Even as the game's release kept getting pushed back, my enthusiasm for the product never waned... in fact, it intensified as I anticipated a product that was clearly being given a proper treatment by its developers.
S:TW attempts to be both a strategic and tactical warfare game set in late 16th century Japan. As a daimyo in S:TW, you can choose several different ways to play: strategic campaigns, tactical battles, or both combined in a grand strategic conquest of Japan.
In the strategic campaign, you must manage your finances, direct the training of troops and the contruction of buildings (which open up new troop types, much as in Age of Empires), hire and manage ninja spies, emissaries and even geisha assassins, while juggling diplomacy, treachery and outright warfare with your neighboring rivals.
S:TW gives you a large variety of 16th century Japanese troops to play with, from weak peasant spearmen to fierce warrior monks and eventually -- after the Portuguese and Dutch arrive -- foot soldiers armed with modest firearms. Along the way, at least according to the box, you should be having to make important decisions such as whether to risk angering your Buddhist subjects by converting to Christianity (and thereby speeding the introduction of guns into your army) or remaining buddhist (thereby having access to fanatical warrior monks). You should also be faced with subtle decisions about which types of troops to build based on your enemy's force composition (think rock, scissors, paper; only with archers, cavalry, pikemen). Unfortunately, from within the strategic screen, there is no way to determine the composition of an enemy's force without first attacking him and personally leading the battle in the tactical screen. Even sending in spies will only tell you the size -- not the composition -- of his force and the name and honor of the general leading it.
In the tactical screen, the game boasts AI based on Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," claiming that the computer enemy will use terrain and weather against you and will attack your weaknesses with its own strengths. Here, too, the game claims subtle nuances abound, such as where to place defending troops (high ground, forests and rivers can all affect the outcome of a battle) and whether or not to attack in rain (arquebuses -- older rifles -- won't fire and archers suffer minuses) or on shorter winter days (attackers only have until nightfall to take a province before the defender is declared the victor). There is also the question of castles, to seige or not to seige, to retreat into the castle or simply run away, etc.
