Everyone knows this game. Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, and rock smashed scissors. Each is superior to another, but vulnerable to the third.
The units in most military games- Shogun II included- use this principle in one form or another. On modern battlefields, the principle applies as well, but the distinction is more blurry and the roles ill-defined. Tanks beat infantry, but dug-in infantry and mechanized infantry have a lot of anti-tank weaponry. Helicopters beat tanks, but tanks can shoot down helicopters that hover. Air Defense artillery beats helicopters, but infantry can kill Air Defense Artillery rather easily.
In Shogun II, your Scissors, Paper, Rock are Cavalry, Archers, and Spearmen. Three distinct unit types, each specializing in countering one other unit type.
Katana Cavalry are your Scissors. Like scissors, they use steel blades to furiously hack down opposing units. The horses give them an impressive mobility, and katanas are weapons that are suitable to one-handed use, allowing the samurai to guide his horse with the other hand. Their charges may not be totally spectacular, but they are very effective when used correctly.
Katana Cavalry is most effective against foes with unwieldy, blunt weapons of wood. Bows are but long pieces of wood tied with string, and with no pointy end. Thus Archers are the Paper to the Scissors of the Katana Cavalry.
And like Scissors, Katana Cavalry are vulnerable to spearmen. Spearmen are armed with long wooden staves as are the Archers, but the spears of the spearmen have a sharp steel blade at the end. This gives the spearmen the choice to ground the butt of his spear and impale the oncoming cavalry, or to use its length to pick the riders out of the saddles and butcher them on the ground at their leisure.
Archers are your Paper. As said above, they are vulnerable to the Katana Cavalry, which is mobile enough to make volleys of arrows much less effective. Plus up close and personal, bowmen are very weak against the katana-wielding horsemen.
Archers are at their most effective against large, relatively slow-moving targets. The blocks of spearmen standing in close formation are perfect archer targets. Thus the Paper of Archers can cover the Rock of Spear Infantry in a shower of highly-effective missiles relatively cheaply and easily. They can wipe out Katana Cavalry as well, if those horsemen are stupid enough to sit still under a barrage of heavy arrows, but their primary focus is disrupting and destroying Spearmen.
Spearmen are the Rock of the game. Large blocks of men, armed with spears that look like they can cut as well as stab. The Japanese spear was more than just a tool to keep enemies at bay- it was a well-designed weapon for infighting as well as distance-keeping. Spearmen usually form the backbone of any army, being relatively cheap and easy to recruit. And Spearmen can eliminate the mobile threat of the Katana Cavalry.
So those are the basic military units, and their relationships. Mastering that simple principle will allow you, as daimyo, to master the battlefield, and defeat your foes to become the one true Shogun of Feudal Japan.
|||||||||||||||| A transplanted Viking, born a millennium too late. |||||||||||||||||
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Somewhere over the EXCO Rainbow
Master Skald, Order of the Silver Quill, Guild of the Skalds
Champion of the Sepia Joust- Joust I, II, IV, VI, VII, VIII