shogun 2 review
I am loyal fan of toal war series, starting to play total war series from their first game "Shogun" 10 years ago. Overall, "Shogun 2" is a good game among the total war series, and also quite addictive... but not a revolutional one from previous series.
Since I am a veteran total war player, thus I have adjusted the game difficulty mode to hard in my first campaign, but quickly I failed.
Unlike previous Total war series, in the strategy map of shogun 2, you also have to keep a very close eye to your food supply apart from the money, and think twice before upgrading your castle or market, as these 2 buildings will consume your food. If your overall food supply is in deficit, and you could not fix the problem within 2 turns( such as upgrade your farm, or scrap your market). You are immediately entering a counter-down for a game over, because soon you will have no tax income to support your army, and at the same time the rebellions will pop out everywhere.
The AIs are quite aggressive in the battle mode, no matter how well you prepared your formation, the AI will find a way to attack your weak points, using their Calvary to charge your archers. In a siege battle, the game becomes increasingly difficult to the attackers, especially when the defender have substantial numbers of archers. My experience: if you are a castle defender, don't afraid to challenge the AI in a manual mode even if you only have an inferior army. As a castle attacker, you should try to avoid manual mode to storm a castle as far as you can. Even if you could win, the cost will be high. So make sure you have a larger army to siege a castle so that you can comfortably use an auto battle resolution.
In a manual mode, sometimes there might also be a frustrating problem when you are a castle defender. Because in the battle field the AI may also act like a real human. In one battle, after having crushed several waves of AI attacks in trying to storm my castle. I suddenly found that the AI stopped any actions. The AIs did not choose to retreat from map, they simply stayed far away from the castle awaiting you to counter-attack them. (what a stupid idea from the game designer!) , and since my defending army is too weak, I have no choic but leave the clock do the magic, waiting the time to hit its limt. So please make sure you did not set the battle time to unlimit. What a time waste it is!
The Naval battle is a bit chaotic in control, especially you have a large fleet, and the new "boarding" tactics is difficult to master. Most often the ships will not be sunken during the battle, they are either escaped from the battle field or surrendered to enemy upon being boarded and losing the deck fight. I lost a lot of ships via deck boarding, since it is virtually impossible to keep an eye to all your ships during the battle.
The game is running prefect well in my AMD X3 CPU with nivida Gforce 9800 GTX. But the performance is apparently slowed down when there are 2 huge armies fighting in the battle field, and you zoom in your camera too close.
