Thoughts on the Demo.

[TehJumpingJawa]

While I think Shogun 2 is an improvement on Empire, it's still in my mind suffering from the exact same problems - just to a lesser extent.

1) The effects of the art style upon playability

The unit cards in Empire & Napoleon were aweful; they went for realistic when what is required is iconic.
Shogun 2 seems to have reversed this mistake a little, however it still isn't as clear as it was in Medieval 2.

A much bigger problem is the portion of the banner that indicates the unit type. The icon occupies ~20% of the unit banner, which makes discerning archer/spearmen/swordsmen/cavalry in the heat of battle extremely difficult.

This problem is compounded by the over colouration of the units.

In Medieval 2 units attire was ~30% faction colour and ~70% unit colour.
This balance was perfect; allowing the player to distinguish both the unit's allegiance and unit's type at a glance.

Shogun 2's colour balance is more like 95% faction colour, 5% unit colour. While this is undoubtably realistic for the period, it seriously detracts from the managability of an army's composition.

2) Combat pacing

Quite simply, it feels far too fast.

Perhaps this is a result of the problems highlighted in (1); that identifying unit types is far more clumsy therefore takes more time and so makes the rest of the decision making process feel rushed?
Or perhaps this is a conscious decision because of the type of combat favoured by the Japanese of this period?
Either way, I feel far less in control of the battle than Medieval 2.

3) The battlefields.

Exactly as they felt in Empire; cluttered.
It's all well & good having a realistic looking battlefield, but when this graphical richness gets in the way of me managing my army effectively it isn't a bonus, it's a liability.

Obstacles on the battlefield (walls, buildings, etc) still seem to cause problems for unit arrangements.
As a general I don't want to be wasting my time micromanaging a unit that is unable to sensibly position itself around a building automatically. I want to click, and forget about it.
This problem has plagued the series ever since Shogun 1, and yet 11 years later it still hasn't been completely rectified?!


You might notice most of my comparisons are against Medieval 2. As I hated Empire & didn't buy Napoleon, Shogun 2 needs to be better than Medieval 2 for me to consider buying it.
Unfortunately, for me, the demo just didn't quite deliver this.

[Psycho Pigeon]

medieval 2 + shogun mod = shogun 2. It's the same.

[Roost]

my own thoughts were:
cool its shogun 2

wait no anti aliasing? its a shown option but no option for x2 etc. probably just a demo / pre release issue?

then,
battle seemed about right, maybe a bit too fast, or maybe it was just a lot of units to jump in with, and i played on hard. and what the heck where those balloon things on the backs of the shimazu and others?

then, campaign. the opening cgi is a bit disappointing for my super-high standards for what this game should be. like, when they show those men sitting around the map planning, their faces are 100% stiff, there is absolutely no animation in their faces, they move their heads but their faces are just blocks floating around. wth is that? looked real bad.
then the tutorial is typical tutorial in the style of every tutorial ever, annoying b/c they only open up a few of the clickables at a time, which sucks and is annoying but expected.

the best part was easily checking out the encyclopedia to see all the interesting traits and builds you could make with different agents, buildings, general traits etc.
the vibe was super chill and very shogun-y. the vibe/ atmosphere feels better than the original id say.

although, i'd always hoped for a 'throne room' or 'map room' like they first did in shogun, but much expanded on, like where you could confer with your generals, and actually walk around and do stuff, would make campaign feel less stiff. i'm disappointed that after 10 years theyve done nothing with that.

then , on exiting the demo, the program 'hanged' and went stiff, had to task manager out of it, and even then could not end task the program. took a good 4 or 5 minutes for the program to do whatever it was doing, which i guess was to bring up the shogun steam storefront, wow glad i waited 5 minutes for that.

so, overall not overwhelmed, but it did get my sengoku jidai juices flowing a bit. lots of cool options to mess around with in campaign, but i think i was expecting more.

[Tha Crazy]

When Empire arrived, I had greatly anticipated it. I was eager to see what the new engine would bring, and how it would feel.
It sucked.
I tried NTW, and so does this.
I really can't stand any of it, the stiffness, the 'move-to' arrows, the unit cards, the minimap, the pre-battle map (of the positions of such), the GUI, just everything!
I was hoping to see a somewhat changed Shogun, more in the style of the original (and newer games, like RTW and M2TW), but it sadly feels just the same as Empire & NTW...
So far, I'm kind of dissapointed, but it's still a hell of a lot better, gameplay wise, than ETW and NTW, for me atleast.

[xiriod]

Wait for the mods. Darth and others turned ETW in to something brilliant. I've had a look at the file structure of STW2 and it is the same as ETW/NTW which means the mod-tools can easily be adapted for STW2.

Like ETW, Shogun 2 seems to be catering toward the arcade/action crowd. Remember the naval battles in vanilla ETW? Speedboating around, even when the wind was blowing against you. They, CA, even said they made it so because they believed many new players would not like battles that became "too slow and boring", though not in those exact words. Same when they revised naval battles later on. But, as always, modders to the rescue.

I've modded my fair share of games up through times, and it seems many games today are like a shell or a platform. Then they release DLCs to make it grow, and the modders make it better for those that like it that way.

For people that don't like to install and play mods, and don't particularly like to get DLCs they're a bit out of luck though as vanilla ETW, NTW and STW2 ain't that great. But RTW and MTW2 wasn't all that great as vanilla either.

Keep a close watch over at TWCenter, if you're in to mods and never gone there before. The rest are probably there already, waiting for it ;)

[FrontlinerDelta]

I agree with all of the OPs points almost 100%. Although the third point doesn't bother me too much, number 2 is the worst with number 1 being pretty close.

It's not even that my units die that fast but I'm playing on the largest unit size and when my men route after losing 25 men to archer fire, this is ridiculous. And this is on normal, I'd hate to see what VH is like.

[wonderboy2402]

The flag icon issue is annoying. You do have to get in close to find a Yari unit in a melee... Also, I agree that units are hard to "read" at a distance. Everyone looks very similar and it is going to take some time to adjust.

The only time I noticed an issue with units wrapping around walls was at the siege tutorial where I was trying to get my guys to climb. Seems like 1/3 were forever stuck on the bottom of the wall unless I reissued the order to scale it...

Overall I see improvement. The game seems to runs well compared to ETW at release. Optimizations will come and the game should be silky smooth.

[TehJumpingJawa]

Maybe i'm remembering wrongly, but in Medieval 2 couldn't you select a unit by clicking it's unit banner.
I seem to remember that was very useful when trying to select just a single unit from within a clump of intermingled units.

Don't seem to be able to do that in Shogun 2 :(
Could you do it in Empire and/or Napoleon?

[ASnogarD]

You can select a unit from its banner in the demo , in Shogun 2 .
If you see the banner getting a bit tattered and you want to pull that unit out its easy enough to click the banner, but wether or not the unit can disengage is another story :P

[bernhaland]

have all the pessimist gatherd here?
I think the game looks really good, and there is many exiting new features in it.
I still agree with many of your points, f.ex: the battles runs too fast, units looks too simular (the banners as well).
But overall i'm really looking foreward to playing the full version

[BoBo2]

It is good. I like it.
10/10. Very good battle men doing stuff.

[Xirix]

10/10?? ..all i can say is LOL...overhyped much.

[jojoabc123]

No kidding, I had no problems with the game. Everything seemed weird at first but hey it's new and different. The second time around on the demo and all seemed right and comfortable. Graphics were still enjoyable despite no dx11 in the demo. Units did seem to kill each other faster but hey that's an improvement. That just means the AI is better and now more individual units are fighting/killing each other, which increases the death rate of a unit, right? Bravo, this game is awesome!

[TehJumpingJawa]

No kidding, I had no problems with the game. Everything seemed weird at first but hey it's new and different. The second time around on the demo and all seemed right and comfortable. Graphics were still enjoyable despite no dx11 in the demo. Units did seem to kill each other faster but hey that's an improvement. That just means the AI is better and now more individual units are fighting/killing each other, which increases the death rate of a unit, right? Bravo, this game is awesome!

The demo doesn't have any AI in it? it's all scripted.