Some thoughts for a tweak mod I’d like to create!
I’ve got lots of hours on shogun 2, finally should be wrapping up a legendary campaign soon, and I have had some thoughts for balance changes spinning around in my head for some time, and it seemed like a good convo starter! (I’ve been thinking about shogun 2 a lot, in case you can’t tell.) Please let me know what you think!
- Matchlocks and siege: there are a lot of mods that try to alter this but none that I love. I’ve always wondered what the thought process behind the gunpowder aspect of the tech tree. The smoking gun to me is that attack by fire has a matchlock samurai as the icon but doesn’t unlock any, I’ve thought for ages that the tech was meant to unlock matchlock ashigaru but they changed their minds to make Christianity more appealing. My thought is this:
- siege workshop available from start: Fire bomb throwers aren’t really worth using in general, but especially not when locked behind a tech that you might not get immediately. This cleans everything up; you have bomb throwers from start, where you have more reason to use them as you lack other killer apps like cavalry or kisho ninja, and then mangonels can be moved to Strategy of Attack, and matchlock ashigaru to Attack by Fire, which would also unlock the gunsmith, from which matchlock ashigaru would be unlock able.
Following that, gunpowder mastery unlocks the arsenal, which then unlocks fire rockets, matchlock hero, and matchlock sams as normal. An idea I also liked was making it so that this also unlocks matchlock ashigaru from castle chain, though idk how feasible this is, hopefully someone can advise me. This prevents the oddity of GP mastery unlocking two consecutive buildings and three units rather nicely, and gives you matchlock ashi in the midgame, which should also help the AI actually recruit more matchlocks.
Furthermore, it represents a unique opportunity to buff hand mortars, by leaving them at gunsmith/attack by fire rather than moving up to arsenal (obviously, mounted gunners and heavy gunners should stay at GP mastery).
- Otomo: otomo are really famously quite busted, and also don’t even enjoy the full benefits of Christianity with their worse church chain. The thought I had was this:
- turn off all ranks fire for donderbuss cavalry. No because like how the fuck are you shooting a shotgun behind four guys in front of you and not hitting any of them lmao, this would make them less busted.
- in return, they have a choice between their church chain and the normal one.
- Terços now have a dynamic cap, with the nanban quarter enabling 2, and then getting +1 for each normal church built, and +2 for each otomo church built. This seems to me like the best way to nerf Terços while also retaining an incentive to build the otomo church chain.
Sword ashigaru: I really like this one mod that exists that adds weaker, more expensive generic sword ashigaru to all factions. I need to try it myself, but on paper it seems like a nice way to level the playing field for the AI, as they aren’t that much worse at using them than the player, unlike how they are with Yari ashigaru, and it diversifies earlygame armies.
Spears: I have been advised that giving Yari samurai spear square makes them overpowered. I’d like to test it for myself and, if true, see what can be done to balance it out. As is, spear square, Yari samurai, and the spear branch of the tech tree all go unused by the vast majority of players; this would ameliorate that significantly.
Additionally, I had the deranged thought of; what if you needed the first spear tech to unlock Yari wall? This would probably make earlygame too hard, but maybe sword ashigaru for all would balance it out.DLC unit changes: this is pretty miscellaneous but,
- give bandits 160 men and 50 upkeep: making them something akin to a ranged version of the wako raiders seems like the smartest change they could get while retaining their flavor.
- Bulletproof Samurai: remove the cap. BPS are already 200 upkeep versus the standard samurai 150 (which is already hard to justify) an improved version of a unit no one uses, and their namesake buff is useless when AI doesn’t recruit matchlocks. Hopefully these other changes would ameliorate things, but there’s no way these guys need to be capped when heavy gunners or donderbuss cav exist.
- hand mortars: see above.
- Marathon monks: just removing the proving grounds requirement. I would most likely ask permission to roll the mod that fixes fatigue into this project, so that alone should help, but steep research requirement +proving grounds is a dick move.
- General skills: I think one of the coldest shogun 2 takes of all is that the general skill tree is unbalanced. It would be a longer term project for me to redo it, but for now my idea would be to make it where the left tree buffs unit ability cooldowns, reduces upkeep etc., and hopefully incentivizes building more elite stacks, but also gives the general all of the support abilities, i.e warcry, second wind, hold firm, as well as heavily buffing inspire and rally, while the right tree would make the general bodyguard truly outrageous, giving it rapid advance, banzai, the extra hit point that heroes have, increased size up to 100, and finally bows, in addition to much higher stats of course. Something strong enough to actually justify turning down all of the buffs the middle tree gives.
I know this has been a very long post, so thanks for reading to the end, and feel free to tell me I’m a dumb idiot!