is the original campaign even worth playing? I've only been playing FOTS
>>2179680yeah
>>2179680It's decent.Realm Divide sucks balls, but naval battles are much better than in FOTSOther than that it's just different unit roster, slightly different agent and research mechanics and worse character skills.
>>2179712Naval battles are the worst part of the game
>>2179717Yes, but in the base game you can just spam mid tier ships and autoresolve whereas fots autoresolve just rolls dice and kills your expensive frigates.
>>2179680yeah it's better than fots imo
>>2179680Yeah, it's quite fun for a run or two.
>>2179717Agreed.You can't avoid them in FOTS because if you don't have control of the sea the entirety of japan will bombard your economy into a pulp while in base shogun you only need to guard against naval invasions.
>>2179712I really like realm divide because it actually introduces a late game challenge rather than the game being a standard snowball
>>2180126it's a standard snowball anyway, you just learn to play around it.
>>2181560Yeah but everyone comes for you instead of just waiting around for you to get to them.
>>2180126The only bad thing about realm divide is that allied AI will switch side without warning and sometimes force more of your current allies to join the war against you because relationships between the two AIs haven't had enough time to deteriorate.Gamey, lame and invalidates diplomacy beyond the early game.Yes independent/republic runs are more fun anyway but I'd rather have the choice.
>>2181972I approve of this post.
>>2179680it's better than fots
>>2179680Its better than fots.Fots is just cheese
>>2181972I've never been able to not hold at least one major ally with marriages/hostages/gifts
>>2182077That's unironically a skill issue
>>2179712Other way around bro, naval battles in FOTS are passable compared to the atroucious slog of vanilla Shogun 2
>>2182293Individual battles are fine, it's just Napoleon but bad.The problem is that the autoresolve is unusable and the AI spams single-ship fleets that it streams at you endlessly suiciding at your capital port, which cripples your economy and bankrupts you instantly because like 2/3 of your income is trade until lategame. The tedious naval whackamole unironically sucks the fun out of fots and makes the campaign a chore.
>>2180126Realm Divide's problem is it turns a complex diplomatic problem into "The player is about to win. Someone do something!"And very often nobody can, but they try anyway, which can range from annoying to boring.
>>2182297Sucks to suck.
>>2182297just park a fucking fleet there
>>2182297>suiciding at your capital portI wish, they systematically bomb farms and blacksmiths and other resources as well as docks. The only way I win high difficulty FOTS campaign is by having lines of fleets on both sides of japan stretching all the way to the map's limit. If you leave the slightest gap they sneak through and stay out of your sightline until they can bomb your resources.The one saving grace is that you can cheese naval engagements by spamming the manual broadside button while slightly outside of your nominal range so enemy ships never aggro and stand there getting hit by stray shots. Technically you can do this to win every naval battle with a single ship if you want to waste like half an hour every battle, but even if you don't want to completely trivialize naval combat it's a nice trick to use in smaller fights to avoid having to constantly rotate ships in and out of your naval nets as they take cumulative damage form the AI's suicide waves.
>>2179680It's imho much better than the FotS campaign aside from naval battles. FotS has an issue in that as soon as you can reliably mass produce armies with cannons the AI has no counter to you at all.The battle AI in regular Shogun 2 is probably the best in TW history, while in FotS it is much more in line with the standard TW fare of "just make a battle line and charge forward". It doesn't understand how to use the units available.>>2179712First ever time I have heard someone say this
>>2185160>The only way I win high difficulty FOTS campaign is by having lines of fleets on both sides of japanI thought this was standard practice? I do this in all my Shogun 2 games, FotS or not.
>>2186485For what it's worth I never bothered building a fleet in either. Zero issues.
>>2186484>standard TW fare of "just make a battle line and charge forward"To be fair most units CA designs are basically the same template with slight stat variations and they might as well be used in the same way. Any distinction is usually superfluous and you are always encouraged to use whatever's got the best stat spread.The whole unit diversity debate is a fucking psyop. Vanilla Shogun 2 is probably the only game they made where almost every unit has a distinct purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok86Hw5CZqE
>leave small gap in entire ocean>single 12 gun ship slips through>have to pay a gorillion dollars of repairs
>>2187466Don't upgrade your buildings and repair costs stay low.
>>2187539Money stays low then.The actual answer is to just base a fleet in your main trading port.
>>2186485>I thought this was standard practice?It's not that important in vanilla shogun because single ships cannot do that much damage so it's no big deal if a couple slip through unless they have an army on board.>>2186493>For what it's worth I never bothered building a fleet in either. Zero issues.Maybe it's a difficulty thing. If you have no navy at high difficulty you'll go bankrupt from the constant bombardment.Actually smart campaign map behavior from the AI.>>2186484>FotS has an issue in that as soon as you can reliably mass produce armies with cannons the AI has no counter to you at all.This is not wrong because fighting with a proper modern army on flat terrain against fair numbers might as well be on autopilot but sometimes you'll face enough armies or enough enemy artillery and those won't be the easiest battles. Traditional armies are also exceptional at dealing with all modern armies if they can get in melee without dying but the game really hates them in autoresolve so you almost never have to actually fight them.imo FotS is more interesting for the campaign side but the early to mid game and traditional-focused campaigns have good battles.
>>2187466Yeah this shit is what makes FotS miserable to play.Protip: there are several naval chokepoints that you can completely close off with a line of fleets.Put the real combat fleet in the middle, and a single gunboat "fleet" on each side, such that their engagement zones overlap. It should reach all the way from the coast to the map boundary. As long as their engagement zones overlap, the middle fleet will be able to reinforce either gunboat. The AI will evaluate this whole line as being the combat strength of the center fleet and will never try to break through unless it has an overwhelmingly larger fleet.Normally if the AI doesn't think it can beat your fleet, it just bypasses it and autistically dives your trading port with a singleminded obession, but if it is physically incapable of reaching said trading port because every path is blocked by fleets it doesn't want to fight, then the AI's pathfinding breaks and it just stops moving its fleets entirely. Once you have the blockade set up you can just ignore navy for the rest of the game.
>>2187764Maybe it's a thing where the AI at best gets a couple turns worth of bombardment before he loses all his territory. If I had to guess you pick too many fights at once and drag your feet finishing them because you're spending a bunch of your income on fleets and that's slowing you down letting their allies join in, having yet more fights, needing yet more fleet and so on. Nasty cycle I'm very familiar with.
>>2187807That's actually what I was doing, but then moved one of my blocking fleets to support a land battle and a single boat sprung out of the darkness.>>2187764>Actually smart campaign map behavior from the AI.As a naval autist I find it infuriating, historically and from a gameplay perspective. Even if they just made it so that buildings didn't exist in a binary broke/not broke state that would be 100x better
>>2187466>one guy shows up and kicks a fence over>hectares of land become unusable, farms go completely unattended, thousands starving until the daimyo can pay 10 shekels for repairs
>>2179680>is the original campaign even worth playing?YesPlay as Otomo if you like FOTS gun battles
>>2187894seconded
>>2187894Oda is more fun
Mods that make yari wall require Way of the Spear to be researched before it's unlocked honestly feel like the way the game is meant to be playedYari ashigaru are a real trash unit before you unlock it
Mods that make archers shooting at all require Way of the Bow to be researched before it's unlocked honestly feel like the way the game is meant to be playedArchers are a real trash unit before you unlock it
>>2187900>>2187894
>>2179680Satsuma!
>>2188046Bow Ashigaru are a trash unit by default though, they're outclassed by every other bow unit because of their poor accuracy, range, armor and zero armor penetration, not to mention bad melee stats and morale means the AI will just charge into them and break them. Meanwhile Yari Ashigaru in base Shogun 2 are such a good unit you can beat the whole game with them because phalanxes in Total War games are busted.
>select legendary difficulty>spam yari>winhonestly the most boring tw game
>>2179680I played it long ago, I was not surprised to discover this statement from an ex dev about TW.It match easily.https://medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8fThe AI simply cheat all the time, they never upgrade their castles so you never get cool siege and once you capture them you barely get any moneyDiplomacy is pointless because of Realm DivideEnemy spam armies in the middle of nowherethe strategy And I did play with mods meant to fix all that.
>>2198970
>>2198970>>AI never upgrade their castlesThe truth is completely the opposite, I rarely pay to upgrade a castle myself because there's only time to take a handful before they're all level 2, and unless you're talking about recruitment provinces you hardly even need to upgrade castles in the first place.The real problem is that tier 2 castles have the same battle map as tier 1 castles, just with towers.Also diplomacy is not pointless, skillful diplomacy makes the mid game easier and can delay the effects for realm divide for several turns.
>>2199120>conquer runaway hojo>the brought in date and chosokabe>multiple front thunderdome battle was nothing compared to the final boss>finding enough food to maintain all their useless upgraded castles
>>2199120>>2199166This.There is a reason why I usually play with a mod that locks castle upgrades behind research and sometimes one that changes the battle maps
>>2198981>>2198970Total War is a baby game.
>>2198970The worst thing about AI cheats is that you have various agents that can do things like sabotage or economic damage, and the AI just ignores them.
>>2198970>And I did play with mods meant to fix all that.drop the mods please
Yeah the AI cheats, as it has in every total warYeah you can cheese the campaign, as you can in every total warStill the best historical title since RTW
>>2199568I have absolutely had cases where the AI tries to assassinate or otherwise dispatch my agents
>>2199568Are you certain one of your mods doesn't simply disable some AI functions? I make a metsuke to sit on my gold mine and better half of japan, enemies or not, lube up and run on all fours towards the motherfucker with their agents. It's frankly obnoxious how much they have a hard on for hunting down my agents.
>>2199568They get btfo by inciting revolts on unguarded cities. If the rebels take it the AI will never ever try to take it back for whatever reason. At least that's how I remember it working in FOTS.
>>2185151There's no zone of control if they "attack" something right behind your fleet. Your fleet should logically intercept, but they don't. This means that a fleet of a single shit boat can blockade your entire economy over the end turn, losing you 10.000 koku, even though your fleet of ironclads will destroy it next turn. The naval system is dogshit
>>2179712>naval battles are much better than in FOTSAre you fucking insane?
>>2187764>Actually smart campaign map behavior from the AI.It's not really 'smart' they just broke the AI in fots (and by extension Rome 2) to be a coward that hates taking any fight it doesn't overwhelmingly win.Normally the AI isn't supposed to respond to assets on the map it can't actually see, so it at least behaves vaguely like there's fog of war. Instead they made it so that the AI sees the whole map at all times, evaluates all possible static targets (ie settlements, ports) and picks one that it believes is the 'easiest'. This is almost always your home port because it's the only port that matters. It then beelines it straight to that target, avoiding the engagement range of any battle it doesn't want to fight, and only detouring to fight a battle if that target is reachable this turn and the balance of power is overwhelmingly in its favour.Because it's programmed to avoid the movement range of fleets it doesn't want to fight, and movement range is greater than vision range, it will always perfectly avoid being visible until it's forced to cross a trade route or until it reaches its target, because it can see all your fleets in the fow and always knows exactly which pixels are safe. If it physically can't avoid your movement range, then it just keeps the maximum distance possible while moving to its target, which usually just means skirting the literal edge of the map.IIRC this kind of behaviour was implemented because in Empire/Napoleon the AI would occasionally bug out and just leave its armies sitting still, because the script that was supposed to pick a visible target to pursue would break, and paired that with adjustments to the AI's aggression levels because vanilla S2's AI was suicidal. Instead they just made everything worse.The AI gets more cautious the more you raise the difficulty but since it has a terrible habit of spamming shitty gunboats and refusing to consolidate them into fleets, the ratboat tactics are present on every difficulty.
>>2199120I barely remember any vanilla AI upgrading their castles and if it happened I would wonder if it's not just a script>mid game easier Because it's a slog, a constant swarm of enemies, if at least capturing an upgraded Castle X gave me access to units I did not research that would be good, but you can't have that playing against AI.>and can delay the effects for realm divide for several turns.>delayWhich is why it's bullshit, if at least I saw the AI attacking each others as much as they attack me, and allies only turned against me in the end-endgame when I should be at peak power>>2199568I absolutely remember vanilla AI killing my agents and using their own agents.>>2199714>drop the mods pleaseI only remember the Darthmod but it's an huge modpackhttps://www.moddb.com/mods/darthmod-shogun-2
>>2200829>Darthmodslop
>>2202909ThisAlmost radious levels of slop
>>2202909as if you have better
>>2200816>So that's why I can hardly remember a memorable big battle from FotsAi simply doesn't give it to you.
>>2203877This
