I still don't know what the changes for this version from the original are. Although considering I found the original extremely lacking in the strategy department I won't be getting it anyway.

I still don't know what the changes for this version from the original are. Although considering I found the original extremely lacking in the strategy department I won't be getting it anyway.

The early game is alright. But it quickly seems to devolve in to simply throwing more soldiers at your enemies and winning. It gets way too easy to just steamroll everything with superior numbers. Granted I only played on normal difficulty so maybe it's better on hard, but considering the predefined movement routes, auto-regenerating troops, lack of troop types and hard caps on troops per city, I doubt it.

Then there's the characters, a cool idea to have a large number of characters with different attributes. But the politics attribute seems to be by far the most important since it lets you develop your cities (a dull and repetitive task that can fortunately by ignored after you've built up to a point where you can steamroll everyone anyway) faster thus leading to more troops faster. The war focused skills didn't seem to make much difference in battle, at least not one that superior numbers couldn't easily overcome anyway.

It's not bad for a playthrough, like I said the early game is fun, it just seems to be a pretty basic pathway from beginning to end. The main clans at least have some story based missions to go through on the way making them a bit more interesting, but there isn't really much difference between any of the others so it's just a game of develop cities to amass more troops than a nearby enemy, throw all those troops at nearby enemy taking their cities and rinse and repeat until you get to a point where you can skip the first part.

There is no proper story mode, it's more of a sandbox style game. The only thing are some missions for the major clans that kind of guide you down the historic route as well as some events. They are completely skippable though and you can do whatever you want within the game really.