Each province has certain characteristics, such as unique terrain, an agriculture/resource rating (which determines how much it produces), and loyalty to the Daimyo (leader) of the clan which currently owns it.
Whatever you call it, the feel of the campaign is absorbing. I refuse to use the tired reviewing cliché "epic in scope" to describe Shogun 's campaign game, so being the hack writer that I am, that leaves me fresh out of ideas. With the strategic element of the campaign game, Shogun acquires a context that enhances both the strategic and tactical angles. Without the campaign game, Shogun would be a very enjoyable RTS game with serious depth. Instead, play takes place on one of the provincial maps.
There is also a "custom battle" game (available in multiplayer as well) in which forces can be selected from a pool, although there is no map editor. The campaign game is the most involved and probably the most appealing, although there are also historical battle scenarios such as Nagashima and 4th Kawanakajima. Shogun can actually be played in several modes. It's a strategic/tactical system that many gamers have been wishing for (a similar lament is often repeated about the lack of a tactical engine for Warlords III: Darklords Rising) and Shogun does a good job of integrating two different game engines and coming up with a robust combination. Terrain ranges from lowlands to rolling hills with forests to river valleys and rocky highlands. The forces you have on the strategic map are the ones with which you fight the battle, and each province has different (fixed) terrain with its own quirks and nuances. When two opposing forces occupy the same space, combat is resolved via an excellent real-time tactical engine. The strategic game is turn-based and superficially like Risk, where players move armies from province to province (each province is a "space") and build structures like castles and mines to build units and collect resources (koku). Players control a Japanese clan seeking to become Shogun of all Japan.
Shogun is a historical strategy game covering the feudal warfare on the Japanese islands in the 16th and 17th centuries. As the Silver medal at the top of this review shows, underneath that polish is one splendid game. Shogun is a rare case where the extra time was clearly sufficient not only to complete the game and kill all the bugs, but also to apply a level of polish you'd expect from a deep-pocketed publisher like EA. Delayed games have an odd tendency to feel either unfinished or stale upon release: either the delay is not long enough to fix the bugs, or the bugs get fixed but the whole project has been left behind by more current titles which were conceived later but stuck to their production schedule. When a game sits in development for as long as Shogun has, it's easy to expect the worst.
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