Shogun2 is out

Bought in on steam but the servers is to busy to download it

 

They should've really allowed a preload

 

If any of the early adopters are interested, a review would be most welcome. Two of the features I remember from the original were the assassination cutscenes (super cool!) and the music, I hope at the very least Creative Assembly haven't dropped the ball on those points.

 

Finally its downloading

 

I have predownloaded it, well at least some part of it.

The servers are so full that my paltry 10Mb/s is suffering, I can maintain only 600~800 Kb/s, and this is a 16gb game

will post something about it soon.

btw the twcenter might have people who are already playing it

 

Please do a an impressions or a full review of it if possible.
This is my most anticipated game of the year but i dont have my laptop yet.
Im basically concerned about bugs as ca is known to put out half baked products in the past.

 

Well mine has finished downloading but I can't get myself in the mood to play it yet

 

I'm downloading this now... I'll do a review in 2 weeks if no one has done one by then.

 

Need some help in here. The thing is i cant use AA in Shogun2...its greyed out.

Thanks in advance

 

what are your specs?

 

Oh I just noticed my Anti Aliasing option is greyed out too ._.

 

I7 740 and gtx460m and 6 gig ram

 

ok force it through the nvidia control panel, that is the best thing anyway

 

is it just me or does the graphics seems quite dark/shaded??
is it supposed to be like that to give it a cinematic feel??
like from what i can see the effect of artificial sunlight isnt really there on the map

 

Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? xD

 

yes it is, the AI is improved if you consider empire, but its miles behind the XAI mod for m2tw.

the gameplay is the same, with added rpg elements due to the administration of the heirs, basically you administrate every character, which in other versions the AI was in charge.

the graphics are improved.

 

It probably sounds like a micromanagement hell once you get past the 1st 50 turns and end up with a quarter of the country and two extended families to manage...

 

xD sounds fun but can you get the campaign to keep going? Like endless until you are the sole ruler of the world?

 

Played the 1st iteration? You're supposed to unify all of the Japanese islands (minus Hokkaido and Okinawa) and end the warring states era. The first game didn't have a time limit like its successor games though.

 

you can play past the end age.

And yes the micromanagement is an added thing that I like, since when you are past the mid early stages, you can just roll over. this time the ai is programmed to gang upon you, if you are too weak or too powerful, thus keeping the fun in the game, aside that there arent as many buildings or options without some mods that can lead you to ruin if you dont micromanage.

 

1st game had a fairly simple tech tree, lots of base buildings with upgrades depending on castle fortifications and available local resources. The addition of naval combat in this iteration (somethiing the developers didn't bother with for good historical reasons in the 1st) means a few extra naval buildings beside the port and trading post.

You can't really beat the game without annoyiing everyone else (clans and ronin states alike) so being ganged up on by the mid-game should be a given.

 

Anyone willing to confirm if the limited edition (the one with the extra faction, extra battle and a few miscellaneous extras) can only be purchased beforehand or remain available via Steam or other digital distribution outlets a few months from now?

 

Anyone know if the performance has been greatly improved from that awful demo they release? Could barely get it above 20FPS, regardless of what settings I turned down.

Shame, as I was totally interested in this game before. Loved the original and spent hundreds of hours with Rome.

 

For those who's playing (mine's still downloading...), do all the factions have the almost the same units? If so I won't bother keeping my computer on all day and night just for the game to finish downloading, because unless the units vary like in Rome Total War, it won't be a good game in my book.

 

If it's something like the old Shogun, the units may be quite similar but the different factions have different specialties ._.

 

Well, Shogun happens in a single country unlike other total war series, so you can't really expect drastically different units. For other total war series though, the unit mostly just looks different, every faction more or less has the same group of units as well.

 

it has, in the demo I got barely good fps, in high now I can strangely play at ultra, specs:

CPU: P7350 2ghz
GPU: AMD 4670m GDDR3
HD: Corsair F120
RAM: 4g DDR2 800mhz

They have basically the same units but as said the tech tree is a little bit different and there are some unique units for each faction, you do have to realize that this is a game only about japan, and they have a much tighter culture than most countries. Aside that they dont put the southern territories.

exactly

i dont know what you are talking about, the volume of buildings in all the series has been about he same, and if you consider any mods out there, its fairly limited and hinder the difficulty of the game (basically mods = units+ buildings+)

The being ganged upon dont happen very often in any total war games, I should know I have all of then, this is indeed a good thing, although logical it didnt happen very often, and this + the tech tree should provide fun at mid late stages, when all that you did was basically build 5 more armies and rule the "world"

 

I'm getting pretty bad fps (20 avg) and I have a 485m and 2720 i7 with 12gb of RAM... Comparably, I've heard people using lower tiered video cards (both desktop and laptop) getting better performance than me and 560ti users. I modded a 267.24 to work with it, so theres a possibility it might be driver related though

 

Actually the building plan hasn't changed much over the iterations, base buildings available with/without a castle and then upgrades depending on the level of fortifications built. Medieval: Total War ramped up the number of buildings since there were 3 distinct religious factions with the associated faction specialty units. In contrast the Buddhist and Christian (if any) factions in the 1st Shogun would differ only along the religious buildings built, although that seems to have changed from the little I've read so far.

If you've played the 1st Shogun, this is a revamp with more emphasis on tactics and less on what variety of unit crushes the other. I personally disliked unit variety overkill, after a while it becomes a pain having to memorise which units are good against which.

 

@harleyquin07

thats exactly what I said, maybe I should have worded it better.

I would wait for some mods to get out for the purchase of the game, since they always make the game harder and as a consequence more fun.

@speculator

when your card gets supported maybe it should work better, but this game is supposed to work smoother for AMD users.

 

I'm not that masochistic, for some reason I could never conquer a map properly in any of the iterations I've owned. By the looks of things the AI in this one is sufficiently competent for most greenhorn players to get stuck into.

Metacritic has an aggregate score of 90 so far, if the glowing reviews are matched by solid sales an expansion shouldn't be far off.

No one willing to comment on the availability of the limited edition in a few months time?

 

i wonder how sieges play in this game. are they broken as has been the problem in some past tw games?
also is it too rock-paper-scissors? one of the reasons i liked mtw is it was less rock-paper-scissors than its predecessors.

 

The advertising blurb is that sieges are fought man-to-man on different levels depending on the castle fortifications. Unlike the 1st iteration siege engines are supposed to be available(?).

 

I need to update my drivers, thanks for reminding me!

I have a 285m so am wary to drop down the cash - really wish they'd release an updated demo as I am genuinely interested in this game due to me love of the original and Rome.

 

Shogun 2: Total War Review for PC - GameSpot

Total War: Shogun 2 Review - PC Review at IGN

Shogun 2 Review Links

great reviews across the board. this is and retribution are the frist games im getting when my new lappy arrives

 

I'm going to have to wait until H2 or Q3 of 2011 at this rate, but what an improvement compared to its predecessor!

 

i thought u had the game already

 

Personally I think the siege in shogun 2 has the best game play. You don't have to deal with all those cumbersome siege engines, just climb the walls. Those defending also has quite an advantage in that if you place all your troops on the walls, your archers can shoot downwards, while the attacker's archers are as good as useless as very few of their arrows can pass through the wooden defenses.

Yes, it is more or less rock-paper-scissors, katana (Sword) > yari (spear) > horse > sword. But then horses are quite seldom used from what I can see, and they kind of suck in siege battles, making katana samurais great in siege battles.

With empire -> napoleon, wonder what will the next "expansion" be, Nobunaga: Total War?

 

I can only read about the game from the myriad of information available, I think some of my earlier posts would have hinted that I can't own the game since my laptop isn't physically capable of running it.

Archers are now placeable on walls? Huge improvement from the 1st where they had to shoot out from the front gate and invaders could attack through bottlenecks. At least in Medieval you could dismount cavalry troops in sieges for specialist infantry troops...

I want a remake of the Mongol Invasion with the new engine! Or something like the later invasion of Korea shortly before Tokugawa Ieyasu took over.

 

Right now it's not really a "wall", because castles are on man-made plateaus, there are wooden plates surrounding the plateau and you can place units behind those wooden plates, including archers. Cavalry can dismount as well, but you only get about half the troop size with dismounted cavalry making them very bad for siege battles.

 

upgrade the castle to a citadel they are awesome! So huge! Even bigger than m2tw castles!

and you can clearly see some bugs in the AI, this was also before the 1st patch that made the game unplayable for a lot of people, after that i didnt saw any units stuck in some god forsaken spot in the map

 

Saw the citadel when I attacked Kyoto. I thought I'm going to lose when their archer destroyed 2 full units of my troops while crossing the river, climbed up with my yari and sword samurais, getting overwhelmed, then they starts to rout, and the AI is stupid enough to throw everything at me at the outer wall and not inner one, so all his units routed at the outer wall and I won without even stepping into the castle much...

 

I have saved kyoto for the last battle.

What is your preferred setup?

I have experimented with different army formations:

3 katana cavalry
6 bow samurai
2 no dachi (although Im going to change those for katana samurai)
2 katana samurai
4 naginata samurai
2 iari samurai (although lately I have just used naginata samurai)

or

4 hand cannon units (forgot the name)
4 matchlock samurai
4 katana samurai
6 naginata (or iari) monks
1 katana cavalry

 

I'm not using cavalry at all, they are good at field battles, but kind of worthless for siege battles, usually I have a combination of no dachi, naginata and bow.

 

the problem is that most of my battles are not siege, and 2 full stacks against one of mine... thats why I always pick cavalry, the problem with no dachi is that when the banzai wears over, they are cut to pieces.