I remember now why I didn't give Shogun 2 a proper run....Realm Divide.

I recall that when I played Shogun 2, years ago, all was going well until Realm Divide, which as I recall at the time, I was not aware was a thing. Suddenly being at war with all my enemies AND all of my allies was not fun. I suppose if you know it's coming, it's manageable. But as I recall, that's when I stopped playing Shogun 2 and never got around to returning. I bought Empire and Napoleon and ended up liking both games and S2 went on the back burner.

So now I'm playing FotS and reached it again, while having forgotten in the interim that Realm Divide is a thing

Not good. Only about 22 provinces were aligned with the Emperor (15 of them mine), leaving the majority of Japan arrayed against me. In addition, at the time it triggered, 6 Samurai revolts occurred, leaving my nation in a state of prodigious peril. So I quit. I had in no way prepared for this, and while I might have survived, it would have been long and painful, and I know my economy would have crashed. I can deal well enough with armies on land. But the sheer amount of ships running about bombarding all of my stuff is more than I could handle. I can't afford the repairs.

So I reverted back 6 or so turns. Now I knew what the threshold is for triggering RD and I went up the line, but no further. Now I plan to turtle for 30 turns while I build up enough to take on everyone. What's the advantage, if any, of going Independent at Realm Divide?

Playing this game again reminded me also of why as a long time TW player I began looking for another game (which ended up being Crusader Kings and then Europa Universalis), and that's the terrible diplomacy. Oh man, it's so bad.

But the battles are fun, and nation building is fun, and as always in a TW game I like utilizing the various agents.

Of course Rome 2 also has its own version of "realm divide" whereby you risk civil war if your family faction gets too powerful.


One of the big pluses with TW: Attila is that there is no "realm divide" equivalent.


As for Shogun 2, you do indeed need to throttle back and make sure you have plenty of money saved up and plenty of armies out there properly deployed before you trigger realm divide. I've also found that marrying off your daughters to factions friendly to you will considerably delay their entry into the war against you.

That's a great tip about marriage, thanks. But the thing is I have no daughters, and even if any are born, the compressed timeframe in this campaign means they won't be of age (I assume they have to reach a certain age?) before the game ends.

Yeah, Shogun 2 (the main campaign) is 4 turns per year so it can be a while for the daughters to come of age. I'm not 100% sure but I think they have to be at least 15 or 16 before you can marry them off.

FotS is 24 turns per year.

I finished that campaign, a normal difficulty long campaign as Shimazu. Good stuff. The 24 turns per year means that winter actually means something, which I like. But it became clear that normal difficulty isn't all that hard. So, having had so much fun with that, I decided to start a vanilla Shogun 2 campaign (stock campaign) as Oda on Hard.

Oda has a tough start, at war with three nations and owning a single province. But what a great start I had, eliminating each of those at-war nations in short order. As I sat and basked in my glorious victories, another nation declared on me and absolutely crushed me with their huge army of space marines. I thought I was in great shape, but this huge stack of advanced warriors rolled right over me. It was like 12 turns in, how did they manage such a huge advanced army? Good grief.

I want to play again, but I'd like to mod it a bit first. Two things I am thinking of are more turns per year. Winter means nothing when it's 4 turns per year. I'd also like to limit (not remove) agents. Have a cap for each nation so that it's not just agent spam by the end.

What mods do others have on their S2? I think I'll skip Darthmod here, though I enjoy it on Empire and Nappy. Not looking for a conversions, just tweaks to make the game better.

There is a very specific reason why I never play above "Normal" in any TW title. On "hard" and above the AI get outright cheats with critical things such as reduced unit upkeep costs, income bonuses and morale bonuses.


In short, playing above "Normal" doesn't make the AI smarter in any way.

Yeah good point PM, but normal is a bit too easy. But hard is too much, at least for me, at the start.

I noticed the restricted UI option for battles. Do you play with that on? Perhaps I should give that a go to freshen up the challenge on the battlefield.

You may already be aware of this, but if not----Something you should note is that within the general difficulty setting to start the game, each clan has it's own individual difficulty rating. For example, Shimazu is rated as easy when playing on normal and Oda is rated at hard. Other clans are rated as normal. What this means is that the individual clan rating moves the general difficulty setting up or down by one level. Since Oda is already rated hard, if you played it on Hard, you were in a sense playing some aspects of it on extra hard.

Also once you have started a campaign, you can go back into the options menu and change or reset the battle difficulty under battle settings. You cannot change the initial strategic difficulty.

In other words, the difficulty you originally chose for the strategic side cannot be changed---only the tactical battle difficulty. I think this changes the initial experience levels of the enemy units and/or alters their aggressiveness. You can also add or disable battle realism mode plus reset the battle time limits after starting a campaign in this screen.

A lot of players play the strategic and tactical parts of the game on different difficulty levels based on the parts of the game that they want to be the most challenging. I'm lazy and rarely bother with this, but it's good to know that it's available.

Cheers

Thanks FO. Yes, I have it on Normal/Hard. (Campaign/Battle)

But I am curious about the thing you are saying regarding the initial challenge rating. Is that really how it works, or is it more of an indicator of that clan's starting position and situation as I have always considered it to be?

You want to have a super insane challenge?


Play the Western Roman Empire campaign in Attila on "Legendary" difficulty. If you can win that you are the ultimate bad ass. State of the bad ass art.

It's the latter. That difficulty setting has to do with the initial strategic disposition of the clan/faction at the outset of the campaign. You can easily tell right away as with the example in Shogun 2 where the Shimazu clearly start off in a better situation in terms of diplomatic relations and economy. I played the Oda campaign as well and the initial challenge was much tougher compared to the Shimazu.

No

What I want is a CAI that doesn't cheat much, but battles that are challenging, and I am OK with the AI having some cheats on the battlefield. But when they have a money cheat it gives them armies and navies that easily outsize mine in the early going. So Normal/Hard seems to be about what I am looking for.

It's interesting, when I played Shogun 2 five years ago, I played 30 hours or so, up until Realm Divide, then stopped. Now I've given it another go, (completely vanilla) and I've dropped another 100 hours and have completed a FotS campaign as Shimazu/Samatsu and a standard campaign as Mori. Something clicked with me this time around I guess. I've actually begun another FotS campaign as Tosa.

That's the way a developer at CA described it at some point, but like you, I think it's more as you describe. That's why I used the phasing "you were in a sense playing some aspects of it on extra hard" as a caveat. I should have elaborated that it probably had more to do with start positions, clan attributes, existing allies, etc.

Cheers

OK, thanks FO. Oda is 'Hard' because you start with a single province and at war with three nations. I was able to deal with all of those initial enemies, but then was hit by a full stack army of advanced troops from whichever nation begins just to the SW of Oda. My complaint stemmed from the fact that it was about 10 or 12 turns in and they had this massive force that there was no way I could have dealt with, especially having just fought three wars. So they crushed me. Compounding matters is the fact that vanilla Shogun 2 has a more compressed map than FotS, putting each city much closer together, and allowing that army of space marines to capture multiple provinces in a single turn.

Having started a new FotS campaign on Normal/Hard as Tosa, it is much more manageable. It was a difficult start, you know how it is when successive AI declared wars keep you hanging by a thread, stretched too thin and always one disaster away from destruction. Love that part of the game, or any strategy game for that matter. When the question is in the air the game is much more fun. But I've kept at it and carved out a nice empire up the the Realm Divide threshold.

Has anyone played as Tosa? They get a special unit called Tosa Riflemen. Wow. In 3D battles they are good. But in autoresolve they are ungodly. I feel like I'm cheating, they are that good. In one autoresolve battle, a single unit of 90 of these dudes killed 1800 enemy. I mean, come on. I would still be struggling to survive I think if it weren't for these units.


I was thinking about this thread when I was playing last night. Here was my 'list' two years ago

1. Medieval 2
2. Empire
3. Shogun 2
4. Rome

Now, I would like to update this list.

1. Napoleon. I feel it's the most tactical title and has the best supply/resupply model. I wish I could import that to all other titles. Of all of the TW titles I've played, I feel this one has the best combat. (I play this with Darthmod)

2. Shogun 2. Specifically Fall of the Samurai. Base game is very good, but Fots is even better. Interesting technological crossroads, and it oozes atmosphere, plus does away with the trade node stuff from S2. The 24 TPY in FotS is great and makes General Winter a formidable adversary or ally as the case may be. (Vanilla)

3. Medieval 2. Tough choice here between this and Empire. But I miss the old trait system and the commander/governor thing. I liked having to make a choice as to whether this city would be economic or military. And who didn't love the slaughter when defending those bridge crossing battles? (Stainless Steel)

4. Empire. Gunpowder is the sweetspot for TW games for me. But the scope of Empire is a bit too much. I hated the naval battles too. But it is still glorious on the smoke-filled battlefield. (Darthmod)

5. Rome. First TW game for me. Was great at the time, and still one of my favorite scores. I've mentioned it before, but TW is one of the very few games in which I do not disable the music. But looking back I see this game had some issues. It tried to do too much maybe? (Vanilla)

The music in all of the TW titles is fantastic with my favorite perhaps being Rome 2.


When it comes to the naval warfare aspect, Napoleon is hands-down my favorite. There's just something about First Rate ships of sail exchanging broadsides that feels visceral to me. The naval combat in Rome 2 and Attila is implemented ok but I'm just not a big fan of the melee and ramming tactics of ancient naval warfare. Also, the ramming is just way too overpowered in both Rome 2 and Attila. Why waste time trying to board ships and firing arrows when you can just ram the enemy ships and sink them much faster that way?

Yes, I agree with that. Definitely the best naval combat of the series. Probably the only one where I actually want to play the naval battles out.

I mentioned the old trait system. Does anyone else miss that too? Traits were gained by what the character did, or didn't do. They were weighted according to the town they spawned in or were stationed in. For example high level economic buildings could make that guy better at tax collection, or more corrupt. There were as many bad traits as good. I know the Stainless Steel mod probably added lots of traits that weren't in the stock M2. But I thought that was a better system than what we have now (up to Nappy, since I have not played any later titles).

The only thing I don't miss is the fact that in order to try to avoid bad traits, the player would have to move his generals out and back in to the town, as generals who hadn't used any movement points were more likely to acquire bad traits. I still do that, but far less often. In Shogun 2, the only bad trait I've seen is "Ladies Man" for -7% movement.

Attila is full of negative traits but I noticed that many of them are just randomly assigned based on some unknown percentage of likelihood.

For example, I've had my faction leader in Attila be rank 7 or 8 or even higher and he would still get negative traits from time to time even though his army has been fighting often and winning every battle.


Attila also has provincial governors and those will often get negative traits as well.

Yeah, some of those traits are so bad that you might as well put your general or governor out of his misery. I'm playing a campaign as the Eastern Roman Empire, which is not as hard as the Western Empire, but still a challenge. One of my well ranked governors just got the random trait of blindness. I've had it happen before to a general also. This means that the character has gone totally blind, which takes his attributes of authority, cunning, and zeal to zero. You might as well put them out to pasture at this point an hire a new officer.

DBond, you really should put Attila on your Steam wish list, so you'll get notified when they have a sale and be sure and get the Charlemagne expansion, which takes the game from late antiquity to the 8th century. It's probably as close to getting a Medieval 3 as we'll get. However, there is an overhaul mod that some guys are working on using the Age of Charlemagne expansion that changes the time frame to the 13th century. It's called Medieval kingdoms 1212 and looks quite promising.

Cheers

I really love the Age of Charlemagne DLC. Favorite factions to play are Charlemagne and the Emirate of Cordoba. The latter was a really interesting experience to play as since you are dealing with Muslim/Moorish units and buildings for your cities.