Total War: SHOGUN 2 Wiki — Clans, Units & Strategy Guides

Start with the Shimazu campaign on normal difficulty. Satsuma sits on Kyushu, an island you can unify before any mainland clan interferes, and the early katana samurai bonus gives you a melee core that beats equal-cost armies. Read the beginner guide, build farms before castles, and recruit four to six yari ashigaru before you consider a war.

Shimazu is the safest and Oda the fastest. Shimazu offers an isolated island start and a strong melee bonus, while Oda's cheap ashigaru let you fight and build at the same time from turn one. Avoid Tokugawa and Hattori until you understand food, public order and diplomacy, because both begin in difficult central positions.

Realm Divide triggers when your clan fame reaches its ceiling or you take Kyoto, and it turns every surviving clan except your vassals hostile at once. Prepare thirty turns early: fortify each border so it can hold a turn alone, convert useful allies into vassals while they still agree, and bank roughly a season of income because trade agreements get cancelled immediately.

Katana samurai are the most consistently useful unit, because armour-piercing melee answers almost every infantry matchup. Yari ashigaru in spear wall offer the best value per coin, and warrior monks have the highest ceiling when breaking cheap infantry lines. The right answer usually depends on which role your current army is missing.

Normal is the honest starting point. Hard adds meaningful AI aggression without changing the campaign economy, so it suits a second campaign. Very hard and legendary change the rules rather than the opponent, squeezing your economy and public order, so they reward players who already know which provinces to develop and which wars to refuse.

Yes. Avatar Conquest builds a persistent general across online battles, co-operative and competitive campaigns put two players on one map, and custom battles host up to eight players. The Complete Edition rebuilds the networking layer. Any mod that changes unit statistics must be disabled for online play, because it desynchronises matches.

The base 2011 game, both expansion campaigns, all three clan packs, two unit packs and the optional Blood Pack, rebuilt with revised lighting and textures, interface scaling for 1440p and 4K, modernised controls and a 64-bit executable. More than fifty minor clans become playable and mod browsing arrives through Mod.io.