As your troops march forward, you see the silhouette of a castle appear over a hill in the distance. You draw your grandfather’s sword, a truly beautiful blade hammered with folded steel. But even the best of care and maintenance your small clan can afford cannot hide the history of bloodshed it has suffered under two generations of war. You point your sword at the castle, which is all the troops need to understand what to do next.
Moving forward, you look behind you to inspect your army. Poor but loyal men all, commoners and farmers. Some wearing munition armor, some wearing old ancestral suits, some just the clothes they left home with. But not a single one of them is going out without at least a spear. The infantry march forward, spears in the air.
The more noble cavalrymen ride at the flanks. Your archers, the best of your troops, trained for a long time, march with your secret weapon: men armed with a terrible device from the West. Your clan and its treasury is nearly in ruin thanks to these expensive, slow, cumbersome yet extremely powerful weapons, which even the finest armor forged by master smiths cannot stop. But if you had not bought these weapons, your foe will have brought your family to destruction anyway.
Your spearmen crash into the enemy formation, forcing them between the castle gates and sharpened blades. You and your personal cavalry, in an attempt to flank, run into the enemy’s cavalry, and find yourselves in maneuvering combat. Arrows fly over the walls from both sides.
Unfortunately, while your infantry fight valiantly, they are less equipped than the well-trained and heavily armored troops of the rich Daimyo inside the castle, who enjoys his sake while letting his men do the work. Your spear formation is forced back by the enemy, but you point your sword at the Daimyo’s soldiers and yell “Teppogumi… KIDOU!”
A frightening crack like a hundred thunderbolts fills the air, and a hundred of the Daimyo’s men fall flat on the ground in an instant. A lone musket is a pitiful weapon, sure to kill one man in one blow at a hundred paces, but while reloading it is easy, it is not a quick affair. But a hundred of them all at once can make a destructive and sudden result in a flash, even if it takes a while to do it again!
As the smoke dissipates, your own troops push the Daimyo’s soldiers back and force the castle gates open. By the time you reach the top of the castle, the Daimyo is already dead, with a gash in his belly from his own blade. He did not even have the honor to face you in honest combat after all he did to ruin your family. You wonder if this was all worth it. Welcome to Great Conqueror 2: Shogun.
Great Conqueror 2: Shogun is a turn-based strategy gacha game by Easytech, much akin to Advance Wars but with a hex-grid. Making use of Generals is important, but so is proper positioning of troops and management of resources. As is usual for Easytech, they’ve made quite a gem of a game with good balance and free-to-play friendliness. We hope this guide helps you in your quest to take over Sengoku-era Japan.
TACTICS
A lot of the game is actual fighting rather than managing menus and unit leveling. Here are some tips regarding how one fights in missions.
If a General Talks, LISTEN
Tapping on certain pre-placed Generals in a battle will give you a small snippet of dialogue. Sometimes they’ll say “I want to fight this specific General!” or “I will stay here until the end of the battle.” or “I am out to capture as much land as possible.”
Use this info accordingly: Often, the guys asking for specific fights will one-hit kill their desired target, and you can use the other types of dialogue to prioritize which of the enemy generals to kill first. No use going after a benchwarmer if the other guy wants your castle’s throat, not to mention you might want to prevent your own generals from getting one-shotted too!
Keep An Eye on Food Supply
Units consume food every turn, and in maps where Castles exist and so does unit recruitment, this matters. If your Food output is beaten by your army’s Food consumption, your Food resource starts to drop. If it hits 0 while the output is negative, your whole army gets a Supply Shortage debuff, marked by a red bowl on their heads.
This causes them to lose both mobility and morale every turn until they are stuck completely unable to do anything. This is especially apparent in Conquest Mode, where large armies and army size management become extremely important.
Use Generals According To Their Skills, Not Just Their Assigned Units
Archery units typically make poor hit-and-run nukers because they don’t hit as hard as Cavalry or Teppogumi, and they’re built for ranged defensive fighting. You might use them for hit-and-run assassinations anyway the second you get Tokugawa Ieyasu as their commander since his skill makes them skip attacking for a turn to get a giant damage boost so huge it can blow half the HP clean off a max-strength Commander-boosted unit on their next turn. Always read a Commander’s skill and stats to give them the appropriate units and use them in unexpected ways.
Upgrade Profit Structures
Some maps have buildings such as Ore Mines and Farms which provide Coins and Food respectively every turn to the owner of their territory’s respective castle. The tutorial tells you to upgrade your castle, but it turns out you can upgrade these structures too! Upgrade your Farms and Ore Mines to further increase profit beyond what the local Castle’s Market and Barn can pull off.
Focus Attack
Unlike other games from the Easytech family, or Advance Wars for that matter, enemies in GC2 Shogun do NOT inflict weaker damage as they lose Troop HP. This means killing the unit entirely is necessary to lessen the enemy’s overall firepower, unlike say in Advance Wars where leaving an enemy unit alive and going for another enemy is usually a good way to keep your troops alive at the cost of more easily positioning troops.
Try to minimize overkill though, and use your weaker troops and non-Generals to finish off dying foes while leaving your hard hitters to the full HP enemies if possible. This also means you should do your best to preserve damaged Ranged units by using them to attack melee units at a distance, or Teppo units, who cannot counterattack.
Force Them Into Chokes
In some scenarios, you may find chokepoints that force the enemy into a tight formation, sometimes even trickling them through a nasty one-tile gap facing two tiles at the end. You can use this to defend your position easily by clogging up the choke with enough units that the enemy is forced to take multiple attacks all at once, along with whatever your ranged units throw from behind your Infantry or Cavalry blockade. You can even make artificial chokepoints using Watchtowers and their superior armed brothers, as they can block movement and are cheaper to build than troops.
Big Siege? Bring Rangers
When attacking a castle, especially one with an outer wall, always bring archers, musket units, and especially artillery to smash the walls open from a distance: Outer walls block movement for your troops but not the enemy, and since they extend one tile forward from a Castle they prevent melee units from attacking the Castle proper and its garrison. If that garrison is a unit of musket units or archers, your infantry will basically have to wear metal raincoats while trying to kick their walls down.
On the other hand, ranged units can shoot past walls and attack the castle’s central garrison. If you’re under attack on the other hand, having melee units in the walls facing the enemy and ranged units in the castle proper and the walls away from the enemy is useful, so you STILL need to bring guns and bows anyway.
While Circles Mean Something
If you see a white circle either on an enemy or a tile, that usually means some sort of scripted event will happen once you either step on that tile or destroy that unit or if you lose said unit or the enemy steps on said tile. It depends on the mission: Sometimes, destroying such targets will cause several enemy units to lose morale or cause a nigh-indestructible castle garrison to leave their castle like an idiot.
Or perhaps give you (or your enemy!) a pile of reinforcements to roll over the other side with. If you see such circles, keep an eye on them, and make sure to listen to what the characters are saying in case they tell you what the circles do.
Morale Barrage
It doesn’t matter how strong your body is if your fighting spirit is broken.
Below a unit’s HP bar is its Morale bar, indicated by a set of little dots that change from green to red as the unit gets more and more miserable from attacks. Knock it all the way down and that unit is disabled, and will not be able to attack, move, or take any other orders for the next few turns until they get a heroic second wind, recovering all their morale.
CAMPAIGN MODE
Most of the tips you’ve just read apply to Campaign Mode: Campaign Mode is the basic story mode, where you are put in various situations and must solve the mission using the resources given to you, and the Generals you have access to. If you know how to fight in Campaign mode, you likely know how to fight in the other modes.
CONQUEST MODE
Conquest Mode is a large-scale mode where you move troops across a massive chunk of Japan depending on the period you pick, where you pick a specific nation and try to reach its geopolitical goals, whether it be capturing certain territories and shrines, gaining a certain reputation, defeating a certain foe, or all three.
While you often have a single guy you have to fight, everything else around you and that enemy can go to heck in a ham basket real quick, with wars happening in the periphery and neglected diplomacy suddenly resulting in wars against your neighbor simply because your army was too big (or too small!) for their tastes! These missions are fairly long-term and get you a large reward.
After that, you have the option to either call it GG, or continue playing and either destroy, subjugate, or befriend all of Japan for fun afterward, but you get no reward for that!
Never Declare War With Your Units In The Other Guy’s Territory
Honor is not just good for your diplomatic ties, but also for your own troops’ sake: Betraying a neutral nation by stationing your troops inside that nation’s territory and then suddenly declaring war on them is a move so dirty that your soldiers in the neutral land immediately drop to zero morale if you do it! Instead, look for a proper border zone within your own territory with which you can rapidly hit an enemy castle in as few turns as possible.
Betraying Allies Hurts
Betraying Allies by breaking alliances and passage treaties puts a dent in your Credit level, damaging your reputation. Meanwhile, making new allies improves it slightly less than the damage your treachery caused, but it does improve it. Credit below 70 makes everyone think you’re a bad guy, putting a debuff on your Diplomacy scores with everyone, including the Shogun.
If the Shogun hates you, everyone is obligated to declare war on you! If ever you wind up needing to betray an ally in the game, make sure you do it when you have enough cash to blitz whatever objective you want AND to glue your alliance back together, unless you wanna play the villain and have the whole of Japan declare war on you.
War First, Peace Later
Diplomatic Gifts are more practical later on once you actually have income to support them: Making a standing army early is more important than trying to be friends with your neighbors since just being next to them angers them and trying to be chummy with them will rapidly burn your resources at zero benefit to yourself. You can get a ton of units for the amount of resources it takes to get the Diplomacy bar up by 10 points.
Instead, once your neighbors inevitably lose their tempers over the fact your army is bigger than them, flatten some of them to make money, but try not to crush them utterly and make some your vassals after you’ve beaten them down enough. A vassal can provide tribute, making it easier to pay your way to actual allies.
As for other hostile nations demanding tribute from you, it’s never a good idea to bend the knee to men: This does not improve diplomatic trends, and merely siphons your war coffers for a short temporary reprieve from their attack. Instead, if someone asks for tribute, use the tribute money to make troops, then send them that army instead with a big fat “NO” written all over the enemy’s burning castle walls.
TENKABITO MODE
Tenkabito Mode is a sort of deutero-campaign: You build and conquer castles all over Japan for passive in-game income, which you can then use to buy upgrades for Campaign and Conquest Mode. You can meet Himes there, who can double as impromptu Generals in most battles or as officials in Conquest Mode for a national buff. Most of the missions are either hard stat checks or puzzles, so alternate between this mode and Campaign as needed.
Capture The Cheapeners First
Some Castles, when captured, reduce the cost of constructing other Castles. Therefore, for any castle, you can capture by combat that leads to reaching such castles, go after them first, then go after the castles that need construction instead of combat to capture.
The Forge
Only in Tenkabito Mode can you find the Forge Workshop crafting system, not to be confused with the structure that makes Teppo units in battle. This is your best source of Purple and Gold tier gear, both of which can be upgraded, unlike Green and Blue tiered gear. As you win battles in Tenkabito, Conquest, and Campaign mode, you will get the materials you need to craft better equipment for battle.
GENERALS
Your Generals are typically key to winning battles: You assign them to a unit, and they will typically boost that unit’s strength further than normal, depending on the level of both the commander and the unit. As such, your strongest General-boosted units tend to make up your best breakthrough units during big attacks, while non-assigned units or weaker Generals form a defense around the flanks when possible to keep those valuable lead assault units alive and only take hits from their direct foes. There are many ways to make Generals stronger.
Equipment
Each General can equip a Weapon, a suit of Armor, a Horse, and an Auxiliary item. Weapons typically improve a General’s Valor, Attack, and Crit chance, all of which are offensive stats. Armor typically improves Leadership and Agility, with Leadership increasing morale and Troop HP, and Agility reducing the damage they take. Horses boost Agility and Mobility, with Mobility improving how far a unit can move across terrain. Auxiliary Stats boost Intelligence in particular, along with any other stat that may make sense for the item.
Intelligence reduces the amount of Food the assigned unit eats every turn. While it would be great to give all your generals the best gear possible, this is usually not realistic: Early on, divide your gear across your generals depending on the role you want them to do: Equip your best weapons to your most lethal attackers such as Tokugawa Ieyasu, Teppo Generals or Cavalry Generals, your best armor to your support units such as any General that has a Healing ability, and make sure you save your best Horses for whover you want to move fastest, usually Cavalry, though mobility is a prized stat that is useful for all units.
Leveling
Eventually, you will get Battle Reports and Operational Outlines from victories, both items needed for leveling Generals. Leveling a General simply makes all their stats stronger, and it’s usually a good idea to keep at least 4-5 of your best generals topped up to your highest standard.
Star Levels
If you get enough duplicate shards for your Generals from the Recruit gacha, you can upgrade their star level, allowing them to unlock special abilities. While they start out with an active skill and a single passive, each general has a maximum of 4 passives, all of which are unlocked by going up every 2 star levels. These will let you better figure out their role in a battle. You can get shards by using the Gacha or saving up blue flames (essentially Gacha mileage) to buy shards for specific Generals.
Unit Matching
Some Generals specialize in a certain form of warfare: Assign them the right troops lest they be a fish out of water.
Unit Adaptability matters a lot: It determines what unit a General works best with, which usually translates into a big fat damage bonus. It is so important that you would rather give a 5-Infantry 0-Musketry stat General a bunch of Ashigaru spearmen rather than handing him powerful and expensive, but unmatching Teppo Samurai.
This also means generalist Generals tend to be rather iffy choices since they won’t be particularly strong in any single battle. While you can assign Generals to newly placed or pre-placed units in battle, sometimes you get the option to deploy that General directly onto any tiles with green circles on them.
What you assigned to them will be the unit they bring to such a deployment, so if the units available to a certain mission are better than what you have assigned to a general (Say you only have access to Ashigarus for a certain General, but the mission lets you build Yumi Samurai or even Special troops like Kagemushas or Warrior Monks, assign them to that stronger unit instead for the duration of that specific battle.
UNITS: ASHIGARU, THE BIRTH OF JAPANESE STANDING ARMIES
Behind every Samurai and Daimyo landlord worth putting in a history book is usually a ton of Ashigarus: common farmers who, at least until the sword-hunts of 1588, also doubled as foot soldiers, basically forming the beginnings of Japanese standing armies. This means all of them have at least some form of training, whether as a direct part of the local Samurai landlord’s personal force or simply to put food on the table.
They were armed with everything from swords, spears, and longbows, and for particularly rich landlords, even had access to early forms of mass-produced munition armor. And then the Portugese arrived with their fancy schmancy guns which Nobunaga Oda yea verily liked. This forever cemented the image of the common Ashigaru soldier as a cone-hatted gunman, even though they were using anything and everything to fight! Thanks, Portugal. Here are the units in the game, typically made of Ashigaru of varying quality.
INFANTRY: YOU WANT A KATANA? TOO BAD, HERE’S A SPEAR
Typical depictions of samurai in popular culture show them always swinging their katanas around as if that were their main weapon during wars. But just like in Medieval Europe with the stereotypical depiction of knights, this is a lie: The katana is to the modern handgun as the spear is to the modern assault rifle.
A spear is usually a Japanese soldier’s true main weapon in war, as part of a spear formation to skewer their foes with, much like in Medieval Europe, Ancient Rome, Biblical Israel, and wherever else large-scale warfare ever developed.
As it turns out, gluing a knife to the end of a very long stick is both a cheap and extremely effective way to arm a large army, with the shorter and far more expensive katana typically being used as a sign of nobility and as a tight-space sidearm, much like an officer’s pistol today. This makes the basic infantry units good both for defending your Castle, and for providing some backbone for your own attack forces, even if the other units tend to do most of the damage.
Ashigaru
Cheap Tile Cloggers, Emergency Defense, Structure Denial
Levied farmers given spears, Ashigaru spearmen are the most basic unit you have. They have a defensive bonus against cavalry, do extra damage when counterattacking, and take less damage overall when in forest tiles. Upgrade them as hard as you can since they’re the cheapest unit in the game and excel at absolutely clogging up tiles and denying enemy movement.
They’re also your friend if the enemy snuck near your castle and your army is halfway across the planet sacking the enemy’s castle in turn, as you can simply make a ton of these guys along with Archer Ashigaru and Naginata Infantry to hold the enemy off. Their cheapness also makes them ideal for standing on enemy production structures and preventing them from making new units, though any unit can be used for that.
Naginata Infantry
Cheap Defense, Bulk For Attacks, Wall Wreckers
Veteran troops with much fancier spears, Naginata Infantry units use precisely that, naginatas. Just like their cheaper brethren, they take less damage from cavalry strikes while dealing extra damage on the counterattack, but they lack the Ashigaru’s forest bonus. Instead, they excel at damaging morale, as they let out a battle cry which deals 2 morale damage every time they attack.
Yari Samurai
Heavy Defense, Bulk For Attacks, Wall Wreckers
Being actual samurai, Yari Samurai can afford to buy iron armor for themselves and are tougher than either the Ashigarus or Naginata Infantry. As usual, they have a defensive bonus against cavalry and added counterattack damage, but are primarily an anti-ranger defensive unit: They take less damage overall from arrows, musketry, and bolts, and if they get in striking range of archers in particular, they deal extra damage against them. You can use them to hold walls in a Main Castle siege while a Musketeer, Archer, or Artillery unit behind them fires from the castle proper.
ARCHERS: ART OF THE YUMI
Samurai also learn the art of archery, letting fly with deadly, precise arrows. Commoners would learn it too by necessity, because it’s that, shopping, or fishing if they want to eat meat. While a tad less powerful on the attack than Musket units, they can actually defend themselves when attacked since they don’t take forever to load up their bows when under pressure.
Their bows are also noticeably more waterproof than gunpowder and hinawa muskets, so they take no penalties in the rain. As with any ranged unit, they lose a tile of range at night, forcing them into melee combat. Most of them, except the special Shadow Ninja units, deal additional damage to infantry and cavalry, but not as much as Musket units on a dry day.
Archer Ashigaru
Defensive Ranged Unit, Emergency Defense
A commoner with a bow. They shoot well enough to put food on the table, they’ll shoot well enough to put men in the ground. They deal 20% extra damage to infantry and cavalry, and recover 2 morale per turn, making them hard to pin down.
Elite Archers
Multipurpose Ranged Unit
Elite Archers are veteran soldiers, able to deal a bit more damage than the usual commoner with a bow. While they share the same damage bonus as the Ashigaru archers, they swap out the morale recovery for a 10% defensive bonus in the mountains.
Yumi Samurai
Multipurpose Ranged Unit
The art of Japanese longbow use is a difficult one, with the Yumi longbow’s power coming at a cost of, well, being a really hard bow to draw. Yumi Samurai honed their archery skills to the limit, able to deal 10% extra damage to garrisoned troops by shooting precisely through windows. They also have a 15% crit boost against enemies with more Troop HP than they do, and deal extra damage vs cavalry and infantry by 20%.
TEPPOGUMI: GUNS? DISHONORABLE? HA!
One day, a pair of pale-looking weirdoes in a Chinese ship got shipwrecked on Tanegashima island, carrying strange sticks that shot out fire and thunder. Instead of cowering in shock or scoffing in disgust, Tanegashima Tokitaka forked over a ton of coins for two of their muskets and over a year and two blacksmiths, reverse-engineered the guns and made 300,000 of them in another 10 years.
It is said that Japan had more guns than any single country in Europe during this era, and about a fourth of the Japanese invasion force that attacked Joseon-era Korea were carrying guns. Contrary to popular belief, the samurai absolutely loved guns and had a rich marksmanship tradition, having made their own tactics and weapon designs specific to Japan, its form of warfare, and its quirky terrain.
Teppogumi gunmen deal more damage than their bow-using counterparts and can ignore a percentage of enemy defense with their powerful matchlock muskets and set a tile aflame with a small chance, but they have a couple of weaknesses: While muskets require less training to use compared to a bow, they take much longer to reload and, being matchlocks from before the era of percussion caps, are not waterproof.
This means Musketry units cannot counterattack when struck first, and do less damage in the rain. Much like Archers, they are forced into melee combat at night because of poor visibility conditions ruining their aim. Thankfully they just use their powerful guns at point-blank when it happens!
Teppo Ashigaru
Offensive Ranged Unit
While it takes more steps to use a gun than it does to use a bow, bows usually need a longer training time since no amount of method makes up for weak muscles, and guns don’t care about that one bit. Teppo Ashigaru are essentially farmers armed with muskets. They can set a tile aflame with a 5% chance, deal extra damage to Infantry and Cavalry, and ignore 25% of an enemy’s defense.
Elite Teppo
Offensive Ranged Unit, Ranged Linebreaker
Essentially identical to Teppo Ashigaru but with better stats, Elite Teppo musketeers have the advantage of hitting harder but are more expensive. Seeing as all Teppogumi units are expensive anyway, you might as well save for these guys whenever level 3 castles aren’t available, which is a lot more often than one thinks. They are also slower movers, with a mobility of 9 instead of 10. Must be the bigger guns they lug around!
Teppo Samurai
Ranged Assassin, Offensive Ranged Unit, Ranged Linebreaker
Teppo Samurai are actual samurai who take their musketry as seriously as they do their sword, spear, and bow knowledge. They have more powerful versions of the other Musket units’ abilities, with a higher chance to set things on fire and improved armor penetration. They also recover 2 morale per turn, making them harder to immobilize than their commoner counterparts.
CAVALRY: HORSE WARFARE IN A LAND WHERE IT IS DIFFICULT
Cavalry warfare was practiced in Medieval Japan just as everywhere else people were trying to kill each other in the 1500s. It’s a tad more difficult than normal in Japan since the terrain tends to be mountainous, though there’s still enough flat space for them to be effective. In particular, your main use for cavalry is to outmaneuver infantry and hit the enemy rear-line, or as a breakthrough unit thanks to their ability to deal extra damage when attacking from flat plains.
Cavalry Brigade
Flanker, Anti-Ranger, Structure Denial
A high mobility unit effective at bullying Teppogumi and Archer units, and able to severely harm Infantry if they make the mistake of positioning on plains next to plains. If both the Cavalry unit and the target are on a plain, they deal loads of extra damage and 2 Morale damage, so get some good Cavalry commanders for these guys.
Note that this damage bonus also applies to offensive abilities, so Commanders that either get attack boosts from delay skills (like Tokugawa Ieyasu, though apparently, he’s a lousy cavalryman in this game) or any Commander with a secondary attack for a skill will benefit greatly from cavalry units.
They also take less damage from enemy counterattacks, emphasizing their use as an assault rather than a defensive unit. The fact they’re the cheapest Cavalry type and move fast means they also work well as a structure denial unit, clogging production structures to prevent reinforcements from backing up the enemy’s defensive efforts.
Naginata Cavalry
Flanker, Linebreaker, Anti-Ranger
Cavalry units using fancy curved Naginata spears. Rather than taking less damage from counterattacks, they instead deal 10% extra damage against infantry.
Heavy Cavalry
Flanker, Linebreaker, Anti-Ranger
Armored assault cavalry meant for breaking through enemy lines, Heavy Cavalry are formed by Samurai rich enough to not just pay for their own armor, but for their horse’s armor too! They hit very hard, with a version of the plains-only charge that trades its morale-dampening effect for yet more bonus damage, and a separate buff that demolishes 3 morale during all attacks, plains or not, so they deal more morale damage anyway! They also deal 15% extra damage vs Infantry.
SIEGE: LONG RANGE CASTLE DISASSEMBLY
Got walls in your way? Are Ballista Towers putting you in a bad mood? Some annoying ol’ daimyo wannabe just sticking cheap Watchtowers in one-tile gaps like a Starcraft depot-blocker? Say no more, the demolition crew has your back. Siege units, also called War Gear by the game, have long-range attacks with a 2-3 tile range, and frankly aren’t the most reliable way to attack units in open combat thanks to their rather wide (but potentially really high) damage range.
Here’s the thing though: All of them always crit when hitting fortifications, constantly inflicting way more than their listed max damage against Structural HP. You will need them greatly for dealing with Main Castles since they have a thick outer wall a tile away from the Castle tile they extend from, which also has its own HP bar.
They can also shoot over said wall like any Ranged unit to hit the Castle proper itself along with its garrison. They lose a tile of range at night, and Cannon-type units (ie any Special Artillery or the tier 3 basic Cannon) are weaker when it rains. Again because gunpowder hates sogginess.
Ballista
Wall Wrecker, Long Range Attack
The torsion-powered ballista can sling giant bolts at fortifications and enemies, much like an oversized mega-crossbow. It deals an extra 5% damage against garrisoned units and 20% against fortifications, on top of always dealing crits against fortifications.
Trebuchet
Wall Wrecker, Morale Dampener, Long Range Attack
A gravity-powered sling the size of a building, using weights to swing a lever into throwing a huge rock at the enemy. It deals an extra 10% damage to garrisoned units thanks to all the bricks falling down on their heads, and another 30% to the building itself. On top of this, it has a 30% chance to drop its target’s morale by 2, because watching a giant rock fly towards you is not fun.
Oduzutsu Artillery
Wall Wrecker, Long-Range Attack
An actual cannon! While Oduzutsu Artillery guns don’t deal bonus damage to garrisoned units unlike the Trebuchet which can arc rocks into and through roofs and the Ballista which can throw bolts through windows, these big guns simply smash through buildings anyway with a 40% bonus against fortifications, along with the ability to always crit against anything made of bricks.
Instead, they have a general 20% damage bonus to all land units, and another 10% damage at range, which is straight-up better as it applies whether or not the target is behind a wall. Turns out, a huge metal ball flying through the air at high speed doesn’t need any special actions to hurt people. Like Musket units, they suffer in the rain and snow, dealing less damage overall.
STRUCTURES
All this beautiful architecture belies a history filled with bloodshed and terror.
Structures are important to take note of in battle: They provide resources, allow you to call in reinforcements, and sometimes they are important mission objectives. Out of all terrain, only the Castle and Castle Wall provide direct protection to units. Here are the different types of structures in the game.
Castle
Capturing these is usually the objective of a mission, but if not, take them anyway as they let you control all the structures on a certain part of the map. Castles provide income, control territory, and allow you to recruit Infantry units. They can be upgraded with a Market to improve Coin output, a Temple to heal Troops every turn, a Library to improve Knowledge output, and a Barn to improve Food output.
Upgrading the Castle itself allows you to unlock extra units to build within its controlled territory, along with upgrades for the Castle. Units inside the Castle also take less damage than units in other terrain types, for as long as the Castle has HP to take the edge off of hits. Sometimes, a Castle may have…
Castle Wall
… A Castle Wall. These usually extend a tile away from the Castle proper when available, allow your units to garrison and walk through them, and block enemy units from walking over them until they are destroyed. They also protect units garrisoning them just like Castles do.
Note that the whole wall shares an HP bar and does not have separate HP for each Wall tile: Sufficient beatings from any direction and on any section of the wall make the WHOLE wall collapse, allowing enemy troops inside from any direction! That being said, they still need to deplete the Castle proper’s own HP bar to get inside that. And Walls typically have a lot more HP than Castles.
Towers
There are many different kinds of towers, but they all boil down to this one main task: Blocking the way. The armed towers aren’t very strong but can be a nuisance, and the Watchtower is unarmed, but they prevent any unit from occupying their tile. This lets you block off uncomfortably wide chokepoints more easily.
They’re also very useful at night if you have lots of ranged units: Any ranged unit next to a tower at night gets its full attack range back thanks to its torches lighting the way and giving them improved visibility. That being said they are destructible, so if someone rolls up with a cannon, watch out!
Note that they take up 1 of a territory’s 2 build spaces, so you’re losing out on a production structure by setting a tower up. This means it’s usually a good idea to demolish them once you’ve pushed the battle line forward, to replace them with a Training Ground for extra Ashigaru spam.
Training Ground
A training ground for Infantry. You’d think this is redundant because you already have the Castle but anyone who thinks that has never been buried in an endlessly annoying tile-clog of Ashigaru spearmen. Use this if you plan to spam Ashigaru and turn the battlefield into a giant spiky traffic jam, or if you find it uncomfortable to leave your Castle empty.
Racecourse
A good racehorse makes for a good warhorse.
A good racehorse is fast, strong, and obedient to its rider even when under pressure, all qualities that are useful for warfare. The Racecourse trains cavalry units, heavy units good for breakthroughs, scouting, and general offensive maneuvers. They tend to be more expensive than Infantry, so use Infantry on the defense and use these guys as your main assault units with the Infantry following behind.
Shooting Range
Where everyone learns to shoot.
The Shooting Range is where the Samurai learn the nuanced art of the Yumi longbow, along with the soldiers they bring with them. Archer units are quite versatile, being cheaper, having the same range, and being able to counterattack unlike Teppogumi gunmen, who trade all that for the raw unmitigated power of gunfire. This makes them the defensive counterpart to gun units.
Forge Workshop
While a Tanegashima musket takes a lot less training to load and fire than a Yumi longbow, it requires more advanced tools to make its small metal parts, difficult metalwork to make sturdy barrels to handle explosive force, along with some good knowledge of chemistry to create gunpowder.
That’s what the Forge Workshop is for, and why it requires Knowledge as a secondary resource rather than only Coins to build. This makes Teppogumi gunmen noticeably more expensive than most units. While they are far less versatile and incredibly vulnerable compared to Archery units, all that money goes into their sheer damage power instead, making Teppogumi musketeers a highly devastating offensive ranged unit.
Factory
Factories make artillery ranging from Ballistae and Trebuchets all the way to Oduzutsu cannons, and they are the most expensive unit type in the game. That being said, you don’t need too many of them: A single max-strength Ballista unit, let alone an Oduzutsu gun, rolling up to your castle is a giant problem all on its own if it has escorts to exploit the massive holes it just blew through your fortifications! Just like the Forge Workshop, the complex nature of siege weaponry means the structure requires Knowledge to build.
Village, Town, Docks
Villages, Docks, and Towns provide both Food and Coins to your war effort and can be upgraded but not built. You will usually spot them easily, but they only count if they’re dead center inside a tile: A small town sitting in between 3 tiles will only count as Plains. Docks and Trading Ports are usually found on shore. Upgrade these early into a game, especially in Conquest Mode so you have more resources overall during the match.
Silver Mine, Gold Mine
Mines are upgradeable but not buildable structures, and you will occasionally find them pre-placed across the map. They generate some Coins every turn, and upgrading them improves their Coin output by 10. Upgrade these early into a battle so you have more Coins built up throughout a battle, especially in Conquest Mode.
Farmland
Farmland cannot be upgraded nor built, but provide Food to train units. You can spot them easily by looking for water mills or crop squares. You’d think they’re flat enough to count as Plains for horse units, but no. Getting castles with access to Farmland is incredibly important in Conquest mode in particular: Not having enough Food means your entire army starves, which is a problem when commanding a huge army over a large map.
And this is the end of our Great Conqueror 2: Shogun beginner’s guide. We hope this helps. If you have your own tips, leave a comment below!