Editing Total War (section)

===Total War: Shogun II===
Shogun II takes place in Medieval Japan during the Sengoku period, although an expansion called Fall of the Samurai places players in the era of the Meiji Restoration.

Many see Shogun 2 as the last objectively good Total War title. Complaints were mostly focused on the long load times and the fact there's very little variation between the factions you can play other than their bonuses and start location, although given the period to do anything radically different would have been unfitting. Particularly an event called Realm Divide turned the violence up to eleven: After a certain amount of player expansion, *every* other clan would unify against you just to deny victory by any means necessary. Put as a method to prevent a snowballing victory, it became a [[Skub]] matter amongst gamers for arbitrarily having pretty much ''all'' of the AI gang up on you to stop you and rather invalidating diplomacy or bothering to make vassals of anyone, though it has some basis in reality with the Sengoku period being full of political backstabbing (though probably not literally everyone else against one clan...) and can be easily worked around with the prior knowledge by getting ''almost'' enough territory to trigger Realm Divide and sitting around building up your armies and stockpiling cash to deal with losing significant territory to the inevitable doomstacks before you place the straw to break the camel's back. Also, this game is where the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6zQ6ZqEqg0 Shamefur Dispray] [[memes]] came from.

Notably, the game received a second life from the modding community and Steam Workshop support.

A tabletop game quite similar to Shogun 2 is [[Kensei]].

The game had 2 expansions, the first being Rise of the Samurai which was basically the vanilla campaign with a 500 years prior flavor, and the second being Fall of the Samurai which is considered to be one of the best expansions for a total war game to date, with many fans of the expansion pack calling it the better-version of the Empire entry of the series. It is essentially a game of that one movie where Tom Cruise becomes a samurai, but is much more accurate than the film as all sides possess modern (by 1870's standards) weaponry including gatling guns, which when added to a game automatically increase its inherent quality because gatling guns are awesome. Icing on the cake is that *you* can control gatling guns and artillery units, giving the game an extra, unbalanced but fun feature. If you're disgustingly rich you can also hire foreign Marine companies, US, British or French. French are shooty, British in the middle, and US soldiers are choppy.

Also you can fire across the map using ships and calling artillery strikes to shred entire armies if the timing is right, preventing turtling by a huge margin and forcing both sides to close in and get slugging as soon as possible. Also Realm Divide is fairer now: Pro-Shogunate and Pro-Imperial sides would ally *together* into two huge blocs to combat each other when it happens, and the player's choice would make him the "Shogunate/Imperial Vanguard" Faction and make every clan on his allegiance unbreakable allies...unless you want to declare yourself as an independent republic to get the old "absolutely everyone wants to murder you" treatment.