The Let's Play Archive

Total War: Shogun 2 - Rise of the Samurai

by shalcar

Part 42: Multiplayer Tournament

Firstly I want to apologise for putting this up so late. I didn't want the first set of matches to overload the second lot, but then life got... unpleasant for me. Without further delay, here are the last matches in round 2!

Tournament Round 2 - Brainamp vs GenericServices

Battle 1

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Battle 2

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Battle 3

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Survives in Losers Bracket - Generic
Eliminated from Tournament - Brainamp

That certainly was an unconventional approach to battle, with Brainamp bringing a very cavalry heavy force to all three of his matches. Unfortunately for him, he lacked the infantry force to hold against the pushes from GenericServices and it cost him the set. Despite some exceptional plays from Brainamp, with too large a focus on cavalry he was unable to find a response to the more naginata heavy army of GenericServices and he focused too much on a single location of battle.

Cavalry's main advantage is their mobility and capacity to be where you opponent is not and if you don't leverage that to be constantly at the enemies flanks and probing and exposing weak points you are not getting the best value out of your troops. In the hands of a highly skilled general, a cavalry heavy army can be almost unstoppable, as you need to be able to keep pressure on three fronts at once to reliably ensure that there is always an opening to exploit unless your opponent buttons up, in which case you exploit your almost absolute battlefield control. Brainamp didn't do that in these matches, instead having all of his cavalry in a single location and by doing that failed to exert the battlefield control necessary to make GenericServices play his game. GenericServices took great advantage of buildings and of sacrificial units to die down and distract many times their value in koku to achieve his objectives. While I felt both matches were evenly balanced and could have gone either way, the inability to divide his forces when it gave him a clear advantage to do so cost Brainamp the match and as such he is our first player eliminated.

On the other hand, he just managed to find himself on Yukitsu's team for our post tournament 3v3, so every cloud has a silver lining...