Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Agreed, the battles are pretty fun. They're more simple than something like Total War: Shogun 2, but there's still quite a lot of strategy involved in positioning units and using tactics. I like how units can hide on the battlefield, too.
Yep, the soundtrack is amazing. I love Sparkling Light, which is the Date attacking theme. Really makes you feel like you're doing something epic.
I'm quite a big fan of Japanese history, so going through the events as I play is always really fun. The Nagao clan have a pretty nice storyline, and the Oda is great as well, of course.
Fair enough. :P
Yeah, moving around units is really fun. Especially when you get the kind of 'Oh crap' moment when the enemy starts sending their doomstacks of 20000 to the battlefield (Having that with the Imagawa right now). You have to make sure your troops can attack from all angles to really give you an edge.
Funny, I just had a very similar story while playing as the Satomi clan. As I was finally getting around to sieging Odawara and finishing the Hojo, the Takeda would constantly come in at the last minute and save them from the brink of death with armies I wouldn't be able to face. Once I controlled the entirety of Kanto, I showed the Takeda who's boss and crushed them in the space of a few months. Very satisfying. :)
That's definitely right. Especially when the clans that get big aren't the usual ones like the Hojo or Shimazu. Right now the Ouchi are getting ridiculously big. They currently control about half of Chugoku and have nearly unified Kyushu. Pretty scary. The Imagawa are also on their way to the capital after crushing the Oda. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out. :)
I also quite like the road system. Personally I'm not a big fan of the battle sequences as they kinda feel like a cheap Total War experience to me, so I tend to fight out 99% of battles on the campaign map (only occasionally getting my hands dirty on the battle map when its necessary). And this is where I come to really enjoy the road system, knowing when and where you should upgrade your roads, using them to attack a flank, setting up chokepoints, etc. Ultimately, its the road system that makes fighting on the campaign map better than Paradox's grand strategy games, and even Total War where the campaign map exists just to give battles on the battle maps relevance.
Strangely enough, I also quite like the diplomacy. While its not as good as the diplomacy in Paradox's games (honestly, its the diplomacy in those games that make them so great imo), its at least a solid system with transparency. Before this game was released on Steam, the only strategy games that I played here that had acceptable diplomacy were the Paradox games. The diplomacy in most strategy games have the problem of: A) not being transparent; do you like me, do you hate me, do you want my land, do you want to work with me against this bigger threat, I don't f'n know cause the game doesn't f'n tell me; and B) is utterly broken; just looking at Total War, in Rome I you could have taken all of faction's land but one territory, destroyed all their armies, and even then they would refuse to become a client state, in fact whether a faction would become a client state at all was seamingly completely random. Shogun II was better but still broken, as realm divide would strip you of all your allies, if not immediately then eventually; vassals would rebel seemingly at the roll of a dice, it didn't matter if you outnumbered them 20 to 1 and they liked you, screw you they want their freedom. And Rome II wasn't much better, the Confederation mechanic was broken, a small faction of celts on the verge of destruction would all of a sudden form a confederation with another group of celts on the other side of the map. While trying to form a confederation with your own blood brothers wouldn't work unless they loved you, they were weak, and you shared a fairly threatening common enemy. And so on and so forth about Total War's atrocious diplomacy. Here in NA, the diplomacy isn't as deep as Paradox's but it's at least A) transparent, trust is how you get the AI to negotiate and you can see how much trust you have with them, and you can also see what stance they have towards your clan; and B) it's not broken; it may be a rather simple system, but if you've gained enough trust you can get the AI to agree to things, also factions that have a reason to dislike you will gain trust at a slower rate than those that have a reason to warm up to you. And as far as I've seen the AI doesn't just randomly break its agreements with you out of nowhere. Man that became a rant, but decent diplomacy is hard to come by in strategy games; which is a shame because in the words of Carl von Clausewitz, "War is a mere continuation of policy with other means." War is just one part of diplomacy, why the heck do so many strategy games have such piss poor diplomacy then?
Finally, I actually really, really like the regency system. So many strategy games have you in full control of everything which is fine and all, but I like to roleplay as the leader of the nation, clan, faction, etc. And one person can only do so much, so I really like it when a game allows you to delegate roles to your minions. For instance in the final act of my Oda campaign, I had Maeda Keiji as the regent of the northern Tohoku region and I just sat back and watched him slowly push north against the Nanbu. And strangely enough, it felt more satisfying than if I had conquered them myself. It was like instead me having to micromanage everything, I had grown so powerful I could just sitback and let my minions do the work naturally at their own pace. It was like I was back in Diablo 2 playing the Necromancer watching my skeletal horde do its work.
So, for the reasons above I really enjoy this game. I may still overall prefer Paradox's games for the better diplomacy, but NA is definitely more enjoyable to play than the Total War games (though I still do quite like Shogun 2 with the Darth mod installed).
First off my biggest reason is simply the setting. I have always been a fan of Medieval era warfare and the diplomatic conflicts and strife that arose during it, and I especially love that time period in the Eastern setting. I'm sure these stories have been more than romanticized, but Nobunaga's rise to power is such an amazing story and just to enter a world and be a part of all this negotiating and movement and deceit is very entertaining, especially when it is capitalized by demonstrations of your military might!
The next best thing about this game is the variety, or perhaps I should say replayability. There are so many clans across many different time periods, each time period unique as well as each clan, but then on top of that you can shuffle everyone's starting positions which is an awesome feature and leads to totally unexpected outcomes. There are other games with a high level of replayability too but it's still a very notable feature in this game.
I also love the pacing of the game. It's kind of a turn-based strategy game, but it has a real-time element to it and each phase has equal importance. If you are better at the turn-based style, you will be able to set yourself up to not work as hard during the real-time element. If you are better with real-time games, you don't have to worry as much about diplomacy or the intricacies of city building because you can overcome your opponent with your tactics on the battlefield. If you are good at both then there is a constant ebb and flow between which phase is currently more important and keeps things interesting for the majority of a campaign.
I do really love the combat aspect of the game, and the development aspects as well. I have always personally leaned more towards real-time games than i have towards turn-based, and so games like Civilization have more or less been lost on me as I find them to be boring (Civ V has recently become an exception). I don't like games that are pure turn-based, I like to have more direct control over the outcome of the battles as opposed to just sending my units to push against enemy units and some dice rolls occur while they slap each other. Games like Endless Space are better to me; even though it is lagely a turn-based game there is still a subtle level of control during battles that strongly appeals to me. Combat in Civilization and in Paradox Interactive games is usually pretty boring as it is just smushing your squads together without as deep of strategy. That's what I love about Nobunaga's Ambition. Even if you don't go to the field of battle, you still have to plot out what intersections you want to fight at, which units will approach from which road, how far can a unit make it without running out of food, and where might the enemy flank me from? But even better, you actually can go straight to the field of battle and control your units directly. You can deploy a flanking squad and have them hide out a little until the big baddie appears and then hit him from the side and push his whole army where you want them to go. You can send a few small units out to scout and then bait your opponent into an ambush you have set for them. By taking direct control of a Mass Battle you can dramatically shift the momentum of a war in your favor and that is awesome.
The building aspects of this game are really great too though. Another reason Civ bores me is the same reason that a lot of mobile or online or facebook games bore me. The type of game where it's not where you build, but simply what you build. You build all your buildings plainly in the city, and "where" in the city they get built isn't even a factor. But, in Nobunaga's Ambition, where you decide to build a district and what type of district you make it and how you upgrade it has a huge effect on how well you do! Critical thinking and planning play a big role in this and that is something I enjoy. And, this means that even if you aren't the most skilled real-time war monger, you can still do very well at the game through careful planning of your builds. I just love that you can set up a city to do so much better than a rival's city just by placing your districts well and having the overlapping adjacency bonuses propel your cities to greatness.
I also want to reiterate something that Vermillion Raven said, about how it is actually enjoyable to delegate some of the work and management to your own officers. Every time I play, whenever I start up I typically decide that 'these regions here' will be the ones that I personally control and manage and upgrade, and that I will leave the rest to my own officers. After a while it can get a little tedious to try and go through every single city, and if you don't play the game regularly enough it can be hard to remember exactly what you were planning to do in ever city.
In addition, this makes the late-game much more satisfying to me. When I have overcome the main obstacle to my total dominance, I don't want to have to be continuing to manually control every single army unit and sending them out and doing all the fighting myself. I like it when I get to the point where all I have to do is support my provinces. Send out a squad of 3 from my very best cities and move them to the front lines. Then, tell my province to launch an attack, and assist them with it, or just charge into the fray and weaken the opponent enough that the province moves on its own, knowing that it has the clear advantage. This makes the later phase of the game much more fluid and a bit more enjoyable, and I often end up turning on Auto Council when I have reached the point where I know I will win eventually, and so I just continue to push my wars forward until I actually achieve victory.
There might be some things I missed, but I think I got it all in one go ;)
I can adjust more than just a simple "difficulty" measurement, and instead can directly select each individual aspect of gameplay that I want to modify. Going back to whether you are better at turn-based or real-time games, you can change the difficulty of the each aspect independently. If I want more labor for faster building early on, I can have that. If I have frequent gold shortages, I can solve them. For me personally, I like to turn down troop recovery for both me AND the AI to low, so that it stays fair (I play on Normal overall) but that it means that battles count for more when they occur. A lot of the time I get slowed down too much when having to fight across ally or vassal territory, or when establishing a new province. By the time my troops get home and back, regarless of how well I did the enemy will still have all their troops back as well. So that change has made it a lot more fun for me.
But even if that wasn't enough, you can also do in-game editing directly! Are Nobunaga and his friends too powerful? Go to the officer list and lower his skill levels! Are the Hojo growing too fast for anyone to stop them? Go in and set all their development levels to 0. Or their troop counts. Or everything. I don't personally do any of this really, as I like to try and play a 'fair' game so that I can feel better about my victories, but the fact that these kinds of things are possible makes this game super accessible to players of all skills and also allows for people to enjoy it across a wide variety of approaches. This kind of player-oriented game option development is something I would love to see a lot more of across the board in modern gaming.
I prefer Takeda than Hojo-Imagawa, you can beat Takeda because they havent policies and manpower on early phase like super Imagawa empire...
They were the first faction I played in the game, 1551 scenario. It sent chills down my spine, and still does when I remember it.
Something almost all western strategy games completely ignore, or deal with in an extremely shallow manner. The only other (non-Koei) strategy games that have comparable depth to character system would be Paradox's Rome, Crusader Kings and HOI3 to some extent. Total War could have gotten there had they built on the earlier games, but of course, as with everything in that series, they are constanty moving towards shallower and more generic gameplay with every release.