Total War: SHOGUN 2

As much as I wanted to like Shogun 2, the shamelessly cheating AI removes any sense of enjoyment or strategy from this game. Just like in Empire and Napoleon, it can generate dozens of elite troops in any fishing village in a matter of a few turns, while you are still trying to rub two coppers together to get some peasant archers going. And when you take over said village, you find all buildings fully upgraded and a single unit training slot at your disposal, begging the question how it was even possible for the AI to train a dozen units in 3 turns, or where it found the money for it all. Ten turns in you have fully stacked armies the size of crusading hosts in Medieval marching toward your home province, more ships circling Japan than airplanes around JFK, and most clans from across the island independently at war with you for no apparent reason despite not even being able to physically reach you. It feels like the game was not play tested at all. You are all but forced to exploit enemy AI to stand any chance at all. We are six games in at this point and the AI has seen no improvement since Rome - it still cannot assault a bridge crossing intelligently, and 300 samurai can still hold any bridge against pretty much any size enemy host. And don't even get me started on units maintaining their formations. This has been an ongoing problem for at least a couple games now. You'll position your archers into nice neat lines and leave them to command your horse, only to find them 5 minutes later standing in one big heap on top of each other. At the same time, archers below fortress walls can somehow see and shoot enemy troops with deadly precision up in the middle of the yard with no line of sight whatsoever. All agent actions now require gold, rendering them all but useless in early game, considering that they often cost more than your entire income for a given turn. There are some nice usability improvements here and there with much needed tooltips, but the UI is ugly and needlessly complicated. Many icons are hard to read or tell apart at a glance. Ultrawide resolutions still do not scale the UI correctly. At this point, it seems that Creative Assembly is more interested in churning out DLC and making money than good games. It is ironic that I was first hooked on the series by the first Shogun all those years ago and the sequel will now be my last Total War game. I would much rather replay Rome, Medieval, or even Shogun again.