Hey Guys,

I get asked this question quite a bit as my YouTube videos show me selecting groups of units. It seems a lot of people don’t know how to do this so I thought I would share this quick little tip.

I am sure most of you already know about the standard grouping button in the battle interface allows you to easily group units and forces them into formations. Upon initial release of the game this feature seemed to be very buggy as the formations never worked. I believe an update patch sorted this out so now you can actually use the inbuilt formations to great effect. Most of the time I will use ‘flying geese’ which gives you a standard front line of bow units and back line of melee units.

While the formations work well sometimes you want more control over specific units. For example if your current formation forces bow infantry up front but you are being charged by enemy melee infantry you will want your bow units to fall back slightly. Without hot keys the only way to do this is to manually select all your bows infantry and reposition them doing the same with your melee infantry. Fortunately there is a much easier way to accomplish this:

1. Select all the units you want to put into a sub group (for example all bow infantry)
2. Press ‘ctrl+f1′
3. Now press ‘f1′ whenever you want to select that group.

This can be repeated with all the ‘f1′-’f4′ keys. This is extremely useful as it allows you to create subgroups within the standard group. This way you have more precise control of our units in the heat of battle.

In this game, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women (couldn’t resist a little Scarface reference there).

Seriously though, Shogun 2 is all about having a strong economy, without a strong economy you will never survive. So in this post I am going to give you some very quick tips on how to make as much money as possible in Shogun 2.

1. Rush the trade posts: I cannot stress enough how important it is to take control of trade posts quickly. If you do not take control of Trading Posts quickly other clans will and that will bottleneck your economic growth.

In my latest short campaign I control five trade routes and they are making me 7,000 per turn on average. I am only 28 turns into the game and I have 35,000 in my treasury as it is too much for me to spend. That is why you rush trade routes!

2. Don’t Waste Trade Post Space: Each trade route supports ten ships, ideally you will want all ten ships to be trade ships. Military ships do not earn income on trade routes. The best option is to place ten trade ships on the trade post and have two military ships beside them as guards.

3. Monitor Resource Prices: Let’s imagine you control three trade posts: silk, cotton and incense. With 10 open spots per trade post you can place 30 trade ships (10×3) on all your trade posts. Building 30 trade ships can take a long while so you need to use each one wisely. Make sure you send the majority of new trade ships to the most valuable Trade post. For example if silk is currently at 30, cotton at 36 and incense at 44 send the majority of your ships to the incense post. If incense is worth more per unit there is no point sending your ship anywhere else.-

4. Diplomacy: Trade agreements are essential to building a strong economy so you must do whatever you can to acquire trade agreements. Exchange hostages, arrange marriages and pay tributes. Many times I will pay a clan 80% x 5 turns of the trade routes per-turn value as a tribute to solidify the agreement. This may seem excessive but I know it will pay off in the long run. So do what you must, hostages, marriages and tributes are in the diplomacy menu for a reason!

5. Metsukes: Metsukes are very expensive if you send them out on the field. However, if you have a Metsuke oversee a settlement he will make you a lot of money. When a Metsuke oversees a settlement the tax level is raised in that settlement without impacting public order.

So recruit as many Metsukes as possible and send them to your wealthiest provinces.

6. Upgrade the Right Farms: Farms are a consistent source of income across all of your provinces. However, not all of your provinces have the same fertility. Soil fertility greatly impacts how much income is generate by your farms.
Barren Soil = +969
Meagre Soil = +1259
Average Soil = +1300
Fertile Soil = +1938
Very fertile Soil = +2907
As you see the difference is significant, so do no randomly upgrade your farms, upgrade the very fertile ones first and the barren ones last.

7. You don’t need castles: In most cases upgrading your castle town to a fortress is more than adequate. Upgrading further costs a lot of money and consumes additional food thus lowering town growth. From a military standpoint a Fortress is easy to defend and upgrading to anything higher is not essential. You will want some castles and citadels for the expanded building option though.

I hope these tips helped, if they did please leave a comment below.

I will post some more tips soon! For now check out the Economy Guide >

Hey Guys,

For the past two weeks I have been working very hard on putting together a Shogun 2 mega game guide. The goal of this guide is to condense Shogun 2 guides, strategies, tips into an easy to read online guide and PDF. Let’s face it, Creative Arts and Sega do an amazing job with the game but the manual/guide is rather clumsy,hard to navigate and severely lacking. So for this reason I have started putting together a much more advanced guide. In the guide I will go over:

Economy

Economic basis: How economics work in Shogun 2.
Advanced economics: How to get the most out of your economy and become the richest clan in the game.

Military

Unit Index: This is a table based unit index, check it out here.
Advanced unit guide: In this section I will go over the strengths and weaknesses of all units and how to best use them.
Army Composition: In this section I will discuss army composition. An example of a good army composition early on in the game would be 8 Bow Ashigaru, 4 Yari Ashigaru and 4 Katana Samurai. Different compositions suit different purposes so I go through several useful ones.
Battle Strategies: How to kick ass in battles.

I will also be discussing agents, diplomacy and anything else I can think of.

Check out the guide here.

This strategy guide shows you how to beat the Total War: Shogun 2 Battle of Okehazama on very hard. This is easily my favorite historical battle in Shogun 2. The first part of this battle, in which you set up a series of ambushes, is some of the best Total War game play I have ever experienced. Enjoy the strategy guide.

This strategy guide is for beating the 4th Battle of Kawanakajima on very hard. It is an interesting battle that is slightly tough to beat. The main issue is the abundance of bowmen the enemy has. Check it out!

Hey Guys,

As with any new game Shogun 2 isn’t perfect. One issue, in particular, made the game almost unplayable for me. During large battles my FPS would drop down from 120 to around about 5. I knew right away that it was not my computer as I have a high-end gaming rig (my computer costs more than my car).

I took all the normal steps such as downloading the latest drivers, running ccleaner and closing all background programs. None of the normal solutions fixed this issue.

I ran some diagnostics and noted that my processor was handling the game fine even in intense battles when my FPS plummeted. I also noted that memory was not the issue. So I figured that it was my GPU bottle-necking me. So I decided to downgrade my driver version. I am running an ATI GPU and up until last night I was using driver version 11.2 which is the latest official version. I deleted 11.2 and installed driver version 11.1 with the 11.1a hotfix and I got a drastic improvement in my FPS. Since the downgrade the lowest FPS I got was 65 or so but I average 100.

So if your running an ATI card and you’re getting lag I would suggest going back to the older drivers. As for nVidia my friend has some success after downgrading to driver version 267.24. Below you will find a table with driver versions for the most popular O/S and download links. All links lead to Guru3d.com.

In Shogun 2 cavalry are very important, even more so than in previous Total War games. So wasting your cavalry by throwing them up against Yari Ashigaru or other strong melee units is a big mistake. In this video I explore some of the basics of how to use cavalry in Shogun 2. I do this by stacking a line of charging cavalry up against Katana Samurai, Bow Ashigaru and Yari Ashigaru and showing you who comes out on top.

Hey Guys,

I know many people struggle with wining the Total War: Shogun 2  Historical Battle. The face is that it is simple to win this battle even on very hard if you have a proper strategy in place. In this video I show you how I beat the Historical Battle on very hard. I also show you how to use your troops to their maximum efficiency.

Hey Guys,

My name is Nick and I am a proud Total War: Arm Chair General. I absolutely love all the Total War games and according to my Steam account I have played over 1,000 hours of the various Total War games in the past 2 years. Talk about dedication!

Being such an avid Total War player I have been lurking Total War forums for quite a while now. With the release of the Shogun 2 demo I saw many forum posts from people struggling to beat the Historical Battle. So I decided I would help out all the newbies and throw up a full strategy guide for winning the battle. To my surprise the video raked up 100 views in its first 24 hours, I got a load of comments and my YouTube inbox was filled with thanks. So I decided to open up a site dedicated to sharing Total War: Shogun 2 strategies, hints, tips and information.

So shogun2strategy.com is now live. Enjoy the site and if you like, sign up to our mailing list and they up to date on the latest strategies, tips and news on Shogun 2.

Thanks,
Nick