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FinalExcalibur

Fall of the Samurai

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Has anyone else played this?

I think this is my favorite Total War yet. Very evocative setting from a time period not often covered in games. There's something very sad and tragic implicit in the whole rapid modernization affair, a 'narrative theme' of sorts I've founded lacking in some TW games. Also, always been a fan of muskets. Seeing them side by side with samurai is a treat indeed.

The mechanics feel great, too. I think they've really refined the systems they had from Shogun 2. The agent/general talent choices are streamlined and not quite so clear cut, and the foreign vet is a great idea. The passive xp gain is incredible.

I do sort of wish the engine ran a little better, but not knowing the engine they use, I don't know if that's fair to say. But gosh the game is big in size. And if I remember, it uses the same engine as Napoleon, which had each faction take up something like 2gb in filesize for assets. Erk.

Oh, great music too. Especially the main menu theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq9MKVwh9sg

By the way, I kinda want to ask: I'm approaching the series as a gamer in general, not a strategy gamer per se. I didn't know much about history until games like Age of Empires and Total War drilled some into me. But I really wish there was a fantasy total war of some kind. Yet I notice when polls are posted on forums on what people want for new TW games, fantasy stuff isn't often mentioned (Though Game of Thrones might get one post, or two). Why is that? Is it just the audience is more slanted towards historical strategy gamers?

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I love Fall of the Samurai. I just finished my first playthrough as the Choshu (Kiheitai are absolute monsters on the battlefield). I totally agree on the theme: there was something a little sad about seeing a city with a Legendary Dojo and deciding "I have no need for this, burn it down." I also found myself fighting my own people as much as the shogun (figuratively speaking -- I don't let things get that far out of control) because of how much I focused on modernizing as fast as possible.

I would have liked more event decisions, thought that might have made the game too unpredictable. It was a nice touch of flavor, especially because I could use them to take a stand against the Western powers (Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians!) even while I had American marines in my ranks.

I got the impression Lord of the Rings is a popular suggestion, though LotR's salience is waning lately. Still, I think there are a few reasons why they focus on historical settings. Fantasy tends to be a character-driven genre where the larger political dynamic is less interesting (notably excepting Game of Thrones). You're certainly right that strategy gamers are often history nerds. I think it is also easier to design a historical game because it is clear how samurai, line infantry, and Gatling guns all figure on a battlefield.

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I had a fantastic game as Satsuma and then three terrible games as the Aizu. Barreling headlong towards modernization works great as a strategy, but remaining traditional has limited returns. Sooner or later, your technology and income will stagnate, at which point you'll have to modernize. Your choice is merely to do it now and reap the rewards, or do it later and play catch-up. That may be thematic, but it's not a very interesting decision for the average gamer.

 

I could kvetch all day about little things, like that there's not much differentiation between most of the factions except for position, but the atmosphere of the game is really top notch, to the point that I'm uncharacteristically willing to give it a pass on the rough spots. The feeling of sending into battle Imperial Guard Infantry trained at a settlement with a Firing Range and a Gunsmith is a terrifying comment on the brutality and power of modernization, as well as being more or less an "I win" button. Since Crusader Kings II has crapped the bed with the 1.05 release, I've contented myself to another playthrough as the Saga to see how attainable the "republic" win condition actually is, at least until the inevitable DLC fleshes out the traditionalist side of things.

 

Honestly, at this point, I'd have a hard time deciding whether to recommend Fall of the Samurai or the base game itself to a Total War newcomer. The latter has a lot more longevity, but most of that is due to the DLC unit and faction options, in addition to the fairly enjoyable DLC campaign. Fall of the Samurai is a much more concise and poignant love letter to the Japan that was.

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...I really wish there was a fantasy total war of some kind.

For whatever it's worth, I know Medieval 2: Total War got modded quite a bit, and I distinctly remember thorough mods for Lord of the Rings and Legend of Zelda themes. The game is fairly cheap on Steam.

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Fall of the Samurai still suffers from the campaign desync bug in co-op that Total War 2 has suffered from the start. This can lure you to playing co-op for ten hours to find out your save is broken and you can't continue. Apparently the way they handle multiplayer campaigns is coded really, really badly.

There's some kind of workaround by using Dropbox, but it really shouldn't be necessary.

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Has anyone managed to make decent use of the railway yet? It seem's like once you own all the needed provinces (because the ai never upgrades fast enough), you've sort of already won.

Also, I've seen it appear on the battle screen a few times, does an actual train ever come along through the fight?

CHOO CHOO.

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I played a Long Campaign where I just marched East from the Choshu domain to Edo, and conquered everything in between. Almost all my newly-trained units made it to the front by way of the railroad. I could get units from the southern tip of Honshu to Edo in about 3 turns, so definitely worth it if you can get it linked up.

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It's much more useful in the east and north, where it connects every other province and cuts down on the long marching times/circuitous boat rides. Of course, the less technologically savvy clans start in that area, so the end result is almost the same.

Edit: I'm honestly trying to keep my glowing first impression of this game in the limelight, rather than the thousand different things that still seem to be wrong with the Total War series, especially ones that I don't really recall in the base campaign. More than anything, the self-destructive tendency of the AI to dogpile the player is back in full force. As the Saga, I've received two boatloads each from the Obama and Odawara on the other side of the map, packed full of green troops. On the one hand, hooray that the AI is attempting amphibious invasions properly now! On the other, both these clans are badly losing wars at home, to the tune of around one province every other turn, and surely those forces would be put to better use defending their home turf. Somehow I doubt they're mistaking the largest faction with the most experienced military for easy pickings.

I'm complaining here because I get called a baby when I point out the suicidal AI on the CA forums. I'm not a baby! I mean, I don't think I am. I'm winning the campaign full of amphibious landings handily. It's just annoying and immersion-breaking to watch the AI willfully lose the game in order to give me more of a challenge, something I remember cropping up as far back as Rome: Total War. I guess it's something that Creative Assembly fans share with a lot of Paradox fans. Most of them come for the historical verisimilitude, but a vocal minority just wants to have the crap kicked out of them, which definitely doesn't interest me.

Edited by Gormongous

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Well, I'm reviving this thread, which is one of the first in which I posted on these forums. After all the talk about the Total War series in the TMA episode threads, I decided to dust off vanilla Shogun 2 to see how it plays a few years down the line. My impressions ended up being surprisingly positive, albeit a bit unorganized and with a streak of pessimism that is characteristic both of me and of discussions on Total War.

  • Wow, the unit balance in the original game is so tight. Ashigaru are almost worthless fresh out of the gate, but they increase dramatically in effectiveness after the first few levels of experience, to the point that they're equal with freshly trained samurai. Experienced samurai will still win in a stand-up fight, even if you're using spear wall with your yari ashigaru, but a decent general evens it out. It's so different from Rome 2, for example, where the starting army that you build for your first few conquests becomes useless once you've progressed down the tech tree to anything with armor. There are no godlike units in Shogun 2, except for the heroes units from that one DLC, which are so tiny and yet so expensive to build and maintain that they warrant their place as miniature generals on the line.
  • Despite all the clans having similar unit rosters, their individual bonuses to certain types of units, along with a single unique unit if you have the one DLC, is remarkably effective. The Ikko Ikki have larger ashigaru units and weaker samurai, encouraging large armies of trash troops that are held together by units of warrior monks. Using their unique "marathon monks" as substitute cavalry continues the impression of a clan that fights very differently from a traditional samurai-core army while not forcing you as the player to discard the basic tenets of tactics in Shogun 2. My most recent game as the Otomo, another DLC faction like the Ikko Ikki was also interesting. They get early access to gunpowder thanks to beginning with a nanban trading port, making your ashigaru-based armies extremely effective in the beginning but eventually outclassed by more mobile and more experienced samurai. Even so, a traditional army from the Otomo, stiffened by Portuguese tercios and donderbuss cavalry, has most enemies already in tatters by the time the melee began. Shogun 2 feels like a master class in tuning near-identical unit rosters to feel different for every faction.
  • On the other hand, the naval mechanics are still terribly unfun, even in light of the utter shitshow that was Rome 2. The tactical battles are trivialized by ships that handle like light trucks regardless of wind or rain and higher-level strategies basically boil down to gaining or losing small amounts of money through raiding, unless you're dealing with off-map trade, which is superlatively important to the point of almost breaking the game and basically requires that you invest as much of your limited attention in it as possible. Furthermore, without the constricting geography that exist on land, the game's AI scatters its fleets to the four winds, which is fine when you're not particularly the target of more than a couple factions at a time but nearly unworkable once the realm divide hits and they all functionally operate as a single enemy against you. Speaking of the realm divide...
  • Jeez, the realm divide is even worse than the naval mechanics, not least for how it reveals the weaknesses of the diplomatic system. The way that Creative Assembly set it up, it is implausibly and frustratingly difficult for any allied or vassal relationship to survive realm divide, at least for any useful amount of time. Upon realm divide, an immediate penalty of -50 is applied to all factions' opinion of you, in a system where -100 to 100 is the typical range and -200 to 200 is the outer bounding, and that already-high penalty increases by -5 every turn until it reaches -200, meaning that a faction that you, as the player, have done nothing but aid and flatter will feel, at best, completely neutral about you after thirty turns, no matter what you do. Clans that hate you through the mechanics of realm divide will always hate you. There is literally nothing you can do with them besides annihilate them, which (granted) isn't saying that much in a game where vassals regularly betray their overlords while being overrun by a mutual enemy. Really, the most unbelievable thing, beyond this completely artificial way of forcing the player to confront the inconsequentiality of their decisions on the diplomatic front, is that there is already a "recent expansion" penalty that is roughly -5 per territory taken, with further penalties if the territory is "desired" by the various factions' AI, which already does a great job of making the player be hated for being powerful. It's fairly obvious to me that, in beta testing, most talented players were able to get close to taking and holding Kyoto before their gradual expansion finally made the entire island their enemy, just like Oda Nobunaga in real life, which must not have been enough for Creative Assembly's vaunted vision of "total war," so they introduced an unavoidable penalty that hits at fifteen provinces regardless of the player's situation and literally never goes away, encouraging you to stop dead in your conquests once you know that you're at that arbitrary threshold and milk all your diplomatic options dry before crossing it. I'm even more sure that it's a last-minute addition because the AI doesn't suffer from it or anything like it. In my recent Tokugawa game, the Otomo held Kyushu, Shikoku, and western Honshu up to Osaka, a total of at least twenty-five provinces, and yet they were the principal ally of the shogun, who denounced me as the devil incarnate after taking my fifteenth province from the ten-province Takeda. Whatever.
  • The agents are fun and thematic, especially once you've leveled them up to be truly great at their jobs, but having them walk all over the map is ultimately tiresome and irritating after you're larger than eight or ten provinces. It feels weird for me to say it, but I'd rather lose the agents in favor of a separate interface window with tokens that you assign to various provinces or armies. Building more buildings could contribute points for spending on local and global actions or modifiers... I don't know, when it's possible to block an army from besieging a castle by surrounding it with agents, with which the army cannot interact mechanically but through which it also cannot pass physically, it makes me wonder whether the horse is driving the cart here.
  • What I have to say the most about Shogun 2 is how clearly it focuses on a specific experience, realm divide and all. There is a singular arc to any campaign of Shogun 2 that is absent from a lot of other Total War titles. In every game of Shogun 2, you are going to build up a core group of armies that play to your faction's strengths; use them to carve out a corner of Japan that's been made secure by mountains, forests, and water; and finally make a push for Kyoto as the world falls apart around you. There's none of Fall of the Samurai's overbuilt tech tree, forcing a false choice between tradition and modernization on the player. There's none of Rise of the Samurai's curiously empty map and unit roster, trying to project the vanilla game's strategic complexities onto a one-vs-one scenario. There's certainly none of Rome 2's massive map full of pointless variety, which almost demands the player feel aimless and invalidated by whatever decision they make or success they achieve. It's a big game, but it's just about one thing, and that doesn't detract from its scale at all. I wish Creative Assembly had taken better notes on that, really.

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Now you see why I was so going on about how awesome Shogun 2 was!  Except for naval battle.  And Realm Divide.  And agents (too powerful).

 

Try tweaking the ini so that you have double unit size.  It's pretty freaking fantastic~!

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I'm so sad that terrible Tom Cruise vehicle basically ruined the expansion for me :/

 

???

 

There is noone like him in the game, and the game plays out completely different.  You end up with two completely modernized faction clashing in epic late 19th century combat.  It's awesome dude~

 

For the first time ever, having good navy feels very satisfying cause it can directly tie in to your land battles.

 

Fuck now I want to reinstall FotS again :x

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Okay, on my third full-scale campaign, as the infamously hard Uesugi, I think I've found my first big beef with the design of the campaign. Shogun 2 does such a good job covering up the large amounts of financial aid that's given to the AI factions on even just normal and hard difficulties, but the outcome of that is that the AI rarely finds it cost-effective to build economic buildings and grow its revenue. If it's anything like the original Rome, the AI will only build economic or cultural buildings if it lacks the revenue to produce a unit every turn at every since settlement that it owns. That's fine, it's mostly invisible to the player anyway, but it has some odd effects that ripple out negatively. At the end of my Otomo game, my western ports that had been nurtured by metsuke for fifty turns were churning out almost five thousand koku each, something that I never found in any of the other provinces that I conquered. Even what I captured from the Chosokabe, all of which had never experienced a siege before and two of which had the requisite pair of market and sake den, were only doing maybe seventeen hundred, because the AI doesn't specialize its provinces and recruits from everywhere. Disappointing, although I suppose that it does keep the player from snatching a single settlement from the AI and collapsing its economy...

 

???

 

There is noone like him in the game, and the game plays out completely different.  You end up with two completely modernized faction clashing in epic late 19th century combat.  It's awesome dude~

 

For the first time ever, having good navy feels very satisfying cause it can directly tie in to your land battles.

 

Fuck now I want to reinstall FotS again :x

 

I think osmosisch is more referring to the fact that the movie's deep visual and thematic similarities to the setting of Fall of the Samurai makes it hard for him to enjoy the intangibles of a game that reminds him of an overrated actor's "white savior" vanity project.

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Okay, on my third full-scale campaign, as the infamously hard Uesugi, I think I've found my first big beef with the design of the campaign. Shogun 2 does such a good job covering up the large amounts of financial aid that's given to the AI factions on even just normal and hard difficulties, but the outcome of that is that the AI rarely finds it cost-effective to build economic buildings and grow its revenue. If it's anything like the original Rome, the AI will only build economic or cultural buildings if it lacks the revenue to produce a unit every turn at every since settlement that it owns. That's fine, it's mostly invisible to the player anyway, but it has some odd effects that ripple out negatively. At the end of my Otomo game, my western ports that had been nurtured by metsuke for fifty turns were churning out almost five thousand koku each, something that I never found in any of the other provinces that I conquered. Even what I captured from the Chosokabe, all of which had never experienced a siege before and two of which had the requisite pair of market and sake den, were only doing maybe seventeen hundred, because the AI doesn't specialize its provinces and recruits from everywhere. Disappointing, although I suppose that it does keep the player from snatching a single settlement from the AI and collapsing its economy...

 

Actually the campaign economy has another super deep flow that I just recalled now that you mention it...

 

So province growth (a vague economic value that provinces get and grow over time, I think it started in Empires) is affected by two things.  Your buildings (including your castle size, this is the important one) and the surplus of food in your faction.

 

Remember food surplus is factored in faction wide, while all the buildings are local.  So the best thing to do economy wise is to... never develop your non-unit producing settlements, and focus exclusively on farm upgrade so that your global food surplus rises.  By mid game you can see about 20+ growth per turn, and right before realm divide you can see up to 40+ growth per turn.  That's 40+ taxable income (so like, 4 ~ 5 actual profit???) per province.  Before realm divide IIRC you can have pretty sizable faction, like 20 provinces or more?  So just by spending less money on your econ, the stronger your global economy gets.

 

Much less of a problem in a short game but still, kinda glaringly bad economy-building design IMO.

 

Still, I prefer this broken economy design over what was in Rome 2... in Shogun 2, at least it worked out like a mobile version of 4X game (watch your econ grow over time woo hoo I actually really liked watching my econ grow) but in Rome 2 omg really hated that whole awful building scaling where higher tier building ate more food but didn't produce enough happiness to compensate for ratio so you were almost always best to leave all the provinces at very basic buildings, same as Shogun 2 but without that permanent econ growth which I freaking loved.  They did fix the buildings a lot in Emperor edition though, which is most definitely somewhat enjoyable TW game, still kinda bloated and messy though.

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So province growth (a vague economic value that provinces get and grow over time, I think it started in Empires) is affected by two things.  Your buildings (including your castle size, this is the important one) and the surplus of food in your faction.

 

Remember food surplus is factored in faction wide, while all the buildings are local.  So the best thing to do economy wise is to... never develop your non-unit producing settlements, and focus exclusively on farm upgrade so that your global food surplus rises.  By mid game you can see about 20+ growth per turn, and right before realm divide you can see up to 40+ growth per turn.  That's 40+ taxable income (so like, 4 ~ 5 actual profit???) per province.  Before realm divide IIRC you can have pretty sizable faction, like 20 provinces or more?  So just by spending less money on your econ, the stronger your global economy gets.

 

Much less of a problem in a short game but still, kinda glaringly bad economy-building design IMO.

 

Still, I prefer this broken economy design over what was in Rome 2... in Shogun 2, at least it worked out like a mobile version of 4X game (watch your econ grow over time woo hoo I actually really liked watching my econ grow) but in Rome 2 omg really hated that whole awful building scaling where higher tier building ate more food but didn't produce enough happiness to compensate for ratio so you were almost always best to leave all the provinces at very basic buildings, same as Shogun 2 but without that permanent econ growth which I freaking loved.  They did fix the buildings a lot in Emperor edition though, which is most definitely somewhat enjoyable TW game, still kinda bloated and messy though.

 

I think that the global food bonus was capped at some point, maybe in a late-cycle patch? Maybe not. Looking at "advice" on the TWCenter forums is still ridiculous, though. A short guide for the Uesugi recommended building a new market at every settlement until you have five to recruit the maximum number of metsuke, then demolishing them all and just leaving the one on Sado, the island with the gold, with a fully upgraded port and all the metsuke stacked there to get 25 growth a turn, plus the food surplus. Barf, that sounds fun.

 

I agree about the problems with Rome 2's economy being worse, though. For sure, it's disappointing to see that there are flaws that let the AI impoverish itself and the player use exploits in Shogun 2, but you get the distinct sense that the buildings and economy in Rome 2 (and this seems like it was unchanged in Attila) were tuned quite deliberately to make growth and expansion necessary evils with the narrowest margin of actual value. Careful planning and an empire of at least three or four provinces could make for something reasonably balanced, but it still strikes me as extremely odd decision for an empire-building game to make the simple act of growing wealthier and more powerful such a mixed blessing.

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Yeah, I guess it's that eternal snowball question of strategy games and expanding.  Growing is always useful but makes the game less 'fun', so how to increase challenge for growing?  Certainly not in the way that vanilla Rome 2 did though, which was to apply passive penalty to buildings.  I think solution is to change the game from outward focus (grab more land) into inward one, and most definitely not in an whack-a-mole sense like rebels popping out of the ether that you have to occasionally kill.  Rather, the internal dissent should be actively managed... think I have a clever work around with this but before it gets too plug-y I should stop and refocus on Shogun 2 :x

 

The advice you mentioned, as horrid as that is from history perspective, I actually love that compared to the bloated drab that Rome 2 Emperor Edition (the fixed and functional Rome 2 where you actually do get to build high lvl buildings)~  I'm both history fan and gaming fan but I guess with games I do lean much stronger towards interesting game, and I always find those borderline exploit strategies very interesting.  The edge cases of the rules basically.  Very fun~!

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I think osmosisch is more referring to the fact that the movie's deep visual and thematic similarities to the setting of Fall of the Samurai makes it hard for him to enjoy the intangibles of a game that reminds him of an overrated actor's "white savior" vanity project.

Exactly, thank you. Sorry to be so vague.

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I just played through rise of the samurai as one of the Fujiwara clans and geshiaish character ability to halt an army's movement for a turn was something I found really important when dealing with multiple enemy armies moving to attack a certain settlement or army. I also liked the influence system which was handy to grab a couple provinces in the early game when it was easy to get one to pledge allegiance than attack the other one. The roster was  light and I found cavalry pretty useless (by the end out of the game I had produced 4 cavalry units compared to 200+ infantry). 

 

 

Even what I captured from the Chosokabe, all of which had never experienced a siege before and two of which had the requisite pair of market and sake den, were only doing maybe seventeen hundred, because the AI doesn't specialize its provinces and recruits from everywhere. Disappointing, although I suppose that it does keep the player from snatching a single settlement from the AI and collapsing its economy...

 

I noticed this in rise where most of the provinces I took over had no upgraded main building which was a problem cause that meant they had no defences which meant it was impossible for me to defeat armies twice my defending armies. That is where having came in handy cause it took 3 turns to get upgraded to a single wall.

 

I think Shogun 2 is the most interesting one I have played for a military geography point of view. Between playing the Mori and Oda in the main game and with Fujiwara the in rise I have found that line of settlements for Echizen to North/South Shino to Kai and Sagami has been a important part of the game. As the Mori the lands to the north were the last I conquered. As the Oda I stayed on the defensive while I expanded to the south where I bypassed Kyoto for ages cause I couldn't afford the loss of troops it would take to conquer. As the Fujiwara it was the line I held for many turns as I defeated my sister clan and built  forces after the emperor declared was on me.

 

Also as  the Mori I remember conquering some extra provinces on my way to Kyoto earlier than I planned cause I needed to expand far enough to have another pass between the mountains dividing the east and west of the island.

 

  • In my recent Tokugawa game, the Otomo held Kyushu, Shikoku, and western Honshu up to Osaka, a total of at least twenty-five provinces, and yet they were the principal ally of the shogun, who denounced me as the devil incarnate after taking my fifteenth province from the ten-province Takeda. Whatever.
  • I don't know, when it's possible to block an army from besieging a castle by surrounding it with agents, with which the army cannot interact mechanically but through which it also cannot pass physically, it makes me wonder whether the horse is driving the cart here.

 

In my rise game the one of the taira clans had 22 provinces to my fifteen when the emperor declared war on me which annoyed me greatly. Same game I came across the agent prevent army attacking siege problem as well. 

 

I must pick up the Otomo and Ikki Ikki next time they are on sale. The sound very interesting.

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I just played through rise of the samurai as one of the Fujiwara clans and geshiaish character ability to halt an army's movement for a turn was something I found really important when dealing with multiple enemy armies moving to attack a certain settlement or army.

 

This ability is too powerful (ninjas have that in vanilla Shogun 2 and I think it was champions in Rome 2 although spy's poison like straight up killed 15% ~ 20% of an army was equally dumb) and I hope CA either removes or preferably heavily nerf this from agents in Warhammer TW.

 

It's broken ability cause it stops that army from reinforce nearby allies, so with couple of ninjas/geishas, you can tear apart say, 5 armies with just 3 through auto resolve by locking out few from reinforcing so you have superiority, rinse and repeat.

 

I like the idea of delaying enemy armies through sabotage and harassments and this could represent that so hence I don't want it removed, but more in favor of tweaked.  Delayed armies should still be able to reinforce allies in combat for an easy fix.

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