DarthMod: Shogun II

DarthMod: Shogun II
Platform	Total War: Shogun 2
Mod Type	Overhaul
Era	Feudal Japan
Mod Leader	DARTH VADER
Release Status	v4.4++
Forum / Thread	Here

Description

The popular mod for Empire: Total War and Rome: Total War has now come to Shogun 2: Total War with aims to improve the depth and gameplay of the vanilla game by removing the 'arcade features' with historically accurate features. Darthmod also makes various changes to the campaign and battle AI in order to provide a challenge for both casual gamers and Total War veterans.

Features

• The movement speeds of units have been slowed down so they walk like human soldiers, not machines. Not only does this add to the realism and historical accuracy but also to the difficulty of the game.
• Morale and the battle mechanics have been changed so your units will no longer rout as quickly, this represents the high warrior ethos and bushido. The AI benefits greatly from this because it is less resistent to morale shocks and avoids early routs.
• Matchlocks are now less accurate, they spread and miss. This adds to the historical accuracy and removes the annoying feeling when a unit of Matchlock samurai destroy half of your elite units in one volley. However, the dmamge has been increased.
• Increased unit sizes, a famous feature for Darthmod. Providing you with some epic battles.
• Campaign and battle AI have been tweaked to provide a challenge. The AI now invades with more samurai and less archers meaning you wont get a full stack of archers invading your territory, ships are used better in both the campaign and battles. Allies are now much more trustworthy, stopping you getting backstabbed for no reason and the realm divide effect has been reduced to stop other clans from going berserk at you.
• Fortifications have many more garrison troops so the strong clans survive longer. The Oda clan, for example, will not get destroyed early in your campaigns because they left their capital undefended.
• The games economy system has been improved so the AI will be encorouged to produce larger armies.
• Increased Army and Navy movement radius so armies can not pass each other without fighting, this increases the amount of ambushes you can set making for a very tactical game.
• Projectile trails and Horo's have been removed from the game, the removal of projectile trails brings a significant FPS inscrease.
• Realm divide now appears much sooner than in the vanilla game. It comes after you annex approximantly 13 to 14 provinces.
• Horse Archers are no longer useless! Darth has stopped their frontal suicide charges, now they evade and attempt to flank you.
• There is now a much greater chance that your ships will catch fire if they are hit with a barrage of fire arrows.
• Combat animation mechanics improved together with new combat lethalities making battles more lasting and the visuals more realistic and cinematic. Now you can truly see how great a job CA did with the animations!
• Traits are a lot easier to get, giving you a more RPG style of game.
• Clans have more diversity for their special units, so the AI makes the right choice and builds characteristic armies, for example the Takeda raise powerful cavalry, the Date a lot of No-Dachi, Shimazu their deadly Katana. This change makes the armies more diverse and less of the same old ashigaru. You have to replan you strategy when you invade different provinces, for example, if you plan on invading Takeda lands you need plenty of anti cavalry ashigaru units to negate the Takeda cavalry boost.
• Launcher, Darthmod now features a new launcher that makes it easy to disable and enable options such as Horo's or projectile trails. This makes the mod suit everybody because you can choose to enable you favourite Darthmod options but remove your least favourite ones,for example if you computer can't handle the large unit sizes featured in Darthmod then you can choose to didable them in the launcher. This launcher also features the ability to return to vanilla, saving you time which could be better spent playing Darthmod!

The team

• DARTH VADER

Credits

• Thoal for gifting DARTH VADER the game through steam.
• PlacidDragon for gifting the game to hip63.
• taw for his mod tools.
• Lord Maximus for upgrading Pack file manager to work with Shogun 2: Total War.
• Porphyr for upgrading Pack file manager to work with Shogun 2: Total War.
• Voice of Treason for their artwork.
• JFC for their artwork.
• Swiss Halberdier for his all round assistance
• The Hedge Knight for his Horo removal mod.
• ToonTotalWar for his all round assistance.
• hip 63 for his early advice and some of his ideas are used in the current launcher.

Visual Material

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  Screenshot 1

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  Screenshot 2

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  Screenshot 3

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  Screenshot 4

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  Screenshot 5

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  Screenshot 6

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  Screenshot 7

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  Launcher interface

External links

Darthmod: Shogun II thread on TWC