Just played the Shogun 2 demo.

[Clement]

Just played the Shogun 2 demo and i must say so far i'm pleasantly surprised, after Empire i really wasn't expecting anything much at all and i approached this demo in a fairly negative mood to say the least, yet i must admit what i've seen has left me cautiously optimistic.

Good stuff:

Nice looking campaign map

agent video's are back

diplomacy options don't look lightweight at all, plenty of stuff there from alliance to trade and vassalage.

family trees back again, looks good and also some new features like a talent tree of sorts for your faction, plus promotions, choose your heir etc, all the good old total war stuff that was missing in empire.

The units look pretty awesome.

Nice to have the seasons back again on campaign map.



bad stuff:

The demo is scripted, which leaves the actual ability of the AI to anyone's guess.

The archers all fire their arrows at the same time and look slightly robotic as a result, as do the horses when moving at times from a distance, better from close up perspective though.

Units move a tad too fast.

didn't see any character traits as of yet.

i hear its not moddable which is a big minus, i hope it does turn out to be moddable eventually.


Dare i say it i like what i see in Shogun 2, the campaign map seems to have received some much needed love this time round after the empire campaign map which really was bare bones, as important as the 3d battles are, its the campaign map that holds it all together and gives narrative to the battles, it looks like time and attention has been taken over it.

Fingers crossed, i'm sort of disappointed i didn't pre-order actually, but after Empire i had every reason not to, looking forward to Shogun 2.

 

[Ajidica]

The demo is scripted, which leaves the actual ability of the AI to anyone's guess.

If the AI was halfway competant the demo wouldn't have been scripted. This combined with the abysman performance in the AI showcase leaves me nervous.

i hear its not moddable which is a big minus, i hope it does turn out to be moddable eventually.

*twitch*
Is CA/SEGA forgetting the one reason people still play Rome Total War? The one reason MTW2 is still very popular? Do they not remember all of the flak they got with Empire?

Not buying the game. Don't like the time period and the AI looks bad.

 

[Clement]

If the AI was halfway competant the demo wouldn't have been scripted. This combined with the abysman performance in the AI showcase leaves me nervous.


*twitch*
Is CA/SEGA forgetting the one reason people still play Rome Total War? The one reason MTW2 is still very popular? Do they not remember all of the flak they got with Empire?

Not buying the game. Don't like the time period and the AI looks bad.

Give the demo a go if you have the time, the battles really do look impressive and the campaign map also looks good, as for the modding part i did hear napoleon total war is going to receive some fairly substantial modding tools, perhaps shogun will be the same some time down the line.

 

[Maniacal]

The demo consists of a tutorial, which I haven't completed as it crashed on me twice and a hard historical battle that is also scripted, which isn't any different from the previous demos for TW games.

I really like that some of the casualties will crawl around on the ground or writhe in pain before dying, and some of the banners will flutter a bit in the wind despite being on corpses.

 

[salty mud]

Aren't the three battles in the mini-campaign unscripted though? I haven't played it properly, I just know there's a choice of three battles.

What set my alarm bells ringing is that they seem to have not removed Empire's melée system. That 1v1 crap was the worst fighting I've ever seen and if it is in Shogun 2 then it's laughable.

 

[Clement]

Aren't the three battles in the mini-campaign unscripted though? I haven't played it properly, I just know there's a choice of three battles.

What set my alarm bells ringing is that they seem to have not removed Empire's melée system. That 1v1 crap was the worst fighting I've ever seen and if it is in Shogun 2 then it's laughable.

I've played a few times now and although there does seem to be some 1 versus 1 fights i think i've seen them get interrupted by other fighting, the fighting seems much more random and fluid than in Empire being affected by all sorts of stuff, at least to me, what surprises me is how much i like Shogun 2 compared to how much i really disliked empire, I feel the same fun i felt from medieval 2 and i really was not expecting that, can't really quantify as to why, i think its that i feel Shogun 2 has a lot more attention to detail, especially on campaign map.

 

[Quintillus]

I've only played partway through the demo, but it's improved my perception of the game so far. That there actually is a campaign map in the demo is a plus - I don't recall that being the case with either Rome or Empire, and I wouldn't buy any Total War game just for the battles without the campaign. I'm not far enough in the tutorial to have free reign, but it hasn't crashed yet, and I'm certainly near the low end of the supported system specs.

I am pleased that it looks sensible when units parry blows in combat and such - I wasn't sure they'd be able to pull this off. In the first tutorial battle, I got distracted watching the 1v1 samurai battles, and lost a third of my archers, only to have the surviving ones expend all their ammunition on immortal units. Oops. Fortunately I didn't need them. I didn't play Empire beyond the demo, so I don't have any prior experience with the rather spread-out 1v1 style fighting. Didn't seem bad so far, although it seemed rather disorderly.

I suppose the archers do fire perhaps just a bit too much in synchronization, especially after the first volley when I'd hope they are pretty much synchronized. Small issue though.

The rotatability of units is a nice plus, sometimes it's difficult to get units facing the right direction in a timely manner in M2TW. Don't know if they added that in Empire or not, but I remember the units being more difficult to control in ETW's demo than in M2TW.

To be honest I don't care about the modding, as in my experience Total War mods tend to be very unstable (my experience mostly being with vanilla M2TW, including all patches) and thus less fun than the unmodded game. I plan to give Europa Barbarorum in RTW a try at some point, and maybe that will start to change my mind, but given what I've seen so far, I'd rather have them focus on making the base game as good as it can. And then if they add modding, maybe making it easier for modders to ensure their mods don't crash to the desktop.

Character traits missing would be a significant loss. They make each character so much more unique, and make the game easier to think of as a history. I'd rather have a king/daimyo who's a compulsive-lying, pagan-priest loving, shameful cowardly hypochrondriac who can't make peasant girls listen to him than have no character traits at all. Fortunately most of my kings are better than that.

But most importantly is that it did feel fun so far. I'm no history buff on that time period in Japan, or really any time period in Japanese history except the WWII era, whereas I quite enjoyed Roman and medieval history before playing those TW games, so I wasn't sure I'd enjoy it even if it was a good game. The Civ3 scenario on the same time period never really grasped me as it did some of my (real-life) friends who were more into the time period, or many of the other Civ3 scenarios, and I wasn't sure if it was the time period or the design of that particular scenario that dissuaded me. Early signs are promising, though. Not sure, but I feel that gunpowder being less common may help. The ETW demo felt boring with most of my units firing from range until they were demoralized, and the one Renaissance-era M2TW mod I played (which actually was stable, surprise of all surprises. maybe the only mod I tried that was stable) wasn't nearly as exciting as regular M2TW. There are matchlock samurai, but not so many that the battles are boring. Which is important.

I'll play through the demo more and if it continues to play well, I'll consider actually buying the game. Definitely waiting until post-launch though, in case it's as buggy as ETW was reputed to be at launch.

 

[Clement]

Character traits missing would be a significant loss. They make each character so much more unique, and make the game easier to think of as a history. I'd rather have a king/daimyo who's a compulsive-lying, pagan-priest loving, shameful cowardly hypochrondriac who can't make peasant girls listen to him than have no character traits at all. Fortunately most of my kings are better than that.

After having played some more it seems there are indeed character traits, but from what i've seen we have to choose them ourselves as our characters level up, the old system from rome and medieval 2 where buildings and events would often shape your general's character traits does not seem to have returned since it was lost in Empire, the part of that i don't like is that it seems that all the character traits will be positive because we choose them, no more drunk, mad, ugly, flatulent generals sadly, just shining hero's, personally i prefer the old system.

 

[Quintillus]

After having played some more it seems there are indeed character traits, but from what i've seen we have to choose them ourselves as our characters level up, the old system from rome and medieval 2 where buildings and events would often shape your general's character traits does not seem to have returned since it was lost in Empire, the part of that i don't like is that it seems that all the character traits will be positive because we choose them, no more drunk, mad, ugly, flatulent generals sadly, just shining hero's, personally i prefer the old system.

I would agree with you there - it seems there'd hardly be a reason to have a mad king if you got to choose the traits. It was fun trying to mould generals into skilled, useful human beings, and occasionally having them turn out to be incompetent madmen instead (or just be hopeless from the beginning). The opening video of the demo made me wonder if honour might be a trait, similar to chivalry in Medieval II. Ah, the wonders of dread lords and kings like one of mine in my current game known as 'The Chivalrous' but actually slightly dreadful.

 

[Clement]

I would agree with you there - it seems there'd hardly be a reason to have a mad king if you got to choose the traits. It was fun trying to mould generals into skilled, useful human beings, and occasionally having them turn out to be incompetent madmen instead (or just be hopeless from the beginning). The opening video of the demo made me wonder if honour might be a trait, similar to chivalry in Medieval II. Ah, the wonders of dread lords and kings like one of mine in my current game known as 'The Chivalrous' but actually slightly dreadful.

From what i understand honour mainly concerns the head of the faction, known as the daimyo, the decisions we make along the way, such as not taxing too hard, not changing religion, honouring alliances etc will make it go up and benefit the clan, generals will be less inclined to betray the daimyo and some other bonuses too, the demo comes with a full in-game manual just in case you feel like giving it a read, so far i personally quite like what i see.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Just played halfway through the demo campaign and I must say I really like it.
I didn't see any general traits except the commissions, and I can't realy comment on the AI because I autoresolved all battles but the first one against the rebels, but from what I can say the game looks really promising so far.

 

[Maniacal]

The Ai in the demo is completely scripted anyway but why would you autoresolve the battles you aren't forced to?

 

[salty mud]

The Ai in the demo is completely scripted anyway but why would you autoresolve the battles you aren't forced to?

I don't think the siege battle is scripted?

 

[GoodSarmatian]

The Ai in the demo is completely scripted anyway but why would you autoresolve the battles you aren't forced to?

I am forced to.
The demo says I can only play three full battles and have to autoresolve the rest, so I'm atoresolving the smaller ones to play with a more diverse army later in the demo.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

didn't see any character traits as of yet

Just finished the tutorial campaign and there are positive and negative traits, they just seem be much rarer than in Rome or Medieval 2. My Daimyo had "fertile wife" which of course means higher chance to bear children and one of my generals suddenly got "an eye for the ladies" which slightly decreased his armies' movement speed on the campaign map. The only thing I miss are administrative traits. I liked how in Rome you always needed to make a choice which guy is more suitable to command armies or administrate your provinces.
Oh, and I really love that agents now have their own skill trees and are customisable. I only got one Ninja to level 3 and I specialised the sneaky bastard to sabotage armies and get away with his life if detected.

 

[Joecoolyo]

Ugh, the only thing I didn't like about this demo is the lack of full graphics options. I wanted to use it as a benchmark to see if my machine could run it full blast, as of now, it can, but the graphics look worse than M2TW

 

[Maniacal]

Over on TWC .Mitch. has been unlocking the demo. One of his mods is here;
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=428829

It allows you to play the Siege and Historical battles without any scripting. He's also working on mods which unlock all the factions in the tutorial campaign without any scripting And a flat map to replace the historical one so you can get sense of the Ai without just blocking the fords on the river.

 

[Maniacal]

So it turns out, the AI may/is actually be decent.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=429849

 

[truckingpete]

I just played it too....I think it was decent. I might get it later on other than that its looking pretty good in my opinion

 

[Joecoolyo]

So it turns out, the AI may/is actually be decent.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=429849

Yeah, I just played his little scenario thing. I was able to beat the A.I. on Normal, to my amazement. A last second charge by some of my units who stopped routing managed to clean up my right flank and allowed me to concentrate all my units on my left flank. Was an extremely bloody battle.

Then I tried it on hard, and, oh boy, I got my ass kicked.