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[Jackrabbit]

I always remember reading something by Tom Francis that stuck with me ever since, which was, essentially "I always develop one aspect of my strategy so aggressively that I ignore all others. This confuses the enemy, who always assume that you must have at least something in the departments you've neglected, and act accordingly."

I like the concept and I've always been meaning to try it out.

[Neonivek]

I am still pissed off that the computer cheats in this game a lot.

I actually lost because I found out the hard way that the computer didn't have to pay for upkeep.

[Aklyon]

Well then what stops it from making overhuge armies, then? construction time only?

[Shades]

I really don't understand why someone would implement a levelling system for players in a RTS game, I always thought people playing RTS games liked winning through strategy, not simply by having superior units because they own the game longer....

It was the first step in an attempt to move towards a better multi-player campaign mode, along with the clan ownership map. You can still play classic style battles as well without the leveling although I'm not sure how big the player pool is for that.
It should be mostly balanced whatever level you are, the beta group spent months trying to get the concept of higher levels gave you more flexibility rather than just raw power, still not perfect of course but then it never is

I am still pissed off that the computer cheats in this game a lot.
I actually lost because I found out the hard way that the computer didn't have to pay for upkeep.

I'm fairly certain it does. On harder difficulty levels it does have more income to play with though, I think it can build more at once as well then.

[umiman]

I take back what I said about my strategy being perfect. I'm getting trounced left and right but it's not because of imbalance. My strategy is simply flawed against people who know what they are doing. Looks like I have to change it up a bit.

Feels great though. I'm getting some very intense challenges and it's very exciting.

[Silfurdreki]

From the multiplayer matches I played early after the vanilla game was released it seemed as if the only way to win with a very elite army against a much larger force is a routing cascade. That means that keeping your general alive is the highest priority in such a game, since he's usually all that holds an ashigaru army together.

Also: don't charge matchlocks with ashigaru. I learned that the hard way.

Damnit, now I want to to play Shogun again >.<

[umiman]

Oh god, this is seriously getting really difficult.

Right now, I can say the hardest armies to face are the old Shogun 2 armies and low level players. Now that I'm level 5 I'm already reeling from the serious lack of men. It's really, REALLY hard to beat those armies that have so many freaking units. The old Shogun 2 armies especially are extremely difficult as not only are there a huge number more of them (for some strange reason...), but all the bow units outrange your guns. =| Then there's the fact that every single Shogun 2 infantryman is stronger than the FotS guys, so you can't ever hope to beat them in melee.

I seriously recommend turning off mixed avatars for this express purpose.

------

Other than that, I've faced some really oddball and strangely effective strategies:

- One guy's army was almost entirely cavalry gunners. It was ridiculous. So hard to catch them. I was actually supposed to lose that match as I lost all but 2 units of Shogitai to his neverending hit-and-run tactics. However, the funny thing about Shogitai is that they almost never rout, so I was actually chasing the remnants of his army across the entire map so long that after about 15 minutes of watching our units chase each other around, his entire army surrendered out of fatigue.

- Another guy fielded only super elite units. As in the American + French + British marines. He had about 800 of them, which is really freaking scary considering each of them outputs the same DPS as 3 full line infantry squads. I managed to set the location of the battlefield to be around a hill where I ran my Shogitai over the terrain in such a way that he couldn't actually shoot me before I reached him.

- On the polar opposite, I faced another guy who's entire army was only super cheap line infantry (White Tigers). He had nearly 5000 men...  It felt like my swordsmen were cutting through some sort of layered cake that never ended.

- I think the most boring fights are those where the maps are split by many rivers that you have to cross. Then you get the douchebag players that get a very good artillery piece and just sit on a riverbank forever. Since there's no way to force the enemy to come to you, I almost always lose those as I can't be bothered to wait and have a stupid stand-off with a coward. The only time I managed to win one of these was when I lied and told the enemy that since I controlled all the points, I was going to win in a few minutes unless he captured one. Complete bullshit, but he bought it and came out and died.

[Aklyon]

Can't you just keep your large size of army without upgrading?

[umiman]

Can't you just keep your large size of army without upgrading?

Nope.

The reason that your army gets smaller as you level is because each skillpoint your general gets increases his deployment cost by 50. You can't not upgrade him. On one hand, it makes your armies tiny, but on the other hand, if you level him up properly, he can become incredibly scary.

Against other similarly leveled opponents, the matchmaking system automatically sets it to 10,000 cost battles so people will most of the time still have pretty large battles. But when low level players are involved, the system puts it at 5000 cost to balance it out (since a low level player can't field anything to combat what a high level guy can with 10,000... cannons for example). It's just quite troublesome when 1/5th of that 5000 cost will be just your general...

[Empty]

Hmm. Holding all the key buildings in a land battle toggles a countdown that makes you win if it reaches 0.

I've seen it before.

[Aklyon]

How many keybindings is all the keybindings?

[umiman]

Hmm. Holding all the key buildings in a land battle toggles a countdown that makes you win if it reaches 0.

I've seen it before.

Have you? I've never seen a countdown myself.

I leveled up our clan by the way, after playing so much. I think everyone in it gets a cap or something.

[Jackrabbit]

Holy crap, first multiplayer win against an army that wasn't some stupid gimmicky army like one made entirely of Yari Cavalry (your charge bonus is useless against ashigaru who know you're coming and if you charge me, I know you're coming) or one consisting entirely of elite units (an all hero units army just means I can pin you down and surround you easier). Admittedly he was playing kinda dumb and needs to be told that forming up two armies opposite each other and exchanging of bow fire like some kind of Gempei era bout doesn't work when your army is so vetted that you're outbowed three to one, but I still won! I think it helped that this was the first guy I'd faced that had the same stars as me, and not like, 20 stars. It's a bastard of a matchmaking system. 

[userpay]

So what is the overall consensus for Fall of the Samurai? Does it improve on the original (both single and multiplayer) sufficiently?

[umiman]

Should be obvious what my opinion is.

Jackrabbit: The matchmaking gets significantly better after about 10 games I found. And I'm still way more scared of low levels than of high levels. >.>

However, I did discover that the DPS skill tree for the general (both in regular Shogun 2 and FotS) contains a high level skill that increases your general's range to that greater of any unit in the game that isn't artillery. Furthermore, the FotS DPS tree also has skills that give something like a 20 - 30% boost to reloading speed for all line infantry, which is pretty brutal. Since I have this now, I figure I can just make regular solid lines of cheapish infantry with high morale against the low level players with shittonnes of units and rely on my general to DPS everything down while hoping the enemy sends his general a bit too close.

If that fails, I really don't know what to do against them. I'm already barely winning games against low levels as it is. I'm starting to see why people cheese so much against low levels; it's ridiculously hard strategically.