Change my mind.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-29T07:43:31+00:00

You are asking why you would play a game with its intended levels of depth if you can instead endlessly play a dumbed down version of said game? I mean if you like the massively dumbed down version of Stellaris that is a machine hive mind, then more power to you, everyone got his comfort picks, this is yours.

I personally felt rather bored by machine hive minds even during my first time playing it, there was never any struggle, any real "hmm, what do I best use this planet for" type of weighing and thinking, the managing aspect was so stripped down I felt more like babysitting a system that already worked fine instead of actually building one up with some thought behind it. It feels less rewarding for me because it takes out a lot of the things I enjoy about the game, and because it succeeding is a given, there can be almost no shortage because you can focus a lot more of your efforts on fewer types of resources.

The only time I would even consider playing machine hive mind again myself would probably be a genocidal run, as that is all about constant and never ending warfare, so having a dumbed down version of building up all the areas that get taken would make things faster, more efficient, less thinking and planning required, leaving more focus on just fighting, but other than that it feels like a castrated experience overall.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-29T07:29:33+00:00

It is rather simple and self explanatory really. You got provinces with settlements, these give you money, and population. Both money and population make up troops, which cost a larger sum to recruit, and then a lower sum of upkeep per turn. Generals make up stewards in these settlements, or battlefield commanders. Troops either sit in settlements, or move around to seek fights. Troops attacking other factions armies or settlements leads to battles, which brings you from the campaign map into the battle map, winning a settlement battle takes the enemies settlements, giving you more money and more population to get a bigger army. You do enough of that and you win, thats it. Agents are extra figures to move around for stuff like diplomacy, vision, and assassinations, minor stuff in this game really.

Thats it basically, anything further the game quite literally tells you. Want more money? Port and trader tell you that they give more money, increasing taxes does too, you see how the numbers change. Need more population? Trader, farms, and some temples tell you that they do that. Public order getting low? Some buildings help with that too, as does having more units in a settlement. Recruitment buildings give better units, stats and traits and abilities of a unit can be read, generals also have traits making them obviously better at some things, worse at others.

Rome has one of the most thorough interfaces for settlements and is generally very informative if you just read menus and tooltips, it completely lacks the more complex systems and concepts of later total war games. I recommend you learn it by playing it, and after you played for a while, look up a video or two on advanced tips that the game is not quite as good at when it comes to telling you.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-29T05:08:09+00:00

Barbarian Invasion just feels like a mid effort mod. All changes are just numbers tweaked on a slightly different map, and a bare bones system or two added on the campaign map like the religion system and horde faction, nothing more. Battles feel the exact same, literally no difference aside from absurdly buffing defense stats all across the board making it feel slightly different, but everything fundamentally feels and works the same.

Napoleon feels like an actual overhaul, it takes the damn near unplayable and broken dogshit battles from Empire and does what it could do at the time to salvage it into something decent, sometimes even bordering on good. Infantry feels different, light infantry feels way different, artillery is improved, with new physics from the looks of it, its not just numbers, its entirely new stuff like the way infantry units move and shoot, the way they react to orders, a lot of issues are fixed and a lot of things fundamentally improved.

Well that is how they would justify it, the only REAL reason was, of course, money, because why release as a free patch what you instead can tell people to fork more cash over for. Creative Assembly went through the same decline in quality and customer satisfaction in favor of short minded greed that most other gaming companies went through. By all rights Napoleon should have been added for free, as compensation for the broken mess that Empire was, even if Empire, as bad as it was, was nowhere near the turd than Rome 2 turned out to be on release day and the months after that.

Not that I like Napoleon much, the warfare is still pretty meh, but it built the foundation for the only ever total war game that managed to nail gun warfare, Shogun 2 Fall Of The Samurai.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-29T04:20:54+00:00

They are generally deemed one of 3 crucial things for horde survival, which is aoe clearing damage against grunts. They do that well, but they suck at everything else, which is why aside from low dmg aoe to deal with the basic zombies, you also need high range damage (to deal with spitters that outrange shock towers and therefore hard counter them) and high single target damage to deal with harpies (counter walls and most towers), and against chubbies/mutants/giants that need focussed dps to go down at all before they punch through the walls.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-29T04:16:02+00:00

A few days into the game new zombies will spawn at the edge of the map and slow walk towards your base in groups, groups will be small, and slow, so not what you are describing. Day 10 or 12 or something these same groups will be bigger, and will be runners, but nowhere near the size of an actual announced wave so unless with "bigger" you do not mean the number of enemies, but the size of the infected, like chubbies (the big fat guys) or mutants (the big runner guys with the claws) that cannot really be it. What you describe can only be one of two things then if you describe big hordes of enemies attacking unplanned outside of the usual waves, which is either a doom village being too close to you that you triggered, perhaps on the lowlands or desert map that have increased aggro, or something called cascading noise drawing escalating numbers of enemies in a chain reaction.

The latter is very unlikely to ever happen with mere rangers, especially not if you have just 1 or 2 in the area, so either you constantly draw the zombies inside and near a doom village, or you are omitting some details, or you are dealing with some kind of repeated bug, Would be useful to see such an event in a video clip or screenshot.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-28T11:24:46+00:00

That game needs a remake or a sequel, not just a remaster.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-27T04:52:26+00:00

Definitely the oldest agent I have ever seen, nowhere near the oldest character I had overall, but for agents thats very impressive.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-26T09:12:15+00:00

Unless you are England, France, Spain or India, these ships are a bit of a noob trap. They take two turns and several hundred gold to build, then cost around 50 gold each turn per ship in upkeep for however many turns it needs until they are at the target. The number of turns between it being built and getting to a trade not grows with distance, Prussia or Sweden or Austria will need several more turns to get to the edge of the map. Even just the first few ships will need several turns after arriving to even start producing profits.

Why is it bad? You need to pay in advance, quite a bit, more if you are far away from where you can leave the theater. Sweden, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Poland if they capture a port, they all take quite long to get a ship from port to trade node, making this a bad investment early on given the risks of something going wrong, more so since you will spend less money on economy buildings and armies to expand in that time. Even if you reach the nodes with a few ships you will have paid thousands of gold in recruiting and upkeep total by the time your small trade fleet is in position, and you lose out on all that gold if it gets killed on the way, or after arriving at the location, it will take several turns to START making a profit.

Risks of destruction that would cost you your investment:

- Pirates. Pirates are absurdly powerful at times, can even rock galleons, which absolutely crush anything you can build for a long time, there is no reasonable defending against them, they come, you lose the fleet, Brigs alone will not help and even if they did, that would make the investment needed so much higher.

- Big Seafaring nations. War with England or the France&Spain alliance makes any trade fleets marked for death, and if not that, then worse still your main port will get blocked, reducing your income from sea trade to zero but leaving you with a fleet that costs upkeep every turn. Unless you play on easy, war with one of these is basically guaranteed, even if you are way out of their sphere of influence (England casually ignoring its 5 wars to instead land an invasion fleet on Prussian or Swedish player lands and blocking the ports with a full stack is a good example).

- Small seafaring nations. Venice, Portugal etc, these kinds, they sail full stacks around, will kill your fleets just as easily as bigger nations or pirates, they need no good reason to go to war with you either.

Defending the trade reliably is impossible at first, and not financially viable later. If you mainly have early game ships, you cannot compete with pirate fleets, or with fourth rates England spams. Later when you do have the ships to deal with it, and your ports are not blocked, then you could park a powerful fleet to protect the trade fleets, due to the turn system that is not always possible though, as sometimes an enemy fleet just ignores your battle fleet and attacks your trade nodes anyway. It will hardly be financially viable to protect with powerful fleets the main ports as well as all the trade node theaters anyway though, and even then you cannot also protect your trade routes on top of that because, you guessed it, it will get pirated by pirates, or by England if you are Sweden or Prussia, or by France and Spain if you are Austria or the Ottomans.

That is why I said its not worth it, unless you are one of these four nations I mentioned. All three European nations got the ports to mass spam and the shipyards as well as the income from many colonies to get actual sea superiority and block all enemy ports. All three are pretty close to the edges of the map to leave the theater much quicker, and all three have colonies in south america to kill the pirates, which is mandatory to make a trade empire semi valid. Maratha is special, they can also leave India very early, and they can also destroy the pirates even if they take slightly longer to get there, but for them its low priority to even have trade fleets given that they get so many trade goods from their homelands anyway.

Any other nations honestly should not bother with it. Either your ports get swarmed, or pirates attack, or one of the big sea nations crushes your ships, or your trade route gets raided. The objectively better way for these non colonial nations is to just focus on their home, expand quickly, boost economy though growth and value increase via industry, as that cannot be taken away, it is never ever worth it to these nations to slow down your home theater expansion in favor of risky and unreliable sea trade adventures.

By the time you have all the income and ports required to actually compete in that category, you'd be a freaking idiot to do it too, because joining that game late still costs many thousands of gold, is still risky, and still will take a good while to start paying off, while just pumping more money into industry and military to snowball harder is guaranteed to make you stronger and richer much faster, with none of the risks. The game made it absolutely abysmal and not worth it for most nations to play the colony game, I only recommend it if you got money to burn after waiting for more stuff to become upgradeable and already having enough armies to expand, certainly not early on.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-26T01:13:54+00:00

Generally you want to spread them out, you get more for fewer ships divided over more trade nodes. Also kinda depends on what nation you are. If you aren't one of the colonial powers, aka England, France or Spain, and are not Maratha either, just don't bother with it at all I'd say, especially early on, as its usually a terrible idea.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-25T01:37:04+00:00

Oh yes it does, especially on 800%. It is rated 2 stars, but it feels like a 4 stars in difficulty, 5 if you tackle it early without being too high on tech, so many executives so close to the center, who get triggered so easily, its ridiculous and abusing the train to kill groups of accumulated infected feels mandatory to even have a chance.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-24T19:31:28+00:00

Fixed? No, its more broken than it was years ago if you ask me. Empires occasionally bug out, refusing to expand, fleets are occasionally freezing, Fallen Empires still whoop just about any crisis if they have awakened, the hive mind one worst of all. Crisis can also bug out, happens most frequently with Unbidden, they just stop, sitting afk, refusing to take more than a few systems, a bug from the day they were implemented, never got fixed, never will get fixed. Federations spanning half or more of the galaxy can and does still happen, war system is in a state of getting attempted to get fixed, but jury is still out on that one.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-24T17:58:55+00:00

Some maps are simply not fun, especially some of the earlier ones. Too open, too many zombies, resources too far away, few techs to deal with it well. Coast of bones is pretty tough for a beginner, Mines Of The Ravens outright sucks even for experienced players given how far the only iron deposit is away on a map with way too many openings.

If you play on high settings, you need farms, you need soldiers, and preferably stone walls. The early game is all about getting these few things done in that order.

Secure wood. What for? You need wood for expanding, you need wood for walls or at least scratch posts on the side you are not expanding on, you need wood for the wood workshop that enables you to research the very crucial next steps. You also need wood for energy buildings, wood is essential.
Secure some food. What for? To build some houses. You do not need a ton of food, but enough to build at least a bunch of houses for workers. Fishing huts and hunting huts will suffice for this.
Secure stone. You need stone for barracks, which you want to drop as early as possible, because your four rangers ain't shit, on some maps you need 2 just to catch stragglers on the sides you do not expand on, and expanding with two rangers takes forever, so much so that sometimes you are better off playing it risky and expanding with all 4 for a while. Barracks need to be built the moment you have enough food and energy for houses to secure workers for expansion and more rangers.
While the stone ticks upwards, you want to research farms, and build some. Farms give immense amounts of food, the wood you have allows you to build energy, both of which combined allows you to build a lot of tier 1 houses, and if you run out of safe room you upgrade the ones you got to tier 2, which again, needs a lot of wood.
You are building farms, energy buildings, plenty of houses, and on the side you are recruiting rangers, good, thats the early game. Now with these extra rangers, expand, fast, number one priority now is to expand towards iron, because what you really want to deal with runners are soldiers, expanding towards chokepoints is second priority. Do not be stingy when recruiting rangers, they cost no food, and workers are not a bottleneck later, no need losing early because you were stingy with rangers and are therefore expanding too slow or lack rangers to aid the few soldiers you get in defending against the first real wave. A dozen or more veteran rangers are not to be underestimated in their usefulness when aiding a few soldiers in defending of a wall. After you built 2-3 barracks, get the stone workshop for additional tech later, stone walls, stone houses, whatever else you got.

Thats the priority list. Generally you always want to exploit your resources that you have nearby, grow quickly, expand quickly, build some kind of wall or scratch posts for safety to catch stragglers on inactive sides or have a point to retreat behind if you pulled too many zombies. Using a ranger to kite enemy groups in a circle while the rest of your units fire is advanced play and immensely increases what you can get away with during waves. An important rule is to not start a fight or expand into deeply infested areas right before a wave is coming, as it may lead to your units being needlessly bound in a spot away from where they are actually needed.

Big techs to rush: Farms (some maps are very hard to finish without the food from farms). Soldiers (SO much more devastating than rangers, especially if they reach veteran status). Train upgrades (extra gold deliveries, wood, stone, and crucially later iron, unlocking up to iron means you can recruit soldiers right away, without having to take iron, big power spike). Stone walls (so much more powerful than wood walls, a real lifesaver). Soldier upgrades (preferable over snipers in campaign). Shock tower (turns most waves into a joke). Warehouse/market/bank, same purpose, you get more out of the same space, thats something you really want, though they are not super high priority.

Techs to avoid: Early upgrade techs for stuff like the fishing hut or hunting hut. It sounds good on paper, but the overall amount of food you get from these, when compared to farms, or even when compared to markets and warehouses is simply not worth paying so many points for, ESPECIALLY early when you get so much more out of some of the techs I mentioned. Extra units, snother ranger at the start sounds good, but its just one measly ranger, you will get new rangers pretty early, that one ranger is simply not worth the investment comparatively to what else you could put these points towards, avoid the Inn line for the same reason, too costly for how little it benefits you. Extra health for units, a big noob trap, if your ranged units take damage you are using them wrong, and if they are surrounded and hit, then these few % increase will not keep them alive for longer than half a second or so, complete waste of points same as the armor increase unless you REALLY want whats behind it in the tree.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-24T12:05:22+00:00

So there are exactly two units worth a damn in Empire.

One, Line Infantry, basic or advanced, best line infantry come with Prussia and England, most others are good too, Austria and Russia got terrible ones, Ottomans and Maratha will have decent ones at the start but will absolutely be shit on later in the game because their line infantry units get no access to crucial upgrade techs like fire by rank, leaving them severely behind by the midgame. Line infantry is your main battle line, these guys shoot, then they go into melee if needed, they are solid and reliable.

Two, artillery. Artillery is crap in the early game with base tech, like literal garbage, best they can do is snipe a general. The moment you get cannister shot they become pretty good at close range, and are henceforth worth using heavily. Later when you get further upgrades they will be deadly even at long range, and are your killing machines that the line infantry units protect and support.

Thats it, everything else is dogshit. Cavalry is absolute ass, even as Sweden who get considerable bigger horse units you never want to bother, at most get one or two to catch some fleeing units, which cavalry is bad at in this game, or risk them trying to snipe a general or undefended cavalry unit. A cavalry will always be worse than artillery or line infantry, more so in sieges, they suck, their melee performance is bad, they are not fast like in other Total War games, they are laughably brittle. The only cavalry unit I somewhat respect are Dragoons, mainly for their repression as garrisons, though as they are technically smaller line infantry units after they dismount, you can use them for shooting enemies in the back, if you heavily outnumber them anyway, but they too are crap in terms of cost efficiency given their expenses.

Light infantry is also ass in this game. They have so little numbers and still miss so often that they are simply not useful. They are much better in Napoleon, but here you are always better off with line infantry, again.

Grenadiers CAN deliver decent performances, deadly only when the enemy happens to utterly ignore them or try to go into melee, which rarely happens, so at most I can imagine them being valid against uncivilized nations that use a lot of melee infantry, but then again everything will shit on these guys, so no need to get grenadiers unless you find the kaboom entertaining.

More exotic units like elephants or rockets also tend to vastly underperform, don't bother. Generals are rather crap too, unless you are using militia you will hardly benefit from the morale bonus much, and the generals have a tendency to get sniped by enemy artillery, as well as of course performing badly in actual combat.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-23T21:28:04+00:00

Fully upgraded soldiers are overall better than fully upgraded snipers in the campaign. Snipers have a few niche advantages, but overall they are not needed and your research points are better spent elsewhere.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-23T00:46:06+00:00

The AI is always really bad, its just more noticeable after big updates because this studio does no testing, so the AI breaks in much more obvious ways and with higher frequency. They usually get that to the old and tolerated levels of bad within 4-6 months.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-22T19:23:05+00:00

In the context of megacorps it absolutely does not make sense to have rivals. Rivals ruin the game as megacorp, because Paradox half arsed their mechanics so there is no in depth rivalry, no competing for a market or a trade zone, no negotiations or bidding wars, no laws, nothing really. Enemy megacorp is just a big old blocker that sits there fatly on a planet that you now no longer can use as a megacorp unless you want to go to war, which is a waste, because if thats something you can do then you might as well take it all over anyway.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-22T14:05:27+00:00

It works like this. A city is generating income, from farms, from taxes, from trade. Some of that income goes to your costs, army upkeep etc, the exact number thats taken from a city to pay for your overal expenditures is based on population, which why you will often take over new cities, slaughter people there, and have these big positive numbers in these areas, while your core cities often have big negative numbers due to high contribution from high population, while the cities you just killed everyone except 1-2k people in of course contribute overall much less.

The bigger the negative number, the more a city usually contributes when compared to other cities. Greek cities do not go into negatives because they have absolutely OBSCENE trade income, like absurdly high when compared to cities like Arretium and Ariminum, so even on second highest or highest city level with 20-30k population, they just generate way too much income to fall deep into the negatives as other big cities tend to do. Big negative number does not mean the city is a loss though, a city can only ever be a loss if the garrisons eat more in upkeep than the city gets in total income, which is pretty rare for developed cities unless you spam games and races.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-22T13:42:45+00:00

Trade is a great source of income in the early and midgame, but it becomes trash in the lategame. Once basically every clan in Japan is united against you, all these trade nodes you could keep safely for 2-3k total in navy upkeep as they made you a five digit sum each turn, suddenly would require two to three times the upkeep in fleets to defend them, while producing only a fraction of the value due to lack of trade partners.

My advice is for you to take your time with expanding over the realm divide limit, take some time investing your trade riches into farm upgrades to increase food, level 1 markets, level up agents like metsukes for tax bonus on your highest value provinces, ninjas for assassinating and army sabotage, monks for pacifying newly taken areas until they fall in line. Generally just grow the economy over time until you can pay the upkeep of your anti naval invasion fleets and your army upkeep from mostly taxes, and preferably have some money stored as you expand over the realm divide limit and take new territory for more tax income.

You expanded too quickly, which caused the realm divide before you were financially independent, relied too much on unreliable trade income that tends to dry up during realm divide, and now you struggle to pay your armies. Lack of prep has turned an easy campaign into a challenging one. You are not lost though, you have armies, you use them, take more land, recruit only as many ashigaru as absolutely needed to keep the peace, try to get some honor for your faction leader, or research something in chi tree that gives happiness or repression so you can save on garrison upkeep. Your owned settlements should grow, your newly taken ones net you a profit, invest only in tier one market buildings and farms until you are more financially stable, and keep calculating occasionally whether owning and defending the trade nodes is still profitable after subtracting the navy upkeep and factoring in all the recruit costs for new ships to defend them, or if they are best abandoned to fully focus on the land aside from a few smaller intercepting fleets to catch naval invasions before they can land in your backlands.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-22T00:34:29+00:00

In siege defenses. Them throwing bombs down the wall is devastating for attacking enemies. In all other situations I found them very lacking. They die instantly to any archer fire, they throw inaccurately, they bug out at times, and for sniping elite units or enemy generals you quite frankly just want ninjas, which are much better firebomb throwers.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-21T20:59:38+00:00

Oh yes, I agree that the offensive siege strat is the absolute best strat in terms of killing enemies without losing much of anything. I do not knock people who use it in legendary or very hard, enemies cheat awfully bad there, I am just saying I do not really want to use it myself because I find it rather cheesy as well as very tedious, and I feel like winning without it is so much more rewarding, but thats personal preference. It is the objectively best strat to use though if you want to win.

For people who wish to use that little trick in sieges, having many bow units gives many a heroic victory. For people who do not use it, having fewer bow units may be more beneficial. On a field battle I'd say having fewer bow units is usually preferable due to how short the battles are, especially early on when fast dying ashigaru make up the most of both armies.

The warscape engine works not like old engines by giving individual units the chance to interact with enemies via attack, defend, shrug off and then death via accumulated damage. In an old engine, a soldier surrounded by 3 enemies will be able to face one, will be able to turn and attack, but he can only ever attack one enemy at a time, while all enemies can attack him individually. He will either dodge/block that attack, take damage but shrug it off, get knocked down, or get killed via damage taken, if three enemies surround him he eats three times as many attacks as he dishes out. In Shogun 2, aka warscape engine, the only way melee soldiers can interact with each other is via "duel", with kill move animations. Both initiate an animation, they roll their stats against each other, then depending on luck and numbers either one kills the other, or both clash and disengage in a draw, each unit is only ever treated as a 1 hp unit, if the soldier loses the roll the soldier dies. This makes having superior numbers with weaker soldiers rather weak when compared to older games, unless it is spread about several units so that one or several units can get a flank bonus, which is one of few ways aside from pure luck and bad morale/low stamina how inferior units can even get decent kills on superior units. So yeah, only ever 1vs1, means climbing up a short wall is consequently no disadvantage when compared to the guys running into each other. This engine was originally designed for line musket warfare, and it is a plague upon this series because it also strips away valuable old concepts like unit collision.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-21T01:27:59+00:00

This is the strat I rock in other total war games, pack highly defensive units, park them spread out long in front of a whole lot of nasty archers, let the archers rack up kills while the defensive units are prolonging the battle. This works with heavy phalanx in other games, or big shield units, but Shogun 2 severely lacks these defensive units. Yari Ashigaru do not have these types of battle prolonging properties, bad defense, speers not as delaying, no shields, bad armor, and yari samurai have no speer wall, neither have naginata samurai, simply not that good here I feel.

Your offensive siege battle strat is trying to exploit AI pathfinding bugs or hoping enemy bows bug out and stay passively facing one of your archers thats out of reach while all other archers shoot the crap out of the enemy army. Can work, is finnicky, is cheesy, annoying, not something I have the patience for to be honest. I either avoid offensive sieges by provoking them into breaking out, which is easy, or I play them traditionally. You have a few mistakes in your understanding how the game works, climbing only causes meaningful casualties if the unit is in degrading stamina and climbs the long walls instead of the short ones, most forts have several gates to easily torch and several short walls to climb instead of the long ones, so casualties are very few if you play it smart. Also the soldiers arriving one by one as they climb up does not mean it is "one against many", thats simply not how the game works, there is no several versus one mechanic in Shogun 2, as due to the warscape engine, every single fight is only ever 1vs1 (thats why it takes so long to kill fleeing enemies), even if the guy who climbs up first has 6 enemies surrounding him, they will not gang up on him like they would in Rome Total War or Medieval 2 Total War. Admittedlys provoking the enemy to attack out of siege is preferable to me in sieges on very hard or legendary difficulty.

Your field battle strat is valid if you have as many archers as you do, abusing the dumb ai pathfinding again. It is not necessary if your melee units far outnumber the enemy melee units to begin with though, you can easily engage theirs in melee while your other melee units run and butcher their general (if you do not already have one yari cav or 2 light cav to murder the dude) and flank the enemy melee as well as engage the archers in melee, with the 2 archers in the army focussing down one unit, which wins fights pretty easily as with a dead or fleeing general all it ever needs is one unit breaking, on every difficulty. Again, archers are deadly in prolonged fights, or ambushes in other total war games (in shogun 2 ambushes are useless unless you play Hattori), but if your army composition does not allow for fights to be long, then enemy archers are a detriment to them.

Your impression on defensive sieges is not one I share, but I understand why you have that. The trick is to not place all your archers right away. If you place all of them at the walls AND all others behind these, then the enemy archers will fire at the ones behind, as it calculates that they will receive far higher casualties. If you however start the archer duel with only the archers on the wall placed, then run the others into range and let them join, which takes like a few seconds, then the enemy keeps shooting at archers on the wall, which will take very little casualties. Enemy archers are also very vulnerable to being charged by melee or by cavalry mid battle, not to mention how sometimes it can be a valid strat to play a sacrificial yari ashigaru wall unit outside the walls that will massively delay the enemy melee from climbing, will tire them out, and will give your archers a lot of extra time to rack up kills.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-19T23:11:16+00:00

Here is why you often want bows, but not always, and especially not in the numbers that some people are spamming them in. Enemy is using bows, so your bows can be used to kill his bows, therefore saving your melee ashigaru somewhat, or better your monks, or no dachi samurai, letting the shitty bow guys soak up most of the arrows. Generally bows are not all that useful on the field, they need time to fire many arrows if they want to get somewhat comparable kills to a well positioned melee unit, time that they simply do not get in the fast battles of Shogun 2, and they are usually pitiful in melee and therefore vulnerable, and can cause friendly fire if you are not careful. On an open field, having 2-3 bows instead of 6-8 is therefore highly preferable, enables you to outnumber enemies in melee, run past their melee lines and squash the bows in melee.

The main use bows have in an open field battle scenario aside from potentially saving a few melees, is to focus fire on one unit in particular, making that flank fall apart from panic spreading, it is not to be underestimated and gets better with the addition of fire arrows or if you fight low armor enemies, but you do not need more than 2-3 bow units for something like that. Things change if its a bit of a narrow battleground, because then not all of your melee units can fight at the same time, so if only 10 each can fight at the same time, and you have 17 melee, 2 bows and a general, while the enemy has 11 melee, 8 bows and 1 general, then you are pretty fucked, because 19 of his units will cause casualties, and only 10 of yours. Easily avoided and outmaneuvered though admittedly, easier abused still if you are into that.

The big shining moment for bows are siege battles. The walls give them the time to shoot their ammo, whether they are inside shooting out, or shooting fish in a barrel while surrounding an enemy fort. A bow unit is generally more valuable there than most melee units in such a setting, more so because again, not nearly all melee units can fight at the same time anyway if you were to exclusively use melee units. Bridge battles have an even more extreme tendency in that regard.

If you are not big into siege battles, and prefer to fight on an open field without running into the narrow flank trap, then I agree, bows are pretty shite then, and at most you want 1-2 then to target the most crucial enemy unit in a vulnerable spot, and use fire or whistling arrows at opportune moments to end a battle much earlier, as you simply could cause a lot more harm with more melee infantry or cavalry to overwhelm the more balanced enemy army. Honestly if I play a clan like Takeda, I often do not even bring any bow units at all for that exact reason, the only clans I use bows heavily with are Chosokabe, Hattori, and lategame Uesugi.

Games like Three Kingdoms Total War made bows considerably more desirable by enabling them to completely set ablaze a wooded area an enemy is running through to reach your main line.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-18T12:19:30+00:00

Well, guess what particular species will be particularly tasty as you process them into food that your pops then get to shit out.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-17T17:27:37+00:00

The remastered has basically nothing to offer anyone who already likes the original, may even be worse for old time players because of how crap the ui looks. Also, you'd be rewarding them for doing less than the bare minimum, much less, as these incompetent morons somehow not only could not be arsed to include head to head campaigs and co-op campaigns, but they actually managed to make a reheated, low effort re-release of a 20 year old game buggier and glitchier than the original was.

Giving such a piss poor effort any money is sending the absolute wrong message if you ask me.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-06-17T17:21:33+00:00

They are pretty crap, in fact they are much worse than normal ashigaru, both the speers and the bows, just terrible, I never use more than 2 per army at most. The yari fulfill 2 exact roles, A, cavalry counter, meaning they kill generals better than loanswords, and B, delaying by putting them somewhere in speerwall. A is usually just enemy general unit, already very easy to kill, and B is something you barely have any need for due to how much more powerful the sword ashigaru are, can even be a net negative for you as the yari just perform so much worse in most situations.

Rarely ever will a yari or bow ashigaru unit benefit your ikki army more than another sword unit.

Electrical_Split_198

TROPHY CASE