Bought Shogun 2 last night cos i was bored

Played 30 mins today and it's not really playable due to the view distance. I don't know if it's a bug is a limitation, but there is certainly no way to increase the view distance of other enemy units beyond 200 metres. For example, I fired up a campaign and immediately started a battle with a nearby opponent. The enemy army would be 200 metres in front of mine as I could tell by a bunch of banners floating in the distance, but as I scrolled forward slowly, the army would magically teleport into the field. I'd scroll back and they'd magically teleport away (or go to cloak mode). Wow. Didn't know technology was so advanced in feudal Japan. I hope it's a bug and I hope that they fix it in a patch, cos otherwise I just blew £30 for 30 minutes of software testing.

As for the rest of the 30 minute review:

+ Music. Very atmospheric. They've even added some of the original Shogun tracks.
+ The general unit has an "Inspire" ability as well as a few others, which is cool. Very basic concept that finally made it in.
+ Icons and general theme of the game are kind of minimalistic, which i dig.
- Graphics glitches during intro sequences that caused me to skip them (stuttering textures)
- No AA. A fucking crime. This is almost making the game unplayable on it's own. I mean c'mon, it's 2011.
- Greyed-out video options. Like "huge" unit size setting and "ultra" graphics options are there, but unselectable. WTF?
- Slight delay with clicking and scrolling in the campaign map. Very annoying.
- I switched the advisor off, but it came on anyway. (Advisor is fucking annoying anyway).
- Formation is lost after issuing a move command to the entire army in battle (they form a line instead)
- AI sucks. Within a minute of my first battle, a lone enemy light cavalry unit came out of nowhere and charged the front of my entire army.

No jade-rating yet.

That's not a very encouraging first look! Thanks for posting Derf, will continue to follow til there's a jade rating. Btw on the greyed-out options, might be like DA2, does Ultra only support DX11 perhaps? And your card DX10 hardware? That's my problem certainly. Worth looking into maybe. Can't believe no AA though, I thought every game for the past 5 years has had that pretty much!

I actually keep hearing good things about the game from others, so I don't know to what extent I will follow Derf's jade rating. I can't afford buying it right now anyway though, so it doesn't matter too much.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise: a friend of mine who's really taken by Shogun 2 and has been trying to get me to buy it (which I didn't, for the same reason I mentioned here) gifted me the game as a belated birthday present! Awesome. I'm installing it now, I'll let you know what I think later on.

Very first impressions:

- art style is pretty great
- tutorial comprehensive
- a lot of the fighting seems a throwback to the earlier (pre-fire arms) TW games, which isn't a bad thing
- naval combat seems to be a lot less mysterious to manage with actual rowing ships (wind direction etc)
- runs pretty sluggishly on anything over medium

haven't actually played much of it yet though, since the game is affected by the same BS crashes I get in MoW: AS and plenty others. I'll play for a while and FREEZE and I have to reboot manually. I may get that new graphics card I was planning on for the Witcher 2 earlier than I planned, cause it's so fucking annoying - especially in a game that you're bound to play for longer periods of time at a time.

Crashes are more frequent than in any other game I've played so far - not the game's fault, but my PC's. Still, if I crash hard every 20 mins or so I can't play the game. May have to look into that new graphics card for the witcher 2 sooner than I expected.

Have you tried manually kicking your graphics card fan into a higher gear? I use MSI afterburner for that. Default fan speeds (at least on nvidia) tend to be a bit too conservative, imo, in order to keep noise down. What you may have is a heat-damaged card.... works fine until it gets too hot, then errors creep in that cause game crashes. Happened on my 8800gt. I've got the fans on my gtx465 escalated to avoid a similar situation... though with my luck I'll just burn the fan out.

The cool thing about MSI afterburner is you can set a graph for fan speed so you're not stuck at 80% or whatever. You can just throttle up as the temp goes up, so if you're just on your desktop, your gfx card doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner. :p

I already was pretty sure that it wasn't anything temperature-related (based on gut feeling), but I went ahead and got the Sapphire overclocking/fan control tool. I put the fan at 50%, cooling my GPU to 50 C° in a few seconds (temperature when not under load is 60-70, which isn't too high either). I start Shogun, load savegame, press 'end turn', and bam. Vertical white-grey lines all over the monitor again, hard crash. So yeah, I'm pretty sure the card is just fucked up for most games, nothing directly heat-related. Maybe damaged like you say.

What puzzles me about the matter is the following facts:

- I NEVER crash in normal windows environment
- some games never crash hard either - TF2, L4D are examples
- some games crash a lot in full-screen but rarely ever in windowed mode - Fallout: New Vegas
- crashes seem to be almost completely unrelated to the game's age or sys reqs. I've had 15 year-old games crash hard (and constantly), others that never crash at all, and some new games (like Shogun 2) that crash every 5-20 minutes, while crashes in others (MoW: Assault Squad) seem to range widely. Sometimes I can play 2-3 hours straight without any problems, other times I crash after 10 mins. Also, some small indie games will crash hard every 5 mins too, when their complete install size is less than 200 MB.
- crashes even occur at certain points in some games and never in others. NBA2K10 would crash quite often in the menu screens, but NEVER during the games (which are arguably a lot heavier on my PC)

Mystifying huh? I have also considered faulty sound drivers, and re-installed and updated but nothing seems to change for the better. CPU problems seem unlikely. PSU too. Ram and mobo completely unlikely.

Also, crash screens range from vertical coloured lines to sudden white (or black) screens, or most commonly a sudden freeze of the image with lines of little black square blocks all over the screen. Never a BSOD. Definitely hardware related.

yea, crashes that end with artifacts on the screen are almost always the graphics card. Ah well. Just cough up the cash for one, man. It's not like you're actually working for the money.

Been playing for a few hours - on hard, but still - and some of the AI behaviour is really bizarre. I'm playing with a clan good at diplomacy and subterfuge and try to play that way. 'Honour' is very important, and can be lost by breaking alliances, crushing defeats, looting towns, etc.

Now...what really fucking annoys me is that I haven't offended ANYONE in the entire game yet, only reacted to enemy aggressions, and people are out for my blood every fucking way I turn. I started out as vassal to a nearby clan who (GOD KNOWS WHY) decided to attack me. I crushed them after a long battle and took their 3 provinces, bringing my total up to a majestic 4. (/sarcasm)

One turn after that, for no apparent reason, I became a threat to a strong clan on the other side of my territory (in the West). Back to war - after losing a few battles at first (army was at Eastern side of my territory), I struck back and conquered 3 of their provinces. As I was deeply involved in this, ANOTHER clan at the other (Western) side of my territory declares war. WTF. Luckily, they didn't really move on me but I was getting spanked by counterattacks from the guys in the West regardless.

Just when I thought I was getting hold of the situation again, ANOTHER clan in the West declares war and marches in 2 fucking full stacks of elite units. At this point I have barely any defense in the West and my main army is reduced to 1/4th of a full stack with no hope of reinforcement. I put up a fight but in the end have to run and leave most of my territory to them. I retreat to the two remaining provinces I had (recently conquered).

Now...there is only WTF to say about all this. All these clans are much more important than me and clearly have no honour at all (unilaterally declaring wars, breaking alliances) while I try my best to stay on my best behaviour. But apparently, the game doesn't care. That's fine, but then don't let me believe that honour is important, for fuck's sake. Realistically, if the honour system worked, these honourless dogs should be attacked from all sides by other clans and at least have some respect for my plight, fighting off much bigger agressors. Instead, being virtuous is the sign for every fucking clan to declare war and march in with massive armies.

Tell me about it. It really is a god awful game in so many aspects. You of course point out one of the glaring flaws. I bought it hoping to get stuck into a bread-and-butter, to-and-fro strategy game. Instead I got a glitchy and perverted excuse of an action game.

Wow, I just concluded that the AI is ridiculous. It just kept coming. With only one army, I would capture a city, recover a bit and walk to the next, and the very next fucking turn I arrived there my opponent somehow divined that the other city was undefended for one turn and would ALWAYS walk a little army there to take it again. Urgghh. I hate it when AI is so clearly clairvoyant. There is no way he could know that city is gonna be undefended for that turn, at least not for me there isn't.

Oh and just more and more BS of long-standing trade partners and big factions across the map declaring war on me. Totally insane. At one point, I was in a war with a faction whose provinces were above and below me. Above me (and them), there was a massive faction that'd already declared war turns ago. Then, below me (and them) there was another big faction that declares war on me out of the blue.

You'd think that's not too bad since there's my enemy buffering the way to me right? Guess again. Both factions walk past my nearest enemies' castles and armies, heading straight for my capital with a full stack of units commanded by their 5-star pimp daimyo. I HAD ONE PROVINCE. I wasn't even remotely a threat to anyone and had always been honourful in my diplomatic arrangements. But the AI's only goal seemed to destroy me, in a team effort.

Another point in case: Faction A is at war with me, as is Faction B. Faction A is 2 provinces away from me, behind Faction B's lands. Faction B is sieging me. I see a large army of faction A only 2 'steps' away from my fortress and Faction B's army. I go 'cool, maybe I'll ask them to surprise Faction B's army from the back while I sally forth from the fortress'. Of course, they wouldn't do it.

YES BECAUSE IT MAKES MUCH MORE SENSE TO CAPTURE AN ISOLATED PROVINCE BEHIND AN OPPONENT'S LINES FROM A HARMLESS OPPONENT THAN TO TRY TO EXPAND THROUGH YOUR MUCH MORE DANGEROUS OPPONENTS BORDER PROVINCES RAAAAGHH

I think I may be skipping this game.

I definitely will, Steam is a no-no anyway as you all know (and take the piss out of) and that sounds...well... pretty appalling actually. Anyone think maybe they spent too long with the multiplayer and forgot the most important bit?

Yeah I'm not sure. The stupid thing is, the game has potential. The artwork is brilliant, and the scope and polish is really nice. In some ways it's the best balance between the golden simplicity of Rome: Total War and the convoluted scope of Empire, but the AI is just so batshit insane on the battle map that it makes you want to cry. The battles themselves are ok, for the most part.

I found another problem: it's impossible to maintain large armies and develop infrastructure at the same time. I currently have like 10-12 provinces in a new game and I can barely sustain one 3/4 stack if I still want to build SOME buildings in my cities. And this is when I try to pimp every piece of trade infrastructure in cities from the moment I can (roads, trade ports, markets, promoting agriculture). It's mindblowing, because this means I can only ever defend one side of my territory (which, as you can imagine, becomes harder as I grow).

It would appear that the only way to beat the game is to steamroll over friends and foes alike, looting and producing armies all the while. Sad.