StrategyFront Gaming

For what is now one of the most popular strategy game franchises out there, you may think Total War would have a more grand start than the humble Shogun Total War. Especially compared to the more expansive later Total War games, and with its initial conception as a “B-Title RTS Game” in the vein of Command & Conquer, Shogun Total War seems quaint today, but it is a game defined by its ambition.

Shogun Total War’s strength is in its perfect blend of the more historically accurate nature of wargaming with the arcadey-but-exciting elements of RTS games. And it was a combination that clearly worked at release. While old-guard wargamers might turn their noses at Shogun’s fast-paced battles and hardcore RTS fans may have been bored by the campaign there was clearly a huge audience who was looking for something that mixed these two genres.

First and foremost is the setting. Eschewing the usual European setting of most medieval strategy games, Shogun went straight for the exotic setting of Sengoku Jidai Japan. This was a brilliant move that instantly set the game apart from its competitors, and allowed for the team to make a smaller first title before expanding in Medieval Total War.

While Shogun’s gameplay is split between turn-based campaign mode and real-time battles, Shogun’s focus is clearly on the battles. With semi-historically accurate engagements consisting of thousands of men on the field at the time, it’s something that set itself far apart from its contemporaries.

The battle system is truly the pumping heart of Total War with the goal of being to give you the sense of actually being a commander with the battle developing right in front of your eyes.

While these were meant to be spectacles they were also deeper than most RTS battles at the time. Units are affected by morale, flanking, and their commander’s proximity to them. Factors not seen in your average Age of Empires or Starcraft. This created the sense that these units were real soldiers, not just emotionless automatons willing to charge into a meat grinder again and again.

That being said, you can see the dedication to having a fleshed-out campaign already in Shogun. While most RTS-focused games would relegate their strategic campaigns to be little more than sideshows, Shogun wanted it to be a competent companion to its battles since those battles are relatively short.

Shogun’s battles allow for over 1,000 soldiers to be on the screen at one time, which for 2000 was an incredibly impressive technical feat, and was heavily promoted in the marketing materials for the game. Shogun was also unique in its use of Agents, having multiple types of each with their own role. While fairly simple in this title it began a mechanic that became a staple in most later Total War games.

Background & Development

Before Shogun Total War, Creative Assembly mostly worked on porting sports games to different PC systems. They began to work with EA in the 1990s when they ported FIFA and several other sports games. After Michael Simpson joined CA they began to work on a side project which they envisioned as a low-risk “B-title RTS game” to compete with the likes of Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, and Starcraft. This would eventually become Shogun Total War.

The most important factor in Shogun’s development was the upgrade to 3D graphics for the real-time battles. This gave CA much more flexibility in how they could portray the battles and it was at this point that they decided on a more historically accurate approach to designing the game’s units and gameplay.

The problem they had was without the base building mechanics present in most other RTS games the “battles themselves were very short, and we needed something to tie it together and make people care about the battles.” The solution was the strategic campaign which was designed mostly to provide context to the battles.

Creative Assembly chose Medieval Japan due to their interest in Samurai, and the fact that they could introduce gunpowder into the game quickly without having to worry about the player needing to develop it.

They went so far in their quest for historical accuracy that they hired a historian who studies Samurai warfare, Stephen Turnbull, to consult on the game. This led to a much higher level of historical accuracy overall than many of its competitors in the same space.

Campaign

The early Total War campaign maps have often been described as similar to RISK, and that comparison is generally apt here. Your armies are placed in a province and can only move to directly adjacent provinces unless there is a port.

When setting up a campaign you’ll choose a time period that determines how big each clan’s starting territory will be with the later dates featuring each clan holding more land. The choice you make will be an indication of how much campaign management you will want to do, as later start dates have more built-up provinces, and be able to get into combat faster.

You’ll then choose from one of seven historical clans, which determine your starting position and some starting buffs. I was surprised to see each clan already being differentiated here in Shogun. The Takeda gain bonuses to their cavalry, Imagawa to their spies, and Shimazu can recruit higher level No-Dachi Samurai for a lower cost. This idea of faction traits being the major differentiator between different clans is mirrored in Shogun’s sequel and works well for a game that necessarily has the same units for each faction.

You can manage your provinces by constructing buildings and maintaining public order. Certain provinces will have special resources that can be exploited with mines. It’s all fairly simple compared to later games but there is a good amount of depth here, despite often wrestling with the UI.

Army and province management are both done through the simple but unwieldy UI. I would argue that more than the art style or the gameplay the UI and controls are what is going to date the game for many people.

You’ll also be using your castles buildings to upgrade units and gain more koku. The more advanced dojos and barracks you build the more specialized units you can produce. What shocked me here was that each castle can only support a certain number of these buildings which was a feature I had thought Creative Assembly had only introduced in Empire.

It was often a hot button issue for fans who accused the series of simplifying its mechanics compared to Rome Total War and Medieval Total War 2. The feature works well here and forces players to specialize in each region to produce specific units, making the different provinces of your empire feel valuable.

Playing the campaign itself is different from the later Total Wars. The RISK-style province system means that if an enemy gets behind your lines, they can capture your undefended heartlands easily. This makes it important to build and garrison castles throughout all provinces, Defense in depth is key here.

This is especially true since many of the rebel armies will start out larger than your own faction’s forces, and you’ll have to carefully think about where you will push out in the beginning so you aren’t cut off from your home provinces.

Campaign AI

Shogun’s campaign AI is fairly competent compared to later Total War games. Obviously, with the RISK-like province system, the AI has far fewer variables to contend with but it will do intelligent things like pull back its forces from a province when it’s outnumbered before counter-attacking with a larger force.

It doesn’t always succeed but it’s a challenging opponent but on the higher difficulties it can be difficult to deal with. This is especially true since the AI is ruthless about exploiting any gaps in your frontlines, and will quickly take advantage of any situation they see fit or retreat when the situation calls for it.

The campaign is heavily-influenced by board game design, even down to the fact that the units have bases like a miniature model would. This evokes the image of a Daimyo standing over a map shuffling his armies around as he plans his conquest of Japan. It’s an excellent visual design that belies the simple map.

Characters and Agents

Generals in Shogun do not possess any traits as they do in later titles. Instead, they possess an Honor rating that can change based on their actions. For example, let’s say that your general has just lost a string of battles, their Honor rating will then suffer which can eventually lead them to commit seppuku if it goes on too long.

Every faction also has a range of agents to work with. You have emissaries that act as simple diplomats. Then you have the Ninjas and Shinobis which act as spies and assassins. Finally, you have the all-powerful Geisha who act both to stop assassins from infiltrating your castle and as assassins themselves. They also cannot be killed in a failed assassination attempt which makes them the most powerful agent in the game.

Each agent has their own cutscenes that play when they undertake a mission. These are all excellent and some are extremely over the top:

Technology

Shogun attempts to emulate several of the critical historical episodes of the period, such as the arrival of Europeans and the spread of the Ikko Ikki, through events. Once the Europeans arrive the player must make the critical strategic decision of whether or not to cozy up to them in order to obtain their valuable gunpowder technology.

Doing this was a double-edged sword. Seeming too close to the Europeans could cause other daimyos to start to resent you while your own people will grow more rebellious. So the player has to maintain a careful balance.

Battles

The real-time battles are Shogun’s most impressive feature. In a game like Age of Empires tactics like flanking can be useful but are hardly necessary for victory. Most RTS games of that vein prioritize unit composition over tactics. Shogun does the opposite: the game insists you need to use a clever variety of tactics to win the day.

The fact that the battle AI was said to have been programmed with Sun Tzu’s philosophy in The Art of War is interesting but the game doesn’t bear this out in any meaningful way besides the most basic tactics. While I see this was heavily pushed in the marketing of the game, the AI in Shogun’s battles simply doesn’t hold up to this ideal.

The best thing about the AI here is that it doesn’t just rush into your lines as it would often do in later Total War games. Instead, it will often try to maneuver for a better position before the main clash. Once the battle begins though, all bets are off, as the AI cannot keep a formation together to save its life.

It will be happy enough to sit on a hill and pepper you with arrows but it cannot assist its units once attacked, and will often try and reposition its forces while being attacked.

Shogun relies on a rock-paper-scissors relationship between cavalry, infantry, and archers. This means that for the AI to be successful they’ll have to successfully take certain encounters while avoiding others, which is something even modern Total War’s battle AI struggles with. The AI will struggle to keep its formations while moving so they can easily be caught out and destroyed.

The battles do suffer from awkward controls and the finicky camera. This makes the game a chore to handle but not having to pinpoint accuracy over where exactly your troops go added a sense of weight to your orders since it’d be difficult to rescind them and more realism to troop movements. It all adds a degree of chaos to controlling battlefields missing from some later titles. 

Sieges in Shogun are definitely its weakest element. The fortifications will mostly be there to provide choke points since they have wide openings instead of a closed circuit of walls. This is due to engine limitations.

DLC

In 2001, Shogun Total War received its first and only expansion pack: The Mongol Invasion. This expansion features a new campaign and a new faction, the Mongols. In the campaign, you can now either play as the Mongol invaders led by Kublai Khan or the Japanese defenders of the Hojo.

This adds some much-needed variety to the campaign and battles but considering that the Mongol Invasion campaign takes place almost 300 years before the Sengoku Jidai period, it’s a little disappointing that the Japanese still have almost all the same units they did in the main game.

The campaign pits a united Japan against two massive stacks of incredibly strong Mongol troops, essentially asking the question, what if the storm hadn’t destroyed the Mongol fleet. The Mongols will be able to easily push out of their early holdings in Kyushu but will have to carefully preserve their forces. The Japanese will need to marshall their far larger but inferior forces to stop the Mongols from gaining too large a foothold on the island.

Multiplayer

Shogun Total War also had an interesting multiplayer system. Multiplayer rank was determined by “Honor” which was a set of points that were gained and lost by winning and losing matches. Each player started with 100 Honor and based on that were ranked accordingly.

The system was balanced so that if a player had too much more Honor than their opponent they would actually lose Honor even if they won the match. Which heavily discouraged experienced players from beating up on beginners. You could also play unranked matches against other players so that experienced players could still show beginners the ropes if they would like.

Multiplayer battles shone since, without the incompetent battle AI, the full measure of the tactics engine could be exploited. The battles were fast and short with formations and positioning being the top priority.

The game’s wiki notes:

“In Shogun, any army could win over another using clever, fast, and precise strategies. In later Total War games, army selection was given more importance. This is the reason why many fans still refer to Shogun as the purest and most skillful of the Total War games.”

When the game first came out, the multiplayer was extremely popular with many players taking up role-playing as Japanese generals.

Conclusion

Shogun Total War was a strong foundation to build one of the most popular strategy franchises on. In researching and playing the game for this article I was shocked by how many features were laid down here that Total War would still be using or reintroduce in later titles.

While the game is now old, the concept of having 1,000 units on-screen is extremely compelling and the historical flavor is superbly done. For a series that has mainly focused on Europe since this game(except for of course Shogun 2), it’s important to recognize where the series started.

Unlike the first Medieval total war, I wouldn’t say it’s a game you should necessarily play today. But it is hugely historically significant for the total war series and served as a strong foundation for Creative Assembly to further explore this concept.

Above all, it demonstrated there was a market for a hybrid approach to war games and turn-based strategy and that Creative Assembly could successfully blend those two systems.