Shogun Showdown: 7 Tips to Score Your First Win

I’m always terrible at writing introductory paragraphs for these things because I’m not actually convinced anyone reads them.

Either way, I’ve been playing a lot of Shogun Showdown over the past several weeks, and wanted to share my notes on the game. There are a handful of things that I’ll discuss in the guide below, which helped me to really improve at the game up to, and including allowing me to score some Day 7 wins. Hopefully you find the same success.

And, as always, I try to keep an eye on comments so if there are any corrections, or questions you can sound off here, or on the attached Youtube videos.

1. Exploit How Reinforcements Work

Shogun Showdown isn’t completely merciless, so there is a limited number of foes that the game will spawn onto the battlefield. This limit changes from level to level, but generally there can be no more than 3 enemies on smaller levels, and 6 on larger levels. I believe this was done to ensure that the player character is always able to move at least 1 space.

Regardless, we can exploit this behaviour to our advantage. Provided you’re not in any immediate danger, you can continually dance around your foe’s attacks without the risk of additional enemies spawning in.

Here’s a video demonstration:

This has a couple advantages that you likely already deduced:

• It lets all of our tiles recharge
• It lets us reposition to a spot that is easier to defend

Normally I detest stall tactics, but this is genuinely one of the strongest techniques that you can add to your arsenal. Being able to reposition, while all of your tiles come off cooldown with absolutely no risk, is hugely beneficial for avoiding unnecessary damage, and preparing for future waves of reinforcements.

This is honestly one of the biggest changes I made to how I was playing, and has resulted in many of my runs in Shogun Showdown feeling a lot more winnable.

2. Rogue Retail is a Lot Better Than it Looks

This feels like an odd piece of advice to give, but for the longest time I was ignoring Rogue Retail. It allows you to sell Consumable items outside of the shop. That doesn’t seem great because Consumables are really powerful, and are better used within combat. Right?

Yes, and no.

Making liberal use of Consumable items can be good. However, once you start to improve at Shogun Showdown, you may find that you don’t need to use Consumable items as often. In those situations, it might be better to convert those unused items into gold instead. This can provide you with additional opportunities to re-roll Upgrades, or buy more things from an area’s shop.

In either case, I find that runs where I have Rogue Retail tend to be a lot smoother because of how much more buying power I have throughout the run. It’s one of the few Skills that I always find useful, which is something that I can’t say about the majority of the Skills in Shogun Showdown as many are highly situational.

3. Don’t Perform Combos (Unless You Need to)

This is a piece of advice that I know is going to sound counter-intuitive, but combos are usually not worth performing. There are a few different reasons that I think this, but the primary one is that there is no in-game benefit to performing combos. Unless you have Skills that trigger during a combo, you don’t actually get anything for going through the trouble of lining up a combo. They’re purely aesthetic, though, admittedly, they do look cool.

Furthermore, if you perform a combo kill that clears all of the enemies off the battlefield then reinforcements will spawn immediately. This is terrible. You’ve given up both your opportunity to let your tiles recharge, and your chance to safely reposition, which could prove to be a fatal mistake. I couldn’t tell you the amount of times that I’ve performed a combo kill on wave clear only to get destroyed by the following wave.

Moral of the story: don’t perform a combo kill unless you need to.

Actually, I guess it’d be helpful to define when you need to perform a combo, wouldn’t it?

I’d argue that you only need to perform a combo in situations where not performing the combo will cause you to take damage. Example, let’s say that you’re staring down an Ashigaru (the guys that attack with Katana tiles), and there is an Ashigaru Archer (the guys that attack with Arrow tiles) standing behind him. If the Archer has an Arrow queued up already, then they’ll attack you as soon as you defeat the Ashigaru. Ergo, you’d want to perform a combo attack that lets you defeat the Ashigaru, and then immediately kills the Ashigaru Archer so you don’t take an arrow to the face on the following turn.

4. The Regions at the Top of the Map Are Easier

This one is fairly self explanatory: the encounters along the top of the map are typically easier to win against. If you find yourself struggling then I’d recommend going to the Whispering Caves for Zone 2, and the Spirit Gateway during Zone 4. Generally speaking, the bosses in both of these areas, as well as the Hot Springs that follow in Zone 5, are all a lot more straight-forward than their counterparts on the bottom half of the map. There’s no awkward movement, crazy long-ranged attacks, or debuffs to play around. This makes getting through the fights without taking damage a lot easier.

That said, the enemies in the Spirit Gateway, and Hot Springs are a little more tanky than those found in the Forsaken Grounds and Theatre of Illusions. This isn’t impossible to play around however as there are multiple ways to upgrade your attacking tiles to deal more damage.

Either way, stick to the top half of the map in Shogun Showdown if you’re struggling.

5. Some Upgrades Simply Aren’t Worth It

I know that this goes against traditional video game logic, but sometimes it’s actually better to skip upgrades in Shogun Showdown. I say this because many of the upgrade types have a cooldown penalty to balance out the strength of their benefit. While I’ve already discussed a method for scoring some free turns, I’d argue that you don’t really want all of your tiles to have 5+ turn cooldowns. That’ll make navigating combat absolutely hellish.

As such, you’ll want to consider the benefit of an upgrade before blindly applying it to a tile. Generally speaking, here are my opinions on all of the different potential upgrades that are available in Shogun Showdown:

Upgrade	My Opinion
+ 1 Damage	Always good
+1 Damage, +1 Cooldown	Can be good, but sometimes having a lower CD is more useful
+2 Damage, +3 Cooldown	Can be fantastic on ranged, or secondary attacking tiles
-1 Cooldown	Always good
-2 Cooldown	Always good
-4 Cooldown, -1 Damage	Great on high damage tiles with high cooldowns, especially if you’ve already given the tile a damage upgrade
+1 Upgrade Slot	Always good
+1 Upgrade Slot, -1 Cooldown	The best Upgrade in the game
+Shockwave, +1 Cooldown	Sometimes good, but makes tile affected a little more awkward to play with
+Perfect Strike, +1 Cooldown	Great on tiles with discrete damage values (ex. Kunai), or tiles designed to kill specific targets (ex. Arrow)
+Poison, +2 Cooldown	I don’t think adding Poison is ever worth the additional 2 Cooldown
+Ice, +2 Cooldown	Always good
Double-Strike, +4 Cooldown	Fun on tiles with low CD, but limited in usefulness
+Curse, +2 Cooldown	Fun on supporting tiles, but very skippable
+Freeplay, +3 Cooldown	A fun option, but difficult to slot because of the +3 CD debuff

Outside of Poison, I don’t think any of the Upgrades are meritless. I suppose my blanket recommendation would be to try to keep your tiles at or below 5 cooldown, and use that to inform your Upgrade decisions. Obviously don’t strictly follow that recommendation. It’s just a guideline to get started until you have a better feel for what does, and doesn’t work.

6. Having a 5 Damage Tile is Generally a Good Idea

I went back, and forth on whether I wanted to include this tip. However, after paying close attention to what runs I was winning, and why I was losing other runs, a pattern started to emerge. The number 5. Having 5 damage on a tile isn’t essential to win in Shogun Showdown, but it sure makes things a hell of a lot easier.

5 damage will just straight up kill every enemy in the game, aside from bosses and elites, until Day 5. It can’t be overstated how powerful it is to remove any enemy with the use of a single tile. That’ll provide you with a ton of options for clearing out all of Shogun Showdown’s most problematic baddies without ever running the risk of being hit.

However, once you reach Day 5, everyone receives a buff to their hit points. I’m a little less certain on if 5 damage tiles are as good beyond this point, but they certainly don’t hurt. Hitting 6, or 7 damage is far more difficult, and I’ve also won several Day 5, 6, and 7 runs without going above 5 damage. As such, I’m still inclined to recommend 5 damage as the magic number for success.

7. Let Enemies Kill One Another

Sometimes it is simply easier to let enemies kill one another in Shogun Showdown. It can feel a little anticlimactic, but it saves you from having to put one of your tiles on cooldown, and it will help to clear out the battlefield.

Heck, if you get lucky you might even have a Twin Tachi (the guy who attacks with Swirl tiles) arrive as a reinforcement for the boss. With a little careful manoeuvring, you can then have Twin Tachi finish the boss off for you. This is one of my favourite low risk strategies for taking out the Shogun since he will invariably spawn a Twin Tachi into the fight, which dramatically drops the overall difficulty of said fight.

Remember, all’s fair in love in war. Even convincing your enemies to kill one another.

Okay – I know that was a lot, but I hope that it helps. I think the 3 biggest things that increased my rate of success were reducing my reliance on combo kills, stalling out reinforcement turns, and letting enemies kill one another more often. It isn’t as exciting to play the game this way, but it is a lot safer, which is hugely beneficial given how challenging Shogun Showdown gets during those later days.

As always, I’ll be around if there are any questions or corrections. Thank you for reading, and best of luck with the game.

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