Well, I have recently started getting back into this glorious series of video games. Or, used to be glorious, that is. Anyways, I would like to address the issue that started a path to my eventual abandonment of TW in general. That is the release of FoTS. At the time, I was unwilling to pay for the new expansion. Whenever I went into an MP battle however, with just a regular Shogun 2 army, I would almost always lose. Now that I am beginning to get back into it, and would rather not play the awful mess that made me abandon the series (Rome II) or Attila, are there any good ways that vanilla Shogun 2 armies can reliably compete against FoTS ones?

And yes, I did buy FoTS recently because I heard it was great. And it is great. I just wanted to pose this question