Returning Player, still can't win Campaign.

[tarkin96]

Hello, i made a thread a logn time ago askign for advice on how to win a campaign. Got lots of great advice that improved my gameplay, but even after this, i still could not win a short campaign on easy, and i quit the game.

I recently started playing Empire and found it easy, steamrolling nations even on harder difficulties (although early game was sometimes challenging).

So i decided to come back to Shogun 2. I recently played 4 different campaigns, all on easy or normal. I attmepted Date on normal, Chosokabe and 2 Shimazu on easy. I will discuss Shimazu on easy due to it being the most recent and the furthest i got.

BTW: I use Darthmod (steam version) in order to prevent the AI full stacks of doom and other bonuses the AI gets. Also this will be a long read. I will have a TLDR at the end, but it will not have much detail to my problem.

I started the campaign and attacked the purple region to the east and took it easily and lost few troops. I decided to halt my conquest while i built up and began some trade. While waiting for my trade port to finish building i attacked and took the last purple region, leaving a small rebel force behind, which began to raid and pillage on its turn. I also built my first trade ship and began searching for open trade nodes, but noen nearby were open, depsite me having not went a turn without working towards trade ships. With my army somewhat reinforced and refreshed, i attacked the small rebel force, 7 of my units vs 5 of its.

Upon entering battle, the enemy started on top of a hill, forcing me to attack it. I sent in my archers to kill their troops while my spear units made up my front line, leaving the enemy no way to get to my archers. However my archers were killing only 1 or 2 units per volley while their were killing 5-10 per volley. Their cav charged my spear units (while in a tight spear wall formation), and sent in their spears afterward, but my force was annihalated. I retreated to the closest town while they continued to raid my villages. The shoni, having almost destroyed the Otomo (christain clan) clan decided to declare war on me.

So now im in a situation. No nation will trade with me, i cant get any trade nodes without causing a war, im almost bankrupt and can not build armies to defend myself, and i have a small rebel force plundering in my territory, with the Otomo trying to spread Christianity to my nation. There is no way to gain peace and the Shoni have a lot more territory and troops than I. Pretty much have lost within the first 20 turns.

TLDR: I have taken a lot of adivce from people, but despite so, i still can not win on easy difficulty. No matter what i get forced into wars to help my economy, which instead will hurt it, and i can not win the trade node race. I have absoultely no ideachow i could be doing this bad. I have seen countless people say that normal and easy are very easy, but just is impossible for me.

[easytarget]

There are plenty of guides if you just google for it. But I'm not sure that's going to work out for you as you've already tried that route.

My suggestion: find someone you know who is better at S2 and play co-op. If you watch how they play the game, what their build strategy is, what they recruit, how they fight, you'll no doubt learn a lot more about how to play the game than getting advice here or from Let's Play's.

If you play as Shimazu and your co-op partner plays as Chosokabe, the starting base for each of you will be to secure your respective islands and upgrade ports to secure all the trade nodes.

Once that's accomplished the Chosokabe player should cross the water at the island province and head towards your location while you cross over towards the starting location of the Mori. You can both then accumulate base provinces leading up to realm divide while unifying your front lines (the better player should be Chosokabe as they will be the ones with the most exposure given their front line will be near Kyoto.

[UMP45]

The idea should have been to flanked their archers on one side instead of shooting each other to death head-on.
With all your archer units focusing on one enemy archer unit for maximum impact before moving on to another.
Should the AI decide to flank you with its cavalry, have a unit of yari ashigaru defending any gaps to your bow ashigaru as they are the main targets.
But if it chooses to attack you head-on, send your yari ashigaru to the frontlines and withdraw your archers to the back.

In the case where they would go rambo by charging at you with all their yari units, employ the same tactics by shifting most of your yari units to the front lines with the archers at the back attacking the enemy archers.
Leave a spare yari unit to flank the enemy yari ashigarus once contact is made.

[Monostatos]

Another thing you could do to further migitate the damage from both ranged and melee units is to keep one or two units of light cavalry or other mobile units in your armies for goading purpouses. If you send the cavalry forward in an arc or other ways that suggests flanking, the AI (moreso on lower dif-levels but still) will most likely divert some of its force to counter and kill your cav. While that happens your other units can -if you fight a range heavy army- move up under less fire since some enemies will be ocupied with trying to shoot down your heavily macroed horses, or just charge a weakened line and pick the army off in smaller pieces -if the enemy is melee heavy. It won't make you win by default, but combined with the suggestions on flanking from HikaruSayers might make the game more manageable. :)

To get trade going I suggest planning a couple of turns ahead like; who do you want to ally or trade with? where do you want to expand to? And in both cases; What will this lead to in the long run? Trade often with big clans that you do not want to fight and less often with small clans you wish to assimilate. Breaking trade agreements are generally a bad thing and the penalties from it will affect you even if you weren't the one to break it. So you should also to some extent consider the personality of your neighbors. Avoid getting too close to unreliable clans and trade instead with more docile ones. Sending ships out early to find faraway trade partners is a good plan, but will have to be done remembering that everyone you see will have an opinion of you in some way for better or worse.
However; by the endgame, most clans will be either destroyed or be your enemies, so you should only focus on trade so much compared to your internal economy which will provide you with more stable and reliable income that wont dissapear when you need it the most. Again, think in terms of the long run; save your rice (since it gives you global growth) and be conservative in what you build. More often than not it is a good idea to build less castles and unit producing buildings compared to having some focused military strongpoints and the majority of your regions focusing on money or something other than units.

A great guide to both the military side of things as well as the economic can be found in "Frogbeasteggs guide to Total War Shogun 2" if you need one. It does not cover the game past some of the more recent patches but may help you with getting the basics down.

[Monostatos]

oh also; unis that charge back get a slight bonus that a unit getting hit by a charge will not get, so when a charge is almost upon you, even if you want to hold position, charge the last meter towards the enemy yourself and he wont be in the lead :)

[Eat3n]

Originally posted by tarkin96:

So now im in a situation. No nation will trade with me, i cant get any trade nodes without causing a war, im almost bankrupt and can not build armies to defend myself, and i have a small rebel force plundering in my territory, with the Otomo trying to spread Christianity to my nation. There is no way to gain peace and the Shoni have a lot more territory and troops than I. Pretty much have lost within the first 20 turns.

TLDR: I have taken a lot of adivce from people, but despite so, i still can not win on easy difficulty. No matter what i get forced into wars to help my economy, which instead will hurt it, and i can not win the trade node race. I have absoultely no ideachow i could be doing this bad. I have seen countless people say that normal and easy are very easy, but just is impossible for me.

Hey, i'm pretty new to the game so my help is only minor. First, my observation: The game/AI cheats...horribly. Aside from full stack stuff which is pure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, i've noticed that the AI never wants diplomatic relations, ever. I've started new campaigns and can't get trade rights for ♥♥♥♥ but every other clan can magically get trade relations. To get relations you have to bribe but there is never enough money around to bribe with! I've also noticed that in Shogun 2, like in other TW games, the AI never runs out of money, ever. A country can be bankrupt and somehow still pump out troops. Tell me how i can have 6 cities, trade rights, and farms but still struggle for money whereas a clan with no trade rights with anyone can constantly repair buildings and field massive armies while being at war? If that was a player you'd run out of money real quick. So, you may want to use mods to help cut the cheating from the AI or use something like artmoney (watch out for viruses)-if the game can cheat and have infinite money why can't i?

The trade nodes: If you play as the Shimazu or Chokabe build ports from the start of turn 1. As soon as you get ships start sending them to the nodes. You can hold the nodes and then recruit trade ships later. You have to be quick because the AI will also try to send ships and the AI will cheat. I started building a port right from turn 1 and built a ship and sent it out...somehow a clan further away from the nodes than i was managed to get ships there first, no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way, that's impossible! Put the cheapest 1-turn ships you can on the nodes until you hold a lot of them, then start putting tradeships on them.

Combat: I've never been happy with the combat in TW games for lots of reasons so the method i try to use is defense: i let the enemy come to me. That way i can set up the battlefield the way i want, on a hill for example, and force the enemy to come to me. If you try attacking you're gonna lose a lot of soldiers. Only attack if you have a promise of victory. Cities with one unit in them? Take them. Cities with 10 units in them? Starve them out or make sure that for every unit they have yours is better.

[tarkin96]

Thanks for some of the advice. The main thing i saw i didnt know was what Eaten said about trade nodes. I did not know regular ships could hold them. I knew i could send ships there but thought it required a trade ship to prevent enemies from taking it over.

The instance of combat is not what normally happens in combat. Normally i do pretty well, unless the enemy decides to camp on a hill or surround a town so that my troops are stuck inside the walls so they can just volley me with their archers. What really bothered me about that battle was that light cav was able to charge a spear wall and take few casualties and that their archers were out performing mine by a large margin. If i get an opportunity to lure the AI to me, fight on the defensive, or fight on an open field i usually crush them with few losses. Also in the example battle i gave, i could not flank the archers as i would have had to travel to the back of the hill (this hill was too steep on the sides and had a large perimeter. By tiem i would have done that, my army would have been dead.

I also attempted an Easy Date campaign. I was doing fine, annihalating enemy armies, economy was solid, was able to acquire the trade node to my north, and keeps a peace with the most powerful nation at the time (which happened to be that green faction south of me). However, capturing territory took forever as the provinces up north are quite large. I had an army set to take the last town that my starting enemy had. I was ready and upon moving my amry to the city, it was just barely missing the range to besiege the city. So i had to end my turn before capturing it. After all the other factions had made their moves, i was forced to make a tactical retreat as that friendly clan to my south captured the city. This cause me to be cut off from advancing further into Japan. The only way i could have kept advancing was to declare war (which i did and it caused a war with the shogunate, some yellow faction, the takeda, and the hojo). I was screwed, my port got blockaded, my trade node was lost, and a ninja kept wrecking havoc on my armies, along with that clan south of me building a large army and starting its march toward my capital while all i could do was build 6 units until it reached me. I rage quit there.

I just seems like im not taking territory fast enough. Sorry if my post are long, but i try to explain things so tips i already knwo don't get repeated. Also a question, while playing as Otomo, can i block that crossing from the island to the mainland with a ship? Its just the Ouchi really would like to get across and destroy me, and if this doesnt actually work then it will save me a little extra cash.

[Monostatos]

Getting cornered as date happens very easily and can become a real game stopper. i spent the entire midgame on sado island after getting my ass kicked by a hojo/takeda alliance once :P. My suggestion would be to try to take the uesugi starting position and try to migitate the amount of ways your border shrinks when the other clans expand. Or, if all else fails invade somebody by boat.
Sorry if im saying things you already know :/, i guess most of what i say are more of general tips rather than specific instructions.
Regarding the situation in which you rage quitted, a lot of the things that happened to you seems to be related to the enemey swamping you through small annoyances. to fix some of it i guess you could spare some of the army money (since you say you got the fighting down) and buy more agents and maybe a fleet or two.
In most such cases careful planning before they actually happens will solve much of those problems before they get to you (im not trying to be a condecending ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, you may very well have planned your moves very well, im just suggesting you look through your preparations), like having an extra ninja or metsuke will do wonders for agent controll and a fleet, even if its unleveled or small will keep important trade routes open and invading armies sunk (kudos for having trade nodes to protect during realm divide, by then i have mostly given up on all but the node ones).
If faced with a situation where going straight into realm divide seems to be the only way to go, take a step back and check the game timer. If you aren't close to loosing the campaign to turn saturation, then you could just wait a while and prepare for the inevitable (and defeat it!) or use it to look for a way around it. No need to do i if you don't have to.

Also. yes you can block small chokepoints with ships. :)

[tarkin96]

Thanks for another response. So you would suggest not attacking the clan directly south of me and just go around them by sea. I thought this would be difficult as maintaining an army split between two areas could cuase issues. Ill have to try it. Kinda reminds me of Prussia in Empire. Your split apart, with a weak polish territory between. If you attack it, then you get caught in a war with Russia, Austria, Courland, and other factions. This however is kidna easy to avoid by just attacking saxony, taking it and destroyign the faction, while poland is forced to go to war with you alone and you can unite your empire without much trouble.

This is a little harder in Shogun as protectorates are kind of rare. And i did play a few more turns of my Date campaign without attacking and just building up without expanding. The faction to my south declares war on me anyway haha, however when they did so only the Takeda joined them. I still lost my trade node and port though. Ill give this strat a go though when my rage over the Date ends :).

Also thanks for the tip on ships, ill be trying an Otomo campaign. It may say its a hard campaign, but the Ouchi can be ignored for a while and defend against the shoni while converting my neighboring provinces to Christianity and counterattackign the Shoni. The path to success is more straight foward for the Otomo, but defending agaisnt the Shoni will be tough. I remember beign able to take the whole island as Otomo, but my provinces would usually begin to revolt and the Ouchi would begin to invade. Also i love musket warfare (despite matchlocks being more of a demoralizer unit and pretty weak overall). Though i cant really get into FotS as its gun warfare is too quick for me.

[Monostatos]

Keeping two "separate" empires going is generally tough enough as to not really be something one would want to do, but if one really gets stuck in a bad way it may provide the economic muscles needed to strenghten the realm for war with the neighbors blocking you. Who knows. by the time you have finished abroad, the dauntless neighbor may have destabilized enough to be defeated due to things you actually didn't have anything to do with :3. You probably already know this but as with poland and saxony, wars started through allies is diplomatically preferable to those started by the own faction in shogun also as it prooves to be a diplomatic loophole. Joining an allys war gives less realm divide points and allows for friction free aggression compared to attacking who you please. In this way, joining forces with clans already at war or unstable clans (but if so, unstable enough to hopefully just die and leave you with your wars and not become strong and attack you later on :/) will help keeping the front count low, especially since you most likely will only join the ally in war with one clan instead of the whole alliance :>

The biggest problem i have with naval warfare in shogun is choosing when to fight and not. small armies will more often than not just run or avoid you completely (apparently this is even worse in FOTS where the enemey later on will just run in circles around your land and bomb or blockade you indefinetely. Never got that far but apparently the small stacks just leave and come back when you try to sink them), and there seems to be very few places to actually force the enemies to attack you aside from a few blockable straits. mostly i just auto resolve ship battles as i suck at them but i figure that if one could find a fleet setup that is fun and effective to field as well as being small, it would be possible to just go about fooling the AI into committing and then winning the fights by hand! But i dunno if it would work since i am too bad at it. It just felt like it would be a sound tactic for Otomo both as it sits on a broad island border to defend AND keeps getting more and more enemies all the time.

never played the Otomo other than to try them briefly. The required extra work from Christianity is too much for me right now but in the similair Ikko Ikki clans situation clever placing of temples made both pre and post-invation converting much easier for me and kept most (most :P) of my land intact and rebel free. religion heavy build may be something to consider. give the Shoni some rebellion of their own to deal with :3

[tarkin96]

I dont really liek naval battles either. Thats why i never played any of the major factions with colonies in Empire. Britain, Spain, and France relied too much on a navy. Only exception for this for me was United Provinces. Pretty much ignored my colonies and made war in Europe.

But Otomo is going good. I now own 4 provinces (didnt play for too long) and 3 of them are majority Christian and have taken over the Shoni clan. I got the Ouchi off my back by creating a small navy to block the strait between our territories, while having another small navy blockade their port while another clan attacked them on thier other front. After destroying their navy they asked for a peace. Next is Sagara which is being attacked by the Ito from the south and their only province capital is only 1 turns march away.

On a battle note: Matchlock units are a god-send. Cheap and good cannon-fodder if i need them to be. They make up my front line and do one or two volleys to kill a few trrops and demoralize them, then they retreat back behind my spearmen. Then i move them to a flank and annihalate the enemy, all while my archers can leisurely volley arrows from safety behind the spearmen. Only bad thing about matchlock, they are bad assault troops, so i really only use them in melee mode when assaulting a castle. How can it be so much easier than Shimazu, Chsokabe, and Date? Maybe its Darthmod.

[Monostatos]

Dunno about the difficulty difference between the different clans but it sounds like you got the early game pocketed allready :D. Clever to use the navy so liberally to destabilize your enemies economically. Also, using the matchlocks and archers at the same time like that seems very smart, I've got to try that myseltf :)

[Boss]

Just for fun, you should watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec6Vu4U6iXU
It shows a rushing method where, as the Otomo, you take almost all of Kyushu in one year. It also includes some battle tactics involving matchlocks. This is in vanilla though.

Darthmod definitely doesn't make Otomo easier than Shimazu/Chosokabe. I'd say that after Oda, Shimazu and Chosokabe are the easiest clans to win with.

As the Chosokabe, there's only one road to follow to capture the entire island. This means you only have to deal with one frontline at a time. Just keep spamming ashigaru units (30% bow 70% spear). When you have around 12 units, take the first city. Meanwhile keep recruiting new units. Once you have 18-20 units, you can take the other 3 cities in one swipe. As soon as you control the island, upgrade your farms and send your 20-unit army to take Buzen. Upgrade the castle in Buzen asap and recruit Chosokabe archers with increased accuracy. While leaving an adequate garrison behind, you can now take all the time you need to capture Kyushu. Once you control both islands, just defend for a while and work on your economy. Get all the farm upgrades and occupy all the trade nodes. Your economy will be more than enough for the rest of the game. Now all you need to do is create 2-3 powerful stacks and invade the mainland.

As the Shimazu, it's pretty much the other way around. I would still suggest spamming ashigaru armies with maybe 6 katana samurai in every army. Wipe out your purple neighbours asap and then rush to Buzen. Upgrade the castle in Buzen and recruit archers with increased accuracy. You can easily hold off all enemy attacks at Buzen. Make sure you destroy all the christian buildings in Otomo's capital. Finish the last enemies on Kyushu and then invade the Chosokabe island. Get all the trade nodes, upgrade your farms and once you control both islands, invade the mainland.

The Otomo are harder since you're attacked from multiple sides, have to deal with christianity (this especially becomes a problem in the mid and late game) and a lot of clans don't like you since you're christian.

[tarkin96]

Right now as Otomo i have control of all of Kyushu and planning my invasion of the Chosokabe island (now owned by the clan the Chosokabe start off at war with). Right now the major super powers consist of me, the Usegi, Date, Takeda, and Tokugawa (this is my first campaign where Tokugawa doesnt get destroyed within 3 turns).

My final battle to take Kyushu was great. 8k of my men vs 10k Ito soldiers. Would have been about 13k if not for my ninja. FPS dropped a lot but it was epic. My matchlocks held a small bridge from nearly half the Ito army while my yari ashiguru and bow ashiguru held off a land bridge across a river. Main prob i ran into was that my archers kept shooting my yari units in the back so i could only use them to kill off the ito bow units so that they would fire over my line rather than straight at it.

Originally posted by Bas:

Just for fun, you should watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec6Vu4U6iXU
It shows a rushing method where, as the Otomo, you take almost all of Kyushu in one year. It also includes some battle tactics involving matchlocks. This is in vanilla though.

Darthmod definitely doesn't make Otomo easier than Shimazu/Chosokabe. I'd say that after Oda, Shimazu and Chosokabe are the easiest clans to win with.

The Otomo are harder since you're attacked from multiple sides, have to deal with christianity (this especially becomes a problem in the mid and late game) and a lot of clans don't like you since you're christian.

Oh and a question. What governs my diplomatic relation penalty from religion? When i started off it was at liek 5 or 10. Now its at 80 and most clans are either unfriendly or close to unfriendly status. And here i was thinkign Christianity is OP. Prolly not as much of a prob on easy though, but still.

And thanks for the strategies with the other clans. I can usually get 3 or 4 provinces with Chosokabe before i get screwed by some nation on the mainland that decides to invade and bring allies along with it. Usually its one of the clans next to the green clan's mainland provinces.

I know Oda is mostly ashiguru spam and has one of the easiest tiem with early game battles. Too bad its starting position kind of sucks.

Also a question about the video. In the second battle, how did he get his archers to shoot at the cav on the hill. Whenever i try that they shoot straight at the hill and only a few arrows make it to the enemy. Also he seems not to worry about his units gettign in the line-of-fire of his matchlocks. Funny vid though.