Game:

Total War: Shogun 2 (2011)

Category:

Show

Duration: 38:05

92 views

1

These are shorter, but I'm going to try and keep these episodes closer to half an hour each for now. Still, you never know when you'll get hit by an hour long match against someone.

Anyway, the informative battle was the first one. Despite appearances, my army was incredibly cavalry heavy thanks in a large part to those two great guard units. One of the biggest advantages to that type of cavalry force is that an opponent that isn't all too savvy may react to your army as though it were considerably weaker in cavalry than it really is, but even if they don't, it grants tremendous flexibility to your forces. It's in many ways the exact opposite of a large number of light cavalry, which present the idea of a strong mobile force, but fail to deliver when your opponent just goes to kill them. It's the opposite of taking the huge swarm of very cheap light cav to give that illusion of cavalry dominance while failing to give the results. By contrast, a smaller amount of very good cavalry can make an opponent focus on something else, and let you deliver a truly decisive blow with the cavalry.

In game three, my matchlocks really demonstrated just what they are for. More than the casualties they cause, it's that sudden impact of casualties and panic that they cause on that first volley. If you can get those, and then keep them alive after to pick people off from the flanks, they've done their job. The counter to them is not to charge into melee against them, you need to either shoot them or distract them into shooting a useless unit. Bows by contrast are to compel an enemy to move forward into a bad position, not to strictly speaking cause a lot of casualties quickly. One way they accomplish this is by defeating enemy matchlocks.

Shogun 2 Total War was created by Creative Assembly and is published and owned by Sega. Commentary belongs to me.

The opening song is The Lift by Seventh Gear from the soundtrack Gunshot. This song is a part of the creative commons, and the attribution can be found at:
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Seventh_Gear/Gunshot/

Other Statistics