That Late-Game Slog
Tags: Gaming, Games, Analysis, Strategy, Game Design

And then, slowly, the troops I had to defeat began to decrease in quality, if not quantity. The well-trained armies supported by artillery I’d been facing at the beginning of my bid for power were replaced by unruly hordes of the same kind of spear militiamen I had abandoned long ago. And my own troops just got stronger and stronger. My economy had blossomed, despite the naval blockade, so I was sitting on hundreds of thousands of koku, the game’s currency, and was making more every month than I knew what to do with, so I could fill my ranks with the most elite troops available.

What had begun as a fun, moderately challenging campaign, and had then morphed into a challenging battle of wits with the AI, had now become a boring grind. Every battle was the same. Sure, using artillery was fun, but it just felt unfair when the AI never had any of their own and simply sent their riflemen to die in hordes under the withering fire of my cannons. By the time I was using gatling guns, I would often fight battles where I would kill two thousand enemies or more without taking even a dozen casualties.

Worse still, armies move slowly in Fall of the Samurai. When it takes four turns to move from city A to city B, the AI player still entrenched in city B will have time to recoup the losses they took defending city A, meaning that I’d have to fight a bloody — for them — siege instead of easily capitalizing on the momentum I had gained from the earlier battle.

And sieges were no fun either. Since the AI never had artillery of their own (and when they did, they inexplicably never unlimbered it to fire), assaults were no more than me pounding their fort until I ran out of ammo, then cleaning up the survivors with cheap line infantry I kept around for just that purpose. There was no challenge to this exercise, and yet it could take upwards of fifteen or twenty minutes.

Battles on the high seas also began to drag. After I unlocked the powerful HMS Warrior, iron-clad queen of the seas, no enemy could seriously challenge me. But that didn’t stop them from trying, meaning I had to fight off three or four piddling wooden fleets every single turn. It wasn’t as if I could just turn on autopilot. Autoresolving, having the computer simulate the battle instead of fighting it myself, often gave me worse results than I could have achieved, especially in naval combat, so I had to fight most battles by hand.

All this added up to an utter slog. I would play for an hour or two at a time, and in some sessions I never captured a single settlement. If there was, by some bizarre chance, an army that could put up a fight and required me to try a battle a couple of times, I would sometimes never even finish a turn.

It wasn’t as if I could have lost at any point. Sure, losing an army in battle would have been supremely inconvenient, but no more than that. I had millions of koku at this point and could have raised as many armies as I wanted — it’s just that I didn’t want to have to manage any more armies. There were no stakes in most battles except the threat of even more grinding and boredom if I lost.

I kept expecting it to get better, but it never did. Eventually, once I had captured Kyoto, the enemy attacks did stop coming quite as thick and fast, but by then I was launching an amphibious assault on Edo, the final province I needed to control to win the campaign. In a sign of my utter exhaustion, I autoresolved the final siege after seeing that it would be an easy victory.