just spamming markets everywhere. Who knew?

Okay, I admit it. I may have been a little too hard on Shogun 2.

A little under a year ago I wrote a little 2,500 word review of Shogun 2. While I recognised that it was the CA’s best game since Rome — achieved in part through taking all the good ideas they’d had in Napoleon and putting them in a game that went back to the series’ melee-based roots — this was mentioned in maybe a paragraph or two while the rest of the piece was spent laying into it because of its difficulty. I found playing the campaign on Normal to be something of a pushover, and so when I started my second one I bumped it up to Hard hoping for a bit more of a challenge, this being the setting where, in the past, I’ve found the ideal balance between “AI nations being more than bumps in the road” and “Hardcoded bonuses ensuring they can spawn terrifying doomstacks of elite troops on my borders every two turns”. What I wasn’t expecting was for the game to hit me with the kitchen sink.

Everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong. Every other clan hated my guts, with the inbuilt diplomatic penalties for being a human who dared to fight back when an AI clan attacked me making me think this was a tad unfair. I spent all fifty-seven turns at war. I was never fighting less than two clans at once. Single province clans would assault me with huge stacks of samurai, while I was stuck in a position where I couldn’t rebuild or upgrade or consolidate my position in any way but instead had to invest all my cash into never-ending waves of ashigaru to be thrown into the meat grinder. At first I actually enjoyed it. The tactical AI had raised its game and several battles came down to a knife-edge; it actually forced me to think about what I was doing for the first time rather than doing the old spearmen-into-centre-and-smash-everything-else-into-flanks trick. For the first time since Medieval 1 I felt like I deserved the victories I won.

Unfortunately this euphoria soon wore off to be replaced by a grinding sense of despondence. I’d been doing nothing but fight uneven battles with crappy soldiers for what seemed like forever. Surely I was going to run out of clans to fight soon. Surely. But every time I killed off a clan, two more declared war on me and assaulted me with fresh stacks of troops. Even worse, I couldn’t rely on some of the old Total War solutions to an unexpected war declaration. Relentless targeting of clan family members in an attempt to decapitate them and turn them into a rebel clan no longer worked; instead, the clans seemed to spawn an unlimited supply of new family members on demand. They also didn’t seem to have to run a functioning economy either, with ninja revealing clans that were running the maximum level of castle with only level 2 farms — not to mention the murky question of how they were actually paying for all those samurai that kept throwing themselves at my fortress walls. Eventually I realised that this state of eternal war would never end; the AI would just keep coming at me until I was dead, until I’d killed them all, or until I gave up. I didn’t fancy spending another thirty hours grinding my way down the length of Japan in the face of what I felt to be a deeply unfair setup, and so I gave up.

This is not my Oda campaign. You can tell by the way I'm fielding actual goddamn samurai.

Rise of the Samurai tempted me back at the end of the year. The CA have an unusually good track record of making DLC campaigns that are genuinely different and fun and reasonably priced, for all that they’re also guilty of gouging players with two-quid-for-a-unit-reskin shenanigans as well. I didn’t get too far into it at the time (although I got far enough to realise it’s well worth playing all the way through, and I’ll be doing that later), but I did notice a distinct reduction in the amount of bullshit I had to deal with. Was it just the DLC scenario, or had the CA actually toned things down and made their game playable on the harder difficulty settings? I thought about giving the main campaign another crack, but even though months had passed my original experience still left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t particularly want to go back.

Then, a couple of days ago, I read this insanely in-depth breakdown of how the strategic layer worked, and it completely changed my opinion of the game. It was much, much deeper than I’d given it credit for, and I realised that my Oda campaign had at least partly been a misery of my own making. I’d been doing the usual laissez-faire province management that Total War has — until now — let me get away with, and I’d completely misunderstood several critical aspects of the economy. Things like the correct use of agents, the distribution of economy buildings, fine-tuning the growth of a province’s wealth, the benefits of adopting Christianity — all of these were things I had pretty much ignored*. The guide convinced me to give the campaign another shot, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the CA genuinely had toned down the amount of bullshit I had to deal with. (Or maybe it was just because I wasn’t playing as the Oda this time). The AI still fields unusually good troops but a middling-size clan will have a couple of stacks of them at most. It doesn’t seem to get the troop building bonuses it did before, either, which gives decisive battles that shatter a clan’s military strength the kind of impact that they should have. And I’ve yet to see a single-province clan running a level four castle off of a level two farm. In short, the challenge — and there is still a significant amount of challenge, which goes to show how unnecessary all that stuff was in the first place — now stems almost entirely from the quality of the fearsome AI rather than a bunch of artificial handicaps fettering the player, which in my opinion makes the campaign a far more worthwhile experience.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm actually tremendously excited at the prospect of playing a Total War game set in the industrial age.

In fact I might go as far to say Shogun 2 is the best title in the series now — not to take anything away from the original Shogun and Medieval, but Shogun 2 has a decade of technical and mechanical advances to draw on that make it a genuine improvement. And it’s the first game since those two that feels like it’s a complete, well-rounded experience. It didn’t ship with any particularly crippling bugs that I experienced (unlike certain other AAA titles I could mention) and so the CA have been able to spend their time improving the actual gameplay, something that’s almost unheard of outside of indie gaming today. So well done, CA. I was wrong about your game, and the things I was right about you made an effort to fix. If it makes you feel any better, I’m definitely going to be buying Fall of the Samurai now.

*Except for using ninja in the aforementioned decapitation strike attempts.

The post Creative Assembly in “Fixing their game” shocker. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The more I play Shogun 2, the more I’m starting to think Total War games have a fundamental mechanical flaw. Yes, yes, we’ve all seen the botched attempts of the Rome-Medieval-Empire era – schizophrenic AI combined with a more fluid, realistic campaign map which in practice led to some infuriating gameplay tics – but with each of those games, the problem appeared to be specific to the game in question. Usually it was the CA’s crappy AI coding. In Empire’s case it was also a case of sprawling scope and the series first flirtation with the gunpowder era producing – aha – a serious misfire. But Shogun 2 is the first game to make me think that Total War games, in their current form, simply will not work.

How can this be possible? At first glance, Shogun 2 is, by the CA’s standards, nothing short of a triumph. Not only have they moved back to the easier-to-implement melee-based combat of the original games, but being set in Japan means that the grand campaign is smaller in scope. This is A Good Thing; I have trouble believing anybody enjoyed starting up Empire for the first time to find themselves presented with a six-province empire embedded in a 120-odd province map (or three). That’s too big for even seasoned veterans of the series to swallow, and so cutting it down not only makes the game more manageable but it also gives it an increased amount of focus, making the game personal again. Every army is valuable. Every general has to be used. There’s no stack of forgotten family members sitting in the capital in Shogun. As a grand strategy experience, Shogun regains much of the gravitas that Empire and Medieval 2 sorely lacked.

The return of melee-dominated combat is also a welcome shift back to the series’ roots. The cavalry-spears-swords-archers dynamic works well and is easy to understand – easy enough that the CA’s battle AI coders have finally pulled their heads out of their asses and produced something worthy of the name. In pitched field battles, the battle AI isn’t just competent, it’s downright threatening. It doesn’t hurt that the campaign AI fields balanced stacks of troops this time around (although it gets more than a little bit of help with this – more on that later), but the AI grasps the concepts of skirmishing, scouting and not sitting on a ridge being shot to pieces by a horde of archers.  It’s still pants-on-head stupid during siege battles, unfortunately, but I’ll take whatever I can get.

The economy has also been rejiggered a lot. In previous games it was something that took care of itself – I just built the odd farm and road network and left the game to get on with it, since that approach brought in enough money that I was never short. In Shogun, though, not only is money a lot harder to come by (unless you’re the Shimazu and happen to live next to all the trade nodes) but unit upkeep costs have been raised, with the result that it is now impossible to field more than two doomstacks of proper Samurai. On the face of it, this is a change that I endorse; previous Total War games got to the ludicrous point of having battles which involved five or six stacks at a time, and that was just on one portion of the front. Armies are no longer disposable entities, which again lends the campaign experience a lot of gravitas since having your prized shock army get mauled in a cataclysmic battle actually hurts.  Similarly, routing the enemy’s army should be a significant victory, since they shouldn’t have two more waiting just over the horizon. But this is the point where we come to Shogun’s fundamental flaw:

The campaign AI isn’t playing by the same rules as you.

Now, coding good AI isn’t a matter of programming something that’ll act like a human. Coding good AI is all about programming something which will appear to act like a human. Half-Life is the famous example of this, where the rudimentary Marine AI was cleverly disguised with a range of audio cues; having the Marines occasionally shout out that they were flanking the player created the perception in the player’s mind that that was what they were doing, when they were in fact moving around fairly randomly. There’s nothing wrong with coding AI which is fundamentally inhuman, which gets all sorts of advantages compared to the player in order to present a stronger challenge, as long as these advantages are low-key enough to be hidden. Sadly, the advantages given to the Shogun AI – the advantages that were necessary in order to make it a credible threat – are game-breaking.

Let’s go through them in no particular order:

1) The AI isn’t restricted by its economy. Basic example: higher level castles require food. Single province AI clans will happily run a tier four castle with a tier two farm. This means they should be dealing with food riots every single turn. They don’t. This adds insult to injury when the player takes the castle and gets plunged into food shortages that the AI didn’t have to deal with.

2) The AI isn’t restricted by its buildings. Oh, it’ll cheat those into existence as well, but I’ve seen more than one occurrence of an AI clan fielding units it didn’t have the capacity to build.

3) The AI isn’t restricted by its bank balance. It’ll spam those expensive high-level castles and buildings with wild abandon, as well as fielding multiple stacks of expensive professional samurai when it blatantly doesn’t have the economic capacity to support them.

4) The AI isn’t restricted by the basic game mechanic of having to physically build units. As in, it will happily spawn half-stacks out of nowhere under cover of the fog-of-war.

5) The AI isn’t playing to win. As bad as points 1 through 4 are, they are nowhere near as bad as this one. Civilization IV had AI that on higher difficulty levels cheated like there was no tomorrow, but it was at least playing with the same basic goals as you – - so if you turned wars off, it’d build the spaceship and win the game in 1800AD or something. This meant that the AI civilizations in the game were actual competitors to the player civilization. By comparison, the other clans in Shogun 2 are nothing more than speedbumps; obstacles placed in the player’s path to make it difficult (and at times downright infuriating) to make any headway.

Taken together, these flaws in the campaign AI take all the restored gravitas I described in the first half of this review and chuck it in the bin. When the Asai declare war on me, they’re not doing it because they see an opportunity to increase their power base to the point where they can claim the Shogunate. They’re doing it purely to make my life more difficult. I’m not one of numerous clans vying for dominance, I am instead a person thrown in a pit with a bunch of unfeeling machines whose only goal in the game is to pound on the squishy fleshling, and who get a hell of a lot of help in order to do so. This makes playing Shogun 2 on difficulty levels above Normal an exercise in pure masochism.

The problem is exacerbated by the Realm Divide mechanic. This attempts to replicate the cool idea of the civil war in Rome, with the critical difference being that in Rome you had time to build up a fairly large power base. In Shogun, not only do you have fewer armies to defend yourself thanks to the altered economy, but the Realm Divide event fires when you’ve taken less than a quarter of the provinces in the game and makes everyone else want to kill you, no matter what they thought of you before. This is just… well, from the very beginning of my Oda campaign I have never been at war with less than two clans at a time. Very often it was four, and at one point it went up to five before I wiped one of them off the map. I had been clawing and scraping my way to the top of the local pile of clans ever since the game started, I was just finally getting on top of things and looking forward to actually maybe spending some of my koku harvest on buildings to rejuvenate my war-ravaged empire rather than endless ranks of ashigaru, and then Realm Divide fired. It was at this point that I gave up.

Now, you might think it’d be a good idea to make some friends before the Realm Divide. It is possible to make allies who won’t immediately betray you when it fires (and of course vassals don’t have a choice). Unfortunately, because of the way diplomacy works in Shogun, the only way to make people like you is by giving them huge wodges of cash. And even if you do this, Realm Divide is a constant negative modifier that increases every turn. Eventually it’ll outweigh all your bribery money, and you’ll be at war with everyone.

This is awful. Awful, awful, awful. Every other clan in the game – every single one – is a clan that doesn’t care about winning, that can replace its troops and buildings at a whim, and that will declare war on you sooner or later.  As a final incidental point, all that stuff mentioned above makes it impossible to sit back and build your economy. When somebody declares war on you it’s a fair bet you’ll be at war with them, on and off, for the rest of the game – and even if not they’ll turn on you once Realm Divide comes up. This makes total annihilation of the clan in question the only valid response to a war declaration. Except, taking another clan’s territory will add a negative modifier to your diplomacy rating with other surrounding clans. This negative modifier will tip one of your neighbours into war, and then another, and so on, ad infinitum.

All this is a very lengthy way of saying that, in adding all the things that were apparently necessary to create a campaign AI that could present an actual credible threat to the player, the Creative Assembly broke their game to the point where it simply doesn’t work on Hard and above. This is why I say that Total War, as the concept currently stands, may be fundamentally broken; if this is what it takes to make the game challenging, if the only way to make it hard was to add layer after layer of shit to artificially boost the difficulty level, then that’s a challenge I don’t really want any part of. If an AI that can function without heavily weighting the game against the player is truly beyond the CA’s abilities then they need to adjust the basic game mechanics until such an AI drops back into the realm of the feasible. And that’s the end of it, really.

The post Thoughts: Shogun 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.