Base game coop - not as good as single player

[Downtown1]

I got a chance to play Shogun 2 base game coop with a friend (I was Shimazu, he was Chosokabe). My friend had only played a few turns of Shogun 2 before this one but did play Rome and Empire in the past (myself I had played 1 campaign of Shogun 2, RotS, FotS plus all the other TW games except for STW).

All in all we started on Monday and ended on Saturday, it took a grand total of 30 hours for a short campaign (35 regions in coop).

The good:

• Virtually¹ all single player features are there in multiplayer too, and you can even save/load games (but have to restart the lobby).
• You can gift units! And your ally can't go to war with you, ever.
• Being able to queue buildings and assign experience points to characters during the other player's turn.

The bad:

• ¹During battles, when every enemy routes, there's no option to continue battle and kill/board the stragglers. Battles are just magically over, it's really annoying when you have a ship surrounded and they get away on the campaign map. I had multiple occasions where the last enemy ship tried to board me, lost the boarding and routed immediately (had I boarded it first I would've captured the ship -- but AI seems to always get boarding priority) and moved away on the campaign map. It was already bad enough in SP when ships would camp on the edge of the battle map and then route after taking a bit of damage, making it impossible to capture them, but not being able to continue the battle makes it even more frustrating.
• Gifting units seems to make them lose all movement for the next full turn. This makes it a lot less useful, as IMHO you should keep whatever movement points it already had. OTOH, there seems to be a bug if you gift on the 2nd player's turn (as the 1st player) it retains the movement points (but not as the 2nd player on the 1st player turns).

The ugly - doing it just like single player seems wrong:

• Not being able to share trade nodes means having to give the node to only one player, and the other person will really dislike you if he doesn't have any trade nodes since the ones near Kyushu are all 3-4k for a full stack of trade ships.
• Not being able to do a whole lot during the other player's turn. Why can't you disband or move units that you forgot to move (or at least queue movement)? Why isn't there simply fully concurrent turns? Who knows..
• No incentive to go to war with coop partner's enemies, since that will break the trade agreement and plus you probably don't even border them anyway. In my game we never even had any joint battles until after the realm divide (but Kyoto was our last province so even that only lasted for 4 turns).
• No real incentive for working together as a team (at least pre-Realm Divide). It's the same greed from SP working (if my ally takes this territory X near me then that's a territory I won't have and thus will make less money next turn). Unless some battle is within a turn of an army/navy, no real reason to move it further away and help with an offense/defense.

Playing post-Realm Divide seems pointless since by then you'd be making so much bank that holding off 1 full stack every turn would be trivial. In my game we choked off all enemy navies on north/south of Japan so they could only attack 3 provinces by land. Expanding would then just mean slowly moving armies eastward and keeping a low defense profile.



Could they have made it better? I can think of a few things:

• Fully concurrent turns. Let both players do whatever they want, including going to battles. Other player should have option of dropping in on the battle at any time (optionally). Turns would go a lot faster this way. Too many times I sat through boring naval battles that were a guaranteed win (but only if you actually fought the battle, autoresolve is busted).
• Special coop gameplay mechanics, maybe some kind of bonus for doing battles near your coop partner, perhaps a bigger reinforcement range, more movement points, being able to trade tech like in Empire, etc.
• Blocking players from declaring war on each other is great, what about forcing them to declare war on enemies together? And having the AI declare wars on them jointly (would make the AI think twice too).

Right now as it is I would say coop amplifies all the annoyances of single player (cheating campaign AI, battle AI tendency to rout or do stupid things, autoresolve being too easy for sieging and too hard for everything else).



Hope they make it better in Rome 2.

[Downtown1]

I forgot to add, that watching other players battles is really boring. Most of the easy battles get autoresolved (takes too long to load in and fight it out, plus autoresolve makes you take less casualties in overwhelming situations). So only the hard ones are fought.. which means guess what? A lot of pausing and slow motion.

I guess they wanted you to gift some units to the other player, but there's really no point to do that if for example you're doing a siege defence (just have to carefully man the walls and move units around when necessary that's it -- there is no flanking involved). Most battles didn't even last long enough for flanking to be necessary since enemies would rout pretty fast, maybe it's different on VH/VH. Watching battles that are near-losses are even worse, since in the end you try to kite the AI as much as possible while desperately microing your 2-3 remaining units.

[Alkaline Earth]

Cooperative campaign is best when seige offenses are at a minimum and both players seige out the enemy castles instead of attacking them, having the enemy sally out is much funner to watch/play.

Always on both settings CAI/BAI Very hard settings to give a challenge.

I suggest playing as coupled factions to make the campaigns more interesting:

Date/Uesegi
Takeda/Hojo
Tokugawa/Oda
Ikki-Ikki/Hattori
Shimazu/Mori/Chosokabe

Even better is if you play with mods then you guys can play very interesting campaigns that you have never experienced before, the complete overhaul mods will make the game very fresh.