Sengoku Saddens Me

[Abe Sargent]

After seeing patch 1.4 coming out a week ago, I decided to try it out. I grabbed the game off a holiday sale for ten bucks and patched it all up. I started the first few paragraphs of a new dynasty and I selected who I would play as.

I spent a half hour reading and checking every menu and the help that came up with it. I wanted to be familiar with every aspect of the game. I appointed people to positions, offered my heir in marriage, and more.

I then moved to the provinces themselves and began looking at them. Hmmm... So, there is little info on them. No taxvalue listed, no trade goods. Let's look at this more closely, because the economic side of things are important, right?

Every single province in the game makes the same exact amount of money, and supports the same exact amount of troops. 10 tax, 750 troops. Every single one. That's not a bug, that's not a failed patch, that is the game working as designed.

Are you serious? First of all, that's hardly realistic, and this is a company known for its realism. Second of all, it makes war about simple numbers. Whoever has more provinces wins. That seems too formulaic. I can't even choose what to build in a province, all I can do is tell my minister to build stuff and they will for me.

I think a design decision was to focus this game on clans, honor, and plots. I'm okay with that, but you are making Japan into one great homogeneous mass with this. I think the game goes too far in that direction. I'm not even sure I want to play it at this point.

[DaddyTorgo]

Wow - I had played the demo, but hadn't realized that.

Yikes.

Is that moddable though?

[Izulde]

I'm just waiting for CK2.

[Abe Sargent]

Another issue is the complete lack of navies and naval warfare. How do you get from one island to the next? Follow the red lines, just like Risk and many other dumbed down wargames. If you have a clan on a peninsula, or at the end of the main island, then you can only expand next to you and only move soldiers that way as well, no surprise transports unloaded troops behind their lines or warfare for the seas or anything else. Are we not past that in a military oriented strategy game by now?

[Shkspr]

It could be worse. You could have purchased it at full price thinking you were actually buying Shogun: Total War 2.

Sengoku saddens us all.

[Abe Sargent]

Heh, true, but the reverse would have truly pissed me off. I've boycotted the TW games ever since they released an expansion for M:TW2 and six months later had failed to patch it to allow it to actually do some of the things it said it would, and then they posted in their forums that all of their personnel were working on future games and none had the time to spare for a patch. All we wanted was a patch to enable the expansion to do the things it said it would ,and we shouldn't have even had to have waited 6 months, but to then tell us its not coming, well, I immediately uninstalled the games and I don't believe that I'll ever purchasing another TW game again. To think that I might accidentally give them money again, that's shivers....