After playing quite a bit of shogun 2, I can easily say that this iteration is definitely the best since Rome:TW. Honestly, it makes me excited for when they make my dreams come true and announce Rome 2 with even crazier Elephants.

Can't wait for some serious fantasy mods to arrive. The AI is great (could be a bit faster at exploiting weaknesses in strategic mode maybe). This might very well be the best strategy / rts to arrive for a very long time.

Campaigner, I haven't played any of the Total War games either.

This.

I'm also going to wait for some excellent mods to be developed for Shogun II, I'm just not into the whole asian warfare scene right now. I LOVED MEII.

What I think is crap is that we have NO ANTIALIASING support in-game at the moment.

Thanks a lot CREATIVE ASSEMBLY....really?   I used to sing their prasises.  I've been a TOTAL WAR fan since the very first one.  Unfortunately I've seen the series tank and turn to hollywood garbage. 

Thanks for the latest FAILURE Creative Assembly........I will be a sucker no longer.  This is the last TW game I will ever buy.  No DX 10 or 11 support with AA until a few weeks from now it might be patched in?!?

LAME!

EDIT:  If I wanted to play DX 9 TW I'd be playing Medieval II and have saved myself the 50 bucks!  Get with the program CA!

>.> Someone should make an Elemental Total War mod for one of the Total War games.

But pick the one that crashes the most so it's closer to the real thing.

----

Joking aside, I purchased the game yesterday. Due to Steam being RETARDED I wasn't able to get much done before work. I barely got it installed and played ten minutes to see how it'd run on my machine.

I didn't know Steam wouldn't let you choose a hard drive to install games to. So since my primary hard drive didn't have enough space I had to uninstall Steam and reinstall it on my larger hard drive so I could install the 15GB beast that is Shogun Total War 2.

It looks gorgeous though, and it plays just as well as the original Shogun, which is what got me into the series. I was looking for a break from Civilization type games and RTS games back in the 90's. Was getting burnt out on C&C and Civ 2. Found Shogun in the bargain bin at a local Big Lots discount store. Spent $7 bucks and haven't ever looked back. I skipped Empire/Napoleon though. Just never liked the look of them, and i don't care for the time period between gunpowder and WWII as far as historical battles go. Don't know why, just never could pay attention to it in school.

I will easily admit that you are right that some elements of Shogun 2 are nearly unacceptable. Though from my point of view, every one of these elements is in the multiplayer sections of the game. For instance, drop in battles do not allow you to select or even accept the opponent provided, thus if one friend wants to play a campaign battle against his buddy, he must go through the match making system.  Another good example is how the match making system will pair you up with player that have horrible pings and don't really make it clear that a game against these individuals will be laggy as hell. However, looking at the single player experience, it is easy to see that the game is fair improved over the previous titles, which is a great thing.

While I will not deny that the TW community has a whole host of issues that they want fixed or changed. The fact is that these individuals are a significant minority of the overall players. Sega reported that Empire sold 800,000+ units of the game, and I doubt very much that the total forum users for all TW communities combined would make up even 50,000 paying users. Thus, it is not surprising that Sega and the Creative Assembly do not simply cater to this vocal minority. In fact, looking at the metacritics site for Empire shows that the users scores are in fact evenly split between people who had a negative opinion and a positive one. The page for Shogun 2 is not split at all, and out of 41 user reviews, only 3 are negative with zero being mixed. In fact, one of the people that rated the game zero did so siting the exact same points I made in the first paragraph about the questionable state of the multiplayer system.

While it is true that the AA in the game isn't currently in use, the setting for it is listed in the options. That honestly makes me wonder if it might be possible to turn it on through the scripting. Either way, with the box for the setting in the options at least we know it Will be enabled soon, probably within the next patch or two.

As for the DX10/11, they already said it Will be added soon. I don't have any information on their actual time-frame for that though, I just know they Do Plan on adding it.

Check out this thread right here for conformation from CA staff that DX11 Is coming shortly:               http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/9307-NO-DX-11-to-Release-!?highlight=sucks

Either way, even without both of those options, the AA or the DX10/11, the game still looks flat out Amazing to me on a visual standard (at least IMO). Clearly it's the best looking game in the series to date (also just my opinion). I think we'll have to agree to disagree on calling it a "Failure" however. IMO it should already be given the title of Strategy Game of the Year, it's just that good.

I've been keeping an eye on the official forums, particularly the bug reports and complaints threads. Some of the people on there complaining, which are definitely in the minority, just seem like they're complaining for the sake of having something to complain about. I read a thread on the official game forums yesterday where some poor kid went on a super-rant about how he couldn't run the game at all and blaming CA repeatedly for their shoddy game making skills and how much the game sucks (even though he couldn't even seem to play it). Everyone who replied, which weren't many, all asked if he even met the running requirements or tried to help him. Mostly though, I think everyone saw that his post was completely unfounded.

The main reason I've even looked at the bug reports for the game was to see if I would run into any of them. Luckily enough (or oddly enough, depending on your outlook) I haven't ran into not one single bug that I've seen reported. To be honest it's been a real long time since I've seen any game run this perfectly and smoothly without encountering at least some kind of bug or oddity. Take DA:2 for instance. While DA:2 runs flawlessly on my system, the game still has that odd pixelation in the backgrounds of some things, or on the edges of the models hair. In Shogun 2 I can't see any blatant flaws at all, and I take the time out to look for them specifically. (granted I haven't played MP yet)

Even Angry Joe completely Loves the game, and that's rare as hell. Check out Angry Joe's Shogun 2 Review here on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5PIIOY2KS4

I completely agree with everything he talks about in the review and he's also one of the only "Honest" reviewers I think are left out there. Angry Joe is one of a us, a Real Gamer, and not some corporate b!tch boy who gets paid to put shine on a crap game. He specifically talks about how everything was improved, and how the AI, while still doing the "occasional" odd thing, is over-all much improved. His one gripe is that he wants more specific options in diplomacy, which I think I can agree with. Check out his review, it's a solid and Real review.

Haters gonna hate.

CA implemented all the features that the community wanted in the exact way that they wanted and imagined. See here. The vast majority seem very happy with it. And there must be soemthing wrong with your PCs if you think the game looks ugly. Looks beautiful on mine.

For many players (myself included) gfx is less important than gameplay. I dont consider getting DX11 and AA few weeks later as a big problem.

Who said anything about "hate"?  I expressed frustration at once again being burned by an unfinished game (ie. the option is there in-game to turn AA on/off yet it can't be used until a few weeks from now?).  To reiterate.......I have been with the TW franchise since the first SHOGUN, I still have every title in a neat little box on my shelf, I've been involved in several TW modding communities......we're not talking about a TW rookie here.   "Haters gonna hate"  Seriously?  The game was released in an unfinished state that is what the bulk of my initial frustrated post is about.  That equals "hate"? .......sigh

That post you linked to is a fluff-post and if you can't see that then you really haven't spent enough time in the TW community.

There is nothing wrong with my PC.  Please see my post history here and elsewhere, my PC's, networks, etc. are always in top-top shape which is why I rarely ever have anything to complain about.  A blantantly unfinished game is something to complain about however.........so that is what I'm doing. 

thanks,

the Monk

Again, nowhere was it said that graphics were more important than gameplay.  In fact no comparitive scale regarding graphics and gameplay was even introduced or any suggestion made that lack of AA or DX11 support detract from the gameplay as such.  The only point made in my initial post was that even just based on the lack of AA the game is currently in an unfinished state.  Overall game-enjoyment is not gameplay. 

My second post did indicate that I thought there were other bugs (non graphics related) still present some of which do go to gameplay.

Which is very true. There still is the occasional glitch in the battle AI. Luckily I've only seen them act up once on me, but once was enough. The whole enemy army stood around and did a little jig for a good 20 seconds or so at the bottom of a hill, getting rained on by arrows. They could have just kept coming, or even turned back, but nope. They wanted to stand around and dance and catch arrows...LoL.

It really does boggle the mind where stuff like that comes from when, on my machine at least, the AI performs damn well 99% of the time. I understand it's a rudimentary AI compared to the "real thing", which means there's sure to be tons and tons of variables in the scripting so that means plenty can go wrong. Still, I just don't see how a program can work good that often, but then out of the blue have such a blatant screw up. Then again I never claimed to understand the finer points of coding...heh.

I also can't wait until it Does support AA and DX11 like it should. It looks amazing now, more improvements are honestly pretty hard to imagine so I'm sure it will look jaw dropping to me then.

Your arguments are very valid, Monk.