Comments on: Thoughts: Fall Of The Samurai.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:18:29 +0000

You know, I can’t say that’s a problem I’ve ever particularly noticed. Certainly the AI does fling hordes of peasant levies at you but that just makes encountering a full army of professional soldiers or samurai a really nasty surprise, and the AI fields enough of those to make things a challenge. The peasant levies can occasionally be nasty too if they outnumber you two to one because their awful accuracy doesn’t matter so much when there’s two thousand of them all firing at your lines.

Normal difficulty is just a little bit too easy for me. I have more fun on Hard, but the weight of crap I have to deal with eventually mounts up to the point where I give up. Now, Normal is fine if I don’t want to think too much about what I’m doing, kind of like playing a game of Civ IV on Noble, but the gulf separating it and Hard is just too big. It’s probably the number one thing I’d say they have to look at for their next game — balancing their difficulty levels so that Hard is challenging, but not ridiculous.

(And yes I am, although I only posted there after the mass exodus from Qt3 and then kind of forgot about it. Although come to think of it it was also because I laid into a worthless puff-piece that had been written about XCOM only to realise that the guy who wrote it was the guy who posted it on Broken. Embarrassing!)

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:05:58 +0000

After playing four (!) campaigns, I’m currently in the midst of a love-hate relationship with Fall of the Samurai. I prefer its period to the base game’s, and its tactical battles, at their best, are superb. On the other hand, its campaign just doesn’t seem anywhere near as tightly designed, and a great battle system is meaningless when 90% of the time, the AI just flings hordes of peasant levies at me. How have you found the AI’s army composition?

I’m in partial agreement with anonymous above about the difficulty levels in CA games. I agree that, for Fall, “normal” is on the easy side while “hard” is brutal due to the AI’s aggressiveness (and CA’s new policy of making everything more expensive on “hard”!). However, I thought the difficulty was just right for the base game.

(Incidentally, are you the same Hentzau who posts at Broken Forum?)

By: hentzau

hentzau — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 21:28:11 +0000

Fall of the Samurai is the closest they’ve gotten to the ideal, but it only manages this because it artificially organises sets of clans into two opposing blocs. In this one case it’s acceptable because it reflects the era, but in terms of gameplay it’s not particularly exiting. What I would like is for multiple blocs of clans to arise naturally and organically, and for the human player to be able to become part of one of these blocs giving them a set of AI players they can trust (within reason). I don’t want to be fighting every other player in the game. Two-thirds, maybe. But not all of them.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:44:10 +0000

“So it’s a decent effort, CA, but it could do with a little more fine-tuning and refinement when you adapt it for your next title.”

That has always been CA´s biggest problem, they could never make diplomacy something natural, logical and pleasant. Whenever you play hard modes, you can be sure the game will always, one way or another, set you up completely.

And CA could also never develop a proper hard level; it is either too hard ( hard modes ) or easy-medium ( medium ). An ideal hard level mode would be one where AI would have more money, research faster and produce tough troops, and that is it. I will never understand the reason why CA always have to completely destroy diplomacy and send everyone to attack the human player simply because you set the game on hard and not medium.