I love Japanese culture and history and decided to take the plunge and invest in both the orginal Shogun and Shogun 2, as the modern variant did not interest me as much. Any one play either and anyone have any suggestions?  Happy to hear them. It will be a while before i finsih some work to get to them but wanted to post and ask. Cheers and i am looking forward to some fun Sengoku time.

I have only played the original Shogun, and it is the only Total War game that I really like. The grand campaign in that game is short enough for it to not get repetitive (unlike say Medieval or Rome, two games that I enjoy in short bursts, but I've only finished the grand campaign once in those two). There might be some issues with getting Shogun 1 to run on modern hardware though. 

Another game that might be worth considering if you enjoy that period of history is Sengoku, by Paradox Interactive. There is a demo for it here, though much like Paradox's other titles, it is hard for a demo to properly show you how the game really works. It will just give you a general feel for the game's basic mechanics. 

OK thanks, i will try all three. I should be able to get Shogun to work, as i have several systems to try and none of them are newwer than XP. I dont support the silly systems after that

I do suspect that Shogun will run better in Win7 actually, unless you have a Win98 machine up & running. I only recently upgraded, but I've had far less issues with running Win9X games in Win7 than XP. Heck, I even got Wizards & Warriors (the one by D.W Bradley, not the old NES games) to run well, something that seemed to be impossible to do in XP. In fact, almost everything seem to run better in Win7, both old & new games (old because the compatibility mode works better & new because of Direct X 10 & 11).

Don't under-estimate your hero units in Shogun.

I used to play it quite a bit when it came out, mainly mp a lot.

The Samurai Hero units were invaluable to use in melee.

At the same time don't put all your horses into a cart and focus on hero/strong units, the cheaper units have more individual units in it then the stronger ones usually. The way it works is that the "cheap/low lv" units have more people in them, but are usually not as much dmg/easier to route then the higher lv units.

You still would usually want a few o fthem, mix up the army a bit, a few higher lv units/a hero unit, then some lower lv ones for numbers.

Be careful with those Yari Ashigaru though. If a unit breaks, nearby units will have a chance of breaking as well (their morale will be lowered). This means that if you have a lot of Yari Ashigaru, then it is quite possible to see your whole army break due to one successful enemy charge (Yari Ashigaru are poor fighters with low morale)

At least when playing the campaign and facing the AI, I found the best strategy to be spamming warrior monks, supported by a few archers & some cavalry. Warriors monks are highly vulnerable to archers though (being "elite" offers no protection against arrows), so I suspect that they are far worse against human opponents.

I never played with the expansion though, so I can't comment on any of its units.

ok thanks to you both, appreciate that. When you say spamming warrior monks, do you mean USE them or spam aginst them?

just wondered about that.

Warrior Monks were an interesting feature of that time, and there actualy were quite a few monostaries and temples that hosted large contingenets of monks trained in marital arts..to the degree that at one point they had to be "cleared out" by the auhtorities for they becamse too boisterous and were starting to raid near by towns and cities and "tax" travellers on the roads below the temples.

it is a fascinating time in Japanese history and i am looking forward to expoeriencing that aspect of it, my real interest is in how the simulation conveys the feeling of history, not beating the game. The fighting aspect is historic too but i am very intrigued to see how accurate the models are and how well they deal with the history. I know it well enough to be able to judge and will enjoy the process. thanks again for the comments.

I spam them. Mass production of warrior monks is a viable strategy against the AI, though it might get a bit boring in the long run if you just focus on them.