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In a culture that glorifies war…

…you're certain to have some glorious battles. Once caught up in the mythos of the Japanese warrior, it's hard to see the simple 2D sprites on the screen as game elements. Despite the lack of a battle cry or glitzy 3D animation, Shogun really does draw you in. The troops marching into position almost seem impatient to engage. Of course, it's only a figment of your imagination, or so you think until your archers bust out with a sky-darkening barrage of arrows at the approaching enemy without command. Your troops will never break ranks at the start of a battle unless under constant barrage from archers. Sooner or later their morale fails and they run away.

Retreating cowards!!!

Again I restart

In fact, morale is probably the most important and fleeting factor in combat. Given equal numbers of equal troops, it's morale that will decide a battle. Yet it changes so often - even massed cavalry charging some archers in the distance may get demoralized to the point that they'll take excessive casualties in what should be easy combat.

You see, each kind of troop is the direct enemy of another. Cavalry will destroy light samurai (archer/swordsman) formations but crumble horribly to pikemen. Similarly, pikemen might handle cavalry easily but they can't take down light infantry too well because of their range advantage. It all balances out in the end. In the current demo, balancing is not where the developers would like it so it's going to be tweaked, and hopefully cavalry won't be as likely to break upon being given orders to take down archers. Overall, the game is in great shape right now.

Here comes the Horde

yellow = arrows. Lots, eh?

If Anything, it's HARD

Wow! If the AI in the final game is anywhere near as competent as it is in the current demo, we're in for one tough cookie of a game! It took several tries of the final battle for us to win. Being a general of the era requires patience, forethought and incredible mental toughness. To win the final battle we sent forward a unit of cavalry archers (which we were VERY fortunate to get in the randomly generated battle) to harass the forward pike formations. One of those broke off in pursuit and we baited it further away from combat. For us it was a good trade - since the cavalry archers would be useless once the heavy fighting started, it was a good idea to to take such a robust unit out of the fight for now. Our two pikemen formations did an excellent job for once - one wedged itself into the side of a yari cavalry, destroying it utterly. The other delayed another pike formation from clashing with our cavalry which then engaged the enemy's cavalry.

A Bright Future

We clearly had an advantage now. One enemy pike unit was off on a goose chase, one cavalry was destroyed while the rest of the battle went its normal, evenly matched course. However, once the pikemen finished with the cavalry, they entered the fray and freed our cavalry to disengage from the enemy cav and engage enemy archers. The rout was on. Once the main fighting was finished, the remaining enemy pikemen were lured into the final trap - and being exhausted as they were from the chase, they got decimated. They were retreating from the archer fire by the time they got into melee range.

Overall, Shogun looks incredibly sweet so far. The tactical part of it is definitely there - you can see this for yourself in the demo. The design behind the strategic portion of Shogun wasn't shown there, so really, players have only seen half the game. The spec for the strategy element seems solid and all that remains is to see how it's implemented. If the demo is anything to go by, Shogun should be an excellent game when it's released.